The Project Gutenberg eBook of The swing of the pendulum

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Title: The swing of the pendulum

Author: Adriana Spadoni

Release date: November 20, 2024 [eBook #74768]

Language: English

Original publication: New York: Boni and Liveright, Inc, 1919

Credits: Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SWING OF THE PENDULUM ***

THE SWING OF THE PENDULUM

By ADRIANA SPADONI

BONI AND LIVERIGHT

PUBLISHERS

NEW YORK

COPYRIGHT, 1919,

BONI & LIVERIGHT, INC.

All Rights Reserved

First printing, December, 1919

Second printing, February, 1920

Third printing, April, 1920

Fourth printing, August, 1920

Fifth printing, February, 1921

Printed in the United States of America

CONTENTS

PART I

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

PART II

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

CHAPTER THIRTY

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

PART III

CHAPTER FORTY

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

CHAPTER FIFTY

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

PART I

CHAPTER ONE

Jean Norris came slowly down the Library steps, passed the Chemistry Building, and took the worn path across the campus to the brush-lined creek. The hot stubble burned through her white canvas shoes and fine, gray dust powdered the mortarboard and black graduating gown she carried over her arm. With one stride she crossed the trickle of water and scrambled up the opposite bank.

"Lord!" She drew a deep breath of the shaded coolness and, taking off the mortarboard, ran the tips of her fingers under the heavy plait of pale brown hair. "Thank God this day is nearly over." She dropped to the carpet of dead leaves under the scrub oak and, with her knees drawn up to her chin and her arms clasped about them, looked out through the lattice of green. With definite appraisal her gray eyes went slowly from one building to another, out across the parched campus, past the grateful green of the entrance oaks, to the strip of town beyond and the Bay, glittering in the hot May sun. A tolerant smile flicked the corners of her mouth.

It was over at last. The four long, interminable years had culminated in a series of fitting ceremonies. All day streams of students had flowed through the buildings, swept the campus, overflowed into the town. Well dressed parents from San Francisco and country parents, uncomfortable in their unusual clothes, had rushed helplessly about, harassed by the necessity of remembering many directions, of being in certain spots at certain moments, of not asking foolish questions and so disgracing their children. Flustered and important, the graduating class had appropriated the earth.

Through the throng, instructors and assistant professors had moved with weary, anxious faces as if, in the graduating of each class, they heard another hour strike in the clock of their lives. Committees, distinct with colored badges, exhausted with importance, had misread hours and locations, given directions in college vernacular so explicit that no stranger could understand them, overlapped, performed one another's duties, apologized, pretended it was all going smoothly. Everywhere well-bred, managed confusion had exuded like a fog.

Exactly at twelve, in a silence so intense that even the sun hung waiting in the zenith, the graduating class had wound its last solemn pilgrimage across the campus. First the aged president, bent, as if in scholastic humility, beneath the great weight of his Doctor's scarlet hood. Then the guests of honor, sleek and prosperous men, followed by the professors in order of their rank and departments, and finally five hundred students, two by two, awed by the seriousness of what lay before them.

To Jean it had seemed hours while the aged president piped of Life's ideals, the security of college, the pitfalls of the world. Each May, for twenty years, he had stood so, each year a little more bent, and piped of the world beyond. Parents had furtively wiped their eyes and students made heroic resolves.

Then, with a trembling gesture of his strengthless hands, he had offered the graduating class to Life. One by one they had filed up, received their diplomas and hurried back to their places under scattered puffs of applause from relatives. It had seemed to Jean that it would never end, but forever black gowned figures would be going forward to get slender rolls of white paper.

In the general confusion of congratulations that followed, Jean had caught sight of her mother, slipping unobtrusively away. She had not expected her mother to seek her out, but there was something so small, so self-effacing in the figure hurrying to take up again the endless round of duties which the graduation had momentarily interrupted, that Jean's eyes had filled with tears and she had escaped from the chattering crowds as quickly as possible.

Now it was all over. The deserted campus lay silent in the late afternoon sun, and the empty buildings rested from the ceaseless chatter. So alive was the Future, waiting for the signal to start, that when the clock, hidden in the woodbine of the Library tower, struck four, Jean jumped to her feet, shook her shoulders as if freeing them from the clutch of the years behind, and turned away.

"It may be peaceful—I suppose it is. But so's the grave."

As she came into the cool dimness of the Girls' Rest Hall, Patricia Farnsworth rose from a hammock.

"Well, for the love of Mike, where have you been? I looked everywhere, until I couldn't stand another minute."

"If you looked as violently as you appear to be doing this instant, I don't wonder you didn't find me. Library—off the main line of travel—only safe place to-day."

"Never thought of it. Gee, but I'm all in. I wouldn't graduate twice for a thousand dollars."

Jean threw her cap and gown on a couch and stretched beside them.

"Well, twice wouldn't be so bad, if you did it just for yourself. But when you insist on doing it for the whole class, Pat, of course——"

"Oh, shut up. Somebody's got to do the dirty work. Fond parents loose their moorings and drift worse than sheep."

"'Moored sheep drifting!' Patsy, how on earth did you ever make Hoppy's English?"

Pat giggled down to the depths of her stocky body. "'Moored sheep,' is going some, but honestly they were worse. I told one bewildered old party a dozen times if I told him once, that all exercises were scheduled for out of doors and nothing was taking place in the coal-cellar of North Hall. He had a perfect obsession on the cellar. Wandered into it every time I turned my back."

"Well? How was he to know that everything was being managed—'with an executive precision never before equaled in the handling of so large a class'?"

"Get out. It's all right for you to talk when you wouldn't be on a committee to oblige the President of the United States."

"I would not. Of all the piffling rubbish! If you all feel as badly as you pretend to do at getting out of the cage, why don't you just go and get your diplomas and sneak away to weep in private? And if you're not sorry to get out, and feel like this—this mess of jubilation, why don't you say so? Conventional sentimentality! It makes my tummy turn over."

"You ought to be all turned over and spanked, Jean. Some day you're going to be found frozen stiff in your own logic."

"Pat Farnsworth, I wouldn't mind beginning instanter. I never was so hot in my life. Me for tea. On a day like this my English grandparent bellows for his tea."

"Bellow on, George III. I'll get it. I've been cooling off for an hour." Pat started for the kitchen with the same vigorous efficiency that ran her many committees, paused, and with an almost shy smile at Jean, crossed to the front door and locked it. "We don't want any one butting in, do we?"

Jean had risen and now she put her arm about Pat's shoulder.

"Oh, Patsy," she whispered, "when you're gone——"

"Don't Jean. Don't. Something will turn up. It must."

Jean's lips trembled. "When you say it like that I feel sure myself for a minute. But——"

"Are Tom and Elsie going to stay all summer?"

"Yes. This is the supreme chance of mummy's life to make herself uncomfortable, and she won't lose it."

"Don't, Jeany. I hate you when you're bitter like that."

"I can't help whether you do or not. It's true."

Jean's arm dropped from Pat's shoulder and she stood frowning. "I have never been able to make you understand, but nobody who hasn't lived and breathed and petrified in Christian Duty for years could. It's the wickedest, most hellish misconception the brain of man ever conceived to make this rotten scheme of things rottener. It's done more harm in the world than the Seven Deadly Sins put together. It——"

"Don't, Jean."

"You were brought up where religion was a kind of entrée, but with mummy it's the whole meal from soup to fingerbowls. God lives right in the house with us, and interferes in everything we do. Think of it, Patsy. For thirty years, mummy hasn't eaten a meal she didn't cook herself. That translation I'm going to do for Renshaw would give us a couple of weeks somewhere. And are we going? No. Because Tom Morton, who was some distant relative of father's, who's been dead for eighteen years and whom mummy didn't love when he was alive, chooses to appear from nowhere and dump himself and his fool wife and disgusting baby on us, mummy conceives it her duty to stay all summer cooking for them, and waiting on that idiot Elsie because she's going to have another. It makes my soul shiver, it makes me so mad. And I know what will happen. You talk about my logic. It's mummy who has all the logic in our family. Because she's saddled with these she'll say she might just as well have others, and we'll have every slab-chested old maid who comes to summer-school and wants to get the best food in town for nothing. Mummy will roast all July and August and say they were very nice people as long as they don't turn her out of her own house."

"Can't you make her see that——"

"Make her see! What chance have I against God Almighty? You don't understand the basis of the whole business. 'Whom the Lord loveth, He chasteneth.' When He stops loving He stops chastening. So it's up to the believers to get all the chastening there is."

"Don't, Jean. There must be more in it than that." Jean dabbed at her eyes and crossing to the sink filled the kettle for tea.

"Well, maybe there is. But when you live with it you're too near to see it. It's either that, all summer long, waiting for something to turn up out of the blue, or going away to teach. Sometimes I don't know which is worse."

"Now, Jean, we've hashed that over and settled it a million times. It's ridiculous. After all you are rather like mummy, you know. There are millions of things to do when you've got ordinary intelligence, but just because you loathe teaching you've picked it out as the one thing that'll come your way. How about that translation? How do you know it won't lead to something else?"

"Because I want it to so terribly hard, Patsy. I know, Pat, I suppose I do rant, but I guess I've got what Dr. Harper calls 'The Imagination for Pain.' I do want things so hard that I just can't imagine getting them."

"Doesn't say much for your imagination, no matter what Harper calls it. But it isn't that. It's just conceit, not another thing. You're so proud of that analytic brain of yours that you work it on everything. The minute you get a glimpse of some happiness you drag it into that mental laboratory and tear off its flesh, and you never stop until you've busted the poor old skeleton to bits. Why can't you let things go about with their clothes on?"

"I do."

"No, you don't. And when you do get it stripped it isn't any more of a truth than it was with its clothes on."

Pat's color deepened and she looked away in genuine embarrassment, for in the emotional reticence of their friendship they were oddly like two men. At long intervals Pat's love and admiration forced her to try and make Jean see things simply and clearly as she saw them herself.

"And it's such a lonely job, sitting there by yourself prying the barnacles off every old oyster that's been struggling to hold its clothes on ever since the world began."

The mixture of figures was too much for even Jean's very genuine mood.

"Oh, Patsy, you are the joy of my life. But I can't help it if I prefer my oysters without their clothes on."

"Yes, you can. And I hate to think of you not getting every scrap of joy there is in life. Sometimes it seems to me you just won't take things when they're right under your nose. Sometimes, you make me feel like a demented ant running about in a circle, and then again I know I'm right. While you sit round waiting for Life, it's being lived all round you. And yet, when you talk that way you make me feel as if you were sitting away off on a cloud somewhere, playing on a golden flute, while I'm down below leading a circus parade—beating a drum in a cloud of dust."

Jean sputtered into her cup and put it down for safety.

Pat grinned. "Well, the figure may be mixed, but that is precisely the way I feel. And I don't want you to sit up there always."

"But I will do things as soon as I get them to do. I can't pretend a doll's alive when I know it isn't."

"But they'll always be dolls if you go at them like that."

"No, they won't, Patsy. There must be some real live things in the world. And I'm going to get them. Even if I have to fall off my cloud and break my golden flute."

Jean bent and for a moment Pat's arms clasped her. Then they stood apart, smiling.

"All right. Go to it, old girl. Only yell in time so that I can get out from under. I never expect to have more than one drum in my life and I don't want it busted. You're no fairy."

When the dishes were finished they locked up, hung the key on its nail outside among the wistaria, and went. At the corner of the street, Pat turned toward the town, while Jean continued straight on toward the foot of the hills.

From his comfortable rocker on the porch, Tom Morton looked up from the evening paper.

"A great day, wasn't it?" His broad face beamed with unintelligent good humor as he put down the paper preparatory to a chat. "You look terribly important in that rig, Jean. Makes me feel like I don't know how to write my name."

"Well, you won't feel like that much longer. It's the hottest rig ever invented."

"You all did look kind of red round the gills. I say, Jean, who was that girl that got the gold medal? Didn't look to me like she was terrible smart."

"She stood higher than anybody else."

"Wasn't you due for something extra? Seems to me a girl that gets a job helping a professor at his own work must be some bright."

"It's not really much of a job, just a few weeks."

"Graft, them medals, I guess, like everything else. There isn't a field in this country to-day——"

But Jean had disappeared.

In the hall she almost collided with Elsie, trailing wearily from the kitchen with a great bowl of salad. Elsie put down the bowl and caught at her.

"Oh, Jeany! It was too wonderful. I never was so thrilled in my life! I don't believe I ever realized what college could mean before. If I only had had the chance! When I heard that darling old man talking about life—oh, Tommykins has just got to go when he grows up, if we starve to put him through."

"Can't be done without food, Elsie." By a supreme effort Jean succeeded in speaking lightly, but when Elsie showed signs of being about to kiss her, Jean escaped to the kitchen.

As she entered, Martha Norris emptied the creamed celery into a blue willow dish, and wiped her damp forehead with her apron. Her mouth drooped with fatigue but she smiled. Jean crossed the room quickly and took her mother in her arms.

"Mummy, you're not going to have a bad headache?" She framed the small face in both hands and looked down into her mother's faded eyes.

"Why, no, dear. It's just the heat and the excitement. It's been a big day for me, Jean. Then I got a little late and that always flurries me."

Jean drew her mother closer. "I'm not going to let you work like this any more. You're going to take things easier now I'm through, whether you want to or not."

"Now, Jeany, you know I'd be perfectly miserable idle."

"There's a lot of difference between idleness and this." Jean's hand swept the hot kitchen and the stove covered with pans. "You slave and what for? They don't even thank you."

Martha Norris laid her work-scarred hand on Jean's arm.

"You forget, dear—'Whatever ye do, do it all to the glory of God.' And it means everything, just as it says, even washing pots and pans."

Jean's arms dropped and it seemed to her that the rigid little body within stepped back almost with a sense of release. It was as if her mother had stood so long alone, that any other expression must always be a slight strain.

"Shall I serve the beef, mummy?" Jean picked up an oven cloth and moved to the stove.

"No, dear. It'll spatter and your dress is as clean as when you put it on. If you'll just cube up the cheese—I am getting behind and it's almost six now."

CHAPTER TWO

As Jean had predicted, the summer was a hard one. Martha Norris insisted on taking summer students to board, closing every argument against it with gentle insistence on her own preference.

"If you really want me to be happy, Jean, let me manage the house as long as I can."

That she might some day be physically dependent on others was the one fear that her deepest prayers had not been able to out-root. So Jean yielded.

All summer the house was crowded. The long, hot days were followed by long, monotonous evenings, filled with the complacent mediocrity of the fat Tom, the whinings of the ill-trained Tommykins, the nagging of Elsie.

The boarders ate hurriedly and had no topics of conversation except the schools from which they came and the courses they were taking. For the most part they were women past middle age, all driven by necessity of one kind or another, always striving to get as much for as little as possible. They seemed to Jean to have been cheated of something and to be resentful, some fiercely and some in a timid way that was pitiful. Most of them thoroughly hated their work, which they defended in high-sounding phrases against the attacks of outsiders, and tore to pieces among themselves.

When Jean hoped she would never have to teach, they looked at her venomously and said it was a wonderful work for which few were naturally fitted. They were like wax-works, most of them, rather scarred and worn, wound up and kept going by the fear of a younger generation, a newer output from the educational factories, who might usurp their places.

The only bright spot was the translation with Professor Renshaw. Jean buried herself for hours in the library and even succeeded sometimes in escaping dinner on the ground that it was too far to go home and back again in the evening.

But as the weeks passed and the work neared completion, she found it difficult to keep the hope that every letter from Pat held out:

"Something will happen. It must. You see, Horace will rescue you yet."

"Tell him to hurry," Jean wrote back toward the end of August. "I feel the walls of an ungraded country school closing about me."

With her mother, Jean never discussed the subject, for she knew that every night, to the long list of blessings Martha enumerated and the few favors she asked of Heaven, was added a petition that "a way would be opened up to Jean." It made Jean furious to be prayed over and sometimes she felt that having to teach would be almost compensated by proving the inefficacy of prayer.

But when the release came, Jean forgot her anger, swooped down upon Martha in the kitchen, took the paring knife from her hands, and waltzed her mother about the room.

"Now, mummy, you've simply got to stop. I cannot divulge the greatest news of the age while you pick worms out of an apple."

"There aren't any worms in these. I made Joe take those others back and change them. It was robbery. Well, dear, what is it?"

"Mummy, you've got to promise to be excited. I'm just about ready to go up in smoke."

"I wouldn't do that if I were you. I'd tell the person I wanted to excite what it was about. Did Dr. Renshaw double the check?"

"Better. Heaps."

"He's got more translation. I knew——"

"Oceans better than that."

"Well, I'm sure——" The clock struck five. Martha removed Jean's arms gently but firmly from her shoulders and turned back to the table.

Jean laughed. "I suppose I shall have to let you enjoy it in your own way. Go on and finish. Then wash your hands and sit down on the hardest, most uncomfortable chair and I'll tell you."

"Don't be silly, dear. It doesn't matter what it is, I shall have to have dinner on time to-night, won't I?"

"Yes, I suppose the animals would have to be fed even if the ark was sinking."

Jean sat on the edge of the table and watched her mother trim the pie edges, with sure, quick strokes and her whole attention. When Martha closed the oven door, she glanced at the clock to be sure of the moment. Before the astonishing news that Jean was about to divulge, the pies might be forgotten. Jean laughed aloud.

"Now." Martha smiled as she took the chair Jean indicated. "The court is in session."

"Well," began Jean, "I took that last lot up and he looked it through in that dead-fish fashion of his without a word. He always does, sits there and goggles as if he were just going to pounce on a mistake, and all the time I know it's all right. I didn't expect him to say anything nice, but I thought he might give me an opening and I had my little speech all ready. 'If this has been satisfactory,' et cetera, but I knew if he didn't say anything at all I could never get started. He freezes me clear through."

"The world wasn't made in a day, Jean."

"I know that. But I never could see why. If I could do a miracle at all, I'd have done a whopper."

Her mother's eyes filled with tears and Jean jumped down and knelt beside her.

"I'm sorry, mummy. I didn't mean to hurt you. It was cheap. Only that was such an endless ten minutes until he took a bundle of letters out of his pocket. He said he had something he thought I might be interested in, and then that human fossil actually pawed over those papers three distinct times and grunted and shook his head and wondered whether he'd lost it and began all over again while I stood wondering."

"That seems the usual method of announcing news among scholars." A sly smile twinkled in Martha's eyes.

"But honestly I nearly died. I was trembling like a leaf."

"Jean!"

"Worse. Shaking with ague. Then right out of the bundle he'd looked through a million times, he drew a letter and handed it over. The Mercantile Library in San Francisco wants a cataloguer and asks him if he knows one. The head librarian is a friend of his and he's recommended me. Do you hear, mummy Norris? I've got a job, got a job."

For a moment Martha did not answer. She sat with her head bent and her tired hands at rest in her lap. Then she looked up and smiled.

"When do you begin?"

"I'm going over to see about it to-morrow."

"You're not absolutely sure?"

"Yes, I am. I'm going to be sure to-night even if I never get it."

"Now, Jean. You——"

"Don't, mummy, please don't. Don't tell me any more about patience and the right thing coming. I've got to get this or I'll die."

"It takes a lot to kill." Martha spoke quietly, and getting up, went over to the oven.

Jean felt as if a spring inside her had cracked and wondered why it was always so when she tried to talk to her mother. Outwardly Martha Norris was the least emotional person in the world but she managed to extract a lot of it from those near her. The most casual conversation usually ended in a tensity out of all proportion to its importance and left Jean with a sense of the futility of trying to make things different.

It was with a distinct effort that Jean put her arms again about her mother.

"Now, mummy, I am going to get it. What's more, I'm going to move you over to the city, into a place that won't be big enough for you to have any duty to any relative of anybody's. So there. Now kiss me, like a nice, obedient mother should."

Martha smiled, and standing on her tiptoes kissed her big daughter. Jean went whistling from the room.

When she had gone Martha Norris closed her eyes for a moment and a look of perfect faith and devotion flooded her. In such moments she was beautiful, like some frail saint, glowing with the fire of self-surrender, strengthened beyond the power of human understanding. But no human being had ever seen Martha alone with her God.

The next morning Jean left the house early. The sun touched the Bay to millions of glittering points, and beyond it, wrapped in a haze of smoke and coming heat, the waiting city sprawled on her hills. Jean could feel it, a magnet drawing her and all these strangers massed together on the sunny deck.

As the boat neared the dock she went and stood in the stern and looked back at the little town, a mere spot at the base of the Berkeley hills. In her very definite sense of escape there was a touch of sadness. She was like a person who, having escaped from a terrible catastrophe, looks back from a point of safety and mingles with his sincere gratitude, a regret for some small souvenir he has been unable to take with him. She thought of Elsie in her dragging kimono waiting on Tom at breakfast; of the dead, habitual kiss they would exchange when he started to look for the job he never found; of Tommykins, bewildered in his disordered world of alternate slapping and petting. And of her mother, trotting about in her endless routine. She was sorry for them all.

Waiting in the outer office of the Chief Librarian, Jean felt the Future coming towards her, stepping swiftly through the stillness, a stillness vibrant with accomplished purpose, the secure accomplishment of many thousands of books. So sharp was the feeling that, when at last footsteps moved behind the door marked "Private," Jean rose as if about to face a mysterious force, made suddenly material for her understanding.

"This is Miss Norris?"

The Chief Librarian stood before her. He was tall and thin and gray, with long bony hands that looked as if they would always be cold. He was like a new chisel, straight and narrow and sharp-edged. He waved Jean back to her seat and took one himself. Then he sat, staring beyond her, as if his progress through the silent realms of spirit had been rudely halted by this collision with a corporeal body.

"You've done library work before?" The question came so unexpectedly that Jean started.

"No." The monosyllable reverberated through the ordered stillness. She felt as if she had thrown a stone at the Chief Librarian.

"Um." In the mental isolation of his daily life, this misfortune arrested his pity. "I believe you did some Latin translation for Dr. Renshaw?"

"Yes, the Odes of Horace."

"Promising—quite. But of course Horace is not library work." The tone conveyed that this was not Horace's fault, however. "Still, in this work you will find, Miss Norris, that every scrap of human knowledge is profitable. I might almost say necessary. It is its wonderful variety, roots in all fields, that makes our work so interesting."

"It must."

"Exactly. Now the question is, Miss Norris, would you be willing to begin at the bottom, sorting? Cataloguing comes next, and then——" But as if fearing that he was being carried away in an excess of enthusiasm, he qualified. "Of course that is if we find it mutually satisfactory."

"I should be willing to begin anywhere. And I have done a little sorting and cataloguing. The library I used for Horace was in something of a mess, and I had to straighten it out before I could begin."

"Exactly. But you will understand, Miss Norris, that no part of our library is in a mess." The shadow of a smile touched his lips and was gone. It was as if a cosmic joke, millions of miles off, had been softly whispered to him. "And now, as I have a very busy morning, I will hand you over to my assistant, Miss MacFarland."

He touched an electric button in the wall. With no preliminary sound the outer door opened.

"Miss MacFarland, this is Miss Norris, recommended by Dr. Renshaw. She will help at first with the new consignment."

His tone admitted Miss MacFarland to the depths of his official being. She nodded.

"Will you come with me?"

Without waiting for Jean to answer she began moving noiselessly away on her broad, rubber-soled shoes. She was very slight and gave an effect of deep brownness. She wore a brown serge skirt and a brown silk waist with a brown Scotch pebble pin. She had brown eyes that looked muddy through the thick, myopic glasses, and a braid of dank, brown hair framed her narrow face.

Through the big reading room, empty at this hour, Jean followed, down a rear stairway, along a narrow cemented hall into a storeroom, dim with a ground-glass window protected by an iron grating. Miss MacFarland indicated the great number of packing cases by a nod as she wound her way among them to a farther door. She might have been a guide in the underworld leading the latest spirit to its appointed task. She opened a door, and a sudden glare of morning sunshine filled the place.

"This is the room you will use for the present."

There were two large windows open now on a tiny strip of lawn that ran along this side of the building. A redwood table and bench took up one end of the room. There was nothing else in it except six huge packing cases.

"I'll send you down an apron and sleeve protectors and have Timothy unpack the cases."

She looked about to make sure she had forgotten nothing, and moved toward the door.

"Is there any special rotation you want the cases opened in?"

Jean asked it to pretend experience more than from any idea of its mattering. But she saw by the expression behind the thick glasses that it did make a difference and that Miss MacFarland had forgotten to tell her.

"I was going to tell Timothy, but perhaps I had better mark them."

From the pocket of her black apron she drew a piece of red chalk.

"The political economies are needed in a hurry and they are in this crate. Then the histories, natural science, miscellaneous, fiction and poetry. If you get into difficulties you can telephone up."

When she had gone Jean stood for a moment just where she was.

"Oh Patsy, a corpse has a sense of humor compared to a librarian! But it's nine a week."

CHAPTER THREE

Every morning at eight Jean crossed the Bay and every night at six she returned. The trains and the boats were always crowded, and very shortly Jean came to know certain faces and to watch for them. She liked to speculate as to what these people did, how long they had been doing it and whether they liked it. When she had made up her mind about a man or woman it always disappointed her to have to readjust her deductions by catching scraps of conversation that upset her theories. She often had to do this, however, because she was always making sweeping generalizations based on tenuous details. There were certain groups that came and went together, and although they seemed to have no connection beyond this short trip twice a day, they always looked eagerly for each other as if in dread of having to make the journey alone. They resented ever having to sit anywhere except in their usual places, and each group surrounded itself with a barrier of self-centered interest that separated it from every other self-centered group.

At first Jean ate lunch with Miss MacFarland and two other women workers, but, as she wrote to Pat, it made her feel "like a mouse nibbling at the edges of a book," and as soon as she could, broke the arrangement, and took her lunch to a nearby park. Here in the seclusion of a thick hedge, little birds came for crumbs and beyond the hedge, unseen people crunched the gravel and Jean caught scraps of their talk, unconnected bits, like scraps of patchwork.

She liked to tell Miss MacFarland about these unseen people, draw pictures of the comedies and tragedies beyond the hedge, because Miss MacFarland always listened so politely and looked so puzzled. Her thick brown eyes searched vaguely for the point of the story, and Jean knew it was only because the cataloguing was well done, that Miss MacFarland did not consider her a lunatic.

But as the weeks passed and the newness of the work dulled to a routine of writing the names of books on cards and putting numbers after them, Jean began to wonder whether in time, she, too, might not come to look vaguely for the point of a story, and prefer to drink strong tea in a stuffy room. At first the idea amused her and she elaborated it in a whimsical letter to Pat, but with the coming of the winter rains, the whimsy died, and the vision of herself in broad-toed shoes and black silesia sleeve protectors, began to follow her home every night. Now the crowds on the boat were damp and peevish and, when the boat docked, each scuttled for his own shelter, indifferent to the others.

But it was on wet Sundays that Miss MacFarland persisted beyond Jean's power to dislodge. Then Tom lounged all day in smoking jacket and slippers, dropping into brief slumber in his chair, while Tommykins cut up the colored supplement of the day's paper on the floor. Martha prepared elaborate meals and went to St. Jude's in the early morning, at four in the afternoon and eight at night. Between cooking and church, she read the lives of Anglican saints, alone in her room.

With the lighting of the street lamps on these wet Sunday nights, the town sank into the stillness of death. Only once, during the evening, did the silence ever part, to let the worshipers from evening service slip through. With soft padding of rubbered feet, a few figures slipped by the window, stealthily, as if afraid of desecrating the holiness of the Sabbath by any motion of their bodies.

At exactly five minutes before ten, Martha came cool-skinned from the dampness. If Jean was in bed, Martha always sat for a few moments on the edge. They never had anything particular to talk about, because nothing ever happened in the interim of her absence. But in these visits, Martha would strip bits of the sermon from their religious setting and offer them off-hand to Jean's intelligence. She never urged Jean to go to service, but Jean knew that in this simulated comradeship on the bed, her mother was trying to keep her in touch with "holy things," to counteract in a small part the godlessness of her days. And sometimes it made her want to cry; the little figure, carefully stripping away the phrases that annoyed, and trying to link up some old, dead form with the rush of life, was so alone in all that meant most to it. Alone with God and unaware of loneliness. So content with nothing.

It was after a particularly depressing Sunday in January that Jean came back to work on Monday morning with so fixed a certainty of becoming in the end like Miss MacFarland, that not even the relief of an unexpected blue sky after days of rain, and respite of lunch in the park had been able to dispel it. Now, in mid-afternoon, she stood by the open window, waiting for Timothy with a fresh supply of books. It was one of those perfect days between rains when sunshine filters clean air, and cool little breezes lurk in the shade. The narrow strip of lawn below the window sent up a spicy sweetness that made Jean resent the walls about her, three more hours of cataloguing and all the restrictions that hemmed one in against one's will. The air had a livingness in it that mocked any gratitude for these few moments she was free to enjoy it. Looking up at the fleecy tufts of white clouds drifting in the blue, Jean felt as a very poor person feels watching the wasteful extravagance of the rich. Something in her called to the perfect freedom of the little clouds, the inexhaustible blueness in the sky, the tingle in the air. She felt stifled, held by something she could not see, kept from something she had never had.

Jean was decidedly cross. She wondered whether, if she told Miss MacFarland she was ill and wanted to leave earlier, because it was such a lovely day, the thick brown eyes would bore into the truth, and what would happen if they did? Would Miss MacFarland ever forgive an assistant who wanted to stop working because there were little white clouds in the sky?

"Oh Lord!" Jean leaned out the window, drawing deep sniffs of the damp earth.

"Miss Norris."

Jean jerked back quickly and the blood flooded under her fair skin at the sight of the Chief Librarian standing beside her.

"Miss Norris, this is Mr. Herrick. Franklin Herrick of the Sunday Times."

He beckoned to some one still in the shadow of the storeroom and the next moment a tall man with a young face and thick fair hair stood looking at Jean. Jean never knew afterwards whether it was her own embarrassment or not, but in that first glance at Franklin Herrick she had a strange impression of receiving a very distinct picture of something naturally indistinct. He gave a feeling of great physical strength and yet looked as if he would always be too lazy to use it. His eyes were clear, deep blue and far apart, as if he went through life seeing very clearly. But the lower part of his face was heavy and his mouth contradicted his eyes. It was soft and full and not at all hidden under a small, close-cropped mustache. There was something large and curved and whitish about this tall man standing before her, with the faintest touch of amusement in his eyes, that made Jean think of the big gulls that circled over the ferryboat night and morning. She bowed slightly and wished she could stop blushing.

"Mr. Herrick is doing some special work and will need Division Z 21, which I understand is not yet catalogued. If you have no objection he might work down here, as Miss MacFarland tells me you are on Z 21 now and it would save him time."

The Chief Librarian spoke in a dry, thirsty tone and with fixed pauses, so that one got the impression of hearing the punctuation. And although he asked permission, his tone conveyed that Franklin Herrick would work in the basement whether it were convenient to Jean or not.

"That will be all right. I began Z 21 Saturday." Jean felt compelled to say something and at the same time the uselessness of saying it. "There's a small table in the storeroom. I'll have Timothy bring it in."

"Oh, no, please don't do that. It's not necessary—unless you prefer it."

Franklin Herrick spoke rapidly in a high, thin voice. It caught and held Jean's attention as the tinkle of a small bell would have done, if unconsciously she had been expecting a gong. She raised her eyes and looked at him, her own embarrassment gone. Herrick understood. Extraordinarily sensitive to the impression he made, especially on women, he knew that the thin quality of his voice had destroyed his first impression of strength. The feminine timbre of his voice was a trial to Herrick and always made him feel at the mercy of the person who noticed it. He had tried for years to deepen the tone and usually made a conscious effort at a first meeting. But for some reason, coming on this big, fair woman sniffing the air, had made him feel as though he knew her, linked them in mutual understanding against the Chief Librarian and made them seem like old acquaintances. The little incident annoyed him intensely.

He crossed to the table and appropriated one end by pushing back the books in a business-like fashion.

"I do not need much space and this will do. I shall probably be through in a day or two."

At the same instant Timothy appeared whistling, with a truckload of books. At sight of the Chief Librarian he checked the whistle, just as Jean had stopped sniffing, so suddenly that even the Chief Librarian turned and looked curiously.

Jean's eyes met Herrick's, and they smiled. When Herrick smiled at a woman he seemed to include her in something very intimate, something fine and delicate, a little beyond words. In some way it shamed Jean for the surprise she had felt at the quality of his voice. It was as if she had shown surprise at some physical defect.

"If there is anything that Miss Norris cannot do for you, if you will just ring that bell." The Chief Librarian looked vaguely about, lost in a world not his own, and went.

Separated by the length of the table, Jean and Herrick stood looking after him. Then, simultaneously, they looked at each other.

Jean laughed.

"He made me feel as if I were doing something disgraceful."

"Worse. Something not quite nice." Franklin Herrick chuckled. When Herrick laughed his voice was higher and thinner than when he spoke, but when he chuckled there was something warm and young about it. Herrick had discovered this very early in life and rarely laughed aloud. When women first heard Franklin Herrick chuckle they usually had an impulse to touch him, which impulse they called maternal or were afraid of according to their past experience. Jean, however, had no impulse to touch him, but she noticed the chuckle and liked it.

As she took her place at the table and watched Herrick cross the room for a chair, she felt that the set of his shoulders, the texture of his clothes, the very motions of his body as he lifted the chair, were not external, but expressed something within the man, just as the deft motions of Martha's hands expressed her indefatigable obedience to the drudgery of small things. And Jean liked the thing they expressed. Without defining it in words, she felt that it was something indestructibly young and buoyant and clean. It belonged with his eyes and not at all with the rather heavy lines of his chin and throat.

With a smile, Herrick drew forward a pile of books, and in a moment was hard at work. But only the surface of his brain was concerned with his notes. He knew that, from time to time, Jean glanced at him, and that, for some reason, she had changed her first estimate of him. Vibrant to any criticism, Herrick resented the implication that there had been a readjustment, and yet delighted in the result. For Jean looked as if she usually made up her mind instantly from trifles and seldom changed. She looked stronger and spiritually simpler than any woman he had ever met, as if she had been born and raised in wide spaces and carried the standards of the mountains with her. He could not picture her large, white hands ever trembling, nor her clear, gray eyes clouding with indecision, but he was sure that if he let the least hint of this sureness into his eyes, her fair skin would flush.

It was almost five when Herrick slipped the notes into his pocket and pushed back his chair.

"Through?" The brusqueness of Jean's tone annoyed him, for he had decided to stay and talk for a few moments, and the indifference in her question made him feel that Jean had shut a door he was about to push a little open.

"Yes. For the present. But I shall have to put in some licks to-night." He picked up a volume and looked inquiringly at her. "I don't suppose there would be any objection to taking this out, even if it isn't ready for circulation yet?"

"I don't know. It is against the rules."

"Perfectly good reason for taking it then."

"Just let me have it a moment. I'll make out a slip and number it."

He returned it with the look of one submitting to a foolish respect for childish rules and Jean felt like Miss MacFarland as she wrote Herrick's name and the name of the book on a pink slip. Herrick put it into his pocket.

"Thanks. It will help a lot having this. You can picture me digging my way through it in the small, wee hours, Miss Norris," he added as he took his hat and this time turned to the door.

The assumption that she would think of him at all annoyed her, and kept him in her memory almost constantly for the next two days. Jean laid this to the interruption of the usual routine. Having the mechanical intervals of Timothy's appearance broken by the unexpected advent of a newspaper man, who turned the rules of the library about, gave her several contradictory impressions of himself and ended by making her feel like a child, naturally stood out sharply in her day's work. So for two days Jean continued to think about Herrick and to be annoyed because she did.

On Thursday Herrick appeared suddenly about noon. He was in a great hurry. He returned the book, and took another, which he handed to Jean to note as she had done before. He seemed preoccupied and made no effort at conversation. It was evidently an afterthought that he turned on the threshold and called back:

"Paper goes to press to-day. Haven't time to breathe."

Jean had wondered at his altered manner, but his explanation seemed to accuse her of having shown it. She gave the slightest possible nod to acknowledge that she had heard him and went on with her work.

On Friday Herrick did not come. Jean wondered whether he was through with his work now that the paper had gone to press, and just what special duties going to press involved. It sounded interesting and much more vital than anything connected with a library. An incongruous picture of the Chief Librarian rushing something to press tickled her fancy.

On Saturday, Herrick appeared directly after lunch.

"Well, back again." Something in the tone, the look that accompanied them, showed that he had missed coming, and now entered again into a congenial atmosphere. It seemed to throw them a long way forward in mutual understanding.

"Going to press must be a ferocious business." Jean smiled across the table and made no effort to pretend work. When Jean smiled, something cold in her face melted.

"It is. I always feel as if I had been caught in a cyclone, carried violently round in a circle and deposited in the spot I started from. You see there's the same pother every week, and we're always caught in the same rush. Newspaper work's a rotten grind, anyhow."

"To outsiders it always sounds nerve-racking excitement. What on earth would you do if you had to catalogue books all day?"

"That is pretty bad." Herrick's eyes softened as they always did when he was making a woman understand his understanding.

Jean felt that without meaning to she had told this stranger a great deal about herself. Almost as if she had told him of her mother, of Tom and Elsie and Tommykins and the long, interminable Sundays. She flushed. Instantly the understanding vanished from Herrick's eyes and he shrugged indifferently.

"I suppose anything we have to stick at feels the same way."

"Did you get your work done the other night?" Jean asked it after a pause in which she wondered what she could say that wouldn't sound as if she had been thinking about him.

"Oh yes, indeed. But it was a hard pull. If you knew me better, Miss Norris, you would congratulate me on that achievement." He looked like a mischievous boy expecting to be punished.

Jean smiled in sympathy. "What on? Sticking to a disagreeable job till it's done?"

"Well, put that way, it does sound rather bald. But you see The Bunch was having a blow-out and little Franklin had to stay in his attic and work. Maybe if you knew what The Bunch can do in the way of highjinks, even you'd be sorry for me."

"Maybe I would. Are they such terribly enticing affairs?"

"Oh, sometimes we get a bit rowdy, but usually we're perfectly harmless—just conversation and music and food and meeting each other. We're congenial and interested in the same things, and keep each other from getting into a rut. Sometimes when one of us goes away or comes back, or sells a picture or an article, we have an extra celebration. That's all."

"It sounds—awfully interesting."

Herrick leaned across the table and said in a boyish, hesitating fashion:

"We do have some pretty good times. If you think you'd care for it, I'd like immensely to bring you round some evening."

"I'd love to." Jean was a trifle breathless.

"Some of us have made good and some of us are—popularly nobodies. There's Matthews and Harcourt, landscape, and Fletcher has done some fine things in bronze. Tolletson's in drama production and Freeman, Gerald Freeman, is going to be heard of with short stories. Maybe you know his stuff. He had a story in Scribner's last month. Then there are the girls, none of them are exactly famous yet; and the rest of us just jog along."

But Jean had stopped listening at Gerald Freeman's name. She had read the story and sent it to Pat. Its delicate subtlety had haunted her for days. And now she was being asked to meet him and others like him. She was being asked as if it were a favor to the big man with the kind eyes, sitting across the table. Jean tried to keep the excitement out of her voice as she answered.

"Yes, I read that story. It was so very—perfect."

"Yes. His things are that, those half elusive, dream things. They always make me think of small, finely carved ivories."

"I should like to meet him very much."

"Well, Freeman himself isn't here now. He's getting too famous to stay long in one spot, but—there's the rest of us."

Jean felt that she had been rude in her special interest and added quickly: "I'd be just as pleased meeting 'the rest of us.'"

"Then we'll settle it right now. Saturday's the best night. The unfortunates don't have to get up early, and we generally have more hilarity than just the usual nightly dinner. Could you come to-night?"

"I'm afraid I can't to-night."

Jean had never wanted to do anything so much in her life, but she could not picture herself ringing up her mother and saying that she would not be home to dinner.

"It is rather short notice. How about next Saturday? Have you that free?" Herrick saw that she wanted to come and wondered why she couldn't.

Under her pleasure that the invitation had not been postponed indefinitely, Jean had an almost irresistible desire to laugh at the idea of her having any night that was not free.

"Yes. Next Saturday's all right."

"Then I'll call for you about seven?"

"I don't live on this side."

The difficulties of meeting some one at seven, when she would be through by half past five, occurred to her, and she wondered where girls met men and how she could pretend this was not as new and exciting a situation as it was.

"Great. You get through about five, don't you? I'll call here and we'll find some way to kill the time between."

"Fine." Jean made the monosyllable as comradely as she could, and flattered herself that she had carried it off very well.

Herrick turned to the books and in a few moments was hard at work.

Jean's confusion had delighted him, and destroyed the slight annoyance he had felt at being carried away by such a foolish impulse as to ask her at all. It would be delicious to watch the reactions of this shy woman in the sophisticated world of The Bunch. He decided to say nothing about her beforehand, and enjoy to the full their surprise when he appeared,—a little late, he would see to that—with Jean in tow.

"She'll hit them like a blast of north wind. I shouldn't wonder if Kitten doesn't actually shiver."

The prospect of watching The Kitten shiver pleased Herrick immensely.

CHAPTER FOUR

Exactly at half past five Herrick came. The thick hair had been freshly cut, and he wore a suit that Jean had not seen before. He looked young and very happy and full of joy in life. As they came down the library steps and joined the after-matinée crowds, it seemed to Jean that Herrick stood out from other men, bigger, cleaner, stronger. There was something in him, burning below the flesh, that whitened and sharpened him, so that the lines which were sometimes dull and heavy when he bent intently over the books across the table, were now finely cut. He walked beside her as if he were walking lightly on springy ground, and the memory came back to Jean how, the first time she had seen him, she had thought of a gull, a strong, white gull, poised in flight. It was impossible to believe that it was only two weeks ago, and that she had seen him, in all, not more than seven or eight times.

Herrick made no effort at conversation as they threaded their way through the crowds. He was not at all sure of his ground with Jean, for his first interest had deepened in the two weeks to an intensity that surprised him. To be interested in a woman who was not obviously pretty, whose life lay well within the circle that The Bunch called the Outland, who made no effort to attract him, who never, by the slightest feminine trick, tried to rouse his interest, a woman who had been through college and was earning her own living and yet had something cloistered about her. She piqued Herrick's curiosity. One by one he had seen his small efforts drop like spent arrows against the wall of her sincere but unemotional interest.

"She's either the most subtle thing that God ever made, or else——" Herrick did not know what else. But he would find out.

When they had left the more crowded streets behind, Herrick stopped and looked at his watch.

"It's only six, and it's not much good getting to Giuseppe's before seven. What shall we do? Go round to Chinatown and have tea, or would you like to go up to Flop's studio? He's the father of The Bunch, you know, and maybe you'd feel as if you knew him better if you saw some of his stuff first."

He stood looking down at her with a smile that consulted only her preference, and showed none of his own eagerness that she should choose the latter. When Franklin Herrick was trying to break through the reserves of a woman, he looked like Sir Galahad going to battle. It always filled the woman with a rush of tenderness, and a longing to stand for something fine and real in his life.

"Besides, I'd like to show you some of Flop's stuff for its own sake, and we won't get a chance after dinner, when the whole Bunch is there. We are a noisy lot, Miss Norris. You must be prepared for anything."

"Oh, I can make a lot of noise myself. And I'd like awfully to see the pictures."

"This way, then. We'll go down through The Coast, if you don't mind. It's quicker."

His tone apologized for the street into which he turned, in a way that made Jean want to laugh at the idea of her needing protection, and at the same time delighted her. She had never been in this part of the city before, and she looked about her with interest.

Skirting the edge of Chinatown, beyond the boundaries of the big bazaars, they touched the poorer fringe of the Latin quarter, where dirty black-eyed babies tumbled in dark doorways, and tired women with bundles of food under their shawls hurried by, dragging hungry, screaming children by the hand. Here the narrow streets struggled up steep hillsides, as if in a forlorn hope of reaching quiet above. Everywhere was dust and noise and the harsh voices of men screaming at each other in the rough Sicilian dialect.

Then down through the sordid section that lies between the White World and the Yellow, where mean, gray houses cling hopelessly together, like the poor for comfort and outcasts for respectability. Where the tides of Barbary Coast wash the world beyond, Herrick paused. Then he plunged in.

It was early and The Coast had not yet come to life, but to Jean it was filled with the rumblings of the swelling tide. A drunken sailor lurched from a dance-hall. A mechanical piano ground out a popular rag. A painted woman with sodden, indifferent eyes looked from a window and laughed shrilly. Other women, powdered to a deathly whiteness, turned to stare after Jean and Herrick. Their eyes were sometimes scornful, sometimes curious. When they brushed close to Jean she felt herself turn a little cold and sick.

Once when she was a small child, while playing in the garden Jean had accidentally plunged her foot through the planking of an unused well and had felt the cold blackness sucking up. For months after she had had a terror of that end of the garden, and could feel the bottomless blackness drawing her. Now the same feeling reached out from these painted women, and Jean drew a little closer to Herrick. There was something horrible and black and hidden, the same black oozing mud that lay at the bottom of the old well. These men and women who moved and talked like herself and Herrick were down there, crawling about. She drew nearer still to Herrick. For the first time he touched her, slipping his hand under her elbow.

"We'll soon be out of it."

Then he began to talk of his work at the library. He had another week of it before he would be through.

"And I'll be glad of it in many ways. If I had to go on much longer digging that dry rot out of books I'd quit my job."

"But in a way you put life in it, rearrange it, make it your own."

Herrick laughed. Like the echo of a memory Jean's repugnance to that high, thin laugh returned. But it seemed trivial now that she really knew him.

"There's nothing to make one's own in the whole business. It hasn't any permanence. Not a scrap of reality. It is not my work."

Herrick had said this so often that he believed it, and his voice was bitter with reproach. "You see it's not so bad so long as you don't want with your whole soul to do something else. It's the knowing and not being able to get at it that's hell."

Jean remembered her hatred of teaching and the misery of that last college year. And she had only known what she hated and not at all what she wanted. What was it that this man wanted so much that the thought of it changed his voice and made him seem suddenly older? She longed to ask, but felt that he had expected her to understand and she did not want to fail him. The next moment he answered it himself.

"Several years ago I mapped out a novel and I've never had time to start it. I can't work sneaking moments. I'd have to have a straight sweep—and so I don't start it. But it gnaws there just the same."

"'Gnaws.' That's exactly what things do when they have no outlet."

He turned quickly. "Do you write, too?"

"No."

"But there's something you want to do. You couldn't understand if there weren't."

Jean shook her head. "It's mostly concerned with not wanting to do things. I have no special talent."

"How do you know? Have you tried anything?"

The irritation at her modesty was flattering. Jean flushed.

"No. But I have no faith in hidden genius. I'm twenty-four, you know, and it would have showed before this."

Herrick felt that she would have confessed to thirty-four just as readily. Her frankness repelled him.

"I don't know about that. I don't believe that we all instinctively know what we want to do. Most of us have to live some time and be hurt a lot before we find out very much about ourselves."

"I suppose we do," she said humbly.

Herrick thrilled at the note in Jean's voice. But he went on in the same serious way as if he were being forced almost against his judgment to let Jean into his confidence.

"For years the longing to get things down on paper haunted me, but I only knew that I was miserable and felt stifled. It wasn't till I came to the city, here, that the puzzle suddenly fitted into place." He stopped and made a quick sweeping gesture with both hands. "Wouldn't it be great to get all this, all the heat and noise and mud and life, to get the whole hot, seething pain on paper! God, what a picture!"

Something came into Jean's throat and hurt.

"It would be glorious." She felt that Herrick had been granted a fineness of spiritual vision she could never hope for. It coarsened her that she had seen only the dirt and squalor of the vice, while the man beside her had grasped something beneath that linked it up with reality even as they both knew it, a kind of cosmic unity too finely toned for her ears.

"You must do it. You must. Don't let an impulse like that die. It's worth any sacrifice, anything. Can't you really get at it?"

Herrick looked quickly away. "Perhaps," he said shortly, "some day, if the conditions are right, I may."

He did not take Jean's arm again and in a few moments they came to an old loft building with a dark, yawning entry.

"Here we are." They turned into the blackness, and Jean felt it close about them.

"It's a rickety old hole, but Flop would suffocate any place else. Perhaps I'd better take your hand. The stairs aren't all they might be and you don't know where the broken places are."

Jean gave him her hand and they went up through the blackness together. At the bottom of the last short flight they stopped.

"Flop usually lights the lantern. He must have forgotten. Just wait a moment." He left her and ran lightly up ahead. Jean could not see him, but she could feel him looming above her on the landing, and hear the low rustle of his clothes as he felt hurriedly through them for a match. She had never before been so alone with a man.

"Oh, shucks!"

The word dropped on the tensity of Jean's mood like a drop of ice water. She wished he had said "damn." It was like hearing a lion say "Tut!"

"I guess I'll have to lead you. I haven't a match and there are none on the ledge. Flop must be out."

They went up the few remaining steps, along a narrow hall to a door at the end of a passage. Herrick turned the handle and stepped back to let Jean enter. But Jean did not move.

"Oh," she cried softly. And again: "Oh."

"I'm glad you like it," he whispered after a moment, and drew her gently across the threshold and closed the door.

Every cent that Flop had made for the last three years, and much that he had borrowed, had gone to the fitting of this room. The walls were of gray, satin-smooth eucalyptus. Soft, worn rugs lay before great couches piled with pillows. Along the west wall, wide windows ran the length of the room, from the rough stone fireplace to the glass door that opened on a tiny iron balcony. All the windows were shaded now with heavy green curtains run on silken ropes. The afterglow of a scarlet sunset came in rose and pale gold through the curtain openings, and lay in pools of light on the dull rugs.

Herrick's hand took Jean's without pressure, so that it seemed part of the quiet beauty of the room, and they crossed to the window. The hills beyond the Bay etched themselves in faint purple and amethyst on the paling sky. They stood silent, looking out across the low roofs, to the Bay, with its wall of hills and the white ferryboats moving majestically in the dignity of distance.

At last Jean turned back to the room.

"One could do great things here," she said slowly as if thinking aloud, unconscious of Herrick's presence.

"Yes. One could do great things, if one were happy."

The emphasis drew her attention and she looked at him.

"Isn't he happy? It doesn't seem possible, quite, to live in a room like this and not be happy."

"Flop? I don't know. As happy or unhappy as every one else, I suppose."

Herrick's eyes sought the Bay again. She was impossible as a grown woman. She was more like a boy, with her annoying way of looking straight into his eyes, and her silly, impersonal interpretations. No doubt she thought that all Flop needed was a room like this, and twenty-four hours a day, to paint masterpieces. And Herrick thought of all the love and hate, the reckless joy and pain that had been born and killed among the soft rugs and old tapestries and small, pure marbles.

"I don't know that it matters so much, after all, whether we are happy or not, as long as we are alive."

Jean spoke with difficulty, for Herrick's sudden turning away made her feel that she had really known him only two weeks, and knew nothing whatever of his life. In the shadow of the green curtains, his face looked whiter and the soft curve of his lips hard, as if he were remembering something that hurt very much. A tremendous necessity to comfort him swept Jean into speech, to make him see that nothing mattered except being alive as he must be, not hampered and swaddled with the crowding of uncongenial personalities. She contrasted Herrick with his ability and definite ambition and friends, with the long, dead evenings and the killing Sundays with Tom and Elsie and her mother.

"'To see Life clearly and see it whole,'" quoted Jean, and her voice shook slightly with the force of her own conviction.

The blood rushed into Franklin Herrick's eyes, and he shook his head as if to clear them from the mist. Again he felt that Jean was eluding him, slipping away from the niche in which he had just placed her. But this time she was flitting ahead of him, tantalizing in her promised capacity to feel. He wanted to put his hands on her strong shoulders and force something into those clear gray eyes, filled now with confusion at her own unusual enthusiasm.

"We'll straighten out all the philosophy of the world some other night," he said abruptly. "But now I want to show you Flop's latest. And, whether he's happy or not, it's great stuff."

Herrick brought the canvas from the easel, propped it on a table and lit a small bronze sconce, which he held so that the light fell on the picture and on Jean's head.

From the shadow of a dusky, smudged wood, the nude figure of a woman stood out with startling whiteness. At her feet a little brook ran over white pebbles. There was a feeling of moonlight among the trees, as if somewhere a full moon were shining in the warm night. But the little brook, deep in the heart of the wood, was cold, and the woman longed and at the same time dreaded to enter it. The warm blackness of the trees held her, like the embrace of an unseen lover. But the cool voice of the brook called steadily and one felt sure that in the end she would go. She was bent a little forward as if listening to the brook, so that the curves of her slim body, the small, white breasts, partly veiled in the red-gold hair that fell about her shoulders, leaned into the darkness.

"She's alive," Herrick whispered, and going to the canvas passed his hand lightly from the red-gold hair to the small, white feet deep in the damp grass.

The blood flooded Jean's face. Instantly Herrick was angry with himself, but the call had been too strong. He covered his anger with surprise as he looked quietly at Jean.

"Come. I want to show you the rest of the things, too."

Holding the sconce high, he moved about the room, pointing out his favorites among Flop's work.

Jean followed, making flat comments on the things he showed her. She wanted desperately to go back to the first picture, and discuss it in a rational manner, for there was nothing in it to shock or repel. It was too perfect for that. Again she felt that she had been crude and childish, just as she had been about the painted women and the sordid ugliness of The Coast, and that she had fallen short of Herrick's estimate and disappointed him. She wanted to say something, but did not know in what words to open the subject nor how to make Herrick understand without. Slowly they made the rounds of the studio and came again to the glass door opening on the balcony. Herrick put out the light.

"It's only a quarter to and it won't take five minutes to get there. Shall we stay here or go and wait for the rest in the restaurant?"

"I'd rather wait here."

Jean hoped that some opportunity would offer to correct what must be Herrick's impression of her, but none came. Herrick sat silent.

As she rested against the pile of cushions Herrick had arranged, and watched the quick western twilight blot the world to night, Jean felt as if for the twenty-four years of her life she must have been fast asleep. All about her men and women had been loving and hating and misunderstanding and hurting each other, and she had been studying books like a child. She had used up much energy and bitterness longing for the moment when she would get out into life and earn her own living, make one of the army that fought its way back and forth each morning and night on the boats. And all the time the real thing was not that at all. The real thing was human relationship, the relations between men, and between women, and between women and men. There were thousands of sensations and cross currents and impressions. There was ambition, not vague ambition like hers, but a focused force like Freeman's and Harcourt's and Herrick's. There was struggle and disappointment and the pain that so evidently Herrick had known, and Flop too, not the petty annoyance of Elsie's whining, but sweeping pain that left one bigger. There was loneliness even in a glorious room like this and pleasant interludes of chance meetings with kindred souls.

The wonderful romance of friendship gripped Jean. From the ends of the earth two people, of different tradition, it might be of different race, met accidentally and their lives forever after were different. From the silent dark streets below, all the personalities of all the thousands she had never seen, came close and touched her, so that she felt that in some hidden way she was being influenced by every one of them. There was nothing in life insignificant, nothing unimportant, nothing unrelated to the whole.

Every one was bound to every one else by achievement and encouragement and understanding. Each of these was a definite thing, like a thread, made up of millions of minute strands, passing glances, chance handclasps, too fine to be caught and held in words and yet each so strong that it could bear the weight of many disappointments.

And there was the web of the whole with its radiating threads of the bigger social relationships, made from these fine, thin filaments of everyday occurrences.

She thought of herself and of Pat, of Tom and Elsie and her mother, each weaving his own pattern. Pat wove carelessly with whatever thread came to hand, singing as she wove, while Tom and Elsie fought over the threads that broke under their ceaseless nagging and left the pattern torn and frayed. And Martha, so sharply did the figure of a weaver present itself to Jean, that she saw as clearly as if her mother had been there, the patient figure sitting before its loom, weaving only the dark gray threads, gently thrusting aside with small, tired hands the golds and reds. And so vital did the need come to Jean of choosing the best threads, weaving the most glorious pattern she could, that she clenched her hands and whispered aloud:

"I will do it. I will."

"Do what?" Herrick bent to her and took both hands in his.

Jean laughed. "Did I really say it aloud?"

"You certainly did, whatever it was that you will. What is it?"

"I'm afraid I couldn't put it into words. It was just the feel of being up here above all those dark streets and—and——"

"'And all about with wings the darkness stirred.' Was that it?"

"I expect it was."

Herrick jumped to his feet and swung her to the floor beside him.

"My, but you're strong!"

They stood smiling for a moment. Then he moved to the door.

"We'll be late after all. But I guess I was dreaming too."

CHAPTER FIVE

Through the crowd waiting for tables, Herrick pushed his way and Jean followed closely. Greasy waiters rushed about with great platters of spaghetti, increasing the noise and confusion by their violent gestures and frantic efforts to serve every one at once. As Jean and Herrick made their way among the small tables that took up three-quarters of the long room, people looked at them and made comments which came to Jean in broken sentences of no meaning. Suddenly the air of the Marseillaise rose above the din. Instantly the crowd waiting about the door pushed forward, and those already seated got on chairs and craned their necks toward the end of the room.

Herrick bent to Jean. "Don't be frightened. We're really not a bit dangerous."

Jean did not have time to answer before they passed through the outer rim of the crowd and came into a cleared space before a long table, from which the deafening din arose. Mounted on a chair, a fat man, in a khaki hunting suit and an enormous Windsor tie of peacock blue satin, was bellowing a song set to the tune of the Marseillaise. The burden of the song was, "Bring on the Food! Bring on the Food!" A girl in a dull green crêpe dress that hung from the shoulders like a kimono, stood in the center of the table and carried the air high above the rest in a shrill soprano. The men and women about the table beat time with forks and spoons.

As Herrick and Jean came forward the man in khaki saw them, stopped, appraised Jean in a glance, and silenced his chorus with a wave of his fat hand.

"I hereby fine him, Franklin Herrick, twenty-five cents for tardiness, said fine to be paid in United States silver coin, not later than ten o'clock this evening, and to be used for the sole purpose of aiding the complete debauch of The Bunch."

He jumped down and came forward with both hands outstretched in generous welcome. He appropriated Jean, separated her from Herrick and swept her into the empty chair between a pudgy woman in a black skirt and soiled white waist, and a heavy-browed young man who did not move or glance at Jean as she took the place. With a wave that included the entire table, Flop announced:

"Jean, Jean Norris, and on with the dance!" He seemed to find this funny, and laughed immoderately. A tall, very thin man next to the pudgy woman bent forward, leered at Jean for a second in maudlin earnestness, and then yelled:

"We want Jean! We want Jean!"

The table took it up, and all down the length, glasses were raised and they drank to Jean in the sour, red wine. Across the table, from what was evidently his accustomed place next to the girl in the green crêpe, Herrick smiled reassuringly. The girl had come down from the table at Flop's introduction of Jean and sat with her elbows on the cloth and her chin in her palms, staring at Jean, with no acknowledgment of the latter's existence in her eyes. Now that she looked at her more closely, Jean saw that the woman was not really young, only her smallness made her seem so. Her blue eyes were netted with fine wrinkles and the skin of her hands was faintly withered. The youngest thing about her was her neck, beautifully modeled, and her black hair which was thin but wavy. Jean was just wondering whether the woman was expressing a genuine mood, or resenting a stranger, when the pudgy woman said in a reassuring tone:

"You mustn't be afraid of us. We say and do anything that pleases us, but really we're not the least bit dangerous."

"But I'm not. Not the least bit. Do I look so—so green, that I need protection?" Jean smiled, but this insistence that there was nothing to fear, annoyed her.

The woman thrust her face close to Jean's and scrutinized her carefully. "An azalea! That's it, an azalea! Listen, listen, all ye present, I've got it. Azalea, that's her Bunch name."

"Azalea! Azalea!" Above the noise, Flop's bass bellowed and he beat the table in a frenzy of approval, as if he could not have endured another moment without knowing the right name for Jean. Through the uproar, Herrick's smile reached like a cool touch. They drank Jean's baptism in the sour, red wine and the next moment the interrupted arguments were going on more violently than before. The name was adopted with voracious enthusiasm and complete indifference.

Rather exhausted by the suddenness of the proceeding, Jean drew back and tried to separate the mass before her into its elements. She wondered which were Harcourt and Tolletson and whether they had been "baptized" in wine. She scanned the faces along the opposite side, where Herrick was now listening with a frown to the girl in green; and then, as no one claimed her attention, leaned a little forward. There was a heavy-set young man with a swarthy skin, who talked with an Oxford accent and made Jewish gestures: a middle-aged man, with sleek hair and a Van Dyke, which he was continually stroking with a very white hand. He seemed to carry on his side of the argument with the swarthy person, in a series of grunts and inner explosions, as if his opinions were so violent that they erupted before he could bind them in words. There was also a woman with gray hair framing a young face and sad, kind brown eyes. She seemed interested, but said little, and Jean liked her. And there was a pale, tall girl, with black eyes and hair, who smoked cigarettes faster than the two men beside her could roll them, and who stared in smoldering hate at these men when she had to wait, as if they had mortally injured her. Jean laughed quietly to herself, but instantly the woman beside her turned.

"I'm not so sure 'Azalea' was right. You sound exactly like a dove when you do that, a deep-breasted, soft, blue dove—Paloma. I believe that's it! I say——"

"Oh, no, please don't. I like the other one better. But I do want to know something. Which is Mr. Harcourt and which is Mr. Tolletson?"

"Harcourt and Tolletson? My dear, they never come, that is, hardly ever. Harcourt lives in London and Tolletson spends most of his time in Paris. Mathews lives in bourgeoise respectability in the country with a legal wife and baby. They were Bunchers somewhere in the Dark Ages. Some of us wouldn't know them if we met them on the street, only down underneath, you know, we're kind of proud of them, and keep their names alive. Then, they have been known to come within the memory of man. Makes 'em feel more successful to measure the distance they've got away, I suppose."

"Oh!" Jean felt as if the woman had stripped something from her rudely, but that she must cover this rudeness from some deeper need to herself. After all, Herrick had not promised that these men would be there. She had jumped to that conclusion herself.

"But the rest of us do something every now and then, in a small way," the other went on, with an understanding glint in her eyes that made Jean flush. "Oh, never mind, it wasn't rude, not a bit. Most every one who comes first, expects to see them, and it's rather funny watching the efforts not to ask point blank. Not many are as frank as you. Do you see that black and white thing, smoking like a chimney, and looking as lively as a mummy? That's The Tiger—mad about Flop for the last six weeks, frightful length of time for either of them. He's disciplining her with Magnolia, that big, sleepy porpoise he's kissing. The Tiger and Magnolia write poetry, damned good, too, some of it, but they never bother printing it. Magnolia'd like to, but it's the only trick The Tiger's got—pretending she doesn't care for money or fame, and 'Nolia has to live up to the standard. The human skeleton next to me's Vicky Sergeant; he has no Bunch name because we couldn't find a fruit or animal he looked like. That girl in green next to Franklin is Vicky's wife. We call her The Kitten—for various reasons. And of course you know Franklin's Boy Blue."

"Why Boy Blue?"

The woman laughed. "Don't ask me. Ask The Kitten. She named him long ago. I think it has something to do with always losing sheep."

At this moment, the now almost drunken Vicky claimed her and Jean looked up, to find The Kitten's eyes just turning away, and a scowl of anger on Herrick's face. The fingers crumbling his bread tightened and then he said something to The Kitten that made her drop the match, with which she was about to light her cigarette, and stare at him. After a moment she began to laugh as if the full force of the thing had come to her gradually. With a shrug, Herrick left his place and wedged a chair between Jean and the dumpy woman.

"I'm afraid we didn't get a very good night. They're all rather keyed up. They are sometimes."

The impersonal criticism in his voice linked him with the charter members who never came, separated him from The Kitten and the noisy enthusiasm that glittered like veneer over what Jean instinctively felt was real boredom and disillusion. It drew her to him and she said in a low tone:

"Who's The Kitten?"

He hesitated, and then answered in the same low tone:

"An unhappy woman with claws that tear herself and every one else who gets too near, and she's in the devil of a mood to-night. Poor Kitten, she will never learn."

Jean looked across the table with more pity in her eyes than she realized, until The Kitten's laughter ceased suddenly, and leaning to Jean, she said:

"Don't be too sweet to Boy Blue, Azalea. He can't stand azaleas. I saw him get disgustingly drunk once, just because the room was hot and there was a big bunch of azaleas in it. Don't you remember, Boy?"

"I can't say that I do, Kitten," Franklin answered quietly. "But you remember such a lot of things."

"Dozens, Boy, dozens."

Herrick refused to continue the conversation and, with a remark that included Jean, entered the discussion going on at the end of the table. While she tried to catch the drift of the talk, Jean felt The Kitten's eyes on her and knew that the woman saw her effort to pretend unconsciousness of them. This lasted only a few moments, for, with an elaborate yawn, The Kitten left the table. No one made any comment on her going and Vicky was lost in assumed jealousy of the dumpy woman who was flirting clumsily with Flop.

The argument was a technical one and soon beyond Jean's depth, for she knew nothing at all of painting or artists. But from time to time Herrick appealed to her on a point about which the rankest layman would have an opinion, so that Jean felt in him a keener social sense and greater natural kindliness than any of the others seemed to possess.

When the argument became too intricate for even Herrick to include her, she leaned back, now much more at ease, and sensing a faint, possible charm, which had at first been quite lost under the gaucherie of manner.

The Outlanders, as The Bunch called the rest of the world, had thinned a little, but there were still many tables filled with starers toward the big table in the center. It was evidently the attraction of this rather dirty restaurant, and Jean judged that the proprietor would rather feed The Bunch for nothing than have them transfer their patronage. And for this freedom, this effortful emancipation from the social code that passed as originality and genius, he charged The Outlanders high. This too they appreciated. It gave value to the thing they bought.

"After all," Jean decided, "I suppose I do look like a baby let out alone without its nurse. I've never met any people worth while knowing in my life, or any one out of the beaten track. And because these tie their neckties across instead of down and make a lot of noise, I feel superior. I've certainly never painted a picture or written a poem and I didn't know there was anything the matter with Maeterlinck at all. Jean Norris, you're a cocky fool."

She was recalled from this philosophizing by Herrick's touch upon her shoulder.

"Dreaming again?" His voice was wistful, not this time as if he wished to share her dreams, but as if he envied her the power to dream. Jean thought that his eyes were very tired and his face rather pale, as she looked up. "Well?" he smiled down at her. "Were you really so far away? Come back, won't you, please?"

It was a sincere request, and as Jean followed to the street, she felt that Herrick was often alone among these people and she thought she understood now why he had not tried to do the novel.

On the sidewalk Flop stood in the center of the group debating what to do with the rest of the night. When Herrick and Jean joined, Flop turned to her with his manner of having just been struck by an illuminating thought.

"We'll leave it to Azalea. Which would you rather do, go down to Ramon's and drink mescal, he's just got some from Mexico, or do the Coast? There's a dancer at Frank's worth seeing."

"I'm afraid I can't do either. The next boat won't get me home till after one, as it is."

"Nonsense. Nobody ever goes home while there's anything else to do. 'We won't go home till morning!'"

The others took it up, and the silence of the empty street echoed to the old song. Jean wondered whether Flop was always singing his wants like this, and glanced at Herrick.

"Let's beat it, if you really want to," he whispered, and almost before she knew it, they had turned down a side street. For a block the voices of The Bunch followed. They did not know that Jean and Herrick had slipped away.

"If there's anything more dull than drinking mescal, it's going to Frank's. I don't see what on earth Flop finds in it."

Jean liked his annoyance. Again she felt that they were linked in understanding against the others. She had meant to ask him about Harcourt and Mathews, but now it seemed unnecessary.

They walked in almost total silence through the dark streets lined with closed warehouses that sent out a mingled odor of fruits and vegetables exotic to Jean in its newness. Often the black bulk of empty crates forced them into the cobble paved road-bed, thick with dust and fruit rinds and withered greens. Once, in common consent they stopped to listen to hundreds of crated pigeons, cooing softly behind closed doors.

"You are like a dove. She was right for once. A big, calm dove," he said, and they went on silent as before.

On the boat they chose the forward deck and watched the dark hills come closer. The great paddle-wheel churned a rhythm to Jean's thoughts, pictures of the day, from the time she had met Herrick and had walked through the crowded streets, to the present cool emptiness of the upper deck with the night wind touching her face and thousands of stars above. To Jean it had been the fullest day she had ever lived.

Gently Herrick's hand claimed hers and she did not withdraw it. The contact seemed only a finer communication, a surer speech than the clumsiness of words.

CHAPTER SIX

Soon after the first dinner with The Bunch, Herrick finished the series of articles and no longer came to the library. But often Jean found him waiting at the closing hour and they walked to the Ferry. Several times they had lunch in a little Mexican restaurant with a sanded floor and strings of red peppers hanging like stalactites from the ceiling. Jean always came from this place with the feeling of having been to another world and touched another life. And there was always the feeling of having shared this happy strangeness with Herrick.

On Sundays, sometimes Herrick called at the house for her, and sometimes she met him at the Ferry, and they went to Flop's. Martha made no comment, but Jean knew that after she had left the house, her mother cried, and because she never mentioned Herrick, Jean knew that Martha disliked him. In the studio Jean made a great effort to enter the spirit, for although she felt more and more strongly that Herrick, too, was bored, she clung to the belief that there must be some charm her own narrow training could not discover.

There was always the same enthusiasm about the same things. Whenever interest flagged they wound it up with the thin, red wine and with more and more cigarettes which they threw away partially smoked. Men and women made open love to each other and there was much kissing and imitation jealousy. Their insatiable need to be different had become a scourge, which drove them along the road of personal eccentricity. In the more or less worthy rebellion of their youth they had adopted Windsor ties and become Bohemians for life.

Through the remaining winter and early spring, Jean and Herrick continued to go less and less often, and in April stopped altogether. Now, on Sundays, they took long walks over the hills. They built driftwood fires in lonely coves and raced like children across the dunes. And always, Jean led the talk to Herrick's novel and the things he would write, so that these vague dreams took form between them. It was as if Jean, reaching down among the qualities he believed he had thrown away, found a small, discarded jewel. Together they polished it.

Jean's attitude hurt and flattered Herrick and the combination was fast binding him against his will. Remembering the hours he was alone with Jean on empty beaches and among silent trees, the knowledge that he had never kissed her made him hot with shame. Away from her, he marveled at his own control. But with her, a genuine peace for the most part held him, so that the control was not so great as it afterward appeared. In some strange way she herself stilled the storm she raised.

It was June, but a high fog had covered the sky all day. They had been walking since morning and now, in the late afternoon, came out through the trail that wound between the hills to the cliffs that edged the sea. Up from below long white arms tore at the cliffs, dropped, reached higher in new effort. While, farther out, the inexhaustible army of waves rushed in, line after line, flung themselves on the cliffs, sank back, rushed in again. Over it all the gray sky shut as if to keep the din from the ears of God. The world was strangely alone, shut in by itself, like a madman locked in his cell. Driven from infinity, rushing on to infinity, the wind tore by them on its ceaseless quest.

Herrick took her hand and they began to run to a little beach wedged between the cliffs. As they ran Jean was filled with a deep sureness, as if she could run so forever, swifter and swifter, never halting or stumbling, borne up by a strength within; a strength that was beating out against the whole surface of her body, in an effort to join the main current of all life, that touched her on every side.

At the foot of the bluff, Jean dropped to the floor of the cove, and for a moment Herrick stood above her. Deliberately he enjoyed the feeling of physical power it gave him to stand so, to feel his greater strength, to know that in spite of her superb body he could bend, lift and throw this woman into the sea. He could see her breast rise and fall under the thin waist, and the base of her throat throb with the breath that still came quickly after their swift run. For a moment, all the artist in Herrick rose in appreciation of the picture, the unity that bound Jean's body, the silent power of the gray cliffs yielding so little to the centuries of rage tearing at them, to the eternal, ever-changing sameness of the sea. There was much of them in Jean, so that, as he looked, he felt tired and worn. He went and sat down a little behind her, and drawing his knees to his chin, circled them with his arms.

It was almost eighteen months since he had first brought The Kitten here. They had raced down the hill too, but at the foot he had swung her to the circle of his arms and kissed her madly. She had returned his kisses, until, both a little exhausted, they lay on the sand, his head in her lap, and her fingers had wandered in his hair, coming, every few minutes, to rest hotly on his lips.

Herrick looked at Jean and wondered. She had never kissed a man as The Kitten had kissed him. Would she ever? What was she thinking of, smiling out over the gray sea? In that passionate, throbbing emptiness she seemed as unconscious of him as if he were one of the gray cliffs. She was as far away and impersonal as the wind sweeping indifferently over the friendly little grasses.

In obedience to his unspoken wish, Jean turned.

"It's the sounds," she said, as if Herrick must have been following her thoughts. "If there weren't any sounds in Nature, pagans would never have invented a God. It's so impossible to imagine a silent Force creating a world where the wind shrieks and the sea roars and you can almost hear the earth breathe. It seems as if there must be a personal god somewhere, a huge, powerful man who needs these voices to talk with."

She had been thinking about God!

Herrick, without answering, drew farther back into the cove. He turned from Jean to the open grayness, and a terror of its immensity forced through every effort to keep it out. In the whole world there was nothing but loneliness, an actual, positive, palpable loneliness, as gray and chill as the sea, as all pervading as the boom of the surf far out on the rocky bar.

"'And who knows but that God, beyond our guess,

Sits weaving worlds out of loneliness.'"

"Did you write that?"

For a moment Herrick stared and then he laughed. She would always do it, make him feel old and spotted, and then whirl him up to the heights by a belief in his power.

"It's absolutely perfect. God,—weaving worlds because He is lonely."

"No. It's not mine, I'd give a good deal to be able to claim it, but it belongs to one Arthur Symons. Do you know his stuff?"

"No. Is it all like that?—'Weaving worlds out of loneliness.'"

"Not all. But he saw rather far into the heart of things." Without further comment Herrick began to quote—whole poems, fragments, single lines. It was all sad and beautiful and sensuous, filled with the hunger of soul and body.

His voice took on a depth it did not have in usual speech. It fitted perfectly with the sad booming of the surf and the whimper of the little waves that ran in terror among the rocks. For the first time in her life Jean felt the ache of physical beauty. She wanted to cry.

Toward sundown the wind died, the high fog parted and the sun sank in a wine-red sea. Out on the ledge Jean and Herrick watched it dip over the edge of the world.

When the coming night had stolen the last thread of color from the sky they went back to the cove. Herrick piled brush and covered it with great logs of driftwood. At the touch of a match, crackling flames ran out and instantly the savage loneliness of the sea was shut away and the cove became a home.

While they ate the sandwiches they had brought from the ranch-house where they had stopped for dinner, they talked of everything and of nothing. From time to time Herrick went after another log and Jean was left alone, conscious of his absence, of the blackness beyond the fire and the warm security of the rock walls, lit by the firelight. Each time he returned Jean felt that she knew him better.

Stretched on the sand, his head on Jean's spread skirt, Herrick told her of his boyhood and his passionate longing, even as a little child, for the warmth and beauty he had no reason to believe existed.

"We had one of the poorest farms in Connecticut, and if you don't know Connecticut you can't know what that means. There were just a few bleak fields, enclosed by fences of stones that my father had picked from the earth. We grew a little corn and some potatoes, but whenever the crop was good there was no demand, and when prices were high something always killed the crops. We had a few lean cows which I could never believe had been calves. I could never imagine that anything on the place had ever been young. Even my father and my mother. It seemed to me as if they must have always been old and lived in the rickety house, in the bare fields, with the lean cows and the failing crops.

"On each side of us the farms had been deserted before I was born. Sometimes I used to wish there were other boys in them to play with, but for the most part I accepted it just as I accepted the whining complaints of mother, dad's stooped shoulders and the feeling of never having all that I could possibly eat at one time.

"But one day a strange man drove up. He was fat, with a red face and a gold watch-chain. He came in and clapped father on the back, and began to talk faster and laugh more than any one I had ever heard. Even dad and mother smiled as they listened. When mother told me he was going to stay all night I went out in the barn and cried."

Herrick stopped and looked into the fire. He forgot Jean, everything but the memories called to life by his own words. His face was hard with hatred against that starved childhood and against his parents, for always Herrick's hatred was deep against the thing that hurt him. There were shadows about his lips, and his hands clenched until the cords rose on his wrist.

"You poor, lonely, little boy," Jean whispered.

"I was. For you see, until that night, when Ed Pierce came back, I didn't know there was anything else. I used to feel those stone fences closing in like a grave. I didn't know but that the whole world was flat and bare and stony. I thought that the Pierces and Thompsons had just died under the strain, and that some day father and mother would die too, and then I would be left alone.

"After dinner we sat round the fire. They had done all the gossiping and Ed Pierce began to tell of the Far West. You must say it just like that—The Far West!

"I can't tell you what it meant to me. It was a mixture of Heaven and pirate expeditions in tropic seas and gold mines. But the thing that stunned me was that we could go. It was on this earth and we could get there! We could have it all, if father would only go and take it. I can hear Pierce's big voice now: 'Take a chance, Bill. Don't be scared. You're young enough yet. You'll make good with a quarter of the strength you'll waste on this hole.'

"And my father sat there with his head sunk and his shoulders bent, shaking his head!

"I crawled over to his chair and got hold of his knees. I begged him to go. I believe I screamed. Father loosened my hands and told me to shut up. But Pierce said:

"'Listen to him, Bill, the kid's got more sense than you. You've stuck here so long you're plumb scared to move.'

"I got hold of his knees again and begged him not to be scared. At last he took me by the arm and dragged me to the door and locked me into the cold hall. I never forgave him. In the morning Ed Pierce was gone. For a few days they mentioned him. Then they stopped talking about him. There was nothing left but the stones and the hope of The Far West. And all the weary years till I could get there."

"And you got here."

"Yes. I got here." There was no triumph in Herrick's tone.

Jean held out her hands to him suddenly. "You see, you can do what you want."

It was the first physical response Jean had ever offered. Herrick took both hands in his and laid his cheek on them. Then, without a word, he got to his feet and helped Jean up.

From the top of the hill they looked back. The fire glowed a deep red hummock on the black beach. The white crescent of a new moon hung in a rift of cloud and touched to silver the crests of the long swells. Herrick walked ahead along the narrow trail and they scarcely spoke.

But at the gate, under shadow of the acacia that drooped its long yellow blooms close to them, Herrick put his arms about Jean, pressed his lips fiercely to hers, and hurried away.

Jean lay awake a long time, feeling the hot pressure of Herrick's soft mouth and wishing that he had not kissed her.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Herrick was happier than he had been for a long time as he sat bareheaded on the upper deck and thought back over the day with Jean and of how she had looked as he kissed her. It excited him and made him tender to remember the look in her eyes, and the faint smile deepened as he wondered what she was thinking now. Her lips had not responded in the least, but she had seemed neither angry nor frightened. She had accepted it as she would have accepted a leaf falling from the acacia above. And yet he was sure that she had not often, if ever, been kissed by a man. In some ways she was strangely primitive and in others she seemed to have lived through and left behind in ages past the ordinary emotional reactions. Herrick's brain was on fire with expectation and curiosity. The memory of the kiss quickened his mind more than his body, and his own reaction thrilled him with a new sensation.

He was happy. So happy that he could not go quietly to bed. Nor could he walk alone in the empty streets. His nerves wanted the relaxation of companionship. The perfect day wanted a touch of contrast to finish its perfection. He needed to frame the memory of Jean's cool lips, possess it alone in another setting.

A few moments later he crossed the studio amid the shrieks and catcalls of The Bunch, straight to the couch where The Kitten was curled alone.

"So you thought you'd come and see whether we were alive. It's awfully good of you! But you know we're hard to kill. Skin's so thick the little stings and arrows don't get through, somehow."

The Kitten drawled between puffs of her cigarette and did not move to make room for Herrick.

He lifted her, deposited her farther back among the cushions and tried to take her hand. She was so furious and making such a ridiculous pretense, just as she used to, that Herrick's feel of youth and well-being increased. It was as if the memory of these old tricks, now powerless to hurt, gave him back three years of time. At thirty-three, Herrick wanted the past.

"But claws do, Kittycat."

"If we'd known you were going to honor us," persisted The Kitten, "we'd have ordered champagne. As it is, we only had the same old ink, and that's gone."

"A cigarette, a jug of ink and thou!"

"You—you——" Then, fearing she was going to cry, she stopped.

Across the room a tall girl with flat, red hair and small red-rimmed eyes like glowing embers in the white ash of her face, broke off a sentence in the middle.

"Who's that man over there, just come in, with The Kitten?"

Flop glared at this interest on the part of his newest inspiration.

"Franklin Herrick, alias Boy Blue. He used to be the real thing, but he hasn't been round for ages."

The girl still stared. "I'd like to model him," she said slowly. "He walks like a panther, has the forehead of a saint and the mouth of a gutter rat."

"Great! Why don't you tell him? He'd be furious inside and look as if he were going to kiss you."

"Maybe I will—if I get a chance."

"You won't. The Kitten's been sharpening her claws for months."

On the couch Herrick was holding The Kitten's hands, stroking them softly.

"Who's the other woman?"

Flop's laugh bellowed above the noise. "You female Conan Doyle." His voice dropped. "A serious impossibility—bromide to the limit—but she has a good skin."

"Brains?"

"Oh, don't ask me."

"What's he see in her?"

"What are you so interested for? How do I know what any man sees in a woman? You're all alike. I suppose when Herrick tries to kiss her she screams, and that'd be enough to interest him."

The girl smiled. When she smiled the corners of her lips turned up over small, uneven teeth. With a shrug of indifference she slipped her hand into Flop's and they turned toward an excited group at the other end. Here a slight man in a brown flannel shirt and red tie, with gestures preserved from his student days in Paris, was arguing a technical point in Verlaine. But as none of his listeners understood French, he was finding it hard to maintain the requisite heat. When he caught sight of the girl he appealed to her excitedly in a French whose studied correctness made her laugh. She answered in a flood of rapid patois incomprehensible to him. A smile ran round the group. Instantly the girl's mood changed.

"Listen. It is impossible to translate. But listen. You will hear his heart beating, throb, throb, in the French."

Her arms dropped to her sides. The heavy white lids lowered over the red eyes. For a moment she stood so, artificial and decadent. Then she began in a low, sweet voice that seemed to have nothing to do with her body.

Her voice flowed in waves across the great room and melted into the shadows. Flop listened with his hands before his face. The strutting of the man in the brown shirt ceased. The Kitten hid her face on Herrick's shoulder and his arms closed about her.

The girl went on, poem after poem. Herrick's eyes filled with tears and his hold tightened on The Kitten. She shivered, pressed her lips deeper into his neck, and kissed him with sudden, sharp kisses that bit like hot coals. For half an hour the voice continued. It burned away the memory of the day behind, of the sea, of the exacting faith in Jean's gray eyes. This was the reality, this passion that throbbed in the poet's words, the girl's voice, the scorching kisses of the small, quivering figure in his arms. To feel and feel and feel.

The voice stopped as suddenly as it had begun. With the shudder of a medium coming from a trance, the girl opened her eyes. Instantly the purity of the listening silence was spotted with exaggerated exclamations of delight. They crowded about her. Flop brought a glass of wine, and sitting on his knee she sipped it, while her eyes wandered to the corner where Herrick had sat and stroked The Kitten's hands. The corner was empty. She grinned, and at Flop's request kissed him lightly on the lips.

As they walked along, choosing the darker streets, neither The Kitten nor Herrick spoke. Her fingers locked tight on his and Herrick walked as if in a dream toward a fixed point. At the corner of the street where Vicky and The Kitten had a small flat, Herrick stopped.

"Is Vicky home?"

"No. He went to Tulare a month ago."

The room was dark except for a long, white bar across the floor from a street lamp outside. Beside the Morris chair Herrick knelt and put his arms about The Kitten.

All the miniature independence was gone. She clung to him sobbing:

"I can't stand it any more. I love you and you're cruel, terribly cruel."

There was all the old abandon, the absolute surrender in the figure trembling at his touch. Of all the women he had known The Kitten had loved most passionately, most recklessly, finding no flaw, asking no change, holding him to no path. She loved him absolutely, utterly, as he was. And it had bored him.

"I know, Boy, you only did it to hurt me. You don't love her. You know you don't. You can't. Boy Blue," she whispered, her lips against his cheek, "promise your Kittycat you'll never see her again. Then I'll forget all the hurt—every single teeny bit."

With his arms about her, Herrick looked into the dark and saw Jean as he had left her, only a short time before, under the acacia, part of the clean night. In the gray fog by the sea, made more vital by the immense sadness and beauty of it. The generous giving of her hands to the lonely little boy, such a small, pitiful and generous gift. Jean with her unshakable faith, her courage and her coldness. He felt suddenly old, and afraid of his own fear.

"Are you satisfied now, Boy Blue? You've hurt me enough—till I've made a fool of myself. But I don't care. Silly, silly Boy, he ran away, and then he came back. He will always come back, always."

Sure of him, she laughed while she held his shoulders and made pretense of shaking him.

"But it was funny sometimes, only very few sometimes, it was like a baby going out with a little spade against a granite cliff. That's what she's like, Boy, a cold, hard, granite cliff. Maybe he bruised his head a little bit against the nasty, bad cliff. Well, never mind, mummy will make it well."

The Kitten drew his head against her breast. "There, there. Now it's all better. Nobody could beat down the cliff, so he mustn't feel bad, but just come——"

The Kitten bent forward from the shadows and, full in the bar of light, smiled at him. The last four months had made deep lines about her scarlet mouth. In the bar of white light she was ugly, with the ugliness of the small and withering. Herrick stepped back.

"You're ranting, Kitten. You don't know what you're talking about."

She blinked stupidly. She was almost hideous in her hungry fear.

"You don't understand. You can't understand women like Jean."

The Kitten got slowly to her feet.

"But she doesn't love you. You couldn't make a woman like that care."

Herrick's face reddened.

"Love! Why, Kitten, you don't know what the word means. When women like that love, it's like a prairie fire. A white fire that sweeps everything clean."

"'A white fire that sweeps everything clean!' A white prairie fire," muttered The Kitten. "You fool! You poor, blind fool. Do you think I'm going to stand by and never say a word? Do you think 'the white prairie fire'—oh, Lord, what a figure!—would love you if she knew? Why, she wouldn't even kiss you if she thought you'd held another woman in your arms—the great pink-and-yellow baby! And Vicky knows. He has always known. They all know. Vicky will let me go. I am willing. I am not ashamed. I——" She felt blindly before her as if she were picking the words from air.

Herrick moved beyond reach. "Listen to me. There is no question of whether people know or don't know. You're talking like a lunatic. There never was a question of whether Vicky would free you or not. We loved each other once and now it's over. That's all there is to it."

Herrick was thankful for the fine wrinkles, for all the small dried ugliness that made it easy.

The Kitten swayed, steadied herself, and said quietly:

"You will have to marry her." She stated it as a simple fact that Herrick might have forgotten. The inference of its judgment infuriated him.

"From women like Jean one does not ask, does not want, anything less."

Long afterwards he envied The Kitten her moment's strength.

"Will you go?" she said.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The next day The Kitten joined Vicky in the country.

Twice in the next three Herrick went to the phone to call Jean, and hung up in the very act of asking for the number.

"You can never make her care...." The Kitten knew him as no woman had ever known him, and he hated her for this knowledge.

He went nowhere and saw no one. Through the lonely dinners, and long evenings in the studio, Herrick worked himself into a fury that urged him on and held him back. His anger spread from The Kitten to Jean, to all women. He was sick of them, weary of the power they had always had over him. He loathed the women who had yielded to him and the women who had not. He hated his own inability to live his life independent of them. If no woman had ever crossed his life, interfering in its plan, destroying the dreams he had dreamed in those last years of the Connecticut farm, he would long ago have written something worth while. He would have succeeded as Freeman and Harcourt and the others had done. He would be free of The Bunch in their hectic fight for forgetfulness. His life would be ordered with calm poise. He had it in him. Jean felt it. Could she even yet make him what he might have been? Like an intermittent fever the conflict raged. Then, through sheer exhaustion, it dropped away. Herrick wondered what it had all been about and went again to call for Jean at the closing hour. She was not there. Two weeks before Jean had lost her place.

The next day they walked again in the hills. Jean was whiter and quieter than he had ever seen her. The two weeks had tried her nerves almost beyond control. The last to come on the library staff, a reduced appropriation demanded that Jean be the first to go. And, although she had taken no joy in the work itself, she had been happy in the security of having work to do. Now, after two weeks of following every advertisement to its end, only to discover she had none of the experience they all demanded, the old horror of teaching had come back, and Jean was almost ill. The new baby cried incessantly and the house was more cluttered than ever. Tom had at last been forced into a job at a ridiculous salary and from morning till night Elsie predicted starvation for herself and her "two helpless little ones." Through it all Martha Norris moved, armored by prayer to gentle acceptance of these petty annoyances that Jean felt closing about her forever.

Her independence weakened by fear for the future, Jean was another person and Herrick thrilled at the new Jean, this unsure, rather desperate Jean. She felt his strength and experience, so much greater than her own, and his understanding and sympathy seemed to relieve her from the necessity of maintaining the silence she had mapped out as a shield against the atmosphere of her home. For the first time she told him something of that atmosphere, of her childhood, not as poor and bare as his, but filled with the same rebellion for something whose name she did not know. Much of what Jean sketched in bare outline, Herrick could fill in. It told him much that had puzzled him. He knew her better than she knew herself.

As Jean sat, throwing pebbles into the almost dry creek at their feet, he knew her eyes were full of tears. He took her hands in his and forced her to look up.

"Don't, Jean. It hurts me terribly to see you unhappy. Something will turn up. It always does. I've been there too, you know."

Jean smiled through her tears. "I know I'm an idiot. But I do loathe the idea of teaching and yet it's the only thing I suppose I'm fitted for. I mean I have a diploma, an actual proof on paper, that I've been through the preparatory mill and I can wave it in their faces. I shall kill the next person who asks me if I've had experience."

"Well, don't begin with me, please. You're positively glaring."

Jean answered his laugh and felt better.

"Because if you do you'll eliminate my valuable assistance, and I think maybe I see light. How would you like to go on a paper?"

"What!"

"Oh, I'm not suggesting that you edit one, but there are several things of lesser importance, things that don't need more than an ability to write good English. If you have a sense of color, so much the better. I think perhaps you have. You'd rather like it in some ways, especially at first, but I don't think you'd ever be a howling success. You're not what they call 'a born newspaper woman.'"

"I don't believe I'm a born anything." Jean made no effort to still the quavering of her voice. She felt as if she had been struggling along a hard road by herself and some one had suddenly picked her up and carried her to a safe spot.

"Nonsense. Of course you are. Only it takes some of us a long time to find out. Would you really like to try it?"

"I should like it more than anything I can think of. How do I go about it? Just walk in and say: 'I'm not a born newspaper woman, but please give me a job'?"

"Hardly, though it might not be such a bad way. Anything that startles an editor looks like ability to him. But we'll be less original than that. Thompson of the Chronicle is going to start a new Sunday section and he's looking for some one. He wants some one with 'a new angle,' 'fresh viewpoint,' 'punch,' etc. These things to a real editor are like the golden calf to the ancient peoples. He grovels before them. His life is spent in a mad search for them."

"But I have no newspaper angle and no viewpoint at all."

"Patience, neophyte. That's only another name for a perfect greenhorn, with intelligence and an ability to manufacture, enthusiasm for the editor's pet schemes. Do you think you can do that, Jean?"

"I could drown in enthusiasm, genuine, hysterical enthusiasm over anything that would save me from school teaching. If it gave me enough salary to move mummy to the city and make it an eternal impossibility for her ever to ask Tom and Elsie to stay five minutes, I'd drop dead of sheer exuberance."

"Under that condition I may not speak to Thompson. But if you promise to continue in this life I'll see him the first thing in the morning and let you know by afternoon. I'm not sure what it is. You may have to do Household Hints or Beauty articles or Society notes. You may develop into the greatest Lady Teazle of the United States and have the New York papers sending for you."

"Then, when my biography is written you'll be mentioned as having given me my 'first chance.'"

"Is that the only capacity in which I figure in your life?" Under the banter Herrick's eyes looked deep into hers. Jean blushed.

Again, when he left her, Herrick kissed her. This time her repulsion was less. Jean was poignantly ashamed that it was there at all. To the dead black and white of Jean's logic there was something wrong in feeling as near as she felt to Herrick, and at the same time sensing that slight inner revulsion at the touch of his lips on hers.

CHAPTER NINE

Thompson of the Chronicle was a large, fat man who had cultivated what he considered the proper editorial manner so that even in ordinary conversation he snapped out his sentences as if he were ordering a cub reporter to a fire. He prided himself on being able to do a dozen things at once and his fetish was concentration. One gathered that he could write a better article in a power house than in a library. When Jean entered he was scanning the proofs of the week's edition, making notes on a pad, smoking, and calling three numbers on the telephone. Jean's nerves had worn her almost to the point of interrupting the great man, before he glanced at her.

"I'm going to run a new feature. I want a series of interviews with leading people who are doing things. I don't give a whoop what they do so long as it's for the general good, 'our city,' 'civic betterment,' etc. But I don't want slush. No sob-sister rot. Civic pride and that dope. Herrick says you can do it. The first will be with Dr. Mary Mac Lean. We've run her regularly about every six months since Settlements got popular. You're to get a new angle. When you get the hang of it, you'll have to find your own interviews."

He almost snarled the last word, glared at Jean as if she had taken his time on a personal matter, and attacked his cigar as if he hadn't had one for fifty years. Jean had never heard of Dr. Mary Mac Lean and had no very clear idea of what a Settlement was, but she did not ask. When she had gone, the Managing Editor made a hieroglyphic in his memorandum, favorable to Jean.

As she sat waiting for Dr. Mary, Jean's courage came back. At the worst the doctor could only refuse to talk to her, in which case she would have to do the best she could.

"And an interview where the interviewed refuses to say anything doesn't leave much room for slush."

Steps sounded in the hall and a stocky woman, in a walking skirt that made her appear even shorter, with quantities of fluffy white hair piled on a large head, stood in the doorway, peering nearsightedly through gold pince-nez. She looked like a large, good-natured and freshly washed puppy picking up a scent. Jean went forward.

"Dr. Mary Mac Lean? I am Jean Norris. I 'phoned you about an interview."

The pince-nez flew off as if Dr. Mary had pressed a button somewhere about her plump person, and Jean smiled. Dr. Mary returned the smile. Without the thick lenses of the glasses her eyes were small but very bright. They were like two little searchlights, ready to be turned on any fact. When she smiled, the corners crinkled into wrinkles.

"Well, go right on. I suppose you're primed to the hilt." Dr. Mary took a deep chair and motioned Jean to another. "What's it going to be this time? Poverty, sin, crime, religion, the Social Evil, the plague, red or white, suffrage, minimum wage, I.W.W.-ism, organized labor, inefficiency of the workingman, college education, or How I Went Into the Work?"

"I don't know. You see," Jean answered in a sudden resolve to take the doctor into her confidence, "I'm very specially at sea. I don't know a thing about any of those things, not even enough to ask for enlightenment. I never heard of you up till an hour ago and would hate to be put on a stand to tell what a Settlement was. I know you do wonderful things with the poor, but I don't know whether you pay their rent, or make them send their children to school. It's because I don't know anything about you that they sent me. They want something new that won't drivel."

Dr. Mary laughed till the tears stood in her twinkling blue eyes.

"My dear, that's the most adequate explanation I ever got from an interviewer, and the Lord knows I've sampled them all. So they're after something new that won't drivel." She bent forward with exaggerated caution. "Do you know, Miss Norris, I have imperiled my immortal soul and ruined my vocabulary, reading those interviews with myself. They've called me everything from Feminine Tolstoy to All Womanhood's Sister. Now, would you like to be called All Womanhood's Sister because you installed three washtubs in an outhouse for some poor women?"

"I should loathe being called All Womanhood's Sister for any reason. But is there anything they haven't asked you?"

Dr. Mary cocked her head to one side like a badly proportioned bird and nodded:

"Yes. Nobody has ever had sense enough yet to ask me if there isn't something I want to tell them. They always come with their ammunition ready and it amuses me to watch them shoot wild."

"Then I qualify for 'the new angle,' for I haven't a bullet with me. Will you tell me, Dr. Mac Lean, if there's anything you want to say?"

Dr. Mary's face sobered. "Perhaps I can better show you. Come."

The next was a wonderful hour to Jean. She felt as if the doctor were going before her, tearing down walls, opening worlds she had never glimpsed. At the door of the last room, Dr. Mary paused.

"I want you to meet one of our girls. In some ways she combines all the problems we have—economic, social, educational. And there are many like her."

The doctor turned the handle and they entered a large, well-lighted room, fitted with sewing machines. A dozen dark women were busy sewing, and their laughter mingled with the whir of the machines. They all smiled and gave greetings in strange broken phrases of English, as Dr. Mary, followed by Jean, crossed to the farthest corner where a girl of nineteen was sewing furiously. She stopped and looked up, smiling.

"Well, Carmen, how's Jaime to-day?"

"Oh, so well! He get fat." The soft voice blurred the words to a single low note as the girl reached over to the wicker basket on the chair beside her. She lifted the baby and turned with radiant face to the doctor.

"See. Hees legs—so fat."

She turned back the coarse little dress and showed with pride the small shriveled legs. The doctor bent over the baby, so fragile and withered that it seemed something not new-born but something older than time, and gave a few directions in Spanish. The girl nodded and, as the baby began to whimper, buried her face in the wrinkled neck and crooned to him. Over her bowed head, the doctor's lips motioned to Jean: "Blind, but she doesn't know it yet."

Jean's throat tightened and she felt sick with the sadness of it; the girl-mother and the baby, so old, so weak, so resigned, as if it had accepted its burden far back down the ages. The girl put the baby, quieted now, into its basket. It lay for a moment staring with its great, empty black eyes, and then closed them wearily. The girl covered him with a bit of mosquito netting and sat down to her work again. Before they were out of the room, she was sewing furiously again.

Jean looked at the doctor.

"Carmen Gonsalez, but I call her to myself, Mater Dolorosa. She has never been to school, although she was born right here in San Francisco and has wanted all her life to read. She is just turned nineteen. Before she was fourteen she went to work in a tamale factory and learned first hand the existence of all the evil she did not already know from her own home. At sixteen she left the tamale factory because the foreman gave her no peace, and went to work in an American overall factory. She thought American men 'were different.'

"They are different. A Mexican of the same caliber makes no bones about his desires, but Mr. George Farrel crept to his goal like a snake. She loves him yet. She believes he will come back, although she has not heard of him for months. Only once have I ever seen her angry—I never want to see it again. It was like the crushing force of a glacier. She was whiter than paper and so still. Some one had told her that George had married a Gringo. It is true. Once I thought I might tell her after the baby was born. But it was born blind. 'The sins of the fathers upon the children, yea, even to the third and fourth generation.'"

"I should think," Jean cried passionately, "that you would hate the whole human race."

"No. You see, I have been very many years in this work and that first rage has worn off. We all have it. Sometimes I think it is what brings us unto it at all. We see the crime and sin and sorrow and we are filled with a blind passion to straighten it out. It's as instinctive, at the base, as emotional an act as jumping into a river to save some one. And then, after a time, long or short according to one's temperament, you learn what I sometimes think is the only thing in the world worth knowing—The Colonel's Lady and Judy O'Grady are sisters under their skin. Then you don't get angry any more at social injustice, or very sad, not unless you happen to have indigestion or try to burn the candle at both ends. You just go along and believe."

"In what?"

Dr. Mary laughed. "Sometimes I don't know. Often I think believing is just a general state of being, like feeling well. It's not belief in a personal God and it's not unshakable faith in man and most surely it's not a belief in the tremendous importance of one's job. Belief in what? I think in this—That the Colonel's Lady and Judy go round in cycles, hand in hand at that, and each cycle is a needed cycle, because in the end—it's going to make a spiral. At least that's as near as I can word it, Miss Norris, and I try to believe it most of the time, the spiral part, I mean."

She walked with Jean to the street door, but stood for a moment before opening it.

"Now you know what it is I want to say and if you can put it into words you can do better than I. But that's your business. I want to make these people happier because I have lived. And I want to be happier because they have lived. I want to take the blind passion of the Carmens and hitch it to the aridity of the rich ladies who come in their limousines to our committees. I want to beat some of the primitive vengeance of a Sicilian fisherman into the George Farrels. I want to teach the women not to make the sign of the Evil Eye when somebody stops them on the street and looks at the baby, and I want the person who stops them on the street not to have spasms because the baby is swaddled in a fashion they have never seen. Personally, it makes me sick to see flies buzzing over a baby, but no sicker than it does to hear some of the comments of the people who come to visit us. Not half so sick. Come to think of it, I'd rather have a baby swaddled to death and eaten by flies than talk ten minutes to the flyspecked souls and swaddled brains of some of our visitors. And if you can get it through the heads of the public, Miss Norris, you will be doing a good thing. In a way, a place like this is public and we don't want to keep people out. But whenever a review of any kind appears we are always swamped as if we were a sideshow. It wouldn't be worth while paying any attention to, except that it does show a serious side of the whole attitude. For it reflects very really what the Colonel's Lady thinks of Judy O'Grady and it's bad for them both."

The telephone rang. Dr. Mary held out her hand. "It may sound vague, but we're in earnest."

"It sounds anything but that. I feel as if you'd turned a white searchlight on Society for me, and——"

"All right. So long as you don't call the article that. 'Gropings' would be nearer the mark. But if you're really interested come and see me sometimes. We're pretty busy all the week, but I usually have Sunday afternoons to myself. It's the only time I have for my personal friends. I want you to come."

"I certainly shall, and thank you."

Waiting in a drugstore at the foot of the hill, Herrick saw Jean before she saw him. She was walking quickly, her head back, her eyes glowing.

"Good Lord, what's happened? She looks like a modern Joan of Arc."

Herrick stepped out and joined her. "I suppose you would have walked right over me and not known it. You look as if you were just about to step off the edge of the world into eternal joy. What happened?"

"She's the most wonderful person that ever lived!" Jean's enthusiasm rayed from her in a physical current. Herrick smiled.

"No wonder the rest of us dry up and grow old. People like you and Dr. Mary have cornered all the energy and belief in the universe."

"Don't mention me in the same breath. My enthusiasms and beliefs are like—like specks of dust on a diamond compared to hers. I feel like a puling infant beside King Solomon. Just think of it—to go on never giving up, never weakening, always believing. To feel that you mean something. Not that you just fit in, but that you have a place that nobody else can take! To do things. To take human beings and make them into something!"

"Do they have to be poor and dirty and foreign, Jean? Wouldn't just plain needing be enough?"

The voice was wistful and Jean laughed rather uncertainly. "No, I don't suppose they would have to be dirty."

"Just so long as they were miserable and weak and dependent enough?"

"Yes. I guess that would do. I suppose all women like to be needed. It flatters our vanity and makes up for all the big things in the world we can't get at."

Herrick gave Jean's hand a quick pressure and let it go. "Kind of indirect action. Well, did this wonderful person come through with an interview?"

"Yes. I suppose she did, if you call shooting a perfect ignoramus into a new world, an interview. I felt as if I were out with a little kite to gather all the electricity in the heavens. Just think of trying to get that personality into three thousand words and hand it in to-morrow."

"It'll look more possible after dinner, a large, soggy dinner. Nothing like it for dragging the soul down within reach."

CHAPTER TEN

Whenever Jean looked back on that night she could remember every detail of the dinner, everything that had been said, almost the order of its saying. Thrilled by the happiness and vitality of Jean and of the emotional response Dr. Mary had waked in her, Herrick let himself go in the delight of answering completely to her mood. Something of the sensation of flying entered them both, as if they were skimming all discord, all the petty misunderstanding of ordinary intercourse. Long after, Jean smiled as she remembered how strongly this feeling had held her and how sure she had been of it.

It was a gay dinner and they sat on in the little restaurant until almost nine. Whenever Jean found a good phrase or Herrick had an illuminating idea on the structure of the article they jotted it down. When they finished there was quite a sheaf of these notes.

"It's a shame to let them cool off. We ought to whip the thing into final shape to-night, lock it up forever in typing. Besides, if you're not used to working in a racket, you may not be able to do it in the office to-morrow. And if you put it over you've got the job cinched."

"I know. I'll sit up all night, I suppose, and it can't be so bad just to have to copy it in the office."

"I'll tell you a better scheme than that. We'll go up to my place and type it now."

Jean had never been to Herrick's rooms and for a moment she hesitated. Then the absurdity of her convention struck her. She had been alone in Flop's when she scarcely knew Herrick at all, and for hours in the hills.

"Fine."

Herrick paid the sleepy waiter and tipped him so generously that he woke with the suddenness of a marionette. They departed, laughing under his effusive thanks.

Like Flop's, Herrick's room was the top floor of a dilapidated building that had once been a place of business but was now filled with cheap studios. It was large and barely furnished, with a long table, a desk, a couch and a few chairs. There were no curtains at the windows, and a tall office building, like a back-drop, cut into the night sky. It had never occurred to Herrick to think about the bareness of his room until he saw Jean's look of approval.

"A real workroom, in which we are going to write the hit of the Sunday edition."

He uncovered his typewriter and pulled the drop-light over the desk.

As Jean laid her things on the couch and took the chair Herrick drew up for her at the table, she thought: "It's like a large cell. In another age he might have been a monk."

They worked rapidly and well together. Jean dictated and Herrick typed. When it was done he read it aloud.

"That's great stuff. I'll see that Thompson stands me a drink for finding him such a prodigy."

"But it isn't all mine. I could never have done it alone. I should probably have blurbed all over the place but for your restraining influence, or become disgusted and given it up."

"You see, it's not easy to do things alone, even when we're very full of them and want to very much. Is it?"

He looked up suddenly and Jean saw the loneliness that she had glimpsed so often below Herrick's moods. The loneliness of the small boy in the bare fields and of the grown man with The Bunch.

"No—I don't suppose it is."

There was a long silence and then Herrick said, as if they had often spoken of it before:

"Do you know, sometimes I have felt that you think I am weak or that I don't want to do the novel very much, and it hurts to have you think that. I suppose if I were a genius, or had the will of I don't know what, I would sit up here and write and write and write. But I'm not made that way. To go week after week, month after month, alone, believing in yourself, fighting through those horrible moods of depression when all your work seems piffling and insincere, beginning again—ugh." Herrick shivered as if his own words had opened a window through which blew a cold blast of memory. "I don't doubt there are people who could. But I can't."

"I don't think I ever thought you were weak, or that you didn't want to do it, but I have wished often that you would."

Jean forced her eyes to meet Herrick's. She felt that she owed him something and that words were not enough. The color ran under her smooth skin and her eyes were shy. Herrick came nearer but he did not touch her. The lines of his face were clean and sharply chiseled and his eyes burned. He spoke simply, making no personal demand, even for sympathy.

"I do want to do it, Jean, very, very much. More perhaps than I can make you understand. But if it is ever written, it will be because some one believes in me."

"You have friends—and they believe."

"Do 'they'? Maybe they do. But I can't imagine Flop, or any of them, stopping long enough from their own affairs to listen to a single chapter. Besides I don't believe it's the kind of thing they would like. It's not 'strong.' I doubt it's even the 'real stuff.'"

Jean held down the unreasoning joy rising in her. Calmly and naturally Herrick was justifying her faith in him.

"Perhaps you're not quite fair. If you've never tried them you can't be sure. Sometimes I've thought that The Kitten, in some moods, was awfully tired of it, the noise and heat and—and——" Jean broke off in her clumsy effort to be perfectly just, for Herrick was looking at her in a strange, piercing way and she felt that again she was falling below the standard of honesty he had set for her. Her eyes dropped. Herrick laid both hands upon her shoulders and she could feel their cold grip on her skin.

"If the novel is ever written, Jean, it will be because some one cares for me and believes because of caring. With a woman like——"

"Don't," Jean whispered.

"It's so lonely, so damned cold and lonely and hideous," Herrick went on, as if he were not speaking to Jean at all. "We're like a lot of lost shades, each locked in the isolation of his own personality, wandering about in a fog. We never really meet or touch, but grope about blindly, never finding because there's nothing really to find."

"Don't. It's too cruel, and it can't be true. There must be something, somewhere."

"Where?"

Jean thought of her own groping and of her mother, the tense little figure praying to her God.

"I don't know."

"There is nothing. Free will? That's only the power to choose between one dead deed and another."

Jean thought of Dr. Mary.

"It isn't true," she cried eagerly. "We are not locked in alone. We're bound tight to every other living soul on earth. We're not blind or lost in a fog. There's nothing so ugly in the whole world that we can't make beautiful if we want to."

Herrick drew her a little closer. "Can we, Jean? Maybe. But not alone. I know. I have been alone all my life—until I met you."

His voice vibrated with the passion that was carrying him beyond his control. He was like a man borne on a swift current past familiar banks, unable to stop. And on the bank stood all the women he had ever known, mocking, hating, amused. Plainest of all was The Kitten. Her eyes were calm, and he heard her say quietly: "You will have to marry her."

"That's why I have done nothing, Jean, because I have been always alone. Will you help me, Jean?"

"Yes." Jean spoke gravely. "I will help you as much as I can."

"Will you marry me?" he asked quietly. "I need you so."

"Yes." She said simply. "We will help each other."

Herrick thrilled with her power and for a moment rose to it.

"You wonderful big, white woman! We will love and work together."

The color burned Jean's face. Laughing, Herrick's arms closed about her.

"Kiss me, Jeany."

Jean turned her head and laid her cool lips on his cheek. Herrick's hold tightened.

"Jean, I believe you're a flirt. That's no kind of a kiss. I want a real one."

Jean laughed a little tremulously. "That was a real one."

The edge of Herrick's joy dulled. Did she mean it? Was that a kiss to her?

"All right, dear. It is—if you mean it that way." He tried to smile but Jean felt that in some way she had hurt him.

Very dimly she sensed depths in the relationship of men and women of which she knew nothing.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

"So you are going to marry him." Martha picked up the toast that had burned while Jean talked and threw it on the fire.

In the bright sunshine she looked old. Her flesh was pale and flaccid, like the flesh of overworked people, or of the aged who have gone without sleep. Her hair was twisted in a tight knot, but stray, gray wisps escaped. Her throat was stringy and the chin muscles sagged.

Jean tried not to look at the discolored neck and the thin, worn hands. They stood for all that her mother had missed in life. It roused something in her sharper than pity, a kind of anger. With an effort she went round the table.

"Mummy, don't look like that." Jean knelt and put her arms about the rigid figure.

Martha did not move. It had come so suddenly, before she had found strength to meet it. She had disliked Franklin Herrick on sight and even this morning, at early service, had knelt long after the close of mass and prayed that he might be taken out of Jean's life.

And now Jean was going to marry him. To take him for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, till death parted them. She heard herself saying the words that had bound her for life to Jean's father. She had tried to do her duty, but death had come as a great release. She had done her best and had had the sacraments of the Church and prayer to help her. Jean had nothing. She was plunging blindly into this state, the greatest personal martyrdom ordained by God. And with Franklin Herrick. Martha could see no plan, no purpose in this thing and battled to hold firm her faith.

"Mummy dear, don't. Please don't look like that, as if something terrible had happened."

"Something terrible has happened, Jean. You are going to yoke yourself for life, think of it, for all the years God may demand you live on this earth, with a man who has no higher conception of life than an animal."

Jean's arms dropped to her sides and she pressed her lips tightly together.

"And he will lead you farther and farther away, Jean. He has a power over you that I would never have believed, never. Ever since you have known him you have been different. You're ready at his beck and call. Have you ever refused to go anywhere when he has asked you? Long ago you gave up church, but, still, you spent the day with some kind of respect. But now, how do you spend the day that God Himself put aside for His worship?"

"In the hills that He made." Jean almost prayed for strength to be patient.

"And your friends? Infidels and wasters and adulterers, by your own story. Oh, Jeany, Jeany, my baby."

Martha laid her head on the table and sobbed.

Jean rose. In spite of all her effort to do otherwise she could not help it. She felt a physical nausea at the sight of her mother's emotion. She tried to go nearer and could not. She could not comfort or touch that quivering figure.

"Let's not talk any more about it, mother. It will only make us both unhappy."

Martha struggled with her feeling as with an enemy and conquered. She rose, too, and for a moment they stood facing each other.

"There is some good purpose in it all, there must be and He will show me. Perhaps I have loved you too much and He has chosen this instead of death. You must have patience with me, Jean. He will show me. Till then I can only say blindly—Thy will be done."

Before the tremendous egotism of her mother's humility, Jean went slowly back to the table and sat down.

"When are you going to be married?" Martha dried her eyes and, crossing to the stove, brought the hot coffee and filled both their cups.

"Very soon," Jean answered wearily. "There's no reason to wait, and Franklin wants to get settled at some work."

Martha winced at the name.

The next moment the door opened and Tom and Elsie and Tommykins came in. Tom was even fatter and redder than usual and more offensively good-natured. He insisted on guessing what had happened, until Jean stopped the flow of his ridiculous suppositions with a brief:

"I am going to be married."

Elsie hugged her, and Jean gathered from the cataract of congratulations that Elsie had never expected her to marry, that marriage was the only thing in a woman's life, that it was one long martyrdom. You were to be pitied if you did and pitied if you didn't. Then Elsie dabbed at her eyes and they all sat down to the late Sunday morning breakfast.

Tom made broad jokes about some people's luck and "turning new leaves." He kept appealing for corroboration to Tommykins and going into spasms of laughter at his son's stare. He wanted to know whether Jean would be able to stand the family now that she was going to marry a highbrow and whether she and Herrick talked in prose or blank verse. He tried with genuine kindness and unfathomable stupidity to fill the silences that settled more and more heavily as breakfast drew to a close.

As soon as it was over and the things cleared away, Martha went upstairs for her Sunday rest. With all her heart Jean wished that she had not told Herrick not to come. She had meant to give this Sunday entirely to her mother, even to go to afternoon service with her. She had known that her marriage would be a blow and had sincerely wanted to ease it as much as possible. But Martha's reception of the news had frozen the suggestion on her lips. Now Jean faced a hot afternoon alone. Upstairs Elsie scolded at Tommykins who refused to be dressed in his Sunday clothes and the new baby helped her brother's efforts by wailing at the top of her lungs. From the hammock under the pine, where he was trying to read the papers, Tom called rough directions for managing the children and finally banged into the house to see that they were executed.

Jean put on her hat, took some paper on which to write to Pat and left the house. In the canyon back of the college grounds it was cool, and Jean lay on her back in a tangle of green, her hands clasped under her head, and wondered just where she would begin. She had so much to say, and yet when she focused it all, it came simply to this:

"I am going to marry Franklin Herrick whom I mentioned to you once. I have known him less than six months and will be married in three weeks."

Put that way, it sounded unreal, and she could hardly believe it herself. She said it aloud and still it seemed strange, as if she were speaking of some one else, not of herself. She wondered whether all women felt that way, and whether her mother had felt like that when she had married her father. What had her mother felt? Looking back, Jean wondered.

What had been the relationship between her father and mother? Certainly there had been no feeling of nearness between them, none of that spiritual contact so strong between herself and Herrick; that thing that made long hours of silence closer than words; that sense of knowing what he felt.

Jean thought of the first time Herrick had kissed her in the spicy darkness of the acacia and of the physical repulsion that had frightened her. And of the other night, when he had pleaded, "A real one, Jeany," and she had wondered what he meant.

How had her mother felt the first time her father had kissed her? Had she known what a "real kiss" was? When she thought about it directly, as she was doing now, she had no memories of her father's kissing her mother, or of their ever sitting hand in hand as she and Herrick sat often, watching the sun drop into the sea. She seemed to have no special memories of them together at all.

Suddenly Jean sat up. She had one. It came to her with the clarity of a photograph. She could see the streak of sunlight across the bare, scrubbed floor, the brightly polished stove, the box of geraniums in the window. She could smell the clean smell of the place and feel again the stillness.

It had been a Sunday, a warm, blue day, like to-day. All afternoon she had been in the garden trying to amuse herself and not succeeding. She could recall, so sharply that it made her smile, the desperate effort, and her final relinquishment of it. It was so useless to battle against Sunday. Besides the monotony of her own home, Jean had always felt the burden of the whole world, locked into the petrifying inaction of the Blessed Sabbath, and struggling to rest and enjoy it therein. This particular Sunday had been almost paralyzing in its peace, and Jean could see herself, a small figure in a checked dress and pebble-goat shoes, come shuffling along the gravel walk, scuffing her toes because she had always been told not to. But the unusual sound, at that hour in the afternoon, of her father's voice in the kitchen, stopped her at the door, and she stood peering through the wire screening. She saw her father come slowly across to her mother, who stood shrinking between the table and the sink. For months after that, Jean had smelled the dust in the screen and felt the rusty wire pressing the tip of her nose, whenever she thought of it. Her father had come close to her mother and stopped. His face was white and his lips trembled and Jean had been afraid he was going to cry.

"Marty, can't you forgive? Aren't you human at all?"

The words had bitten into Jean's memory because it was her father who was saying them in a queer voice and with a strange white face. Then he had come closer and tried to put his arms about her mother, but she had shrunk back with a sob that brought Jean at a bound into the kitchen. Her father's arms had dropped to his sides. The blood rushed into his face and for a moment he had stood with his mouth open. Then with a shrug he turned away and said in his natural voice:

"You'd better ask that God of yours for a little common sense."

At that Martha had unclasped Jean's protecting arms and gone quietly out of the room. A few moments later Jean heard the front door slam. For the first time in her life her father did not come back to supper. But, mixed with the tragedy of her mother's red eyelids and the silent supper, was a tingling excitement that something had happened on Sunday. It gave an elasticity to the rigid Sunday routine that for months had filled Jean with a pleasant sense of possibility.

Shortly after that her father had died. Strange relatives had appeared with an extraordinary attitude toward her mother, as if Martha had suddenly become unable to think for herself. They had bustled about whispering, and had tried to take direction of the funeral. But their efforts fell useless before Martha's quiet determination. A step-brother of the dead man's had become rather violent in his objection to a church-service. But the long brown coffin had been carried into the church nevertheless, and the priest had intoned the mass and incensed the coffin in spicy smoke that had made Jean cough. And afterwards, she and her mother had stood at the open grave, and when the priest said, "Dust to dust," and all the relatives Jean had never before seen sniveled or sobbed openly, Martha had held her hand tightly and Jean had heard her whisper, "Father, forgive."

For a year Jean and her mother had gone early every Sunday morning to church and Jean had prayed fervently that her father be forgiven. For what, exactly, she did not know, but she remembered now that she had linked it up to the Sunday that her mother had cried and her father had not come home to supper; and that she had not felt quite honest praying for her father to be forgiven. Living, he had never said a prayer nor gone to church with them. But dead, they had him at their mercy.

What had he done? Why had they prayed so earnestly that he be forgiven? Why did these two memories alone frame her father, when she tried to think what life had been to him and to her mother? What difference would it have made in her own life if there had been other memories?

In the quiet warmth of the brush, Jean shivered. It was wrong, wicked to bring children up like that. What did it matter that she had always had enough to eat and to wear and had gone to school, when the deepest memory she had of her parents was her mother shrinking from her father's touch, and the long brown coffin in the church to which her father had never gone of his own will. It seemed to Jean that she had been cheated and deprived of something that could never now be hers.

She pushed the hair back from her eyes.

"If I ever have children——"

Jean stopped. She could feel the blood creep up from her toes, scorching her. If she had a child it would be Herrick's. It might have Herrick's changing eyes and soft, full lips and the high, thin laugh. Jean had not thought of Herrick's thin voice for months.

She jumped up. She did not want children. She wanted to do her work in the world, and to help Herrick do his. There were too many people in the world already. She thought of Dr. Mary and the problems she struggled with, of Carmen and the puny, blind baby.

As Jean came into the kitchen Martha was getting supper. She looked rested and Jean knew that she had been praying. Jean's anger of the morning was gone, and as she looked at the small figure moving quickly about, rather envied her. Had there ever been an emotional crisis in her mother's life that had not been eased by preparing food for some one?

"Mummy," she asked suddenly, "do you remember once my coming into the kitchen, when we lived in the old Webster Street house, one Sunday and finding father trying to put his arms round you and—you wouldn't let him?"

As Jean asked it, she turned to take an apron from its peg and stood so, for her mother had stopped in the act of lighting the gas stove, let the match burn to her fingertips, scorch them, and go out.

"Yes—I remember," Martha answered after a long pause.

Jean waited.

"I think, dear, I'll warm the cold meat with a brown gravy. It makes it go farther."

And Martha Norris lit another match.

Three weeks later Jean and Herrick were married. They were married in church to please Martha and for the same reason made a pretense of eating afterwards the elaborate meal she had prepared. Tom was heavier and cruder than ever and Elsie more vapid. The new baby cried incessantly and Tommykins took occasion to outdo himself as a general nuisance. Jean was thoroughly glad that Pat had not been able to come, and always remembered her wedding dinner as the worst meal through which she had ever sat.

CHAPTER TWELVE

From the chaos of chance emotions, pleasure snatched at random, Herrick settled down into the calm order of a life directed by a fixed purpose. He was going to write the novel. It was all mapped out. He and Jean had settled it through the long, peaceful afternoons of their two-weeks' honeymoon at the Portuguese ranch in the Marin Hills. Spurred by Jean's interest, Herrick had seen the thing clearly and they had worked up an excitement about it that had given Herrick an exquisite sense of power, youth, achievement. Her belief filled him with the conviction that it was all he had ever needed.

The cool little kiss that had so disappointed Herrick on the night he had asked Jean to marry him, delighted him now that he realized the almost incredible depths of Jean's shy purity and ignorance. She was like no woman he had ever known. Herrick was surprised at himself and grateful to Jean for this surprise. The most precious thing, in Herrick's scheme of life, was a new sensation and that he now had.

For the present he was content to have Jean's eyes light as he worked out some intricate detail of his hero's life, or spoke with firm purpose of the thing he meant to do next, as soon as this one "that had haunted him for years" was out of the way. The breathless way she would say: "That's great. Now go and get it down before you forget it," made him want to take her in his arms and crush her until he hurt even her strong body. But deeper than the delight of doing it, was the sensuous delight in his own restraint. He asked none of the passionate response of other women. This almost frightened surrender was enough. The other would come, and of its own accord. The light in Jean's eyes and the quick catch that came into her voice when they talked of the full years ahead, was a promise. No fire could burn on the surface like that. Secure in his untried strength, Herrick was very gentle and tender. He was going to write many fine books and he was going to tend that spark in the calm gray eyes of his wife until it blazed at his will.

Watching him, Jean was happy too. She had justified her own faith. Looking back after almost two months of marriage, Jean saw what a blind faith it had been. She had known nothing whatever of him. She had found him among people she despised. Her mother had mistrusted. She remembered the Sunday she had sat under the scrub oak and recalled her mother shrinking from her father's touch, and farther back than that the hot shame that had held her at the hungry groping of Herrick's first kiss. There was nothing of that in his touch now. He liked to draw her to the arm of his chair as she passed and rub his cheek softly against her shoulder, and when he kissed her Jean always felt that it was somehow a little rite that something very pure and deep in him was offering to her.

Jean had not given up her work on the paper, because she did not wish to be a dead weight on Herrick and had definite ideas about the economic independence of women, and because she knew that housekeeping, as she and Herrick were content to live, would take up very little of her time. They had made few changes in the studio except to transform a rubbish closet into a kitchenette and to make an extra bedroom of the storeroom at the end. Otherwise it was as bare and "monk-like" as in the days when Herrick had lived alone. Shortly after they were married, Jean had told him how like a monk's cell she had thought it, the night they wrote her first interview. Herrick had laughed, but suddenly his eyes had misted and he had drawn Jean close and held her so for a moment.

Martha Norris disliked the studio almost as much as she did the haphazard order of their lives, and for this she blamed Jean. Deep in her heart she liked Herrick no better than she ever had, nor could she yet see the Divine purpose in making him Jean's husband. But, since he was her husband, it was Jean's duty to weave about him those iron bands that Martha called "making a home." Instead, more than half the time they ate in restaurants. Jean called at the office for Herrick, or they met somewhere and ate strange food in not overclean places. Once in a while they brought chops or steaks in with them and fried these over the gas. Martha made many indirect inquiries, but she never heard of a meal that took more than fifteen minutes to cook. To buy cheap underclothes and throw them away when they wore out, as Jean now did, as well as Herrick, savored to Martha of license. It reached beyond economics and touched morality. It was not far removed from their decision not to have children. On this subject Martha and Jean had talked only once, but Martha had prayed half the night about it.

The whole manner of this life was hectic and a little illicit, but she made no comment. In the hours of lonely agony that she had spent on Jean's wedding day, she had laid out her plan, and even finding that it was the worst possible would not have swerved her a hair's breadth from it. Nothing should ever come between her and Jean. She would accept Herrick and try to like him, and this she did to the best of her ability. She listened with interest when Jean told her of the work Herrick was planning to do, and cooked all day Saturday getting the dinners she served with so little apparent effort every fourth Sunday. Jean understood and was filled with a softer love and truer sympathy for her mother than the other guessed.

Martha only knew that, as weeks slipped by, this marriage of Jean's was not weaning her big daughter away as she had expected and feared so terribly. On the contrary, it seemed to draw them more closely together in many ways. Jean often stole an hour from work and dropped in unexpectedly. Then they had tea, and if there were any of the little tea cakes that Jean loved, she always took some home for Herrick.

As for The Bunch, they seemed to have passed quite out of Jean's life. Sometimes she met one of them by accident, and twice she and Herrick had gone, at Flop's insistence, to an extra "blow-out." But Herrick had been as bored as she, and they had not gone again.

When they had been married a little over three months, Herrick began the novel. It was to be the life story of a man who had beaten his way up from just such beginnings as Herrick's, and who finally achieved fame and fortune as a great engineer. The man's name was Robert, and Jean and Herrick spoke of him as of some one who lived with them.

Every night they hurried back from dinner to "keep the appointment with Robert." From eight until ten Herrick wrote. He insisted that he could not write a line unless Jean was curled up in her favorite place on the couch. From time to time he would stop, and as soon as she became conscious that the machine was no longer clicking, Jean would look up and smile. Herrick liked to make Jean look up and smile.

Watching Herrick at work evening after evening, Jean felt that life was a very simple matter if one used one's common sense and went straight ahead doing the thing that was best and right. If people spoiled their lives and got less than they might have had, it was because they were either like The Bunch, grabbing feverishly at every passing illusion, afraid that they might miss something; or else they were like Martha, refusing and denying, which, after all, was only another kind of fear. In these days of greater nearness to her mother, Jean sometimes wondered whether Martha had not really wanted happiness so much that she had been afraid to take it.

Jean spent many happy hours listening to the click of Herrick's machine and laying down the laws of life. Fear was the thing to be afraid of. She was very clear and definite in her own mind about this. Fear was the great paralysis. But there was no need for any one to be paralyzed unless he wanted to be. Of these speculations and certainties she wrote to Pat, and Pat wrote back asking the color of Herrick's eyes and saying she was too busy to philosophize about fear or anything else and would "save all that" until she saw Jean, if that happy day ever came, now that Jean was so busy leading her double life. Pat always insisted on referring to Jean's newspaper work as one life and her "man job" as another life.

Herrick liked this and used to stop work sometimes to come and sit close to Jean on the couch and demand:

"Am I your 'man job,' Jean?"

When Jean said he was, Herrick insisted that she put the stamp of her workmanship on it, which meant that Jean was to kiss him. When she had kissed him he would go back to the machine and work steadily. He was always making up little games like that, and after Jean had gotten over the first sense of foolishness, she had come to like them.

Jean was quite honest with herself and with Herrick when she said that he was her real work. She had no delusions about the newspaper. It was much better than the library and infinitely better than teaching, but she was not a born newspaper woman. She had not again found a Dr. Mary or any one who approached her. It was only because her personal life was full in those first months that some of the interest overflowed into her routine, and Jean was able to interview dull people and whip their mediocre purpose into some kind of life. The atmosphere of the office she loathed, with its terrific rush and confusion, and was never able to work up a proper respect for the wonderful concentration of Mr. Thompson.

She often thought of Dr. Mary and her promise to go to the Hill House. Twice she asked Herrick to go with her on a Sunday afternoon, but Herrick had begged off.

"We work hard all the week, Jeany, and taking tea and settling the affairs of nations strikes me as too strenuous for our one day of rest. And, besides, I want you all to myself."

Jean was disappointed but said nothing. She decided to go and see the little doctor the first chance she had. But, somehow, the chance did not come, and finally, when six months had gone by, she was ashamed to go.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

In the middle of November, Herrick struck a snag in his work. The first five chapters had gone well. He had brought Robert up from the farm, taken him through college and plunged him into a big mining scheme in South America. He had drawn well the narrowness of Robert's home and the longing for opportunity.

But now Robert balked. He sat down in the Brazilian jungle to which Herrick had led him and refused to move. Hour after hour Herrick struggled and honestly tried to wake him from the permanent sleep into which he had fallen without warning. But Robert would not wake. Herrick's nerves tightened. He wanted and did not want to consult Jean. He had never asked her advice about the psychology of his people, only about the arrangement of incidents, or the vividness with which he had succeeded in portraying them. To ask help in this was a confession of his inability and Herrick's vanity refused.

And deep in Herrick's consciousness, beyond the point of self-acknowledgment, was the fear that Robert was not asleep. Robert was dead, dead beyond the power of revivifying. Until now Robert's reactions had been Herrick's own. But from now on Robert must be himself, and Herrick could not flesh the skeleton of this strenuous young engineer, toiling away alone in his jungle, with no nearer stimulus than a board of directors fifteen thousand miles away.

Evening after evening Herrick sat at the machine and covered pages with useless words. His fingers moved mechanically, although he tried to focus his attention on Robert. But the thoughts running at the back of his brain pushed Robert further and further beyond the border of his interest, and, finally, one evening in the middle of November, Robert dropped over the horizon altogether and Herrick knew that he had finished with him forever. His fingers lay idle on the keys and he stared into space.

In the dressing-room Jean was changing into a house-dress. Herrick did not like her to curl up on the couch in her working clothes and she always changed to please him. In a few moments she would come through the door quietly, take a book and make herself comfortable among the pillows. She had done this for four months now. Every evening they had sat so, Jean beyond touch across the room, but where he could look up and see her. Every evening for four months he had sat almost the whole distance of the room away from this big, calm, gray-eyed woman. Herrick smiled. Soon the real winter would set in. The rain would beat on the attic roof and the wood-fire crackle in the grate. There would be long Sundays impossible out of doors. Would Jean expect him to sit through these too, driving that mummy forward in his senseless progress? Herrick's smile deepened.

Coming through the door, Jean caught the smile, and answered it. Then, passing the work-table without speaking, she took a book and dropped among the pillows. It was Hunter's "Poverty." She did not open it immediately, but lay back against the cushions and closed her eyes, stretching her arms above her head in a way she had when she was tired. Completely relaxed she lay there, her throat and bare arms white on the dark blue background of the cushions. The smile withered on Herrick's face, and his fingers closed tightly, but he did not move. At last Jean drew a long breath that swelled the deep breast, stretched, and reached for her book. Herrick rose, ripped the paper from the machine, tore it into fragments and threw them in the waste-basket. Then he covered the typewriter and came towards the couch. Jean sat up.

"Why, Begee, what's the matter?"

It was the name that they had evolved from one of Herrick's little games. It stood for a contraction of baby and genius. Jean had hit on it accidentally and Herrick had insisted on keeping it.

He came over to the couch and sat down. He did not sit very near Jean, because in a little while Jean was going to move of her own accord. Now that he had so suddenly murdered his pretense he knew exactly what he wanted.

"Jean, we're all wrong about Robert. He isn't a man at all. He's a machine."

Jean laughed. "He is not. He's nothing of the kind. He's not the least bit mechanical. You've fleshed and blooded him beautifully."

"Maybe I have since I've given him my own. But he's an ass, just the same."

"He isn't and I won't have you abuse him. He's a real man and a particular friend of mine."

"Well, I can't say much for your taste, then. I'd like to punch his head. He'd bore me to death in ten minutes. Maybe, if you're so keen about him, you'll accompany him on that neat little stunt he's about to pull off. I have no desire to go to Peru with the creature."

"I'd love to, but you know perfectly well that I can't put a thing together except the ambitions of ladies who rescue cats. Getting Robert through the next six months of his life wouldn't bore me. It would overwhelm me."

"It'll swamp me—if I try."

"Begee!"

"Absolutely. He's behaved pretty well up to now because I understand him. But I don't understand how it feels to tramp through a jungle with nobody but natives you can't talk to, and sit all alone in a tent, through wonderful moonlight nights, smoking pipes and being happy. I never sat alone in a tent under tropic moonlight and I don't want to, with nothing but a pipe. I'd go raving mad."

"Nonsense. If you'd wanted to build bridges instead of write novels, you'd have done just the same."

"But I didn't want to build bridges. What's the good of them anyhow, messing up a perfectly good jungle? It's a fool point of view, that everlasting conquering difficulties and improving things."

"You know you don't mean that." Jean was looking at him now, with the smile gone from her eyes. No more than Martha did she like to hear the things she cared for derided. Instantly Herrick saw that he had gone too quickly to his goal.

"I tell you what, Jeany, if we get that bridge built we'll have to give Robert some incentive. We'll let him meet Dora before he does it instead of after. It'll make her better, too, eliminate any possibility of her loving him for anything but himself. How does that strike you? She can't fall in love with his achievements, if he hasn't any."

"But that isn't the way we've mapped it out. Robert was going to get it all done and offer it to her. It's just what he would do. If you go and change it round you make him another kind of man. Maybe that other kind of man wouldn't get the bridge——" Jean broke off suddenly.

"The bridge built at all. Is that what you mean?" Herrick finished for her.

"Yes, I suppose I do. You see——" Jean frowned in her effort to get exactly the right words. It seemed somehow very important that she should get them just right, "The way we have it fixed now, Robert is one kind of man and Dora is one kind of girl, and they're going to be awfully happy. But if you change him she wouldn't be happy with that kind of man. He'd be just the kind that would want to trail her through the jungle after him. You will have to change her, too."

"Rubbish, Jean. That's the psychology of a girl of sixteen. Do you suppose love depends on whether a man builds a bridge or not?"

"That isn't the point, Begee, and it's not the same thing at all. Whether he built the bridge or not, under those difficult conditions, depends on the man he is."

"Oh, Jean, you're a baby. Carrying out that logic then, if I never finish the novel, I am another man. And you'll have to get made all over yourself. Would I be a different man to you?"

Jean looked down at her hands clasped in her lap. Then she raised her eyes to Herrick's:

"Yes. You would be different."

"Why? Why would not finishing the novel make me any different?"

"Because, if you had never wanted to do it and never started, or couldn't do it, that would be different. But you have always wanted to, for years and years it's been haunting you. You can do it and you have started it. So, if you stopped now, because you've got into a hard place, it would mean that you hadn't the grit to go on. It would be just plain cowardly. You'll be afraid of the pain and trouble of the effort."

"Well, what of that? What's so specially fine in not being afraid of pain? What's so horrible in being a coward? A coward is often a man who sees values more clearly than the mob. What's so noble in beating after something that won't make you any happier when you've got it? That's all courage is, striving after something difficult or impossible to get."

Herrick came closer and laid both hands on Jean's shoulders.

"It's just a lot of words, Jean, handed down till we swallow them whole, this babble about courage and strength and getting the best of things. Words, words, that's all. The measure of all this courage is a measure of effort, not of accomplishment. According to that theory, a baby that beats its head against a stone wall is brave."

Jean sat silent, held by the same terrible necessity of getting the right words.

"No, it is not just blind fighting. It isn't beating after something that you think's going to make you happy. It's seeing clearly and not being afraid of being unhappy."

"Not being afraid of being unhappy? What else is there to be afraid of? What else matters?"

"Being the best self you have, the very, very best."

"Is it?" His hold on her shoulders tightened, and he said, more to keep that look on her face than for any further interest he had in the subject:

"And this best? There is never any doubt about it? It is always perfectly clear what it is?"

"Of course it's always clear—if we're honest."

"And every one knows what this wonderful 'best' in himself is and goes trotting on alone and grabs it?"

"Extremist! No one trots right along and grabs anything. You know what I mean, Begee. Life's like a story or an editorial. You don't go on blindly putting down words without knowing what you're aiming at. You know the points you want to make and you make them. You have your climax before you begin."

"Good Lord! Do you believe that?"

"Yes. I think I do. I know it sounds terribly high-falutin but lots of things do when you really get them in words. Life isn't just a jumbled mess. It must make for something. If it isn't a road we build going along, what on earth is it?"

Herrick's hands dropped from Jean's shoulders.

"It's a pendulum. That's all it is, at the best. That's all, Jean. We swing through the arc, back and forth, from one higher point to another and through all the lowest points between. When we reach one end of the arc we are pushed back and do it all over again, and after a while the arc grows shorter, and we hang there at the will of—what? Fate or chance or our own limitations."

"Oh no, Begee, no. No. You're tired and you don't really believe it yourself. It's a corking good image and we'll get it into the novel somewhere, only Robert won't say it. But as philosophy, it doesn't swing. I'm not hung on a wire by Fate or anything else and when I get to the end of my arc I can go higher. Which may be bad mathematics or physics or whatever it is, but it's good sense and gets things done in this world."

Jean laughed as she laid hold of Herrick's shoulders and shook him gently.

"It's you who are the baby. That's what you are. A baby that gets a spiritual tummy-ache every time he strikes a snag."

Jean was very near now, smiling into his eyes, and Herrick could feel the cool, firm strength of her.

"Am I?"

"Certainly, not a doubt of it. A baby that can scarcely walk. But never mind, when he gets to the end of his arc, mother'll come and push him along. Mother's a grand pusher and she adores it."

"Is she?" Herrick's voice broke and he groped for Jean with trembling hands. "Prove it—prove it." His breath came hot against her cheek as he seized her in his arms and crushed her mouth against his.

"Wake up, wake up," he panted, and through the anger and nausea that seemed to be dragging her out of consciousness, Jean heard him. Years afterwards she could recall the feel of each word as if it were a stone that was hitting her, and the feel of Herrick's unshaven chin against hers.

With all her force she tried to push him away. But, blind with his long suppression, Herrick only held her closer. Not till the edge of his hunger dulled did his hold loosen. Taking Jean's chin in his hand, he turned her face up. Instantly his arms dropped.

For a moment Herrick refused to believe the look in her eyes. Then a wave of anger swept over him, flooding his face and neck to a deep red.

"Well, we're married, aren't we?"

"If that's marriage, no." Jean stepped back out of range of this thing that had taken every scrap of her self-respect and ripped it off as if it were a cloak, that had held her, against her will, at its own pleasure. "Don't you ever kiss me like that again—ever. Do you hear?"

Herrick said nothing. He went over to the window and leaned his forehead on the cold glass. He had acted like a brute, but it didn't matter. Nothing mattered. He had shocked Jean, but that didn't matter, either. It didn't matter whether she was shocked or needed shocking or didn't need it. Nothing in the whole world mattered at all.

Slowly Jean came and stood beside him.

"Please, Franklin," she said in a low hurried tone, "don't kiss me like that ever again. I hate it."

"All right." Herrick spoke from his folded arms without looking up.

Jean stood where she was for a moment and then went back to the couch. She took up her book and tried to read, but the words made no sense. Herrick still stood at the window and the typewriter was covered on the desk.

It was as if a murder had been committed in the room.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Late in December the rains set in. Heavy gray clouds hung low over the city's hills, pressing all the joy and color from life, flattening the world to a monotone of black umbrellas.

At New Year there was an interval of pleasant weather and then more rain, steady, deliberate, endless rain. The street cars were crowded with damp people, all trying to keep as far as possible from each other, all peevish and nervous under the strain. Gutters broke and streams of water ran everywhere. The streets were rivers of thick, black mud and buildings reeked with the odor of woolen clothing drying in steam heat. From the middle of January to the middle of February the world woke in the morning to rain and went to bed at night with the rain steadily pouring in long, gray lines from the leaden sky.

Against the background of the rain, Jean's days ran together in a blur. She created a false enthusiasm and, under this self-imposed stimulus, got so many words on paper. Sometimes she wondered how long she would be able to keep it up. She thought now more and more often of Pat steadily plodding in her mountain school, and of her mother, trotting through each day's task, every crevice of her life filled with the knowledge that she could do no more than she was doing, nor do it better. Most of all she thought of Dr. Mary, buoyant and vital among her people, holding to her purpose and working toward it surely. She wondered whether Dr. Mary would remember her if she went.

There had been no mention at all of the night that Herrick had stood long at the window with his face in his arms. The thing that had been killed had been decently buried, so decently buried that it might never have existed at all. Herrick worked spasmodically on a short story, but he rarely worked in the evenings. They often went to the theater, and at long intervals to Flop's. Once Jean had quite enjoyed herself and they had gone again the following Sunday, but the out-of-town visitors had gone away and it was duller, more noisy, less sincere than ever.

Through the four worst Sundays of rain Herrick wrote and when he had finished went over the result with Jean. They haggled each point with a desperate show of interest. When Jean said a scene did not ring true, she explained very elaborately and carefully and Herrick listened and argued and in the end usually agreed. Jean often thought of Robert as some one who had died far away in the jungle.

In March the fury of the rain lessened, wore itself out in a succession of damp, drizzling days almost harder to stand than the steady downpour. Then the hills stood out once more softly green and clear against the blue sky. With the coming of spring, Herrick gave up his pretense of winter. The unfinished short story went into the waste basket. Jean was glad and the tension of her nerves relaxed.

It was a lovely day in May, when Jean's work brought her close to home about one o'clock and she decided to do the writing in the studio instead of going back to the noisy office. As she opened the door she pushed back an envelope of the gray paper that Pat used. Jean pounced on it and without waiting to take off her things, tore it open. There were only a few sentences on a half sheet:

"Will be down on the sixteenth.

"Train gets in about three. Don't meet me or upset your day in any way.

"Leave the key where I can find it. I like doormats best."

Pat was coming.

For the moment Jean could grasp nothing else. Pat was coming. She would be here in that very room. They would talk. It was years since they had talked. No, not years. Not quite two yet, since she and Pat had sat together and swung their feet from the sink board of the Girls' Rest Hall, and she had been almost hysterical because there was nothing in the world but teaching. Jean's eyes filled with tears and she dabbed angrily at them.

"You old fool! What do you expect? To feel the same always? No doubt Pat feels older and has changed a lot too."

But the idea of Pat's having changed frightened Jean. Pat must not have changed. She must be just the same sane, practical, efficient Pat. She would be. And she was coming, coming on the sixteenth and the sixteenth was to-day.

The next moment Jean was pounding out her interview on the machine. It was done in a space of time unsurpassed even by the concentration of Mr. Thompson. Jean sent a messenger with it to the office and began cleaning the studio. By half past two the place was so clean that Jean could not find another thing to do, not even rearrange for the fourth time a vase of roses. She took a book to the window seat and sat down.

"Now you compose your mind and act like a rational human. She won't get here any sooner if you flutter about like a demented hen. 'Flutter like a demented hen'—it must be the effect of Pat's coming!"

By sheer will Jean succeeded in sitting still, but no effort could keep her attention on the print. Her thoughts got away from her and ran back down the months, fetching up in days she and Pat had spent together; in graduation day, that seemed so many years behind her; and courses they had taken together, that for some reason seemed closer now, than when she had taken them.

In the glow of Pat's coming, forgotten things became recent and clear, while recent things seemed unreal and far away. In this inversion, the past winter, with the strained atmosphere between herself and Herrick, blurred into a memory of some very disagreeable period she had lived through long ago. Perhaps that unobtrusive, ever present third presence that had moved so silently between them through the long weeks of rain, and against whom she was ever on her guard, was not so real as she had fancied. She had accepted the thing she did not want to believe and believed it for fear of being a coward in not facing it.

"I'm an idiot, and a conceited one at——"

"Haven't a doubt about it, old girl. Didn't I always say so?"

Jean tumbled from the window seat and Pat's arms closed about her.

"Oh Pat—Pat."

They stood so for a moment. Then they separated, Pat wiped her eyes and they grinned foolishly at each other.

"I knew I'd be glad. But I didn't know I'd be like this. I guess I've been suppressing all the way down in the train, in case you'd changed a lot, and you haven't changed a bit, not a single bit."

"What did you expect? After all it's only two years, even if it seems a million."

"I guess I was trying to do one of mummy's tricks, get all primed up just because I didn't want to. Jean, if you had changed, I'd have busted on the spot."

"Well, you can stay whole then because I haven't. Now get off those things. I feel as if you had dropped in for ten minutes."

"I haven't, so get rid of any such hopes. I am going to stay a week or more. I don't care whether it's convenient or not. During the day I shall be out on my deep and serious mission, but I expect the evenings. Oh Jeany, do tell me what he's like. I've been expiring for months. You never did describe him to me, you know, and I was too delicate to ask. He might have only one eye or be bald. Is he?"

"No. He's neither lame, halt nor blind and I won't tell you a thing until you get those things off and I make some tea."

When Jean had drawn the tea table close to the window that looked out across the tops of the roofs to the crown of the Berkeley Hills, Pat demanded:

"Now, go clear back to the beginning and tell me everything. Your letters on the subject were the most unsatisfactory things ever penned by the hand of man. Get out that mental searchlight and turn on the analysis. Why did you fall in love? How does it feel? Were you swept off your feet or did you just get dragged under? Begin."

"I don't know, Patsy. Honestly, I don't know."

"Good Heavens! If that isn't the most Jeanesque performance ever! Here you can spend years rooting about in your soul for the whys and the wherefores of some silly thing that doesn't have a why or a wherefore, and for a big thing like getting married, you don't know why you did it! It sounds to me as if you had fallen so head over heels into the sea of love that you blinded yourself."

"No, I don't think I did that." There was no answering laughter in Jean's eyes and the twinkle vanished from Pat's. "We had a lot in common and used to have such glorious days out of doors together and he wanted to write and I believed I could help him. He'd always been alone and no one had ever taken any interest in the things he cared most deeply about until we met, and it seemed to me, from the very first moment, as if I had known him always."

"That's a symptom, I've always heard." Pat's tone brought Jean from a path in which she seemed to be wandering by herself.

"I mean that I didn't lose my head and go around raving like Alma Perkins did when she was engaged to Porter. Do you remember the spectacle she made of herself? Of course, I loved Franklin. I wouldn't have married him if I hadn't, would I?"

"No, I don't suppose you would," Pat answered, after an imperceptible pause. "How did mummy take it?"

This time Jean laughed. "Pat, it really was funny. Mummy was divided between being grateful to Franklin for being a 'burden' and dislike of him personally."

"Doesn't she like him? Didn't she ever?"

"No. And you should have seen the wedding breakfast. Not even in the days when she wasn't sure whether you were 'a good influence' did you ever inspire such food."

"Why didn't she like him?"

"I don't believe she really knows. I was silly enough to describe the first evening I went out with him and the people I met. When she saw him, she said he had 'the flesh and the devil' written all over him. You know how she condemns people to death on a technicality?"

"Haven't you got a picture of It? I'll die before I see It."

"Oh no you won't. But I'll 'phone in a few moments and tell It to come home early. We usually eat out, but we won't to-night. I want to talk and talk and talk. Now, tell me what you've been doing and what you expect to do, for you haven't been so very explicit yourself."

"Well, in comparison to turning my life inside out as you have done, mine's very tame."

"Well, go on."

"Oh, there's nothing to tell, really. I've been trying to see if I couldn't raise the personal standards of some of the people in my mountain fastness. That's all. It's kind of hard to explain if you don't know the conditions. You see, most people think of the country and country children as I did when I first went up there. I expected them to be behind city children in some ways but I did not expect them to be ahead of them in the ways they are. Jean, there's more rubbish talked about the morality and health of the country than a million books on the subject could get rid of in a million years. The purity of the country is a myth! There are just as many underfed, subnormal, dead, inert objects of pity among my people, big as well as little, as there ever was in a congested city slum. Why, it took my breath away. I just wouldn't believe it at first. I was all filled up on this 'pure air' and 'God's out of doors' dope until I wasn't fit to teach a goat. But I got it banged into me at last. That's why I'm here."

"Elucidate. You've jumped a few steps that my 'logical mind' needs. Why does the immorality and stupidity of a mountain district school bring you to town?"

"Because I want to talk to a woman I've never seen, but from reading everything she ever wrote and every report she ever made before all the societies there are and aren't, I have come to feel that she knows everything on earth that's worth while knowing. She may have struggled with bovine intellects in a mountain district school or she may not, but I know she'll have something worth saying. Ergo, I come."

"Pat, as I have remarked many a time and oft, you are the joy of my soul. Now who on earth but you would be so unspeakably efficient as to come down here—I see I can't flatter myself that I had anything to do with it—in order to consult an ideal on something she probably doesn't know anything about? Idealism and efficiency go hand in hand."

"I don't care. Laugh if you like."

"Who is this prodigy? May I go and sit outside and listen to the pearls of wisdom?"

"'Listen to pearls of wisdom.' Not so bad! Well, the name of this remarkable woman is Dr. Mary Mac Lean."

"What?"

"Don't you like it? Sounds like a good, common-sense Scotch name to me. Not in the same class with Jean Norris or Patricia Farnsworth, but no doubt quite respectable in its way."

"Dr. Mary? My Dr. Mary!"

"Yours? What do you, married parasite, Bohemian newspaper woman, know about Dr. Mary?"

"More than you do."

And Jean related in detail her one visit to the Hill Neighborhood House.

"And you needn't think that you are going up there alone. I've been thinking about her and wanting to go terribly, but I let such a long time go by and then it seemed rather—oh, I don't know. I just haven't been."

"Well, we're going and we're going now. If I can't see Franklin right away, at least I can see her, and they're the two people I'm most excited about at the present moment. 'Phone your husband instantly and come along."

Jean got Herrick on the 'phone and astonished him more than he had been astonished for a long time by demanding that he come home to dinner and come early. She would give no reason but chuckled happily as he had not heard her chuckle for months.

Herrick went back and sat a long while at his desk without doing anything. Then he telephoned to Flop, whom he had met accidentally early in the afternoon, that he would not be able to help in the celebration of Magnolia's birthday, as he had promised. After which, he smiled and wrote five hundred words of very good editorial.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

"I am certainly glad." Dr. Mary, as she came padding across the big living room, saw only Jean. "I thought you were a 'promiser,' and I loathe 'promisers,' almost as much as I do people who really forget me."

"No, indeed I did not forget you. I think it was because I remembered you so well that I didn't come. I got to thinking how busy you must be and—and——"

"You must have been rather busy yourself. The name they announced wasn't Norris. Is it you?"

For the first time she perceived Pat and looked inquiringly from her to Jean.

"Yes. The Herrick is for me. I was married shortly after I interviewed you. Did you read the interview? I didn't call you anything, although I assure you it was a temptation. You have Mr. Herrick to thank for that. He pruned down my finest flights."

"Sensible man. Oh yes, I read it. I thought of memorizing it, you worded it so much better than I ever did myself. But let's go into my den. I always like to have friendly chats in little rooms. Big places make me feel official."

"She's a dear," whispered Pat, as they followed the doctor to a small room at the end of the hall.

Deep in her leather chair, the doctor lit a cigarette and beamed at the two young women before her.

"Are you a newspaper woman too, Miss Farnsworth?"

"Nothing so exciting. A school teacher, and a country one at that."

"Let me congratulate and condole, may I, both at once?"

"You've taught, too!"

"Does that give me so completely away? Yes, I've taught, but it was many years ago, in an interim between college and medical when I was trying to earn money to put myself through."

"But you haven't forgotten."

"Not a thing. It makes me uncomfortable yet to think of some of the mistakes I made, the big opportunities I let get by. I suppose I did not have the right stuff in me for a teacher. I started so full of hope and plans, although I knew it was not to be my life work, but I let my enthusiasm die down. I let all kinds of small, personal things dull the edge."

"But it's so difficult to keep the edge sharp. Sometimes I think that living close to the earth and animals makes one like them."

"I don't know but that you're right. Only that never occurred to me then. Perhaps I went at things too violently, but when I couldn't wake them up, well—I just let them sleep."

"And they've been asleep ever since, at least mine have. I'm afraid I can never wake them up."

Pat's voice was grave with her deep interest and Jean glimpsed the scope of teaching as she had never before.

"Oh, yes, you can. Because you realize that there is something underneath; I didn't. I called it emptiness, when it was really desperate shyness and fear of new things, a kind of deep, perverted faithfulness to all they have ever known."

"I've thought that, sometimes—and then my light goes out again. I started a kind of library when I first went up, but all that the girls and women seem to care about—the men never read at all—are love stories, the sillier the better. Anything else is something going on away off in another world. It does not concern them and never will. Why, some of my people had, until recently, never even heard of suffrage or sex hygiene or minimum wages, and they don't care or understand when I try to explain. They accept their lives like the weather. To the men the crops are good or bad, and the women have good husbands or bad husbands and that's all. The boys and girls marry young and the babies begin coming right away. For a few years the children seem to be eager and interested and then, somehow, it leaks away. I've only been teaching two years but I can see it, as if I had been there a hundred. And I want to do something. I want to get those who come to me started right. Perhaps, even with little children of six or seven, if some of us could get the seed planted——"

Pat broke off, as if the physical strength for explanation had broken under the terrific weight of the indifference with which she was struggling. Jean looked at her and a coldness settled about her own heart. It was so real to Pat and so worth while, something into which she could pour the whole warmth of herself. Jean pictured the last woman whom she had interviewed, with a scheme for saving stray dogs; and Thompson's long harangue with the Art Department about the illustrations.

"You're right, absolutely right," Dr. Mary went on; "it is the century of the child. There's our biggest chance, especially for you younger women, and so few see it. But there's hope. After all, we are beginning to creep in this field. In the next ten years, I hope, we'll at least get on our knees. Maybe in twenty we'll be able to walk."

"It's so maddeningly slow."

"It's like creeping paralysis, only going the other way. We are not getting deader, but more alive, at the same speed. But if we hang on to our patience we'll get something done."

Pat leaned forward. "I wish you would speak at the next state institute. Maybe a few of us would get up on our knees a little sooner."

Dr. Mary laid her hand over Pat's. "Thank you. There's nothing that makes me feel so unworthy and humble and grateful as meaning something to other women. I love 'em, every one of them, the young, brave, fearless women. Society's been asleep for ages, but it's waking up. It needs us, in other ways than it thought it did, and we'll be there with the goods."

Jean drew deeper into her chair. At the motion Dr. Mary turned.

"I'm not even going to apologize, Mrs. Herrick, for absorbing all the conversation. You know what I am when I get started."

She grinned at Pat. "When Mrs. Herrick came to interview me, she didn't get a chance to say a thing. I talked all the time."

"It was the only real hour I've had in the whole newspaper business," Jean said slowly, "and I wish I had never come."

Pat started as if Jean had called to her for help and the little doctor said sharply:

"You don't like interviewing?"

"I despise it! It's the most futile, useless round of senseless rush that was ever invented to waste one's days. It means nothing at all to the one who does it or to any one else. It's just words, words, and more words."

For several moments Dr. Mary said nothing, but sat looking at Jean with an odd look in her small, bright eyes.

"If I am rude, you must pardon me, Mrs. Herrick, but why do you do it, if you feel that way?"

It was Jean now who was silent, but Pat knew that she was trying to find the right words for something that meant very much to her.

"Because," she said, at length, "I should go mad doing nothing at all."

Dr. Mary smoked her cigarette to the end in a silence that Pat recalled afterwards as one of the longest and tensest five minutes she had ever spent. Then the little doctor said in her brisk, off-hand fashion:

"If salary is no particular object to you, Mrs. Herrick, I could find a place for you here. We're starting so many things and are overworked as it is. We can't pay much, and as you have had no experience before, the committee may kick at giving anything. But I believe the laborer is worth his hire always, and have never found volunteer work satisfactory. If you would like to try for a couple of months—it's better all around to have it probationary—I can use you."

Twice Jean's lips opened but the words would not come.

"Well, since silence gives consent, I take it that you will try it."

"I shall be very glad."

"Then it's settled. Let me see; I suppose you'll have to give the paper some kind of notice?"

"No. The managing editor never recognizes any such obligation when the work isn't satisfactory. And it's only the other way round. I'd like to begin with you right away."

"You can if you want to. It's your own affair. We're in the throes of the summer camp and two of our regular workers will be away for the next three months attending to that. How about next Monday?"

"Perfect," Jean said, trying to keep her voice steady.

"Now we'll have some tea."

Dr. Mary touched the bell and a few moments later a maid brought in the tea things. The doctor had a fund of stories, humorous, pathetic, all human, and she told them well. It was almost six when she rang for the maid to take away the cups and then it was too late to show Pat over the building.

"Never mind. You'll come again and very soon, and I shall not let you escape without explaining every detail."

She dropped Pat's hand and turned to Jean.

"Monday, then?"

"Monday." They smiled quietly as if they were sealing a contract.

Out in the street Pat drew a deep breath.

"Well! If you ask me, I recommend that as about the quickest thing I ever saw pulled off. You go up to introduce me, and come out with a new life work. I believe you've got it at last, Jean."

"I think I have, Pat. I feel as if something had clicked into place inside."

She stopped and looked at Pat with real fear. "Pat, suppose you hadn't come! I wouldn't have gone. I'd left it too long. I feel as if you'd rescued me from something and—as if you'd come just in time."

"Little trick of mine," Pat answered lightly, but her eyes clouded and she slipped her hand into Jean's arm and held it there.

They did not speak again until they were almost at the studio door.

"We used to think we knew an awful lot, didn't we, Jean?"

Jean nodded.

Upstairs they found Herrick. Pat's first impression was very much what Jean's had been the day Herrick had walked into the library and found her sniffing the grass. Of a big man, strong but rather lazy, with something frank and winning and clean about him, and nice eyes. And the next was surprise that he was so different from what she had pictured he would be, and that never would she have picked him out as the man Jean would marry.

"This is Pat."

Herrick came forward and they shook hands heartily.

"I am awfully glad. I've heard of you, you know, until I was almost jealous. When did you get in?"

"About half an hour before I 'phoned you," Jean answered.

Herrick turned to Jean.

"I wondered what the wonderful surprise was. I never could have guessed it."

Pat felt something in him change, but before she could be sure, he was talking pleasantly again.

Herrick went out and brought in things for dinner and they all cooked together. Pat and Jean did most of the talking but Herrick seemed to enjoy their reminiscences. From time to time, however, Pat caught a heaviness in his eyes as they rested on Jean, and she decided that there had been some slight quarrel before her arrival and that Herrick had not been able to forget it. In spite of his gentle manner and kind eyes, he might bear a grudge a long while.

The dinner was a jolly one. Jean looked as Herrick had not seen her look since they raced hand in hand, against the wind, over the hills. Half way through, Herrick turned to Pat.

"I think you'll have to come and live with us, Pat. You're a regular tonic." Under the gayety of his tone, Pat felt the resentment. She wondered what it was they had quarreled about and whether Jean had altogether forgotten it. It wasn't like Jean to forget anything that really mattered or, remembering, to pretend she did not.

"Oh, I can't flatter myself that I am responsible." Pat made no pretense of not understanding. "It is——"

She glanced at Jean and Jean nodded. They had decided to say nothing about Jean's new work until the black coffee was reached. Then Pat was to spring the surprise in the form of a toast, but now at Jean's nod, she continued:

"It's not my influence at all. Jean has a new job."

Herrick turned quickly. "Have you left the paper?"

"Yes. Thompson doesn't know it yet, but he will by to-morrow. If he makes a great row I'll get him one more interview so he won't be behind, but on Monday I take a real job."

"Doing what?"

"I'm going to work with Dr. Mary."

"At the Hill House?"

"Yes. I feel as if a hand had reached out from the blue and rescued me. I'm going to work."

Again Herrick's face changed so that Pat wondered whether she had been quite right about him in either of her estimates. He looked older, heavier and rather bored.

"Yes," he said quietly, "I think that is your work."

For a moment Jean and Herrick looked at each other.

"I think it is and I expect to be very happy in it."

"I hope you will."

Herrick filled all three glasses and cried gayly:

"To the Poor, God bless 'em."

Pat stayed ten days. Sometimes she went with Jean on cases and sometimes she was out all day on work of her own. But every evening the three met for dinner in the studio and afterwards Jean and Pat talked social and educational reforms. At first Herrick listened, not quite grasping the vital import of these things to them; then, one night, he asked Jean, with a lurking smile that annoyed even Pat, whether she really expected to make over the world.

"No," Jean answered shortly, "I don't; but I'm going to patch at it as long as I have strength in my body."

"The leopard won't change his spots, you know, no matter how many kind ladies dab at him with their social paints."

"Then they will be cut out or burned out," Jean said in such a still voice that Pat stared. But Jean and Herrick were looking straight into each other's eyes and did not notice.

"Poor leopard, he'll die under such treatment."

"I don't know that that would be such a loss to the rest of the animals if he did."

"No. I don't suppose it would," Herrick said after a pause, in a voice controlled only by the need to maintain a pretense before Pat.

Pat picked up the table of statistics she and Jean had been discussing and studied it closely. For a moment there was not a sound. Then Herrick went over to the couch with a book and Jean took up the argument again.

Herrick never joined the conversation after that evening but it seemed to Pat that he was always listening and she felt that Jean felt it too.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

One day in September when Jean had been working almost four months, Dr. Mary came to her with an open letter in her hand.

"Jean, I'm going to give you this case, because I feel in my backbone that it's out of the usual run, and that's saying a good deal, with some of those we've had lately, isn't it?"

"It certainly is. Perhaps I won't be able to handle it."

"I'll take a chance. It's because I believe you can, better than any one else, that I am turning it over. No one has done a thing on it yet. It's brand new."

Jean took the letter. It was written on ruled paper in a fairly good hand.

"DR. MARY MACLEAN—Please come to see me as soon as possible.

AMELIA GORMAN."

"Well, at least Amelia seems used to giving orders."

"No information furnished. No request made. I'd like to go myself if I had the time. I thought first of turning it over to the C.O.S. of that district but, somehow, the woman interests me. Do you want it?"

Jean was already putting on her hat. Mary smiled.

"I know, Mary, but I haven't gotten over that first rushed feeling yet, in spite of all your warning. I'm always sure that everything will go to pot if I don't get to a case the very minute I hear of it."

"I hope you never will, not really. When that goes I can't imagine a worse work than this to be in. You'd better take some money with you, she's likely to need most anything."

An hour later Jean rang the bell of a shabby, two-story house out on the Mission Road. The house stood a little back in a dusty, parched patch of ground, where a few wilting geraniums struggled against the dust-laden wind that blew always over the bare hills. A half-grown girl opened the door. She seemed parched by the ceaseless wind and her dry hair looked as if it had never been quite free of the dust.

"Does Mrs. Gorman live here?"

"Back room. She ain't Mrs." The girl stood staring while Jean knocked on a door at the end of the dark hall.

"Come in."

It was a small room and held only a single bed, a child's crib, a broken dresser and a chair. An emaciated woman sat up in bed and looked at Jean with the calmest look of appraisal that had ever summed her up.

"You're from the Hill House. It wouldn't be anybody else. Are you Dr. Mary MacLean?"

"No, I'm not Dr. McLean. She had to go out of town. My name is Herrick."

"Miss or Mrs.?"

"Mrs."

"I'm glad of that." The woman's voice was perfectly detached, as if something bigger than a personal desire in the matter directed her.

Jean drew the chair to the side of the bed and sat down.

"Have you any children?" the woman asked abruptly.

"No. I have no children."

"Do you want them?"

For some reason it was impossible to resent this woman's questioning. She did it so calmly, so deliberately, as if each question were the end of a long line of thought, important to her. Jean felt herself grow warm and uncomfortable.

"I don't—think very much about it."

There was another long pause, in which Jean listened to the wind and to some one moving in the room above. Suddenly a child's voice broke out in angry protest: "I won't!—I won't!" There was a mild scuffle, a door slammed, then silence. The woman continued to listen for a moment. She turned back again to Jean.

"I did," she said, in her odd way of continuing her own line of thought. "I wanted a child. That's him we just heard. Mamie don't mean to be mean but she ain't any brighter than she has to be and she don't understand. That's why I wrote to Dr. MacLean. I don't know whether you'll understand, seein' you never wanted one, but I'll have to tell you, since you was the one she sent and mebbe there won't be time to send another. I ain't always as strong as I am to-day, and there won't be many more days, weak or strong."

"You mustn't talk like that. You can't——"

The woman turned her dark eyes to Jean and a faint smile touched them.

"There ain't no call to talk that way to me. I don't want no cheerin' up. The time's past for that. I fought it all out here alone and now I got my plan ready. I didn't send for no one to tell me I ain't goin' to die, because I know I am. If it wasn't for Jimmie I'd be glad, laughin' glad to go. It's him I'm goin' to tell you about."

For a while she seemed to forget Jean altogether and then she began again, in a flat, even voice, choosing only the thread of her story, as if she were used to husbanding her small strength.

"Did you ever live in a room like this? Get up in the mornin' in it and go to bed at night in it, and sit all the evenin' in it, so that your thoughts soak into it and you can feel them rush out at you the minute you open the door? You can never get away. And there don't seem to be nothing in the whole wide world but yourself. It's a terrible thing.

"I used to lay in bed at night and feel myself shut up in my cell, and then I got to thinkin' about all the other people in the world shut up in their cells and none of us could get out or talk through to one another, millions of us locked up tight.

"Hundreds of times I said to myself, 'If that's all there is to it, why go on?' But I could never come round to the picture of killing myself. Once I tried but I didn't get very far. And then I begun wonderin' why it was that I didn't do the job straight through; wonderin' and wonderin', until one night, like an earthquake, it hit me sudden. It was all the people behind me, clear back to Adam and Eve, holdin' me here, all the men and women that had loved each other and hated each other and had children and kept things going. And if I killed myself—it would be like takin' one of the girl's jobs in the factory to finish so she could draw her pay and then not doin' it.

"Mebbe you won't understand, but you'll have to take it the way I say, for I saw it as clear as I see you in that chair. We was put here to keep things goin'. And I was goin' to stop 'em. There wouldn't be any me after I was dead and all them people back of me was goin' to drop out of things, just like I had killed 'em. Did you ever think like that?"

Jean shook her head. Before the fire of loneliness that had seared this woman, she could not speak.

"We're all different, I guess. But I got so I couldn't bear the thought of dyin' and bein' ended, without ever havin' had nothin' and leavin' nothin' and so—I had a baby."

Jean felt as if the wind outside had torn its way into the room.

"You decided, made up your mind to have a baby, and had one?"

"It seems kind of queer, mebbe, when you say it like that, but it was all simple after I'd been thinkin' about it. Lots of things are queer when you first think about 'em, but after a while you get used to 'em. It's like strangers you meet and get to know after a bit real well."

Jean looked away to the houses crouching on the windswept hill.

"He lived in the same house. He was the only man that ever asked me to go any place with him or tried to kiss me. You see I was twenty-seven then, almost twenty-eight. There was never no talk about marryin'. He went away before Jimmie was born, a long time before. I think he was afraid somebody'd find out. He was always kind of scared of people. He sent some money for awhile and then he stopped. I didn't care about the money. I can always get work, and as soon as Jimmie was old enough to leave, I got a job in another place."

From under the pillow she took a bit of folded newspaper and handed it to Jean. It was a clipping a month old, a condensed account of a political fight in a small town in the southern part of the state. It said that the fight had been won by the adherents of Mayor James H. Martin, who could always be relied on to stand on the side of law and order.

"He always said he was goin' to get into politics some day and he did. I wouldn't bother now, because he ain't had none of the joy of Jimmie, but I haven't more than a few weeks, days mebbe. It's cancer, like mother had and grandmother and Aunt Sarah, and I want to know that Jimmie won't have to go to an institution. He can't be so terrible poor if he's Mayor and he'll do something for Jimmie. Maybe he'll be kind of afraid at first but if you make him promise, he'll keep it. I'll give you some letters he wrote and Jimmie's picture. Will you go?"

Evidently she had used up all her strength, for she lay back now, wasted and white, with her eyes closed. Jean tried to speak and couldn't. It was all so tangled, so thwarted, so stark and bare. It was like the rickety house in which the woman lived, and the parched hills. Jean felt as if the thick dust was choking her. The woman opened her eyes.

"You don't understand very well, do you?"

"No, not very." Jean tried to say she did, but the naked honesty of the other compelled the same from her. "I can understand how you must have been lonely but——"

The woman shook her head. "No, that's just what you don't, or you would understand it all."

Her hands, white from illness, took Jean's. "But you're kind and it don't matter much. I wanted the Doctor because she was awfully good to one of the girls that worked with me once, and when I was thinking of somebody, I remembered her."

Jean forced back the sob in her throat. "I'll go to-night if there's a train."

The sick woman smiled gratefully. "You are kind," she said again. "And—there's not many that's kind when they don't understand."

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Jean propped her note to Herrick on the desk where he would be sure to see it as soon as he came in, and caught the six-fifteen train.

When Herrick came at half past six he found the note, read it three times and tore it into bits.

"Taking the six-fifteen to Belgrave on a case. May be away a few days.

JEAN."

It was eight before Herrick stopped pacing up and down the studio, took his hat and went out.

Giuseppe's was crowded. The air reeked with smoke and the heavy odor of highly seasoned food. Not a place at the long table was vacant. Flop was denouncing the low standards of American art, exemplified in the flat failure of a recent exhibit of his own, and the others pounded the table in the old way and shouted their approval. Flop caught sight of Herrick first, stopped in the middle of a sentence, and then, with a shout:

"Well, I'll be damned! Look who's here," got up and dragged Herrick forward as if the latter had been trying to get away.

"Boy Blue! Franklin! Herrick!"

The racket was deafening. The Outlanders jumped on chairs to see what was happening. Flop corraled a waiter hurrying by with a demijohn of wine and took it way from him.

"This is on the house, Pietro. We drink to the return of the lost sheep."

A waiter brought Herrick a chair. He took it, and walking deliberately about the table, placed it next to The Kitten's. There was much laughing and some quick looks interchanged and The Kitten shrugged as if the matter did not concern her in the least, and continued to talk to another man across Herrick's back. The enthusiasm, diverted for a moment from its channel, went back. The Kitten finished what she had been saying and was forced at last to meet Herrick's eyes. She tried to hold the contempt in them, but it was useless. The corners of her scarlet lips trembled. Herrick's hand took hers under the table.

"Don't be silly, Kittycat. We wouldn't keep it up, you know...."

Two hours later The Bunch went singing up the hill to Flop's. Herrick and The Kitten turned down a side street. Herrick walked with the light, springing step that had reminded Jean of the earth and wide spaces. The Kitten skimmed along beside him, clinging to his arm. At the foot of the stairs he lifted her, and carried her up. He put her in the Morris chair and knelt beside her. Every motion was a repetition of the last time he had knelt so. It was all exactly the same, even to the bar of light from the street lamp, and the fine, tired lines about The Kitten's mouth.

The Kitten bent and lifted his face from her knees.

"Why did you do it, Boy?"

"I don't know, Kitten."

She drew his head to her shoulder and stroked his hair quietly. There was no claim in her touch, no insistence, only peace. The Kitten was weary, too.

"Tell me about it," she said at last.

Herrick smiled. "She's straightening out all the misery and sin and ugliness in the world, Kittycat, and it keeps her rather busy."

They talked for a while of Jean and the little doctor and the futile, foolish tasks at which they labored.

"It makes me tired to think of so much energy." The Kitten yawned. "I'm glad I have no 'work.' I wouldn't 'improve' a single living human being, even if I could, not even you, Boy Blue."

"Most wise Kitty." Herrick drew her to him and kissed her passionately.

The next day they slipped away for the week-end to the cabin on the Portuguese ranch where he and Jean had spent their honeymoon.

"It was the first place we ever went, Boy, and I want to go there again," insisted The Kitten. After a moment's hesitation Herrick agreed.

The dairyman and his wife showed no surprise. They were as dark, as silent as ever. The woman wore the same bright red skirt and the same dirty white waist. She brought food to the cabin as she had brought it before, without a word. There was the same full, silver moonlight brimming the bowl of the little canyon, and the same quiet cows wandering over the hills.

They stayed two days and went back. Herrick wondered what he would say if Jean had already returned, and gravitated, according to his mood, from a lie he knew would not deceive her, to the truth.

But Jean had not come. Nor did she come the next day, nor the next. For the Mayor of Belgrave had a cold. Years afterwards, Herrick speculated sometimes, what his life would have been, if James Martin, Mayor of Belgrave, had not had a cold.

But the Mayor did have a cold, and not even Jean's most Machiavellian tricks succeeded in getting at him. In a small neat house, behind a small neat lawn, a small, neat wife guarded his civilian privacy and Jean was forced to wait until the fourth day, when protected by an overcoat and neck muffler, in spite of the glorious fall sunshine, Mayor Martin again took up his official duties. Almost as soon as the office was opened, Jean forced herself beyond the secretary and confronted the Mayor, small and neat like his wife and the baby Jean had seen being aired on the lawn.

In words as few and stark as Amelia Gorman's she presented the case.

"Now, what I suggest, Mr. Martin, is that you send to us monthly fifteen dollars, for which we can board your child in a respectable family. When he is fourteen, if he shows promise of making more than a grammar school education advisable, this amount to be increased to twenty. He can make up the rest himself until he graduates from some technical school. In the event of your dying before he has reached the earning age, this amount is to be continued. You can arrange it as a bequest to us and need not mention the child."

The little man sat staring at Jean. Behind his flat, frightened eyes, she could see the procession of his small hopes, running to their death. He would do as she asked because he could think of no way of escaping with the dignity that befitted his office. He would cover his terror under the cloak of his mayoralty and submit to supporting his child, as he might have contributed to the erection of a public library. But for all the rest of his life he would enjoy the memory of this morning. Once the danger of publicity was removed, he would come to regard himself as a bold, bad man of the world, and from the pinnacle of his knowledge of evil look down upon the sober, uninteresting members of his town and of the church, where he went every Sunday morning in a neat black hat.

"Well, Mr. Martin?"

Jean gathered up her gloves and handbag and rose. He reached out as if forcibly to detain her, almost as if he expected, should he refuse, that she would go through the town with a bell, proclaiming him in public.

"Of course, I wish you and your office, to understand that I do this through no legal, or, I may say, moral compulsion."

He was like a vicious terrier taking a last nip at some one's leg, before being dragged away on a rope. "I have many demands made on me, both public and private, and my income is not large."

"Fifteen is not much, Mr. Martin, for food and clothes and schooling. You will find later that your present baby will require all of that."

At the mention of the baby, the Mayor frowned.

"I never shirk an opportunity, Mrs. Herrick, to make another happy. I will remit the amount to you monthly by check. It is to be booked as a contribution to your work."

"Certainly, Mr. Martin."

The Mayor escorted Jean to the elevator, rang the bell for her and, as she stepped in, bowed elaborately. Jean chuckled. Already he was assuming the manners of the bold, bad man.

The train got in about eight. Jean went straight to the studio, after finding that Dr. Mary would not be back until the morning. It was dark, and when Jean turned on the light she saw that the dust was thick on everything. Herrick had evidently not straightened it out since she left. It looked forlorn and struck through the exhilaration of Jean's mood unpleasantly. As always, successful accomplishment gave Jean a sense of physical well-being that she enjoyed as deeply and as consciously as ever Martha did her moods of spiritual exaltation.

When she had put away her things, she turned off the light and stretched out on the couch. Through the open window she could see the stars, and their peace quieted the inner excitement that had held her ever since she left Mayor Martin's office. She had done a good piece of work with which Dr. Mary would be pleased and because of which Amelia Gorman would die happier. But beyond this, the thread of her action stretched down the years, binding together lives of which she knew nothing. At a moment's notice she had entered these lives, just as she might go to the window and call a stranger into the studio, and never would life be the same to these strangers as if she had not done the thing she had. The Mayor would grow old and die, a different man than he would have been if every month he had not sent fifteen dollars for the support of Amelia's child. And all the lives he touched would react to this secret check. Jimmie would grow up in some workman's family and their lives and his would be altered. She remembered how once she had thought of each person, weaving before his own loom, deliberately choosing or rejecting the threads that Life offered. Now she saw myriads upon myriads weaving before a high loom whose frame was lost in the immensity of time and distance.

She started as the door opened and Herrick entered. He did not see her, but came over to the empty fireplace and stood leaning his elbows on the mantel shelf. He looked tired and there were lines about his mouth. Compunction for she knew not what seized Jean and she rose quickly.

"Begee!"

Herrick whirled. Jean had been the last person in his mind.

"You!" he demanded stupidly, and instantly recognized that his tone gave the natural meeting the proportions of drama.

Jean laughed. "Sure. Who else?"

"Your note, you know, wasn't very illuminating. I didn't know whether you were going for a day or a month."

"I know. But I was so excited and I didn't know myself exactly."

Jean saw that her abrupt going had hurt Herrick and she tried to make up now. She came closer and laid a hand on his.

"I'll make some chocolate and then I'll tell you all about it. It would make a perfectly ripping story."

Herrick looked down on Jean's hand resting upon his and it seemed to him something disconnected from both of them. He wished she would take it away. To his jangled nerves it was a real weight, pressing heavily upon him. It was force, that strong, white hand, a mechanical force for pushing obstacles from her path. It would push him and her mother and all who did not see things as she saw them, all but the fat, mannish little doctor with her stupid generalities. With the merest touch of those firm, cool fingers it would push The Kitten into oblivion.

"A corking story?"

Jean resented Herrick's mechanical interest but tried not to show it. She had been wrong and had said so and it was trivial of him to let the memory rankle.

"Wait till you hear it. It's a regular Thomas Hardy novel. It ought to be set in the granite hills of Devon."

While they drank the chocolate, Jean told him of the woman propped on her pillows in the miserable room, with the wind blowing over the stony hills; of the frightened Mayor with his overwhelming respectability. Her eyes glowed and the strong, white hands moved in unusual gestures, as if from the slough of human weakness and suffering into which they were plunged, she was drawing quivering bodies and setting them on a stage. Herrick's bitterness saw none of the drama, only Jean's own safety from any suffering. There she sat, glowing with interest in her "case," a stupid, everyday matter of seduction. She could work up a tragedy about a scrubwoman overcome by physical desire. But for him, for his needs, for The Kitten, for Flop, for any one whose way of life was different, whose clothes did not please her, whose manner did not suit her, she had no sympathy and no understanding. Herrick laughed.

"It's a scream, simply a scream! A lot of women puttering about, fiddling with the forces of Nature and getting paid for it!"

Jean's face went white.

"I might have known," she said and sought for words that would hurt him most, "that you could not possibly grasp the spiritual significance."

Herrick's face flushed and his eyes were two black slits as he bent across the table.

"You're a fool, Jean, you and Dr. Mary and all the other dead, marble women she has trailing in her train."

It seemed afterwards to Herrick that they stood for hours looking at each other across the table, before Jean turned, and without a word went the length of the studio and closed and locked the bedroom door behind her.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

In the months that followed there were whole weeks when Herrick despised Jean for her blindness; when he hated her for the calm, filled order of her days; when he wanted to go and lay his head in her lap and be comforted.

What would Jean do if he told her?

She would answer as she would to any cry of distress. In a scientific, impersonal way she would even be happy at her ability to help. For the time he would be her favorite "case." She would probe into his feeling for The Kitten and into The Kitten's and decide what was to be done. When she had analyzed it all, she would ask him what he wanted to do.

What did he want?

From considering the abstract possibility of his wife's action, Herrick came down to Jean herself. Picture after picture of her flashed before him. Jean in the Sundays before their marriage. Jean as she had looked in the moonlight, beside the driftwood fires. Jean on the Sunday mornings when they used to argue about the novel. Did she ever think of it now? It was months since they had even mentioned it. Had she forgotten this thing that had once seemed the motive of her days? Had her interest ever been real, or had it only filled an empty space? In the mazes of his own nature Herrick groped and could find no answer. After almost three years of marriage Herrick knew less of Jean than he had the first day in the library.

Would she go on forever as they were going now? They had never referred in any way to the night that Jean had come back from Belgrave. It might never have been, for all the outward difference it had made in their lives. Only Jean never again mentioned a case nor did she ever ask him to come on Sunday afternoons to The Hill House where she poured for the neighborhood teas that she and Dr. Mary had instituted for the winter.

On Sundays Herrick went to Flop's. Jean made no comment, except sometimes to inquire about various people, with a forced interest that exasperated Herrick. As for The Bunch, they never asked about Jean. Behind the banner of "personal freedom," Herrick and The Kitten marched unquestioned. As indifferent as the rest, Vicky had gone back to the country. The Kitten had refused to go with him.

The long rains ended and spring came again. The air was clean and soft, and fluffy white clouds sailed over the hills, once more cameo-clear against the blue. Herrick and Jean saw even less of each other than through the winter. They ate together in the mornings and then went their ways. The paper was changing hands and Herrick spoke of the new proprietor and the future policy. Dr. Mary and Jean were drawing up a pamphlet on the evil conditions resulting from bad housing, and now that the actual gathering of statistics was over, and the work had widened to include quarrels with political bosses, with the Board of Health and Building Commissions, Jean was in her glory. The breakfasts were calm meals, unruffled, impersonal and dead.

The darkest spot in this third summer of Jean's married life was Martha. The small face was thinner and whiter and, for the first time in Jean's memory, her mother moved slowly about the house. Jean went as often as she could and frequently found her sitting on the porch behind the screen of roses, her hands idle in her lap. Twice, tiptoeing in unexpectedly, Jean had found her mother lying down, her eyes closed in such utter weariness that Jean's heart had stopped beating for a moment in a terrible fear.

But each time Martha had insisted that it was only the heat and promised faithfully that she would take more rest.

"Mummy, it's really selfish of you not to let me help. I know half a dozen women who would be glad to come over and work for their home and a very small salary, and I could spare it so easily."

"Now, Jeany, don't be silly." At this point Martha always got up briskly and began preparing tea. "In all the years that I've kept house, I've never had a maid."

"Which is no reason at all," Jean insisted. "You know, Martha Norris, that once you see the error of your ways the trouble's over. You used to tell me that yourself when I was a little girl."

"Maybe I did. But the cases aren't the same."

"Why not?" It was the oldest form of dispute they had, Jean quoting her mother's own words and Martha insisting the cases were not the same. "It is the same, exactly. You're not well, or else you're getting lazy. Which is it? It must be one."

"Not at all. You're just talking to hear yourself, Jeany. You always were fond of that silly arguing that pins people down to a yes or no."

"Oh, mummy, you're such a fake. You get so terribly philosophic when you want to slip out of a thing. But now listen to me. I won't scold you any more. But I'm going to watch you precisely as if you were a 'case' and I'll give you till the tenth of July and not one day longer. If you look the way you do now you're going to the country, if I have to take you there by force. Do you hear?"

Martha smiled. "Yes, dear, I hear."

It was an afternoon at the end of June and Martha and Jean were in the clean, darkened kitchen, waiting for the kettle to boil. Bees buzzed in the garden outside and the old pine was sweetly fragrant in the warmth. There was something very positive and real about this peace and clean orderliness, so that Jean wondered whether, after all, this silent strength was an accident of her mother's nature, or whether the quiet little figure, trotting on its mechanical round of duty, had not achieved it, at perhaps a price no one guessed.

Jean watched her as she beat up a pan of the tea biscuits that no remonstrance of Jean's had been able to stop.

"I'd have to make something for supper and I might just as well make these."

And as always she had her way. Jean listened to the bees and watched the deft hands at their work. It was so precisely as it had always been and yet somehow it was different. Jean's mind wandered lazily about the problem. What was different? Why did it no longer annoy her? It had once.

She remembered the day of graduation when all her fine enthusiasm to fill her life with work and beauty had died at the sight of Martha dishing up the roast. And the day when she had heard of the library work and Martha had gone on making apple pies. And now she was making tea biscuits and pretending that nothing was the matter with her, when Jean could see that it was a strain to lift the heavy mixing bowl and that tiny drops of perspiration appeared at the corners of Martha's mouth. She was ill and no doubt she knew it.

Jean got up and took the mixing bowl away from her.

"Mummy, you're all in. You can scarcely stand. You've got to tell me what's the matter."

"Now, Jeany——" But Martha's eyes fell before her daughter's. "I don't feel quite so strong as usual, but it's the heat. It's the warmest June we've had for years."

"It's nothing of the kind. It's not a bit hotter than it always is. And if you feel like this now, what will you be in July? I don't believe I'll give you till the tenth. I have a good mind to cart you off to a doctor this very minute."

"Now, Jean daughter, I appreciate your interest and all the rest of it, but remember I am not a case. I won't be packed off to a doctor."

"I wish you were, I'd straighten you out in two minutes. You're really a very simple proposition. I'd close this place, send you to a nice quiet country house where you would have nothing to do but eat lovely food cooked by some one else, and get fat."

"I should hate to get fat and there's no place nicer or quieter than this."

"But, mummy, you need a change."

"Well," Martha took the bowl away from Jean and went on with her mixing, "I haven't said that I wouldn't take that, have I? You always were the most impatient child. I suppose you want me to put on my hat this minute and leap on a train."

"I certainly would, but I can't imagine you 'leaping' at anything unless it was particularly disagreeable. For the second time, listen to your daughter, who has had much experience managing many families and can surely manage one small mother. Next week Mary and I are going to locate a new summer camp for mothers. We're going to take the train and get off wherever it looks good to us and tramp and ride around till we find the exact spot. It's going to be glorious. I've been looking forward to it for months. I'd just bundle you along, too, but you wouldn't enjoy it, and besides it's going to be awfully strenuous. What you need is rest. But I won't budge a step unless you're fixed first, do you hear? If you don't go to a doctor and get some kind of tonic and promise to do exactly as he says, I'll stay right here and work without a day's vacation. There, now will you do as I say?"

"What's Franklin going to do, while you and Doctor traipse about?"

"I don't know. He said something about taking a vacation himself once, but he hasn't said anything very lately."

"Jean, I don't want to annoy you or interfere in any way with your life. You're a married woman and must manage your affairs. But, I've never seen any happiness come of a husband and wife having separate interests and not knowing what the other's going to do. Not that I've seen much happiness come of any married life. But if you do the best you can, you can't do any more and you can't have it on your conscience that the fault was yours."

Jean laughed. After all, if there was any change it must be in herself, for certainly Martha was the same as ever.

"Mummy, times have changed. No modern husband and wife clamp on each other's backs in the good old-fashioned way. Marriage isn't a pond in which you both drown, hanging madly to each other."

"What is it?"

"It's—it's a mutual arrangement. If you have the same interests and ambitions, you work them out together and if you haven't, why, each one works out his own."

Even as Jean spoke, she wondered when she had come to formulate this theory so decidedly. She remembered the night in the studio when she had promised to marry Herrick and life had seemed to her like a river in which they would both swim on together side by side. But the current had come between and now they were the width of the stream apart.

"You could always word things better than I, Jean, but sometimes it seems to me that that's all there is to them. They don't mean much when you get right down to the bottom of them. How can two people, 'whom God has joined together,' work out their lives apart? It's like the nonsense you and Pat used to talk, just as if you could do with life anything you happened to feel like. We weren't put in this world to follow every whim and there's no bigger whim-killer than the state of holy matrimony."

Martha stopped, cut the biscuits and laid each one carefully in the pan. When she had put them in the gas oven she began clearing up the table. Jean had gone back to her chair and sat looking absently into the garden.

"I don't believe, mummy," she said at last, "that anything that makes you feel smothered is right, no matter what holy state it belongs in. If that isn't 'wrapping your talent in a napkin,' then what is? Franklin doesn't care whether a hundred people live in a room or not. He doesn't think it matters whether people live like intelligent humans or like animals. He doesn't think that any one can change any one else or make the world a bit better."

A look of pain crossed Martha's face. "It's an awful way to believe, Jeany. I hate to think——"

"Then must I give up my beliefs and take things as they are?"

Martha wiped the last grain of flour from the table, washed out the cloth and hung it on the rack to dry.

"Some women should never marry."

Jean looked quickly at her mother and then away. After a moment she said gayly:

"All of which has nothing to do with the question in hand, Mummy Norris, and that is that you go to the doctor and get a tonic or I'll come and take you myself."

Martha agreed that she would go, and the subject of "holy matrimony" and "separate interests" was dropped.

But as Jean crossed back to the city she decided that she would ask Herrick what his vacation plans were and, if possible, arrange her own to meet them.

Herrick was leaving the studio as Jean entered. He stared in such surprise that Jean felt uncomfortable.

"I knocked off early this afternoon and went over to mummy's," she explained. "She hasn't been well and I've been worried. I thought maybe we might go to dinner somewhere, or we could have it here."

Herrick's first surprise gave way to amusement. After all, there was something amusing in Jean's self-centered density. For months they had come and gone without inquiring about each other's engagements and now, because the notion seized her, Jean assumed the possibility of acting as if they were in the habit of knowing each other's whereabouts every moment of the day. The amusement deepened as Jean stood without taking off her things, apparently waiting for him to decide.

Herrick had promised to take The Kitten to a Syrian restaurant that had just opened, and every moment that he delayed increased the possibility of The Kitten herself appearing. She often came for him if he were a little late, although Herrick had begged her not to. She liked the excitement of the risk she ran in meeting Jean, but she always claimed that she came because she loved the studio.

Herrick stood undecided. A meal with Jean would be a restful thing. There would be no emotional demands, no insistence. And The Kitten was getting very insistent. At first, the renewal of her little, cuddling pleas to be assured of his love had thrilled him and made him feel alive. Her fits of childish rage had amused him, just as in the old days. Besides, he could always bring her to time by leaving her for a while. The sense of power was pleasant. But the monotony of its exertion was beginning to weary him.

To-night she would be very insistent. From the first warm days of spring she had been begging him to go for a week to the Portuguese ranch and Herrick did not want to go. She had been through almost all her bag of tricks. She had been the petted, teasing child, the angry woman, the commanding mistress. There was one left. To-night she would be the alluring, giving-all, asking-nothing lover. For that reason she had chosen a new setting. In the isolation of the Syrian restaurant they would be alone. She would wear the dress he liked best, a thin, black clinging thing, and a hat that threw kind shadows on the small face. Against the background of sawdust floor, of strange, dark men who came to eat, she would stand out, fragile and completely his.

Jean saw the hesitation, the uncertainty in his eyes.

"Never mind, if you have another engagement. I'll go down to the delicatessen and get something. I don't suppose there's anything in the house to eat."

Jean smiled. She couldn't help thinking of Martha and what a heinous crime it would be to have a house and nothing to eat in it.

"We aren't very good housekeepers, are we?"

"No, there's nothing; but the shops aren't closed yet. It would be rather nice to eat here."

After all there was a touch of excitement in being invited to picnic unexpectedly with one's own wife.

"I was only going to eat with Crane. He's been taking the cure again and isn't quite sure of himself. He hates to eat alone. I'll 'phone him and bring some stuff up with me."

Herrick ran whistling down the stairs.

The Kitten was angry and Herrick was very tender. But it couldn't be helped. Crane was his boss and if he would have delirium tremens at inconvenient moments, there was nothing that Herrick could do about it. Herrick was patient. He called her soft love names and promised a week at the Portuguese ranch. The Kitten relented. She was reasonable. She understood. She said low, sweet things that came lightly across the wire and touched Herrick in a caress.

Herrick and Jean got supper together. The strangeness of doing this once familiar thing made them a little shy. They sought for things to say that would not show the realization of this strangeness. The sensation was new and exquisite to Herrick. It was pregnant with possibility. He mashed potatoes vigorously and sensed a possible new relationship waiting beyond the interlude of supper. What it might be he did not know. He did not want to know. He was tired of moods that he understood, reactions that he could bring about at a touch. To-night he had no wish to rouse Jean to the depths of physical passion that had been his aim in the old days when they had gotten supper together. It was not in her, and to-night he did not care. He was weary of storms, smothered at moments beyond endurance by the clinging of The Kitten's arms. He would leave everything to Jean. He would do nothing, lead nowhere, make no effort. He would follow, drugged to a sensuous peace by his own inaction.

When the things were cooked, Herrick laid the cloth at the end of the big table in the studio. He brought up a chair for Jean and with a flourish handed her to it. He was like a boy starting on a new trip, happy and excited. And, as always, Herrick looked the part. His whole body seemed keyed to a greater physical firmness. His eyes had the light that had been in them so often when they used to eat their sandwiches in the rock coves by the sea.

Jean saw and wondered and felt unsure. Was it her own blind, sweeping judgments that had stripped Herrick of all that of which she had once been so sure? To-night he looked and felt as he had on the night he had told her of his lonely boyhood and she had held out her hands to him. Hadn't she changed at all since the days when she and Pat had settled the questions of which they knew nothing? Did she still sit off on her cloud and play her golden flute while people struggled along in the dust below? Did she?

Jean talked of Crane, the pity of his wasted days, while the shuttle of analysis wove back and forth in memory, behind her words. Had she condemned as lack of purpose and sincerity what, after all, might well be a concomitant of that very sweetness and boyishness that had called to her? It was that which had called, Jean was very sure. And the claiming hands that were always trying to hold her, to touch her when she was near, the hunger of Herrick's kiss? It was the groping of a child that didn't want to be alone.

They ate slowly and sat on after the last drop of coffee was drained from the percolator. Herrick had asked Jean about the pamphlet and was helping her with details of publishing and distribution. With a paper and pencil he was making calculations, while Jean leaned across the table, her elbows on the cloth, her chin in her palms. She and Dr. Mary had gone over this ground but she saw instantly that Herrick knew much more about it than they did. It amused Jean, this new humility that met her at every turn to-night.

"I guess there are some things, just a few, that men can do best." And she chuckled in the old, childish way that had always delighted Herrick. It was such a ridiculous, delightful, childish chuckle for a woman of Jean's size. It had always given Herrick in the early days one of those double sensations, two contrasting emotions, that pricked his sense as a pungent spice pricks a jaded palate. It made Jean half woman and half imp.

The pencil quivered a little, but Herrick did not look up. Instinct warned him to go on with the serious business of calculation.

"There," he announced, "if you'll be content with just ordinary paper you ought to be able to get a thousand for——"

The door opened suddenly and The Kitten came in. She stood quite still, while Herrick sat motionless, the pencil poised over the paper, his lips parted on the word. Every drop of color left his face and then rushed back in a deep red that swelled the veins of his neck and congested his eyes. He rose heavily and the pencil rolled away under the table.

The Kitten closed the door and came toward the table. A few feet away she stopped. Jean noticed mechanically the scarlet of her mouth in the dead whiteness of her face. It was like a wound, and when she spoke her voice was high and cutting, like the crackling of tin that had torn the wound.

"So this is why you lied?" She looked at Herrick and Jean's eyes followed. His flushed face was heavy and ugly, and he looked unspeakably foolish, staring back with his lips parted. Jean thought of her father, standing in the bar of sunlight, and of her mother shrinking from him. In a strange, unreal calm, she thought how odd it was that she should have the same picture of her father and her husband.

She rose, with a detached feeling of not belonging here and at the same time of being called on to do something, perform some unpleasant social duty, that should have fallen to the lot of the hostess, who wasn't herself at all.

"We've just finished dinner," she said quietly, "and there's not a thing left. But I can make you some coffee."

The Kitten turned from Herrick and looked at her directly. The heavy lids lowered and her eyes went slowly from the crown of Jean's head to her feet, in a look that drew Jean's body after it into the mire.

Jean stepped back quickly. There was no pretense or misunderstanding now.

The Kitten grinned. "Didn't you know it, really? I was always sure you guessed. It's been such a long time before you—even."

Clearest of all the thoughts whirling in Jean's brain was the knowledge that she felt no anger, nor was she stunned. With no warning this thing had come upon her and there was no slightest doubt in her. Instead, there was a kind of relief, grotesque but real, and as if she had discovered at last the source of some annoyance that had long puzzled her. Her brain seemed to be running in layers, streams of thought all perfectly distinct. One layer was concerned with herself and Herrick, from the first night they had eaten with The Bunch and The Kitten had stared so rudely across the table. Her first vivid picture of The Kitten had been across a table and now she was seeing her again across a table. And another stream bore Herrick apart from The Bunch, alone with her in the days before their marriage, and the things she had believed and the things that had really been true. There was a stream for Herrick and herself running through the last eighteen months, with all sorts of landmarks coming to the surface. And there was the stream of her own present calm, with the feeling that it was impossible that she should feel this way, that it must be a false strength which would fail in a moment and leave her at the mercy of this woman with the white face and the scarlet mouth and the malicious eyes under their lowered lids.

"No," Jean said, "I didn't know." The calm was broken for a moment by a spark of cold anger at the insincerity of the question, or its implication.

The Kitten shrugged and turned to Herrick. She was trembling with anger now and it made her look like a fierce, small animal at bay.

Jean's calm was swept aside in a wave of physical nausea. She could not stand there and see them quarrel. She moved to Herrick.

"Will you go? Please go. Quick! Now!"

"If you wish." Grotesque in his consideration, pitiful in his relief, Herrick went. They heard his step echo and die in the silence below.

Jean and The Kitten stood looking at each other. Before Jean's calm, The Kitten's anger crumbled. Jean went slowly back to her place at the table and sat down again. Her brain seemed the only living thing about her. She had a problem to solve, but the problem concerned the woman before her more than it concerned herself. There was something she was going to do, but she couldn't do it until she had talked to The Kitten, and she didn't know just how to begin. She sat with her chin in her palms, as she had sat while Herrick made calculations about the cost of the pamphlet.

"Didn't you really know?" It was The Kitten who broke the silence at last. "He always said you didn't, but I never believed it."

"Did you think that I would have gone on just the same?"

"I didn't know. You never loved him. What difference would it make?" The Kitten waited a moment and added more kindly, as if she were making something very clear to a child. "Vicky has loved other women; he's always having an affair of some kind, and I don't say anything. You see, I don't love him."

Jean did not move. She sat rigid as if the least movement would precipitate her into the abyss The Kitten was opening before her.

"You thought I knew—and—would go on just the same?"

The thing rose, a barricade to further thought. Jean tried to get by it, push it aside, go on to the end, but somehow she could not get any further. She was living in a world, among people who believed things like that. Men and women lived that way. People she knew lived that way. Not "cases," but friends, people she had eaten with, to whose houses she had gone, people whom she had been anxious to meet once, friends of her husband, of the man she had married.

Jean closed her eyes. It made her sick, physically sick to look at the little figure across the table, the hungry, contemptuous eyes, the fine lines etched by unsatisfied desire in the smooth skin. They did not belong in the same world, they did not speak the same language, and there they sat in Jean's home, at Jean's table, and talked of Jean's husband.

"You needn't look at me like that." The Kitten leaned across the table, so near that Jean saw clearly the smooth texture of her skin and the flecks of black in her eyes. "I don't see that you have such a lot to be proud of. I loved Franklin, I have always loved him, long before you came into his life at all. I loved him and I gave. You don't love him; you never did, and yet you married him. You took. You sold yourself for what? So you wouldn't have to teach school, to get away from that bromide mother, the whole monotonous round! A great motive, wasn't it? Oh, he's told me all about it?"

She spoke in quick, panting breaths, as if the words were coming faster than she could utter them. Jean felt as if little pellets of mud were being flung in her face. She moved now, pushing her chair away.

The Kitten laughed. "Oh, don't mind me, you can go clear over to the end of the room if you like. You have always acted like that, you know. It amused us terribly at first. You were so funny! You tried so hard to be nice to me and The Tiger and the rest of us, but you couldn't quite make it, could you? We were so awfully muddy and you were so clean. Clean! Good God, you're not clean, you're empty. Why, I wouldn't be you, you cold, dead thing, not for all the pain it would save me. You——"

Jean rose. The mud no longer came in pellets; it flowed, a black, sticky stream.

"I think you have said enough. After all, there really is nothing to be said."

She came slowly about the table and stood before The Kitten. She could almost hear the beating of The Kitten's heart, under the stubby hands pressed so tightly over it.

"Well," demanded The Kitten, "what are you going to do?"

"Do?" echoed Jean blankly. "Why, I'm going away."

"You're going away! You're going to give him up, without any more fight than this! You're going to swallow every single thing I've said, without asking him? I say, how do you know it's the truth? How do you know it's not all a lie, except my loving him?"

"I don't know," but as she spoke Jean felt something drop from her eyes. With no warning this thing had come upon her and there was no doubt in her. Like the sucking blackness at the bottom of the well, it had always been there.

The Kitten smiled. "He must have had a hell of a time with you. Poor Boy Blue."

Mechanically Jean put on her things, the things she had thrown down when she came in and found Herrick just leaving. It was queer to put them on again, the things that had not changed at all, while she had been on such a long journey and come back. The Kitten was watching, fascinated into silence by the ordinary movements of Jean pinning on her hat, gathering up her gloves and handbag. When she was quite ready, Jean turned to The Kitten. She felt no anger or disgust now. Instead, she was sorry for the little thing, so eager, so avid, so unsure.

"You can tell him," she said slowly, "that I shall be at the Hill House. I don't want him to come. Please tell him that. But if there's anything to be discussed, he can write. I don't see what it can be, but I suppose he will want to."

"Oh, yes, he'll write."

Then, for no reason at all, the two women smiled faintly, as if they were speaking of a child. And, always afterward, Jean remembered The Kitten as she looked smiling above the greasy dishes.

PART II

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Jean touched the electric button on her desk and Josephine Grimes appeared with notebook and pencil. She was a tall, spare woman, impelled through life by devotion to an invalid sister, to the Charity Organization Society of New York City, and to Jean. The three were somehow connected in Miss Grimes' mind and she never tried to separate them.

Jean handed her a pile of mail. "All the regular thing, except that one on top. That's very extra special. It's from Gregory Allen, the architect Selina Mitchell thinks might be interested in the tubercular tenements. He says he'd like to talk things over. So write him, conveying something between abject gratitude and decent self-respect, and make it to-morrow at 3.30."

Miss Grimes nodded and turned to the door. She never made any comment on these semi-personal confidences from Jean, but at night they were retailed verbatim to the invalid sister.

"And tell any one who rings up that I won't be back to-day, but, under pain of death, don't give them the house number. Except Rachael Cohen. But I don't think she will, because she knows I know about the meeting to-morrow night and I'll be there."

Again Miss Grimes nodded and disappeared. Jean sat on at the desk for a few moments, smiling into space. Then she locked the lid with a snap, put on her hat without looking into the glass, snatched her gloves and black leather wallet and left the office for the Grand Central Station.

The train was just pulling in, as Jean elbowed her way through the waiting crowd, pressed close to the iron grille. It seemed as if all the people in the world went by before she saw her, the same stout figure, the same eager peering through the gold pince-nez. Jean waved frantically. Mary stopped, stared for a reassuring second, dropped her grip and came at a trot, calling back over her shoulders to the bewildered red-cap to pick it up.

"Mary—oh—you——"

"Not a word or I shall weep. Lead me to the decent seclusion of a cab. I haven't wanted to cry for thirty years."

Safe in a taxi, they looked at each other and laughed.

"Mary, I haven't been able to do a thing since I got your wire. Why didn't you write me?"

"Didn't know it myself. I just woke up one morning with such a heavy feeling in the pit of my stomach when I looked at Lucy Phillips that I knew the hour had come. I took a leave of absence for a year and I may extend it. I'm going to absorb and study what the rest of the world's been doing. In short, I'm going to stay until I love Lucy Phillips. I was going to make my point of saturation Chicago, until I got to really visioning you. Then I wired. I couldn't very well before, could I?"

"Hardly." Jean hugged her. "Mary, it's been an age. I don't believe I've known, myself, how much and how often I've wanted you."

"I was thinking about it the other night. Almost seven years since you came walking into the clinic and told me The Kitten was up at the studio and you weren't going back."

"And mummy trotted over the next afternoon, and when she found we'd both gone to keep our engagement with that Building Trades man as if nothing had happened, she sat down and cried. Poor little mummy."

"How is mummy, Jean? I never could quite picture her here in New York. I could never make her fit."

"Fits like a glove. But, then, no one can ever tell what mummy is going to do. She not only likes it, but is happy, really happy, for the first time in her life. I believe she has learned the trick at last."

"Much incense and lace altar clothes and Jeany all to herself, I take it."

"Pretty near. But we have been happy, both of us, these six years here. Mummy still believes social service is connected, or ought to be, with religion, and she calls my very finest pieces of work 'the act divorced from the spirit', but she lets me send out all the laundry and have a woman in once a week—a maid she absolutely forbade—and there's a church run by Father Something-or-other a few blocks away, and I'd get fatty degeneration of the soul if it weren't for Pedloe. He gets six thousand a year and poses as a radical, but he has the imagination of a mouse. Some day he's going to fire me, if I don't do it first myself. I work ten hours a day, get more and more furious at the whole business, and come home every evening like a novice to her convent. Our chief excitement is having Pat bring the children over for the week-end, when her husband is out of town. She has two children and is going to have another, all in four years, exactly like an immigrant. She hasn't changed a bit, manages her family as if it were a college committee and her husband adores her. Once in a while she brings an uncle of Stephen's with her, a fat, good-natured creature about fifty, who, I sometimes think, is a fool and sometimes I'm sure he's a philosopher. Mummy likes him and makes all his pet dishes. Years ago he was married to an impossible creature in an Arizona mining camp and she ran away in six months. So you see he's had his 'sorrow' too."

"You don't mean that she still looks on Franklin as a 'sorrow'?"

"He's my 'lesson.' She never speaks of him, but I know she prays for him."

"Good Lord!"

And for the remaining few moments of the drive, Dr. Mary sat chuckling.

"Here we are." Jean led the way toward the cool marble entrance of a huge apartment house facing the Hudson. Young mothers in summer white sat on camp stools, doing embroidery in the shade of the high walls, under the trees that lined the Drive, and in the vacant lot across the street. They chatted and moved white perambulators with the tips of their white canvas shoes. Fat white babies slept under dainty white coverlets. Older children in white played in the earth.

Dr. Mary stopped in the vestibule. "It looks like miles of them. I've never seen so many baby buggies at once in my life."

"Mary, that sight has done more to inspire me with a love of work than any other thing I know. Whenever I feel like sneaking a day I just take one look out there and jump into my office clothes."

"I should think you might. Do they keep it up all day?"

"All day, every day, from spring till fall. They must sew miles of scallops. Wait till you see the last rites. About six the husbands come along; they're all young and rather slight, wear blue serge and straw hats. They all look exactly alike. Each one detaches his special piece of white property and off they go. Behold the female backbone of our nation!"

"It makes me homesick for my frowsy crab-fishers and those poor bowlegged mites that crawl over the hills alone."

As the key turned in the lock, Martha Norris rose from her chair by the window where she had been reading in the green-gold light that slanted up under the window awnings. Dr. Mary took the outstretched hand in hers.

"I suppose you were surprised, but not more than I was myself. When it came right down to it, I started at a moment's notice."

"I know. Jean was in the greatest state of excitement yesterday when she got your wire." Martha smiled and it made the small face, rested in the peace of the last six years, astonishingly young. But she could think of nothing else to say. There had always been something breathless about Dr. Mary's energy that made Martha feel inadequate. Something a little indecent, in an enthusiasm and exuberance that could carry a woman well over fifty across the continent, at a moment's notice, to study. It was almost as if she infringed on a younger generation, wore mental rouge and powder.

"It's a frightful journey, especially in this heat. You must be very tired."

Martha drew a chair to the window and Mary dropped gratefully into it.

"I'll just make a cup of tea and we'll have cold supper later."

She pattered out and Jean and Mary looked at each other and smiled.

When tea was ready they had it close to the window looking to the Palisades. Jean made valiant efforts to hold Martha in the talk but it kept drifting away from her, and soon she was sitting quietly to one side, as she always did, listening, while Jean and Mary talked and interrupted one another and made a thousand plans.

"I tell you, Jean, I was getting to be a big frog in a small puddle and that's not good for the soul. I'm not going to give a single scrap of advice to a living soul for three months at least."

Jean patted the plump shoulder. "Croak on, Mary, croak on. Why, you'll be taking the tenements out of my hands, if I don't step lively. Not to mention the garment strike and Rachael herself."

"Never. I wouldn't offer a suggestion for ten additional years of life. I'm going to sit to one side and watch."

"Mary MacLean, you'll sit to one side exactly as long as I'll let you—forty-eight hours perhaps to get rested. And then—Lord; I feel as if I had been asleep for years. Mary, this is going to be one glorious summer."

"I have a slight feeling that way myself, Jean."

Martha got up and began clearing the table.

Out in the kitchen, Martha filled the pan with hot soapy water and began washing the dishes. The voices went on. Once she stopped to listen.

"Now, Jean, not another word. Please. I appreciate the offer and all that, but I shouldn't do a thing but sit and stare at that river and overeat, and where would my serious study be then? No, to-morrow I find an apartment."

Jean laughed. "All right, go ahead, but you won't escape me that way."

There was a pause, and then Jean added softly: "Oh, Mary, this is going to be a glorious summer."

CHAPTER TWENTY

A few moments before three-thirty the next afternoon Jean tidied her desk, settled Miss Grimes with enough work for the rest of the day, and drew out some notes she had made for Gregory Allen.

At a quarter to four she laid the notes aside and looked at the clock. At four she verified the time by the big clock in the Metropolitan Tower.

"Rather rude, to say the least."

At four-thirty she rose impatiently, moved to the outer office, changed her mind and came back again to her desk.

"It costs a nickel and takes two minutes to 'phone. If he's that kind of a person, I don't want him mixed up in the thing at all. He needn't have answered my note if he isn't interested."

Jean looked over the notes again, and when she laid them aside for the second time it was almost five.

"Well, I'll be darned. If——"

The outer door opened, a man's voice asked for Mrs. Herrick and Josephine Grimes appeared. He stood close behind her. Without waiting to hear whether he was to be received, he stepped into the room.

"I'm afraid I've kept you waiting, but I hope it hasn't been too inconvenient." The tone implied, however, that it would not trouble him very much if it had.

Jean wanted to say that it had been very inconvenient, but in view of the fact that he had arrived, she said she was glad he had not been detained altogether and sat down again at the desk. Gregory Allen took the chair opposite and stretched out his feet, as if he were used to making himself as comfortable as he could. He was a tall man, about forty, with thick, dry, brown hair, full of reddish lights, and red-brown eyes. His face and neck and hands were tanned as if he were a great deal in the open, and the hands were long, bony and nervous. They seemed to express something hidden deep in the rather slouchy figure, under the ready-made suit that looked rumpled, although Jean saw that it was really quite new. His shoes were not well shined and his tie did not strike the note of the tanned skin and reddish hair.

He made no further explanation of why he had been detained and sat silent, waiting for Jean to begin. Jean wished he would say something to give her a better clew to his mental makeup, but as he didn't she plunged in.

"I don't know, Mr. Allen, how much you know about conditions among the poor, or whether you are specially interested in them. I think you would rather have to be, to take any joy in this work at all, there are so many restrictions."

Jean spoke as if she were handling an obstinate committee member, and Gregory Allen smiled behind his eyes. But the smile did not come through. Accustomed to classifying people in terms of architecture, he decided that Jean was like a tower, an old Roman tower, rugged, firm on its base, built for a purpose and for the accomplishment of it. Whatever charm there might be would come from perfect accord between form and purpose. He nodded.

"Not so much a restriction in finances," Jean went on, "but restrictions imposed by the condition of the tenants. You see, the plan is this: thousands of people, right here in Manhattan, die yearly for lack of air and sunlight. Literally thousands of incipient cases of tuberculosis, and those in the earlier stages, die because of their living conditions, die needlessly. There is all the sunlight and air in the universe right here. It is only a question of being able to get it."

Jean paused, but Gregory Allen said nothing. He did not know how many people died in New York for need of air and sun, but now that he thought of it, supposed quite a number. Jean seemed very positive about it, and he saw no reason to comment.

Jean felt like shaking him, and, turning slightly away, made aimless lines on the desk blotter as she continued.

"There is also a lot of vacant land, doing no good to anybody, just where we want it. The problem is to get it, but, of course, you would not be concerned with that, but only to put up a building for the sole use of families in which there is any one either with, or threatened with, tuberculosis. I don't want a contractor who thinks that anything is good enough for the poor. And I don't want an architect who doesn't grasp the spirit of it, either."

He might just as well get the situation straight to begin with.

Gregory Allen wondered whether Jean always enunciated her purposes so emphatically, rather as if she were firing small shot at a target. She was decidedly like a Roman tower, part of a fortification. Amplifying his own figure, he scarcely noticed Jean's pause for his comment, nor did he notice the frown as she continued.

"And in addition to this, the building must be as beautiful as it can be made, beautiful even to details that may seem finicky, in tone and line and tint. These people, besides being stricken in body, have been cramped in soul, too, most of them, until they don't know there is any beauty in the world. Or, worse, they don't believe that it is for them. As one woman told me, not long ago: 'there ain't no free beauty nowhere.' Well, we are going to give it to them, all we can possibly give. It will take a lot of time and there's not a cent in it. It will lead to nothing else. It is just a gift, the most beautiful gift you can make, within the bounds of our funds."

"What are the bounds?"

"I don't know yet."

A smile darted from Gregory Allen's eyes to his lips, and settled there. During his student days at the Beaux Arts, a grisette had told Gregory that his smile flitted like "un petit oiseau" over his face and then flew out of his mouth. Jean did not call it "a little bird" but she liked it.

"Of course we can't go ahead without rime or reason, but we don't have to stick too close to reason either. They are to be as beautiful as possible, allowing for reductions if we don't raise quite as much as we hope, and extension if we do. That's possible, isn't it?"

"Certainly. I take it there is to be a minimum of beauty below which you will not sink, but you're going to leave the roof off and soar as high as you can."

"Exactly." Jean laughed, and Gregory added a ray of sun slanting across the tower. There was a pause. Was he interested, or wasn't he?

"Well," she demanded at last, "does it appeal?"

Gregory Allen looked at her sharply. He wondered whether, sometimes, she did not pose a little. If he had not been interested by Jean's first note he would not have come, would not have answered the note, probably.

"Of course. That's why I came, to talk over the details. I made a hurried sketch after your note, just a ground floor plan, but I don't think now it will do." He drew a blue-print from his pocket and smoothed it on the desk. "This, followed out, would give plenty of light and sunshine, but there wouldn't be much beauty about it."

There she had sat wondering why he had come, and all the time he had this blue-print in his pocket!

"He's too simple to be out alone, or else a dyed-in-the-wool egotist who expects every one to read his thoughts."

Jean was still concerned with the problem as she bent over the plan, following the line of Gregory's pencil while he explained.

"You see, it's not much more than an improved tenement, this way, a well-ventilated, all-outside-rooms box." He tore the print across and threw the pieces into the waste-basket. "I'll work up something else and let you know as soon as——"

The door opened and Dr. Mary rushed in.

"Found it, the only place in New York worth living in. Got it, moved into it, maid goes with the furnishings, and dinner's almost ready. For Heaven's sake, hurry up!"

Then Gregory Allen came into range of the doctor's near-sighted eyes, and she stopped.

"Mary, let me present Gregory Allen, who is going to draw plans for the T.B.'s. Mr. Allen, Dr. MacLean."

Dr. Mary offered both hands. "One's for manners, the other for gratitude."

"Mary, you couldn't possibly have found an apartment in one day." Jean turned to Gregory. "Dr. MacLean only arrived from California yesterday. She has never lived in New York and didn't know what part of town she wanted."

"Can't be done. Impossible. I know. Once every three years my wife finds our apartment impossible and we house hunt."

Gregory smiled his petit oiseau smile and Dr. Mary accepted him on the spot.

"All right. Then I include you in this evening's dinner. Come and see for yourself. Can you?"

"I shall be delighted."

Dr. Mary in the lead, they left the office.

Gregory felt as if he were on a mischievous adventure.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

In winter Gregory Allen always looked forward to summer, except for missing Puck, as a rest from the weary round of Margaret's enthusiasms, her uninteresting friends, and the boring parties to which he went because it was less trouble to go than to fuss about not going. During the winter he never made any close friends, but always thought he might do so in the summer. And then, after the first few weeks of freedom to come and go as he pleased, he began to miss Puck with her long, serious discussions of the doings of Lady Jane, and the well-managed house. In these moods he went to the club of Beaux Arts graduates, knowing beforehand that it would be no more interesting than either of the other two clubs to which he belonged. But he always felt that something interesting ought to develop, although it never did. The members who frequented it were men like himself, neither rich nor famous nor pushed out of the race, comfortable, moderately successful financially, with modest summer homes on Long Island, to which they sent their families from May to September. They had all adjusted their lives as he had, and beyond the round of their work, were as unmagnetic as the routine of their days. They all accepted each other as they were, and believed they were common-sense, practical men.

As for women, Gregory met very few in the course of his work; and, once relieved from his duty as Margaret's husband to the members of The Fortnightly, he could no more imagine looking any of them up during the summer, even if they had been in town, than he could have picked up a stray companion of the streets and spent a pleasant evening in some crowded dance-hall. He could no more imagine meeting Caroline Ainsworth or Mabel Dawson on the street and going home to dinner with them, than he could imagine doing something careless and impromptu with Margaret. Gregory smiled as he pictured himself walking off with Mabel Dawson or Caroline Ainsworth.

At Nineteenth Street the doctor turned east, crossed Gramercy Park and stopped before an old brownstone front on the north side.

"Here we are." They followed through a wide, cool hall, flagged in black and white marble, to a huge door on the right. Dr. Mary threw it open and swept them in with a flourish.

"There, you doubting Thomases. Not so bad, is it?"

Gregory and Jean looked at each other and laughed.

"Mary, I'm glad I didn't bet you that set of Dostoievsky. I would have been broke for a month."

"As long as you are repentant now, I won't crow. Dinner will be ready in a few minutes. I'll hurry it up."

Like the hall, the room was high, cool and dim. The heavy, tapestried furniture seemed built for the ample Dutch forms that had no doubt once inhabited it. It was impossible to imagine raucous voices or useless rush between these lofty walls.

"It's the only real bit of Old New York left," Gregory said, and with one accord they moved to the wide window looking down on the Park.

The rumble of the Third Avenue El, two blocks away, threw into sharp relief the spirit of the past, the old, unhurried past that hangs over Gramercy Park. Behind the scratched and rusted palings, the dusty trees stood aloof, superior to the hustle and roar of the great tide washing its borders; faithful to dead standards, tolerant of the rented keys that now open the gates, to the ever-changing stream of tenants that flows in and out of the brownstone fronts, once the stately homes of unhurrying men.

"It is a bit of the past, isn't it?"

"Yes. It always makes me think of an old French marquise, stiff, powdered, poor, but never forgetting. Here, like this."

He took a scrap of paper from his pocket and drew, with a few strokes, a marquise of the older days.

"But you see, she has to make some concessions, while she waits here, year after year, for the return of the Bourbons, and so——" Gregory clapped upon her head a hat, just a little bedraggled and over-trimmed. "The Spirit of the Present. She bought it at a bargain."

"Oh, Mary!"

"No. Don't, please." Gregory tore up the paper in such discomfort that Jean wanted to pat him on the shoulder and say: "There, there."

"What?" Mary peered in through the door.

"When is that food coming?"

"In a moment." Mary disappeared.

Gregory looked at Jean and they laughed again. "Thanks," he said.

Until dessert the talk was general, mostly of the great strike of garment workers, and of Rachael Cohen, the leader.

"She is literally like a flame. And her people follow her blindly. They will win or lose by Rachael."

"Why lose?"

"They won't. They can't. But, the man whom Rachael loves, hates her people, her power, everything about Ray that makes her what she is, and yesterday Tom Dillon gave her the choice of leading this thing—think of it, fifty thousand people—and winning, because Rachael will win, and a little house in the Bronx with some chickens and, I believe, a baby for good measure."

"Poor girl," Mary said sadly. "Jean, do you remember Carmen?"

Jean nodded. "Oh, Mary, it makes me sick clear through sometimes."

And then, for a little while, they talked of old times and people whom Gregory did not know, but he did not feel left out, only he wondered whether there were many women in the world like these two. Their interests were so varied and deep and they were so, almost exhaustingly, alive.

But with the coffee and cigarettes, they came again to the plans, and Gregory sketched his new idea. They all bent together over the table, suggested, disapproved, argued and contradicted each other, until Gregory forgot he was working with women at all.

It was half past nine when Jean pushed the plans away and stood up.

"Not another word, please," she begged, "or I'll begin on that sun-porch idea of mine and then I never will get to the meeting."

"Does every one's pet wrinkle get included in the general plan? Because I have a couple up my own sleeve," Gregory demanded, as he gathered up the sheets, disappointed that the evening was over.

"Certainly. Didn't I tell you the limit was an expanding quantity? You ought to have seen Mr. Allen's face, Mary, when I told him we didn't know how much we would have to spend."

"We may not know the amount but we know how we're going to get it. And now we've seen you, I think we will notch it up a few pegs, eh, Jean?"

Jean pretended to survey him critically. "Yes, I shouldn't wonder. Oh, Mary, they'll just eat it up, won't they?"

"Who? Me?" Gregory felt a little silly at this banter, but enjoyed it.

"No, the cake, which you will hand 'round."

"Never."

"Don't be alarmed. It won't be to-morrow. Not until winter. Right after the first blizzard we give a tea, very exclusive, only the rich invited. You've made a nice technical plan full of dotted lines and cross-sections, guaranteed to confuse any living female. Said plan hangs upon wall, real live architect, all dressed up, explains. Money pours in. By summer tenements are. Tenants move in. Q.E.D."

Gregory shook his head. "Plans until you're both dizzy with them, every female in the world sick with the blind staggers—but no tea."

"Oh, by that time, you'll be such a reformed character you'll beg to come."

Laughing, Jean moved to the door and Gregory followed. Dr. Mary came as far as the front door and watched them down the steps. On the sidewalk, Jean held out her hand.

"Good-night."

But Gregory Allen fell into step beside her. "Don't condemn me, please, to a roasting hot apartment alone or to a Broadway show. Mayn't I come? I'd like to see this Rachael."

"Of course, gladly, if you care to. But a lot of it will be in Yiddish and it will be fearfully hot and smelly. I want to talk with the committee and after the meeting is the best time."

Gregory did not answer but walked along beside her. She told him more of Rachael, banished by her family because of her love for the Gentile Tom; of the frightful conditions in the garment trade and the faith of her people in Rachael. Gregory Allen heard only stray phrases here and there. But he felt Jean's strength and belief as she swung along beside him, as unwearied as if the day were just beginning. When a woman was wonderful she was very wonderful indeed.

The hall was packed. From wall to wall a flat surface of women's dusky heads swayed like a dark sea, with here and there, like rocks rising above the surface, the hatted heads of men. From this sea rose a suppressed rumble, so that the walls seemed to vibrate with the throttled protest. As Gregory followed Jean to the seats instantly vacated for them, he felt as if he were dropping down far below the daily surface of his life. And as he took his seat it seemed to him that a trap literally closed above him, a trap of foul air, so thick it had the quality of iron, and of rebellion so unbreakable that it had the resistance of steel. A trap that, once having sprung, would never again rise above the imprisoned below. He looked to Jean. But Jean did not seem to be imprisoned in a foul subsurface. Her eyes glowed with excited interest and he realized that this was not a strange scene to her, but part of her daily interest.

"Do you think they will lose?" she asked, with a look that made Gregory feel as if her strong, white hands were drawing him gently with her into this seething mass, rumbling below the settled plane of his life with Margaret and Puck. But, before he could answer, the door at the rear of the platform opened, and a man and woman came out.

"He's the National Secretary of the Garment Workers. And she's Rose Kominsky——Ladies' Waist Makers. I wonder where Ray is."

The National Secretary was short and oily, with none of the dignity of his race. Western hustle was grafted upon Eastern servility. In the midst of bluster, he might suddenly cringe. He was a radical, but he appreciated the good job of being National Secretary, and if it had not been a tenet of his radicalism to despise insignia, he would have delighted in a gilt badge. He made a long speech, shouting and beating in his meaning with furious gestures of his fat hands. He amused and disgusted Gregory.

The local secretary followed, riding in on the wave of the other's emotion, with stated facts and proved data. As she flung her last bunch of clinching statistics to the ceiling, scattering it like confetti on the heads of the people, the rear door opened again, and a slip of a girl in black, with great black eyes in the dead whiteness of her face, came forward. The local secretary broke off her last sentence in the middle and sat down. The girl came to the very edge of the platform and waited quietly for the applause to cease. At last it died, and Rachael began to speak.

She spoke in Yiddish but Gregory felt that the terrible silence of the listening mass was a medium through which her words were registering in his consciousness. Jean was right. She was like a flame. Like an acetylene torch burning its way through all barriers of race difference, social strata and language. So fully did he feel that he knew what Rachael was saying that he scarcely noticed when at the end she swept into English.

"Wait," she cried, "wait in patience and in courage. For thousands of years our people have waited. For ages we workers have waited. And now the time is coming, each year a little nearer, with every battle, another inch. It is near, our freedom, near. Wait. Wait. And out of that waiting rises the thing we demand. It hears us calling. It is coming. It is there always, under the ashes of past hopes, never dead, always burning, a light. Keep heart. Keep faith. Do not kill the little spark. After all the years we have waited, can we not wait in faith a little longer?"

Before the roar of applause ceased, Jean and Gregory were out on the sidewalk. Here the heat was like a cool touch after the fetid heat of the hall.

"Whew."

Jean turned to him: "Did you get more than you bargained for?"

"Yes. In a way, I did," he answered slowly.

"I warned you."

He might have been a child who had disobeyed. Gregory frowned.

"I know you did," he said shortly, and then added, with a look that made Jean wonder what he meant, even after he was gone, "Thank you."

Did he mean for taking him? Or for the meeting itself?

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

"What are you doing, daddy?"

Gregory started, for Puck had come so lightly in her little rubber-soled sandals that he had not heard her.

"Making a house, Pucklets."

"Let me see." Puck spoke with Gregory's quiet determination, as if she always expected to have to hold out against some opposition. It sat oddly with her golden hair and the delicate oval of her face which were Margaret's.

"Well, look at it. See, that's the floor and these are the walls." Gregory moved so that Puck could come closer, but went on with his work.

"What's that?" A ridiculous duplicate of Margaret's forefinger pointed to a square separated from the main plan.

"That's a room."

"A room?"

"Surely. Look; there are the two windows and there's the door."

She made no comment and after a moment Gregory forgot her, standing so still, her chin just touching his shoulder.

"There isn't any top on that house," she announced suddenly. "It's a funny house. I don't like it."

At the same moment Margaret Allen appeared in the doorway.

"Why, Gregory, aren't you going to take her? It's after eleven now."

"Um." Gregory was making lines on a separate sheet and heard only the modulated run of the words. He rarely paid any conscious attention to Margaret's remarks in the making, because he could always come in on time at the end.

Puck looked from her father to her mother. Her under lip drew in as her mother's did when she was hurt, but it was with the man's straight look of facing a difficulty that she turned away.

"I guess daddy's too busy to play with Puck. The house hasn't got its roof on yet."

"Gregory! She's been looking forward to it so all week. Why, you're working!"

"What did you think I was doing?" Gregory looked up curiously; he so often felt as if she were the child and Puck the woman.

"I thought it was one of those water color things."

Gregory sometimes rested his eyes during these week-ends through the summer, sketching the woods and soft green fields. They were not bad sketches, but Margaret had no respect for them. Subconsciously she was jealous of them. They stood for something in Gregory that had escaped her. With more courage than any one gave her credit for, Margaret Allen had long ago buried her early belief in her husband's ability. She had been very sure when she married him, a year after his graduation from the Beaux Arts with honors, that he was going to be a rich and famous architect. Neither the fame nor the riches had come in spite of her early efforts to connect with people who could be of service. Nor later, when she had recognized the uselessness of trying to force Gregory along these paths, and turned her influence to taking a personal interest, which meant asking questions about technical details which she could not understand. The little water color sketches were like relics that Gregory had kept from the years before he knew her, and when he had gone back to the office on Monday mornings, and she came on a sketch among the scattered sheets of the Sunday paper, she felt almost as if it were the possession of some woman who had an illicit place in her husband's life.

Margaret bent over the plan.

"Greggy, did you get the Stevens house?"

Gregory watched her with a faint smile. She was very near, so that the same clean, sweet odor drifted to him as when he slipped his arm about Puck. The same little tendril, too slight to be a curl; brushed Margaret's neck just below her ear.

"But what on earth is that? Surely the Stevens aren't going to have a front like that?"

"Hardly. What's the good of making a fortune in five years if you don't write it all over the place?"

"What is it then?"

"Tubercular tenements."

"What?"

"It's a building where the poor, who either have or are going to have tuberculosis, can get as much air and light as the rich will let them."

"It sounds terribly socialistic."

"It's terribly individual."

Margaret straightened and locked down with a glance that reached him from the far citadel of pride to which she retreated when she was not sure whether he was making fun of her.

"Who's putting up the money? It's not just building itself, I suppose."

Gregory laughed outright, for he saw Dr. Mary and Jean and himself standing at the table, that first night six weeks ago.

"It's got to be raised yet."

"I don't see anything so amusing about that. It means that you're not sure of your fee, as far as I can see."

"Oh, I'm quite sure about that. There is no fee. I'm doing it for nothing."

"Well, I must say——" Margaret broke off. It was the one fixed principle of her relations with Gregory that they never had an open difference of opinion, especially before Puck. Above all things Margaret Allen was well bred and she could no more have cleared the atmosphere in a burst of anger than she could have struck some one. She never dynamited an obstacle with outspoken objection. She returned again and again and scratched at it.

"Is the contractor giving his time, and the laborers?"

Gregory was still looking off to the line of trees and smiling.

"It isn't started yet. But they may."

Margaret moved to the piazza rail and sat down. She was slight and so fair that she seemed part of the sunlight sifting through the thick green of the wistaria.

"Who's backing it? Somebody must be behind it all."

"Oh yes. There's some one very much behind it; in fact, two people."

It was impossible for Gregory to think of the plan without Dr. Mary—Dr. Mary and Jean and himself in Gramercy Park.

"There's Dr. Mary MacLean and Jean Herrick."

"What! Jean Herrick! The Charity Organization woman?"

"She works with the Charities. It's her scheme."

"Well!"

Words failed Margaret.

"Well what?"

"How long have you been working on them?"

"About six weeks. Yes, just about six weeks," he repeated, and went on with a detail of the entrance hall.

"Sometimes it seems to me that you do things to be deliberately annoying. Why didn't you say anything about it? You know I'm interested in public things like that, and besides The Fortnightly is going to take up housing and public dependents this winter. Mabel Dawson is down to get the first speaker, and we've talked over Jean Herrick a good deal."

"You have?" Gregory suddenly stopped working on the detail.

"She's becoming terribly popular, in the front line of everything, the last word in feminism and all that, you know. A lot of the most progressive clubs have her down for winter talks. But The Fortnightly has to be careful. We have a good many of the old families and we have to go slowly. Mrs. Herrick is extremely radical and speaks at labor meetings and strikes and all that kind of thing, you know. Besides, she's divorced."

Gregory's pencil jabbed a hole in the blue-print. "Is she?"

"Yes, one of the horrid kind." Margaret's tone separated divorces, tolerated some and excluded others. "Mabel wrote to a cousin in California to find out before we asked her. Goodness knows we're not straight-laced, but there are things one can't stand for officially. This Herrick was an artist, Mabel says, did futurist things before any one else heard of them and drank like a fish. He abused her shamefully, but she stood it as long as she could."

Gregory got up and pushed back his chair.

"But when he began to bring women right into the house, she left him. So of course it wasn't her fault. Mabel says she's a wonderful speaker, just a little masculine in her manner, but then such a life wouldn't make her specially clinging or gentle. We've about decided to have her."

Gregory closed the drawing board and Puck came hopefully to his side.

"You mustn't tease daddy, dear; he's busy."

Margaret moved toward the door and beckoned Puck. "Can you take her for just a little walk this afternoon, before the Dawsons come? They're going to bring Squdgy, you know." By raised eyebrows Margaret indicated the need of Puck's being perfectly happy before the arrival of Squdgy, whom she disliked and was apt to ignore completely.

Puck slipped her hand into her father's. The motion drew his notice.

"It's all right, Puckie, go and dress Lady Jane and I'll take you now."

"Do you really want us to take Lady Jane, daddy? I ought to take Matilda; Lady Jane went last week."

"Well, I'd rather have Lady Jane, because she knows the first half of the story already and I'd have to go all over it from the beginning for Matilda."

Puck sighed her relief and scampered off.

"Greg, don't tell her any of those terribly exciting things. You never seem to understand how highly strung she is. All last week she kept on giving the most terrible versions of that bear story to Lady Jane. You don't realize what an imagination she's got."

"Thank God," Gregory snapped, and wished that Margaret would sometimes give him an excuse to be as rude as he felt.

Out in the woods, with Puck trotting by his side, Gregory tried to push the picture Margaret had brought before him into the cool shade of the trees. But, in the shortest interludes of Puck's silence, it was there before him again, hot and glaring and tawdry: Jean Herrick, married to a libertine. A man who, in sottish sensuality, turned from one woman to another. And she had "stood it,"—that ghastly compromise of weak women—until it had passed beyond bounds.

It was impossible. And yet what did he know of women?

There had been that one grisette in Paris, who had embarrassed him so by calling his smile "un petit oiseau." A single month's mildest flirtation with a pretty stenographer, who was more like a mischievous boy than a girl. And Margaret. He had married Margaret because she was so different from the grisette and, yet, when he had put his arms round Margaret for the first time, and she turned her sweet, unresponsive lips to his, he had wanted to crush her, hurt her in some way, just as he had once wanted to choke the grisette. As Margaret wasn't a grisette, Gregory had believed the big love of his life had come. Afterwards the need of making his place in the world had claimed him. And, now, occasional moods he dispelled with extra work and Puck.

Margaret had always told him he was interested in nothing that he could not draw, and did not know what was going on in the world. Perhaps women were part of the "things going on." Perhaps he was old-fashioned. Perhaps it was a puritanical streak, this intense repulsion to thinking of Jean married to a drunken libertine. It would not have been a happy memory, but Gregory could imagine a dozen men he knew, himself even, living down such a memory, doing useful work in spite of an unfaithful, drunken wife put out of their lives. How did he know but that——

"Dad-dy, did the bears get the children?"

Gregory came back to a realization that Puck had been asking this for some time.

"No, the bears did not get them, Puck; not in the end, but they had a hard time of it."

Puck's eyes blackened with suppressed excitement. It had a startling effect, had excitement on Puck. It was like an acid that ate out all her resemblance to Margaret, obliterated the softness of outline, seemed to devour even the delicate tints of her coloring. Excitement brought Puck up the years to meet him, sent him racing backward to her.

"Oh, I was so frightened they'd get all eaten up and left out there without their mothers and daddies knowing where they was."

Her hand clutched Gregory's, and her other arm protected the beloved Lady Jane.

"Lady Jane's been terrible frightened, too. I couldn't get her to sleep last night, not for a long, long time."

"Dear me, that's too bad. I guess we'll have to settle the matter right now."

Gregory sat on the ground under a huge chestnut and filled his pipe. Puck curled close, cautioning Lady Jane to be "very, most perticular still," and Gregory began a rambling sequel to the tale of the Three Bears. Behind the Three Bears—Jean stood with Herrick.

They were late for luncheon, but Margaret made no comment. Puck did not look over-excited and Gregory was in one of his silent moods. Margaret wanted to ask him details about the Tubercular Tenements, and Gregory knew, by her mole-like burrowings about the subject, that she was pleased with his connection. In a way he could not unravel, it was connected with a new wing some millionaire friend of Mabel Dawson's had just donated to St. Luke's hospital in memory of a dead baby.

As soon as lunch was over, Margaret and Puck went to take a nap before the coming of the Dawsons, and Gregory took the detail his walk with Puck had interrupted, out to the hammock under the maple. But the lines grouped themselves to pictures of the last six weeks and he did nothing. Six weeks! For the first time, Gregory blocked the period out of the past and the incredible richness of it startled him.

Six weeks, forty-two days since he had come two hours late to his appointment with Mrs. Herrick of the C.O.S. and wondered whether she did not sometimes pose. Six weeks since he had gone with her to the meeting and heard the rumbling of the world below the safety of his own conventional social strata. Only six weeks since he had again begun to feel the stirring of the old dreams that he had believed dead. So that now, after he left Jean in the evenings, it was hard sometimes to remember that the plans they discussed were not things he was actually doing, instead of the things he had forgotten he had ever hoped to do.

At five the Dawsons came. Mabel and Margaret retired to the end of the piazza, Squdgy was unloaded upon Puck, who obediently took him off to the play-house, and Bill Dawson, fat, moist, as bored by Gregory as Gregory was by him, did his best to start a conversation. Gregory wished he could follow Puck's example with Squdgy and give Bill a picture book. He listened, however, as well as he could, to the perspiring stockbroker's denunciation of Socialism and all "this fashionable parlor radicalism," politely assisted him to a plank of personal reminiscence and prophecy, and, with a breath of relief, saw him presently fall off the plank into the stock exchange, where he let him wallow happily in his native medium.

He was still in it, when the maid wheeled out the tea-wagon and Margaret and Mabel came to join them. Gregory knew by the look in Mabel's eyes that this was the first time Margaret had ever come in under the wire first, and, by the new respect with which she treated him, that the tenements linked him favorably with the great civic achievements of The Fortnightly, Puck brought Squdgy, delivered him to his mother as if he were a sacrifice and climbed into Gregory's lap. Nor could any frowns or suggestions that "big girls sit in chairs" dislodge her.

At last tea was over and the Dawsons went, Bill leading with the now sleeping Squdgy in his arms, Mabel and Margaret sauntering behind. They passed down the lane and disappeared. The gold in the sky dissolved to palest yellow and faint green. Crickets chirped. The earth, freshened by the coming coolness, threw back to the world, in spicy sweetness, the garnered heat of the day. Puck slept in his arms.

In the kitchen the maid finished the dishes and went across the creeping dusk to the next house. Snatches of laughter came to him and he saw the two girls come out and sit on the back steps. In a few moments the chauffeur from the big house up the road joined them, and they all went off together.

Gregory carried Puck in and laid her on her bed. Then he went into the library and switched on the light. He spread the blue-print and began again on the delayed detail. It was the last touch to the plans, and he had promised to bring it with him to-morrow night. But the weight of the day just passed pressed down upon him, and ideas came slowly. Margaret had been long in bed, when he finally drew the last line and turned out the light.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

"What on earth is the matter with you to-night? You look as if you had lost your last friend and been evicted for non-payment of rent." Jean was leaning back in her usual chair to the right of the window, drawn just far enough to keep in view the tops of the trees, beyond sight of the dry, trodden grass. Her chin tilted, she looked at him sidewise, laughing.

All day, at every interval not crowded with work, Gregory had been pushing the thought of Herrick away. The need to do this had filled him with a vague anger at Jean, and he had not intended coming to-night. But the evening had stretched so empty before him that he had come, and now he was angry that he had.

"Cheer up, it can't be as bad as all that," Jean bantered.

The words jarred and the tone annoyed him. "I beg your pardon. I didn't realize that I was so terribly glum."

He spoke with a stilted conventionality that made Jean glance at him quickly. The smile went out of her eyes. She wished she had not spoken.

A silence fell between them, unusual in its artificiality. Jean tried to think of something impersonal to say, but there had never been anything effortful in these hours with Gregory and the present need made her uncomfortable. After all, a thousand incidents of which she knew nothing might have happened to depress him. He had spent the week-end with his family. The hinterland of Gregory's life came close, and Jean felt that she had intruded.

The silence deepened. Jean wished that Mary would come. She thought of getting a book, of finishing a report that she had begun, of going into the kitchen. But she never picked up a book when she and Gregory were together, nor finished office details, nor looked after Mamie in the kitchen. And this feeling that she must move, get away from Gregory, break the silence, filled her with an almost physical uneasiness. This sudden need to move beyond the reach of some tangible element in the silence, frightened her. So that Gregory, turning unexpectedly, surprised a strange, unusual look on Jean's face, that made the conventional remark he had finally succeeded in capturing unnecessary. Jean, too, was in a new mood to-night.

The silence tingled with something that Gregory felt must always have been in it. Something was pushing into the foreground, from its seclusion in the carefree weeks behind. The need to know definitely about Herrick was there before him at last. He could admit Herrick or exclude him. For a moment he had the choice, and then Jean said:

"I am afraid Rachael is going to be ill. She looked like a ghost to-day."

"What?" Gregory leaned forward, peering through the words to Jean's purpose in uttering them.

"They are getting dissatisfied. Things are not moving fast enough. And Rachael is very tired."

Jean seized Rachael and dragged her forward, held her there between herself and Gregory.

Gregory slouched back in his chair.

"That's too bad. I suppose it's the heat."

"No, it's more than that. Tom is pestering her. If she gives up, the whole thing will go under."

There was a silence.

"Do you think it very much matters after all? It's a pretty big price you want her to pay."

The words brought a picture of Herrick on the night he had kissed her and she had locked the door of their room. Jean moved as if to get up, but her own motion drove back the memory, cleared her brain and forced Herrick's hot eyes into the past.

"When personal need reaches the depths it has in Rachael," Gregory said slowly, "it becomes cosmic."

"That sounds like fatalism."

Gregory looked at her quietly. What had been her own need, when she had married Herrick? What had been his, when he had married Margaret?

"It's all so unreal when it's over, but——"

And then Mary was in the doorway laughing.

"Well, of all the gloomy-looking objects!"

The words exploded in the narrowing space between them. Smiling, Jean dragged herself up from her chair. "We're so hungry we're perishing."

Why did she say that?

But Gregory too was glad Mary had come.

"We weren't gloomy. We were thinking—a process quite unknown to you, Doctor."

"Absolutely. Mine's action." Mary threw her things on the couch but did not sit down. Her eyes twinkled. Her whole plump person emanated mystery.

"Mary, what have you got up your sleeve? You're just about ready to burst with it."

"Well, it's not so bad, but it needs the accompaniment of food. Mamie!"

"Dinner's ready."

"Come on. I'll tell you when we reach the demitasses."

Nor could she be persuaded or trapped into a statement until the table was cleared for coffee and cigarettes. Then she said:

"Dr. Fenninger is in town."

"Mary! Not really!"

"Yes, he is. I met him to-night in the Subway."

"Who is Fenninger? The Great Poohbah?"

"Just about, as far as we are concerned. He prescribes bread pills for every exhausted society woman in town and diagnoses the indigestions of millionaires at a thousand per. Jean, do you think mummy would get up a dinner for him? He's going to be in town a week. We won't tell her how important he is, just that he is alone in town, family away, 'simple little home dinner, you know,' 'just ourselves in summer,' 'impromptu,' 'home atmosphere,' and so forth."

"I think she would. I'll ask her."

"But why does this man get asked to dinner because he prescribes bread pills for society women?"

"Have you forgotten that we have to raise funds for the T.B.'s? Now, does light glimmer?"

"Not a glimmer."

"It's this way," Jean explained. "We invite him to dinner, very expensive and elaborate and described as a simple little home affair. We make him very comfortable and mention the tenements. We go on eating and mentioning gradually. By the time we get to the black coffee he believes he thought up the whole thing; gives us a check—but that doesn't matter so much—is pledged by his own masculine conceit to prescribe an interest in raising funds to every bored patient he has. By the time The Tea comes off, there you are."

"Well! Of all the round-about, feminine methods of procedure, that takes the cake. Just explain to Mrs. Norris that there will be two extra guests. I wouldn't miss it for anything."

"Yes you will. Because you're not asked. Nothing like that. Home atmosphere to a man means himself. We'll tell you about it, but that's as near as he'll get, isn't it, Jean?"

Jean laughed. "I'm afraid it is. We may be able to work Fenninger in on mummy, but she's heard about you and thinks you're a frightfully important person. It would scare her stiff to have you to dinner."

"Give her another name, anything. I've got to be in at the death."

"Besides," Mary interposed, "we'll have it on Sunday—best set for lonely man in city without his family, dismal Sunday, etc."

"Well?" Gregory's eyes met Jean's for a second.

"You couldn't come on Sunday. You—won't be here."

There was an imperceptible pause, and then Gregory said quietly:

"No, in that case, I can't."

In a few moments they left the table and went back to the living-room. But Gregory did not sit down again. He moved restlessly about the room, reading bits out of magazines which he picked up at random under pretense of trying to find an article he had seen the week before.

A little after nine he said he was tired, and had work to do at the office. When he had gone Mary turned to Jean.

"Well, of all the extraordinary manifestations! What on earth is the matter with the man?"

"How should I know? Nothing, probably."

"Rubbish. He got all fussed up and peevish about something. Do you suppose he was really hurt that we wouldn't let him in on the dinner?"

"No, of course not. Besides, how could he come? He always goes home over the week-end."

"I know. But there was something. I never saw him act like that before."

"Oh, men are likely to do anything. They're—they're so inconsequent."

Jean wondered what she meant, as she lit a cigarette and took the chair facing out to the tree tops.

But later in the evening, when they were not talking of Gregory at all, Mary said suddenly.

"Jean, do you suppose we'd better make it some other day? Sunday is the best, but I wouldn't like Gregory to be really hurt."

"Nonsense, Mary. Of course Sunday is the best day. No. Let's leave it that way."

But she too left earlier than usual.

As Gregory Allen walked slowly uptown in the hot night, he was aware that something decisive had happened. Some thread, carried over from the moments alone with Jean before dinner had snapped, when Jean said:

"You couldn't come on Sunday."

All through these summer weeks, he had felt alone with Jean. But the conditions of his life, his home, his wife, his child, his obligations, which had entered not at all into his consciousness, must have been present to her all the time. She did not think of him as a separate human unit, in the way he thought of her. He was married. He had obligations. He conformed to the conventional social usage. Married men went home over the week-ends. Therefore it was impossible for him to be present at the dinner. Jean had not for a moment seriously considered the possibility of his doing it. And he would have, gladly. He would have broken the habit of years. He would have stayed the two stifling days in town. He would have done this thing if Jean had not said:

"You won't be here."

Why would he have done it? Why did he want so much to go?

Again and again Gregory cut through the tangle of false explanations and reached this point. But beyond it he would not go.

"Oh, the devil!" Gregory turned at Forty-Second, passed the Subway station and continued on to his office.

The elevator had stopped running and he walked the three flights. The last mail lay on his desk as the office boy had stacked it. On the top, anchored by a paper weight so that he would be sure to see it instantly, was a telegram. Gregory tore it open. It was from Amos Palmer, asking him to come at once. The Palmers were hastening their departure for Europe and wanted some changes made in the plans.

For weeks the Palmer place had been a joke with him and Jean and Dr. Mary. They had taken turns in designing terrible ornamentations which would advertize for miles Palmer's success in the leather trade. Dr. Mary had insisted on a golden shoe for a weather-cock on the ten thousand dollar barn, and Jean had suggested carving cattle all over a turret. Gregory smiled as he recalled Jean's painful efforts with the cow.

It was the biggest job he had had for years. But—the remaining month of summer shut up with Amos and his wife and the ten-thousand-dollar barn.

"I'll be damned if I——"

Gregory stopped, sat down at his desk and lit his pipe. He smoked one pipe and lit another. Again and again he filled his pipe, lit, and smoked slowly.

It was very late when he took down the 'phone and sent an affirmative telegram to Amos Palmer.

Then he looked up trains. There was one at eight in the morning. Gregory wrote a note of explanation to Margaret and laid it on the mail to be sent out first in the morning. Then he took a sheet of paper, started a note to Jean, tore it and began one to Dr. Mary. When he read it over it sounded as if he were apologizing for going at all. He tore this and tried again. Now he seemed to be asking permission. This followed the others to the waste-basket and Gregory locked his desk. There was really no need to write at all. They would understand that he had been called away, and anyhow the plans were finished. When he returned, things would be different. Summer would be over. Gregory whistled as he packed the Palmer plans, and all the way down the three flights to the street.

It was after one, but the crowds still moved in four streams, two up, two down. Gregory wondered why so many people walked in the night, as if the city, like a nervous woman, must never be left alone.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

The Fenninger dinner was a success, and Jean waited all the next morning for Gregory to 'phone. She so thoroughly expected him to, and waited so impatiently, enjoying in anticipation certain shadings which she knew would delight him, that, late in the afternoon, when the alternative of calling him occurred to her, Jean could not do it. She did not like to feel this way, and told herself that her own interest had colored her perspective. There was no need for Gregory to rush to the 'phone as soon as he came back from his week-end with his family, when she would surely see him in the evening. Nevertheless, that night at dinner, when Mary asked her if she had heard from Gregory, Jean felt a relief out of all proportion to the explanation she had forced on her own logic.

"Funny, he didn't ring up."

Jean cracked a walnut with great deliberation. "I suppose he's extra busy."

"Not so busy as all that. Jean, you can say what you like, but he was angry. I imagine, in some moods; he would be awfully touchy, and evidently he was in one that night. But he'll never be able to resist long."

Jean picked the meat carefully from the shell and ate it slowly.

"Let's string him a bit first," Mary continued, "pretend we couldn't work Fenninger and then spring it on him. He'll smile, then gurgle and finally explode like a small boy."

Jean reached for another nut. "He is like a small boy, very often."

There was a silence, while Mary chose a bunch of raisins from the nut dish and ate them thoughtfully.

"It's a damn shame," she said suddenly, apropos of nothing.

Jean rose and pushed back her chair.

"Oh, lots of things are a shame," she returned flippantly, and they went into the living-room.

But when a week had passed without hearing anything from Gregory, Mary rang up his office. He was out of town. No, they did not know when he would be back, exactly, certainly not for another three weeks. He was at the Palmer place.

"Well I'll be darned!" Dr. Mary apostrophized the tip of her cigarette, and in acquiescence, the little ash-head fell off. "That's not like him one single bit. Not even if he was called away in a hurry. I wonder what——"

She did not see Jean for two days, but when she did, asked abruptly:

"Have you heard from Gregory yet?"

"No. Have you?"

"I rang up the office. He's gone to the Palmer place, will be gone for a month."

Under pretext of laying aside her things, Jean turned away.

"I suppose they rushed things at the end, one of the whims of the idle rich."

"That's no reason for his acting like a boor."

"Of course it isn't. But then he has."

"I don't believe it. There was something——"

"Didn't I tell you men were queer?" Jean spoke without turning. "They—they don't have reasons, not good ones, for everything they do. They——"

"Fiddlesticks! Maybe they don't know their own reasons, but they have 'em. Nobody, not even a man, switches round like that without some cause. Why, he's been coming here three and four times a week, and he's enjoyed it, too. I feel as if he belonged somehow, don't you?"

Jean was looking into the Park, to the trees, a sickly green with their coating of summer dust under the arc lights. But she could see Gregory lounging in the empty chair at the other end of the window, could see him very distinctly, his nervous hands on the dark tapestry of the arms, his head tilted back.

"Yes. He does seem to go with the place."

"Are you sure you didn't do anything? He looked awfully glum that night when I came in."

"I don't know. Maybe I did, but I can't think of anything." Jean continued to stare at the dusty trees. "Anyhow, if he's the reasonable being you insist he is, he'll get over being huffy, and then we'll know."

Mary laughed. "Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings. But I'll confess that it annoys me. Doesn't it you?"

Jean faced into the room. "No. But then I have real annoyances to contend with."

"You've been at it again with Pedloe!"

"I certainly have. He's having a fit because I'm on the committee for arranging strike relief. Of course, personally, Mrs. Herrick, my sympathies are all for the strikers, but you understand that officially——' Round and round he goes like a frightened squirrel. Honestly, it's pitiful. He can't come out openly on either side. He's just as shackled by that $6000 a year salary as a convict with a ball and chain. What do you think he told me?"

Jean forced aside the figure of Gregory and put Dr. Pedloe in his place. Holding the head of the Charity Organization firmly before her eyes, she began walking up and down.

"Almost anything, from the way you look."

"He said that this strike, it's got fifty thousand women now and it may become sympathetic before it's over and take in hundreds, was essentially a struggle of Jewish workers. That the Hebrew Relief should supplement strike benefits. And that in the cases of others, Christians, well, he did not know just what they could do, but he was very sure that the Organization could do nothing. Why? Because the roots of the thing ramify so that some of our very heaviest subscribers are in the tangle, and he doesn't dare go against them."

"What's he want you to do? Resign from the committee?"

"Yes. He hinted around for an hour, hoping I'd help him out, I suppose, but I just sat and let him fidget. So in the end he came out flat and told me he could not stand for having me officially mixed up in it and I told him that I was not officially mixed up, that it was purely a question of personal belief,—you ought to have seen him at that,—and friendship for Rachael Cohen. He got off the strike then, quick, and began to hint that in other ways I did not measure up to Organized ethics. I always knew he was furious at those talks I gave last winter, but he never said anything before. He was quite worked up to-day, however, and finally put it just about as plainly as Tom did to Rachael. You know he gave her the choice between him, a decent home in the Bronx—and her people."

"Do I understand that Dr. Pedloe——"

"Scarcely. But he did intimate that in future he would be grateful if I would attend to my duties as per Organization and nothing else. I told him I would think it over and he almost fell out of his chair. He simply can't conceive of any one throwing up a perfectly good job 'with a certain position in this community, Mrs. Herrick.'"

"Are you going to?"

Jean walked the length of the room and back without answering. Then she came and stood before the doctor.

"Mary, I'm getting pretty sick of the whole thing. It's just one tangled mass of red tape. Here we are, literally hundreds, right here in New York—and think of the whole country—intelligent men and women, doing what? We feed a huge machine with our strength and brains, and what comes out of it? What are we doing? What evils are we curing? What are we constructing? Nothing! Absolutely nothing. We are an obsolete institution. We are of no more use than the rudimentary fifth toe of a horse. And we're not even honest about it. That's the greatest danger. We pretend to ourselves and to society, that's too lazy to look into it, that we are tremendously important. We get out reports that look as if we were safeguarding humanity from all kinds of evil and imposture, and spend thousands in keeping alive the fact that Mrs. Jones got half a ton of coal last month. If we'd only be honest about it! But we pretend we're doing good. The whole business is a pitiful survival of the days when a kind lady went round in a pony cart and gave away red flannel."

"I know it. But most of us can only go on plodding in the road that's already made. We do what we can to broaden it or make it straighter, and then we die. But if you see another, Jean, get down on your knees, like mummy, and thank God."

"I have been thinking a lot lately about something I would like to try. I suppose you and the T.B.'s have stirred some sleeping ambitions. I don't know that in the end it would set the world on fire, but at least it would have the vigor of honesty. It won't be going round in a rut worn a mile deep by others. I want—hold tight, Mary—to gather together all the strength going to waste in women's clubs and harness it."

"Good Lord! Women's Clubs!"

"Go right on, Mary; there isn't a thing you can say that I haven't thought of. I know all about the fiddling little sections for doing fiddling, unnecessary things. I know all about the bickerings and miniature storms, every drawback to getting efficient action out of our sex. But—this is our century. It is our first real chance in history, and I don't know but what we're measuring up pretty well. I suppose there are a dozen bigger things one could do, but for some reason I want to get in on the ground floor of this."

"You want to start something all your own."

"That's it. I want to start something. I want to organize a body, local at first, but national before we're through with it, a kind of woman's congress to deal with all national questions that concern women. If we have problems we ought to settle them, not one little handful here and another there. And if we haven't, then let's stop ranting. I don't want a national representation of clubs that have separate interests. It's—well—'congress' is just as good a name as any other."

"Jean, I'd give a good deal to be fifteen or twenty years younger. I wouldn't let you get into this alone."

Something choked in Jean's throat, and the old feeling that she had had years ago in the clinic on the Hill, of gathering courage from this white-haired woman, swept over her.

"Sometimes, Mary, I feel as if all the women in the world, who can't get out somehow, were behind me, pushing me on."

Mary reached both hands to Jean's shoulders. "They are, Jeany—I believe they are."

"And sometimes, Mary, I wish to Heaven they'd let me alone."

With a laugh, Dr. Mary sank back into her chair.

"Well, they won't. Now, tell me all about it. It's got the T.B.'s beaten a mile."

"Not to-night. This is one of their pushing days, and I feel as if they had me just about over the edge. I'm all in, and anyhow, it's pretty vague yet."

So they smoked and talked of other things, but not again of Gregory nor why he had gone without a word.

It was close on twelve when Jean let herself into the apartment, and saw the light go suddenly out under Martha's door at the end of the hall. Jean tiptoed to the door and opened it.

"Mummy, I saw you do it this time."

"Well, dear, if I can't sleep, I didn't know that I was not allowed to read."

"Not without glasses. Did you go to the oculist's to-day?" Jean sat down on the side of the bed.

"I didn't have time to-day. I'll go to-morrow."

In the shaft of moonlight, Martha looked very small and frail. Jean bent and kissed her. "Please, mummy, don't put it off any longer. You do need them."

"Yes, dear. I'll go to-morrow. I really will. I promise."

It was not often that Jean came and sat on the edge of the bed, and it made Martha happy. She wanted to draw Jean down as if she were a little girl again, only she knew that Jean hated more emotion than the mood called for; so she only patted Jean's hands and smiled.

But to-night Jean would not have objected. She was tired to the point of being glad to feel the worn fingers on her own. For all the way home in the train, back and forth behind the plans for the congress, which the quarrel with Pedloe and Mary's faith had brought sharply to the foreground of her thoughts, had moved the thought of Gregory.

Why had he gone like that? Gone for weeks. What had it to do with the strange mood of the night he had sat so silent, at the window? Why had he looked at her like that when he had said: "Well?" Why had he said so strangely: "No, in that case, I can't."

"You're tired, dear."

"Yes. I guess I am. It's been a busy day and I had one of my periodic fights with Pedloe. Some day he's going to fire me, or I'm going to resign, and he'll be the most astonished thing alive."

"Remember, dear, once you thought this the most wonderful work in the world."

"I know. But I've outgrown it. It's such a useless round. It doesn't get anywhere."

Martha stroked Jean's fingers. "I wouldn't do anything hasty, if I were you. Lots of things straighten out if you give them time."

Jean smiled. "You don't know Brother Pedloe, mummy; a million years wouldn't straighten out the kinks in his soul. Besides, I guess he fits well enough. It's the whole institution that's worn out—a relic of twenty years ago. I feel as if I were in prison."

"Well, don't make any change hastily. Wait until you see clearly. You want things to come so quickly, Jean, and you want them so hard."

"I know." Jean slipped from the bed and leaned over the quiet face. "But not to-night, mummy. I want nothing in the world but my own comfortable bed."

Martha looked anxiously at her. "Pat was over this afternoon, to see whether you were dead or alive. She says she doesn't suppose she'll ever see you again until the building's up."

"I don't suppose she will."

"She's so proud of the baby, Jean, and he is a dear. Don't you think you could take an hour or two and run over? She would be so pleased. Pat loves you, Jean."

"I'll try. Maybe. Good-night, dear, and don't forget to wake me. Seven and not a quarter past. You will, won't you?"

"Yes, dear. Good-night. And try not to think of work, but go straight to sleep."

Jean promised and shut the door.

But the weight of Martha's unshakeable patience, of Pat's efficiency and unswerving love, of Gregory's life beyond her knowledge, all this settled security, this sureness of others, oppressed her, so that, even between cool sheets, the ordered round of daily intercourse seemed a difficult and intricate maneuvering among unknown quantities.

Why had Gregory gone like that?

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

For the first week a feeling of relief in going without writing to Jean had persisted in the background of Gregory's mind. But as the heat increased, and the improvements suggested by Amos Palmer and his wife rasped Gregory's nerves to snapping, he realized that he had been colossally rude. He had acted so badly that he could not write except to apologize, and he could not do that without explaining; which was impossible because there was nothing to explain, at least nothing that would not prove him the fool he had been.

What had been his motive? He did not know, and now that he was speeding back on the Express to New York, he did not care.

From Harlem to the Grand Central, Gregory sat in the smoker, his suitcase at his feet, his hat on, hoping that Jean had no engagement that would prevent her from going to dinner. He wanted to sit opposite Jean and tell her about the Palmers, the endless alterations that every few days, had thrown him into a rage and a resolution to quit. He wanted to tell her about the house, as it was finally working out, a compromise between Amos' ideals and his own efforts to keep the man from being a laughing stock. He wanted to hear Jean's chuckle of appreciation, for now that he had left it all definitely behind, it certainly was funny.

When Jean heard the telephone in the outer office ring, she answered quickly. It was one of those blindingly hot afternoons in late September, after a comparatively cool spell, when summer comes back with vindictive pleasure, like a cantankerous relative from the verge of the grave, to spoil one's just expectations. For two hours Jean had clutched her patience and held on through the exhausting insistence of the Friday Committee to do its duty. With the excuse that she was expecting an important message and would have to answer personally, Jean escaped for a moment.

At the sound of Gregory's voice, Jean's heart beat furiously and then seemed to stop.

"Hello. HELLO. I want to speak to Mrs. Herrick, please."

"This is Mrs. Herrick."

"Hello. This is Gregory Allen."

"Well!" It came with just the right degree of heartiness. "When did you get back?"

"About two minutes ago. Am I in time to take you to dinner? Hello. Hello. I say, Central, you've cut me off. I want——"

"Hello. No, they haven't cut off. I'm trying to 'phone, and listen to a meeting in the other room at the same time." With the ease of this falsehood, Jean's composure crept back.

"Who is it,—The Dalton?"

"Yes, after a month's rest."

"I'll come straight down and rescue you. Give everybody a ton of ice all around and close the meeting."

"It's milk," Jean whispered into the receiver, "the Caseys have had a quart a day for three weeks! We've been half an hour on it now."

"It sounds like an all-night session, but I'm coming just the same. Six thirty, will that be all right?"

"Six would be better. I promised Rachael to see her to-night before eight."

"All right. Six. How's everything?"

"Beyond our dreams. Did you put on the turret?"

"Worse. A cupola with an electric globe on top, a kind of spherical Star of Bethlehem."

"Nothing but a blue-print will convince me. Bring it down."

She hung up and sat staring at the floor until a sudden cessation of voices in the next room attracted her. Reluctantly she went back.

"We've decided to continue the Casey milk for another week, Mrs. Herrick, until I have had time to look more thoroughly into the reason of Casey's losing his last job."

Mrs. J. William Dalton's expression conveyed that after that, not even Jean herself could do anything.

"Very well, I think that would be wisest." Jean did not sit down again, but stood at the table fingering the mass of records. "And I think we've done enough for to-day."

Mrs. Dalton opened her lips, thought better of it, and made no objection. It was hot, and if she started to fight out the Monarco case with Berna it would be another hour before she could get home, take off her corsets, and have William forbid her "once and for all to go getting all tired out with that Charity dope."

"Very well."

The Friday Committee groaned with relief, pushed back the chairs, and gradually rustled away.

Jean washed her hands and changed to the clean blouse that she kept for emergencies. She had just finished when the elevator stopped, the outer door opened and Gregory crossed to the private office. Jean opened the door before he knocked, and they stood for a moment, one on each side of the threshold.

"My, but it's good to get back. You look ripping."

Every pulse in Jean answered so suddenly and unexpectedly to the clasp of his fingers, that she almost lost the non-committal greeting flitting in her brain.

"So do you, and I don't believe a word about the Star of Bethlehem."

"Well, it's true, whether you believe it or not. A heavily-powered arc-light right on top."

Jean withdrew her hands and turned to get her hat from its peg. Gregory watched her. She was extraordinarily strong and cleanly cut for a woman. Every motion she made was firm and carried decision with it, as if from a mass of possibilities she chose that particular thing and nothing else.

"All right, I'll believe it. After all it's not more extraordinary than what we accomplished. You're not the only one with news."

"Is Fenninger still alive? Or did he make his will in your favor and die of indigestion?"

"Neither. But you'll have to wait. I'm not going to read my lines without the proper back-drop."

"Will The Fiesole do, or isn't that swell enough for the Doctor?"

"It will do nicely; he'll think he's slumming."

The Fiesole was Mary's favorite place, and this was the first time they had eaten there without her. Jean wondered if that were why it seemed so different. She felt that this was a new environment, and yet there were the same long rooms, stretching back from the street balcony on which they sat. There were the same waiters, hurrying at the same gait, as if they had been wound by machinery to a set speed which they could never lessen or increase by their individual wills. There was the same orchestra, sheltered behind the dingy palms, playing the same semi-classical, popular music. There was the steady buzz of talk and the same people might have been sitting there for months. The heat had in it the same feel of dust, as if it held the disillusioned souls of millions, ground to powder in their struggle for forgetfulness; there was the same odor of highly spiced food, like too strong scent; the same sensuous music, the passion in its heart hidden under the cloak of form, except when it broke through and flicked the senses, till men touched women's hands in filling their glasses and the women leaned across the table.

"Well, you look as if you had never seen it before. Doesn't it suit Fenninger, after all?"

Across the table Gregory was smiling. He looked happy and younger than Jean had ever seen him.

"Perfectly. But he'd like any place where he was the richest man in it and people could see him spend money."

While they waited for the first course, Gregory told her of Palmer's suggestions and Mrs. Palmer's struggle between pride at being able to spend as much as she liked, and uncertainty as to the taste.

"She has just one criterion, a hotel she once worked in that had green marble walls in the hall, and blue velvet furniture in the lobby. It was evidently large and rather quiet because she has kept an impression of something 'terribly genteel.' She measures everything by it, the timbre of your voice, the way you take off your hat, and the thickness of the stair carpet. She's as pretty as a picture. The whole thing would be repulsive, that old man wallowing in his money and passion for this child, except for a kind of honest eagerness in the girl herself. He wants to take her somewhere abroad to get the edges rubbed off, and give his grown children a chance to cool down. She'll get the edges rubbed off, and some of his, too, long before he thinks it's time to come home. But she'll always be grateful, and never let people make fun of him."

"Poor child. I hope they won't get rubbed too smooth before she sees the star again."

"No. It'll take a bit longer than that. Besides the pergola will be the first to go; she isn't sure of it even now, with Turkish lamps of colored glass and Japanese wind-bells. In about three years she'll make him sell it."

"I'll keep an eye on it. It's rather far, but it would make a glorious convalescent home, if we could get it for nothing."

"No doubt you could."

They laughed in understanding.

"Exit Amos. What did you do to Fenninger?"

"It worked like a charm. We didn't tell mummy a thing except that a friend of Mary's was in town for a few days, and she wanted him to have one really good home dinner. Mummy rose to the bait and begged for more. As a relative I can't brag about that dinner but, by the time we got to a frozen dream of mummy's invention, he believed that the whole idea had originated with himself. And by the time the percolator got to bubbling he gave me a check for three thousand as if he were hiring me to attend to a few minor details he had no time for."

"Poor devil! And his part's only just begun. Does he know he's going to operate on people for the remainder?"

"He's not. He just advises the operations; Mary and I do the surgery."

"Who is it?" Gregory was grinning, his small-boy grin.

"It's not a 'who.' It's an it. Fenninger's pet case is a millionaire, cirrhosis of the liver, with two pieces of property on the East River, one in the upper fifties and one in the nineties. He thinks we can get either on a small lease; it can't be deeded over altogether because of some legal tangle, but it's perfectly safe. Mary and I are going to make our choice this Sunday."

"I want to help, may I?" There was a pause. Something hung in the balance. And then Gregory said dully:

"Be sure to choose the right one."

"We will. Mary is good at that kind of thing."

The waiter brushed off the crumbs and brought the coffee. When they began talking again the mood had changed. Gregory told Jean of a competition to build a Peoples' Auditorium in Chicago. It was open to the architects of America, and he had played with the idea through the hot, lonely nights of the past month.

"Whenever the pergola got too much, I took a swat at this."

"Well?"

Gregory shrugged. "It was good fun. It saved Palmer's life more often than he knew."

"When can I see them?"

Gregory ground the ash of his cigarette into the cloth as he answered:

"They're in the waste-basket. I was afraid to keep them around, like a drunkard with a bottle of whiskey."

"Why?"

After a moment, Gregory answered: "It's years since I've done anything but Stephens and Palmer houses."

Jean reached for the little silver coffee pot and held it over her cup. But it was several moments before she noticed that there was no more coffee in the pot. She put it down.

"That's no reason."

"Oh, yes, it is. If I don't try, I can't fail."

Gregory's lips smiled but his eyes were tired. Jean looked away.

"You wouldn't fail. I'm sure you wouldn't fail."

"It's almost twelve years since I left the Beaux Arts, and I'm putting electric stars on Palmer pergolas."

"You are not!"

"Yes, I am, and glad to do it. You don't understand. Why, the night that I thought most seriously about entering the contest, I felt as if I were presuming, doing something I had no right to do. I walked till almost morning in the woods, and then I threw the beginnings I had made away. You don't understand. The worms have been at work too long inside."

"They have not." The emphasis pricked like a sword. Jean was leaning to him across the table. "You are not glad to put arc lights on pergolas, and the worm has never gnawed at all. It's not what you do that makes a failure or what you don't do. It's what we no longer dream of doing, and—you do want to enter."

The throbbing assurance drew Gregory's eyes. He tried to smile.

"But think of all the young, undefeated men whose souls have not been Palmerized."

Jean's eyes were black and stern, as Puck's were sometimes.

"Your soul has not been Palmerized. Nothing can hurt us unless we let it."

Gregory's fingers trembled as he lit another cigarette. Did she believe that really, of every one? Was it abstract faith, a gauge by which she measured men, or was it for him? He had to know.

"Then why didn't I go ahead? There's nothing exterior to prevent me."

"Because," Jean said slowly, "because, when we can really do big things, the light at first blinds and rather confuses. But you get used to the light and go ahead. You will draw the plans again."

There was a long silence, before Gregory said, without looking up:

"I believe I shall. And it will be all your fault."

Jean's smile was uncertain, too, as she replied:

"All right. I'm willing to take the blame."

They drank the last drops of cold coffee to The Auditorium, and then Jean looked at her watch and got up quickly.

"There seems something specially fatal about plans and the strike. I promised Rachael to see her to-night. I've got to run."

"Wait. I'll walk down with you."

"I may have to stay some time. I'm worried about Ray——" Before the look in Gregory's eyes, Jean stopped. She knew he had not heard although he was looking directly at her. She sought for words to prevent his coming, but she knew they would be useless even if she found them.

Gregory paid the check and they left the restaurant. In absolute silence they walked along Division Street, between the rows of shrieking hucksters, and past the babies tumbling in their path. They halted before a dirty tenement on Essex Street. Again Jean tried to think of something to say that would turn Gregory back, and could not. So close that she could almost feel his body touching hers, they mounted the first two flights with their imitation tiling and flickering gas, the third with its cracked plaster, the fourth with no lights at all, and the fifth, so dark that they had to feel their way by the greasy wooden wall.

There was no light under Rachael's door. "I don't believe she's in. There must be something wrong. Terribly wrong."

Gregory did not answer. She could hear him breathing in quick, deep breaths. She began knocking sharply and calling. But no one answered. Jean turned the handle. The door opened. It was silent and dark and stifling.

"I think I had better leave a note." Jean entered the kitchen, and Gregory crossed the threshold and stood close.

"Have you a match? I—think—I'd better—leave a note." Against the weight holding her back, Jean forced herself forward toward the front room, lit palely in the light from the street lamps far below. Gregory could see her outlined in the hot blackness. He turned and closed the outer door.

"Haven't you a match?" Jean groped in the space before her, for Gregory was crossing the kitchen now, was coming to her.

"Haven't you—one—match?"

"No," Gregory answered at random, "no." His mouth was parched, although his whole body was bathed in cold damp.

Jean's hand touched a little brass match safe under the wall gas-bracket. Her fingers closed on it, and for a moment she stood gripping it, leaning against the bamboo table under the bracket. Then a yellow glare absorbed the darkness, and Jean sat down at the table. Gregory drew one quick, deep breath and moistened his lips.

Jean found a scrap of paper and a pencil in her handbag, and the pencil, obeying a law of its own, moved. Jean folded the note and stuck it in a corner of the mirror. If Rachael came home she must see it.

"There." Jean rose and stood with her hand on the gas-cock. "If you'll light the light on the landing first—it's just outside, it's hard negotiating this labyrinth."

Gregory obeyed. Jean turned out the gas and followed. They went down the stairs in silence. Without a word they walked through the crowded street and turned west to the nearest Subway. At the entrance Gregory stopped.

"I think I'll take the El. It's just as near for me and a lot cooler. Good-night. And don't abscond with the strike benefits."

Jean nodded. "No. I won't. And don't put a pergola on the auditorium."

The tone was brisk. Jean smiled back as she vanished into the entrance hole. Gregory turned away. He hated her.

Jean was grateful for the stifling air of the tunnel, the noise, the lights, the groups waiting for the train. It was familiar and safe. Wedged between a fat Jew in a black alpaca coat, and a sleeping Italian plasterer, covered with the dust of his trade, Jean stared before her. Had she said those last words at all, or only mouthed them?

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Jean never knew by what power she left the train at the right station, nor how she sat as usual for a few moments on Martha's bed and told her of the meeting. She had no memory of kissing Martha good-night nor coming to her own room.

But she must have done these things, because another day was creeping out of the east, and she still sat by the window, trying to think, but the motive power of her brain was dead. There was no explanation, no reason, no wonder at it. Analysis and explanation were the pipings of crickets, extinguished in a crash of thunder. There was only the thing itself. She loved Gregory Allen with a love that she had not known existed. It was a terrific wave, crushing upon her from the outside. It was so far beyond her will or control, that the thought of beating it back was drowned in its own flood.

All her life led to the moment when she had stood in the dark alone with him and been afraid. All her life she had been walking blindfolded to this point of blazing light. It reached back to the days when she had longed so passionately for something to happen, for something to smash the sordid monotony of dutiful acceptance. It held all the beauty to which she had clung so desperately. It had been the driving power of the wind over the hills, the lashing of the rain, the sparkle of the sun on the Bay. It had whispered its reality in the moving leaves, called loudly in the wash of the waves on the sand. It had always been there close, all through her lonely childhood, the dreary years of college, and in those long days in the open with Herrick. It had come close in the wrapping fog and the crackle of the beach fires in the little coves where she and Herrick had talked for hours with dead poets.

Jean buried her face in her hands. For in the dawn, creeping up the river, Herrick was coming toward her. In the motionless void between two days, he stood looking at her. And Jean knew that behind the fear that had dragged her to the gas-bracket above the bamboo table was the longing for Gregory's arms about her.

When the tips of the trees lit to gold, Jean rose and crept into bed.

It was almost three o'clock when Gregory let himself into the apartment, and the air of the place, closed for weeks, rushed at him as if it had been waiting. With the force of a physical blow it shattered the peace he had won in the long battle he had fought, alone in his office, after leaving Jean. He opened the windows slowly. Then he came back again into the living-room and the weary round began again.

He wanted Jean with the pent-up longing of years. He wanted her with a need from which there was no escape. He had always wanted her, from the first moment when he had come late to the appointment and Jean had explained the scheme to him in her brisk, business-like fashion. He had wanted her all through the summer, through every moment of it. Through the long talks alone, while Mary studied or slept in the room beyond. Through every gay dinner, and boring interminable week-end. He had wanted her desperately when he ran away to the Palmer place. And his need had thrust almost through his consciousness during those interminable hours coming back to her.

He had wanted her as she crossed the office only a few hours before, and he had wanted her terribly as she leaned across the table, the faith in her clear eyes flicking to life all the dreams that life with Margaret had killed.

And up in the reeking blackness shutting them in alone together, high in the air, with Jean across the room, blocked faintly in that same blackness, he had wanted her. And he had resisted. Against the current dragging him to the center of life, he had clung to his silly little rock of—what? No thought of Margaret had entered his mind. No fear or convention. Neither custom nor social rule had anything to do with this. Of what had he been afraid?

Gregory's forehead was damp, and he slumped low in his chair. He might have held her in his arms, crushed her resistance, kissed her to the ease of that gnawing hunger within.... What if she had resisted?... And she might not have resisted. She was no girl of eighteen, desired for the first time. She was a woman. She had been married, married to a libertine.

"Good God!" Gregory jumped to his feet. "I am rotten, rotten clear through."

But the pictures would not go. Their vividness tortured Gregory to motion and until dawn he walked a beaten path through the living-room, across the dining-room, back to the living-room through the hall. At five o'clock he threw himself on the couch.

He slept heavily until eight, then took a cold bath and prepared some coffee. He was at the office before nine. The desk was piled with a month's accumulation that had gotten beyond Benson, and Gregory was grateful that it had. He worked through without a break until four o'clock. Then he segregated the most pressing business, packed his portfolio and caught the Long Island Express.

Puck came hurtling down the path, screaming: "Daddy! My Daddy!" Margaret came, too, not hurriedly, but with just the right degree of welcome and surprise in her eyes. Her cool lips took the meaningless kiss that still passed between them on all their meetings and partings, for, with the death of all reality, they had grown wonderfully careful of these insincerities. She led the way to the house, while Puck capered beside him, and they had an early dinner.

Later, Gregory lit his pipe and wandered through the woods in the dusk with Puck, but often Puck jerked his hand and cried impatiently:

"Daddy, aren't you listening to Lady Jane?"

Gregory stayed until the following Wednesday. When he went back, Margaret and Puck went, too.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

It was the end of October. The trees in the parks and along the Palisades were bare, but the sun still shone and children danced in the streets to the music of the hurdy-gurdies. On Fifth Avenue, women in costly furs drove from shop to shop, buying greedily. Starved through their long summer with the mountains and the sea, they bought laces and jewels and still more costly furs. Down in the restaurants of the foreign quarters, the proprietors had taken in the little tables and dismantled the artificial gardens. The husbands of the women in costly furs now dined at home or in their uptown clubs.

Everywhere people settled to their winter's work. The strikers and manufacturers were locked in a death grip, and Jean often sat up half the night with Rachael. Rachael was whiter and more flamelike than ever. She never mentioned Tom, but Jean knew that he had married a girl of his own faith and that Rachael knew.

Then, on the fifteenth the manufacturers capitulated. With almost all their demands granted the strikers went back to work. No jubilant mass meeting marked the victory. Worn with the long fight the workers went back quietly. Jean felt as if something had gone out of her life. The settlement left vacant hours, and she wanted something to fill every moment. For the thought of Gregory was always waiting, ready to slip in.

From dreading ever to see him again, Jean had passed through hours when nothing else mattered, dizzy hours when she juggled with excuses for communicating with him and persuaded herself that it was the perfectly natural thing to do. And there were hours, lying awake at night, when she did not think of herself at all, but went round and round the endless circle of Gregory's motives. That he had shared her fear never entered Jean's mind, for so deep and hidden was the longing to believe that he cared, that not even Jean's analysis dragged it to light. One impossible reason after another Jean grasped and held for a little while, and then it slipped away. He was busy. He meant to ring up or write or come—and didn't. Summer and winter were two different worlds in New York. He had been bored and lonely then; now his days were full.

Jean held to this firmly, and, as the weeks slipped away, succeeded in believing it. Still, she was glad when Mary at last stopped mentioning him. Shortly after Thanksgiving, Jean and the doctor made up the list of invitations to the tea, with which, in what now seemed another life, they had threatened Gregory. Dr. Mary jabbed her pencil through his name, which headed the old list made up that hot June night.

"It's your business, of course, Jean, and you can do as you like; but I wouldn't ask him, for anything. I don't believe it will make any difference, and we have Fenninger. It's really going to look terribly imposing, the building plans and the lot diagram, too."

"I don't want to ask him. Fenninger will be the whole show and more."

But, a week later, as Jean moved through the crowded rooms, explaining the same things over and over, receiving congratulations and the more substantial promises of checks, her eyes kept wandering to the door. And she knew she was hoping that somehow Gregory would come. There was no way that he could know, and yet——For what seemed interminable lengths of time Jean kept her back deliberately to the door, and then, when she was sure that it did not matter to her at all, turned, and for one brief second—so vividly was he in her imagining—saw him with his badly fitting clothes and the happy twinkle in his eyes.

When the last guest had gone, Mary dropped into a chair and groaned.

"It was a success all right, but thank God it's over. Jean, that is my idea of Hell."

Jean was looking out to the bare trees of the Park. It was empty, and bits of paper blew in a gusty wind about the paths. A leaden sky hung low and the arc-light was not yet lit. Jean shivered.

"It's mine, too," she said, and the tears suddenly welled in her eyes and ran down her cheeks.

"Why, Jean, what on earth is the matter?"

Jean brushed at the tears and tried to smile. "I suppose I've been more worried about this going off well than I knew. It's finished, too; nothing left but to build now. It's rather like a death somehow."

Dr. Mary looked thoughtfully at Jean's back. It was not at all like Jean to cry because a piece of work was successfully finished. In fact, she had never seen Jean cry before.

"I shouldn't wonder if you didn't need a rest, Mrs. Herrick, in spite of that energy of yours. I don't believe you had a decent, leisurely meal all those last weeks of the strike. Will you take one?"

For a moment Jean did not know whether she was going to laugh or burst into an uncontrollable fit of crying. She turned away from the window.

"Certainly not. I never felt better in my life. It's partly these candles. I hate the things. They always look like funerals or a church. Let's have some practical, plebeian light."

She switched on the electricity and then went round blowing out the candles. By the time they were all out, Jean had worked up a disgust of herself that deceived the doctor.

"It's not less work that I need, but more. I haven't had a fight with Pedloe for a month, and the strike's so terribly settled I feel as if there was never going to be another dispute worth mentioning between capital and labor for the rest of my natural life."

"Cheer up. Society is beautifully rotten yet. Besides, just think of that talk you're scheduled for on—Municipal Housekeeping, I believe you said, Mrs. Herrick?"

"Garbage, Dr. MacLean, garbage, flies and infant mortality."

They laughed. "Jean, really we women are a scream, though no man would draw that out of me with red-hot pincers. Why, in the name of common sense, has everything got to be Housekeeping?"

"Because we've been locked up so long that we're afraid of the open. And we haven't got over the idea that we have to placate men, even yet, with a suffrage organization in every State. They still like to think of us, running between the cradle and the stove, so every mortal thing we do we've got to hitch up some way to a home. Decent milk, and the regulation of food prices, and garbage, divorce, child labor, widows' pensions, are all 'National Housekeeping,' and it sounds as if we had only moved into a larger house."

"Is that what you're going to tell them to-morrow? If it is, I'm going to stay right here and go, even if Third Cousin Nelly never speaks to me again. And she won't. I slipped out of it for Thanksgiving, and she's only got this one turkey left."

"You can go and eat it in peace, for I wouldn't have you at the meeting if you begged me on your knees. There are depths of depravity and duplicity in me that you have never guessed. You've never seen me being gracious."

"You weren't so bad to-day."

"Not a circumstance. A mere nothing to what I shall accomplish on Tuesday."

They smoked in silence for a while, and then Dr. Mary said suddenly:

"Some day I am going to write an article on the Biological Why of Women's Faith in Each Other."

"Outline it now. Maybe I can incorporate some of it in the talk."

"I can't. I don't know myself. It's not written yet. But it is funny, isn't it, how women in the aggregate do annoy one, and yet at bottom each one of the mass has the same qualities of the individual woman, who keeps our faith burning. I once went to a conference of women physicians, and it almost drove me wild. There's something about my own sex en masse that depresses me dreadfully. And yet, each one of those doctors was an able woman, and I would have enjoyed an hour with her more than with any man I had ever met."

"I know. I believe in my congress idea, but sometimes I wish I could put it over without ever having to go near anybody. Trade Unions and Consumers' Leagues and things like that aren't so bad, but these clubs!—And yet it is just where most of the energy is going to waste. They always make me feel like an overgrown, gawky boy, and as if all my clothes were on wrong."

A few days later, as Jean stood on the raised dais waiting for the well-bred clapping to cease, she almost wished she had urged Mary to come. She could never do it justice, never.

The perfectly appointed clubrooms were crowded with beautiful gowned women all looking toward her in polite interest. There was no enthusiasm and no inattention. Beneath their interest in her as a public person, was a restrained curiosity as to her as a woman. Jean had long ago become used to being considered a growing force in her world, but she knew these women had gauged to a cent the price of the furs she had laid off in the anteroom and that the simple way she did her hair, in a rather tight wad at the nape of her neck, was in some way connected in their minds with indifference to masculine interest or inability to capture it.

The applause ceased and the room rustled to silence. They sat waiting, their white gloved hands graceful in their laps, their chins raised, their well kept, unvital bodies in repose. Seen so, from the dais, they all looked bewilderingly alike, as if many artists had faithfully copied a model, varying as little as possible. Jean wondered what they would do if she should begin:

"'Licensed prostitutes,' I am here this afternoon——"

She smiled. All the faces below smiled, one large smile cut up into pieces.

Half way down the room, behind one of the pieces of the smile, Mabel Dawson sized her up.

"Conceited as they're made. Because we know how to do our hair she thinks we're feeble-minded."

Jean began to talk simply and convincingly in a way that held her hearers but annoyed Mabel Dawson exceedingly.

"I don't wonder that her husband brought another woman into the house, if she always explained things to him as if he were two years old." Mabel then lost the drift of Jean's talk altogether while she tried to trace the marks of suffering on her face.

Sitting well down to the front and looking lovely in a soft lavender creation, Margaret Allen's mind was busy with the same problem. She too was searching Jean's face for lines of suffering and could not find them. A woman with Jean's past ought to look more as if she had gathered up the broken threads and gone on. But Jean must be the kind of woman who either never broke threads, or if she did, ripped out the ravelings and wove new ones. There was nothing sad about her. In fact her superb physique and very evident efficiency were rather hard. She would always know exactly what she wanted and just how to get it. She would walk straight to her point, in the low-heeled shoes that just missed being square-toed and common-sense.

A patter of hands broke in on Margaret's cogitations. She listened for a few moments. Jean was really making the subject interesting. A vague envy began to crystallize at the back of Margaret's mind. She did not want to dispose of garbage, but there were many things, in the last twelve years, that she had wanted to do and had had to let go because of Gregory and Puck. The chemicalization passed from envy of Jean to annoyance with Gregory. It never occurred to him that she had given up anything. She was never sure that he did not think she was a little stupid. His tolerance of The Fortnightly was insulting, and yet women like Jean Herrick thought it was worth while.

The meeting came to an end with sincere applause. Women gathered about and begged for another talk, and proved by their questions a real desire to do things besides hold meetings. Then two maids wheeled in tea, and gossip bubbled up.

Holding her cup and the last crumbs of rich cake, Jean succeeded in drawing to one side. Almost hidden behind an alabaster statue on an ebony pedestal, she was studying the faces about her, when a soft voice startled her so that she almost dropped the cup on the velvet rug.

"Oh, Mrs. Herrick, I just couldn't not speak to you." Margaret often gave her sentences small twists that ornamented them. Jean smiled.

"Was the urge as great as that, really?'

"Yes, indeed. That was a wonderful talk! Besides, I almost feel as if we were old friends already. I'm terribly interested in the tenements."

Jean's smile deepened but she looked puzzled. She met such a lot of women like this, and was always forgetting them. Margaret might even have been at the tea or sent a check.

Margaret laughed. "No, you haven't met me somewhere and forgotten, though I shouldn't mind a bit if you had. I am Mrs. Allen, Mrs. Gregory Allen."

Jean's fingers closed on the saucer. From a long way off she heard the words dropping between herself and the woman before her:

"I am very glad."

The same power that dropped the words, lifted her hand, and Margaret's came to meet it.

"I was terribly interested, and so glad that Mr. Allen was connected with the tenements. It's so much more real than just ordinary houses, more human and broader, you know. Sometimes I tell him he'll petrify in all those angles and concrete, without the personal touch."

Jean grasped her brain and set it down outside, as she might have lifted a screaming child and put it firmly in a chair. She would deal with it later.

"There are dozens of things I would like to talk over with you. Couldn't I presume on the acquaintance we haven't really got yet, and ask you to take pot-luck with us? Now, please don't say you've got something desperately interesting to interfere."

For years Jean remembered that moment, and the way in which Margaret Allen receded, became more and more indistinct, almost vanished. But not quite. Just at the moment she was dropping beyond the horizon an icy hand clutched Jean's heart and Margaret was close again, smiling and waiting for an answer.

"I'm sorry, but I'm really very busy. Winter is one long rush in this kind of work."

"I know. It must be; that's why I'm not going to try and force you to anything formal, just ourselves, and if you have a meeting afterwards you can run away. We shall understand."

Jean felt as if she were in the grip of some small, persistent animal that would never let go.

"Any night you say, Mrs. Herrick. But I'm just not going to let you off." Her pretty lips curved in childish pleading. And Margaret suddenly assumed a reality of her own. This was the woman whom Gregory Allen had loved and married, whose life was bound to his, whose babbling was always in his ears.

Jean almost laughed. She and Mary had paraded their bag of tricks, their broader viewpoint, their richer personalities. He had been interested, as he might have been interested in a play above the summer level of Broadway, and had gone back to his home, to the stifling life which evidently did not stifle him at all. Not all the big problems, the genuine human needs that she had struggled with for the last two months, had dulled the memory of that dinner when his need had called so sharply to her, when she had wanted to take his head in her arms and comfort him. And those moments in Rachael's room, when she had been caught up and almost swept away by the biggest force that had ever touched her life. And he? During these two months he had been quite contentedly listening to this senseless chatter. He must have been, since he had made no effort to escape it even for the brief visit that common decency demanded.

"How about to-morrow, then? Don't you think you might just squeeze us in?"

"If you will really understand and excuse me right after." She would go and free herself from this power. She would go and see Gregory Allen and this woman in the home they had made together. Pride and her own sense of humor would do the rest.

"Indeed we shall. How about seven o'clock? Or is that a little late? I can make it six-thirty if you'd rather?"

"Oh, no. Seven is quite all right."

Margaret wrote the address with a gold pencil she took from her handbag. For a moment Jean felt linked to Margaret by her inability to say that she already knew the number.

"I'll give you the 'phone, too, in case anything should happen, but don't let anything, please."

"No, I won't." Jean took the slip, and at the same moment the chairman glided up and began scolding Margaret for monopolizing Mrs. Herrick. Jean was led away, and for another half hour she answered questions. Then Margaret was before her again, delicious in a coat with fur cuffs and a collar that framed her face like a huge leaf.

"Au revoir, until to-morrow at seven."

Margaret caught the envious glance of the chairman and made an intimate little motion of farewell to Jean.

It was over at last, and Jean was walking along briskly in the coming night. She was going to see Gregory Allen again. She was going to sit at his table, with his wife and child, and talk of general things. She was going to grasp this haunting power that held her days and crush it. She would not be afraid after she had seen him there in his own world.

"I suppose she will tell him to-night—'Oh, Gregory, Mrs. Herrick is dining with us to-morrow.'"

Jean smiled. He would be surprised. She could see his eyes widen in that childish fashion that had come to make her feel——

"You fool. You unspeakable fool." Jean's scorn of herself before these vivid pictures of a man, who had never given her the slightest right to think he had any of her at all, lashed her pride to anger.

"You're thirty-four, you idiot. Suppose you do love him? What of it? Maybe you won't after to-morrow night."

All the way down in the Subway the refrain beat in Jean's ears:

"Maybe you—won't. May-be you—won't. Mebbe youwon't. Mebbeyouwon't."

She let herself into Dr. Mary's empty apartment, and then telephoned Martha that she had to work late. In the morning it would be different, but to-night she could not describe the meeting, and Martha was always interested in every detail.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

It was a few minutes before seven when the maid showed Jean into the Allen living-room. A little girl rose from a hassock and stood looking at her quietly. Then she came forward and held out her hand.

"My mamma's not home yet, but I'm Puck."

Jean took the mite of a hand in hers. "And I am Mrs. Herrick."

"I know. I'm going to entertain you. Won't you sit down?" The brown of Gregory's eyes was softened to hazel in Puck's, but the spirit in them was his. "That's the nicest chair. My daddy likes it best." The tone was a childish treble of Margaret's, but the decision with which she pointed out that particular chair was the same with which Gregory in the end had always won over hers or Mary's suggestions. A lump rose in Jean's throat.

"Stop it," she whispered fiercely to herself. "You're in it now. You've got to see it through."

Puck had returned to the hassock, where she sat with her brows drawn, looking for a foothold in this, her first social struggle. As one grown woman to another Jean smiled and said:

"I think it's going to snow, don't you?"

Puck's face cleared and she smiled back at Jean, exactly as Gregory smiled, the light touching her eyes and then settling in her lips.

"I shouldn't be s'prised. I told Lady Jane that this morning." There was a pause, as if she were weighing a sudden decision. "Would you like to see Lady Jane? She's just back from the hospital."

"Indeed I should, if you're sure it won't hurt her."

"I don't believe it will, not for a few moments. I haven't put her to bed yet."

Safe with Lady Jane in her arms, the manner of hostess dropped away. Puck came close to Jean's chair, and turning up the filmy clothes in which Lady Jane was arrayed, pointed to a leg glaringly new and unscratched.

"It was a bad accident and she broke it, but my daddy said it might have killed her. She was lucky, wasn't she? My daddy took her to the hospital and they—they—imput—"

"Amputated?"

"Yes. They—ampt—they did that to the old leg and gave her a new one. But I don't let anybody touch her, except me and daddy. He loves Lady Jane too."

"I'm sure he does." Jean smoothed Lady Jane's lacy skirts with trembling fingers.

"Do you like her?" Puck asked it abruptly after a brief pause in which Jean fought to hold fast her belief that she had come to kill her own fear once and for all.

"I think she is one of the nicest persons I have ever met."

Puck dropped the subject and climbed to the arm of Jean's chair. "Tell us a story," she demanded, "we love stories."

Jean put her arm about the slight body and her own throbbed at the contact.

"What shall I tell you?"

"Well, I like Cinderella a whole lot and so does Lady Jane." She stopped, looked straight into Jean's eyes and added: "Mamma doesn't like me to have too many fairy stories, but my daddy tells me one when I've been good enough. Am I good enough now for Cinderella?"

"I'm sure you're quite good enough for Cinderella," and Jean plunged into the story before she yielded to the impulse to kiss Puck.

With additions of her own, highly pleasing to Puck, Jean wound the fate of Cinderella to its climax. The coach was ready and the Prince about to start on his quest, when the door opened and Margaret Allen hurried in.

"Oh, Mrs. Herrick, what must you think of me! Those impossible cross-town cars and there wasn't a taxi in sight. Did Puck give you my message?"

"Indeed she did, and she's been entertaining me beautifully. We've been——" In the nick of time Jean remembered—"having a lovely time."

Puck looked gratefully at Jean and slid from the chair.

"Now, Puck."

"Please, mamma, just till daddy comes. He'll be here awful soon now."

"Now, dear, don't tease." Margaret shook her head with gentle firmness.

"But, mother, maybe he'll let me stay to-night. He——"

"Puck, say good-night to Mrs. Herrick while I go and hurry Annie." She smiled at Jean. "You see, it really is pot-luck, including delayed dinner and family discipline."

Puck came and laid her hand in Jean's.

"It wasn't a lie, not a really lie, was it? Because we did have a lovely time."

"No, I don't think it was a lie."

"Next time you come, I'm going to ask my daddy first——"

But a key turned in the lock and Puck fled.

"Daddy!"

"Well, Pucklets!"

Jean knew that the man bent and lifted the child to his shoulder.

"And how goes it? Lady Jane had any fever to-day?"

Jean went quickly to the window. With the coldness of the glass against her forehead, she tried to think. The murmur of Margaret's voice directing Annie came from the kitchen. In the hall Gregory was hanging up his overcoat. Puck's high treble fluted in a string of words that conveyed nothing. Gregory had come home, back to this world of which he was the central pivot. The very air was changed, charged with a vigor that it had lacked. And she, an outsider, was closed in there with them. Jean gripped the window-shelf and waited.

"Daddy, Mrs. Herrick likes Lady Jane too."

They were almost at the door. Without turning, Jean felt the man stop, Margaret had not told him.

Jean turned and stood with her hands hanging quietly at her sides. Puck clinging to him, Gregory crossed the threshold. It was Jean who spoke first.

"Indeed I do like Lady Jane."

Jean felt that she was throwing the words to him, aiming blindly and hoping that he would catch them. For the smile with which he had listened to Lady Jane's symptoms was still in his eyes, as if consciousness had been killed at that moment.

"Of course. Doesn't everybody love Lady Jane?"

He had caught the words. Across the child they looked at each other.

"This is a surprise."

Jean felt as if they were playing a game. A thousand things that she had wanted to tell him during these weeks rushed to her mind. She felt childish and excited, like Puck. "Yes——" She had intended to say something about meeting Mrs. Allen yesterday, to enlighten Gregory as much as she could, but she found herself facing the words "Mrs. Allen" and she could not go on.

Then Margaret entered, trying to sum up in a rapid glance the measure of her success in proving to Gregory that important people like Jean Herrick thought her worth while cultivating. But there was no surprise in Gregory, and Jean felt that Margaret was annoyed. She had set her little stage and the actor wouldn't play.

"Come, Puck, have you said good-night to Mrs. Herrick?"

Puck cast one long, beseeching look at her father, but for once he failed her. Without seeing her pleading, he bent and kissed her good-night.

"Good-night, Puck; sleep tight."

Puck's shoulders straightened. There was forced politeness but no friendliness now in her eyes as she held out her hand to Jean.

"Good-night, Mrs. Herrick."

Jean wanted to drop on her knees, put her arms about Puck and explain straight into those stern, hurt eyes.

"Good-night," she said, and without another word, Puck marched out of the room.

"Come, Mrs. Herrick, I'm afraid everything is spoiled as it is." Margaret led the way to the dining-room and they sat down in a silence that Jean felt was never going to be broken. When Margaret spoke, Jean turned to her gladly.

"I've been thinking all day about what you told us yesterday and I'm getting more excited every moment. Why, it's perfectly tremendous, that idea of a woman's congress, something bigger than women have ever done before. Mrs. Herrick is planning a general woman's congress, Gregory, to deal with women's problems all over the country."

Gregory Allen did not answer. Margaret bit her lips with vexation and then hurried along to cover the breach of his rudeness.

"Won't you tell me some more about it, Mrs. Herrick? You presented so many new points, even in the Garbage Disposal, that I know I didn't get half of them clear. As I understand it, all the clubs with civic divisions already formed, will come together in a central body right away? Don't you think that's a great idea, Gregory?"

Under pretext of passing him the crackers, Margaret made a last effort to draw him in. Jean's anger vanished in pity for her. She was like a bright moth buzzing helplessly against a silent, bronze Buddha.

What thousands of meals they must have had like this, Margaret's enthusiasm pricking at his silence!

Jean had not wanted to talk about the Congress at all, but now she plunged in, before Gregory could answer.

Beyond their voices Gregory sat, catching a phrase now and then that interrupted the trend of his thought but did not turn it. Nothing was real but the fact that Jean had come back into his days. Through no action of his own, she was sitting at his table. He had closed a door of his life and Fate had opened it.

"Don't put a pergola on the Auditorium."

In the past weeks Gregory had heard Jean's last words until sometimes it had seemed to him that he would go mad. They were such ridiculous words to have marked the end.

And here she was. So close that almost without a motion he could reach and touch her hand—the firm, large hand that he could see without looking at it—crumbling the bread beside her plate. With his eyes on his own plate, he could see the outline of her throat, the even throb of the strong pulse that beat at the base. Night after night, during the last ten weeks, he had shut it away, forced it out of his vision and gone on reading, while across the table Margaret sat embroidering clothes for Puck.

He had closed and locked a door. Margaret had opened it. His brain beat in a chaos of anger and gratitude and pity for Margaret.

"Gregory, just listen to this." They had reached the dessert without Gregory's noticing that the maid had brought things or taken them away, and without his uttering a word. Margaret's patience had reached its limit, and she turned to him now with the same controlled impatience with which she disciplined Puck.

"Mrs. Herrick believes that there are spiritual forces, just as real as physical ones, like gravity and cohesion and all that, that are going to waste because nobody has tried to channel them. Isn't that right, Mrs. Herrick?"

Gregory was looking up now. Like a humming-bird Margaret flitted aside to let the stronger force sweep him into the current.

"Yes, I believe that what we call personality is almost a concrete thing. You can feel it, just as you can feel any force. It seems to me there is a lot of this vital undercurrent in women."

And Gregory felt again the hall, packed with Jewish workers, and Rachael leaning from the edge of the platform.... "How is Rachael?"

Jean wondered whether the words she was trying to grasp would ever come within reach. Margaret looked with a puzzled frown from one to the other. But she didn't care much what he said as long as he said something.

"Rachael won the strike. But it took all the strength she had."

"You see, Gregory, I am not the only woman who believes in women." Jean was grateful to Margaret for fluttering back.

"Evidently not."

"When we really get started we might have a special meeting to give the men a chance to apologize. How would that do?"

Margaret covered her triumph with flippancy, as if only by condescending to Gregory's interest could she keep him from lapsing again. Jean visioned an evening at this level and knew she could not face it. She glanced at her wrist-watch and then at Margaret.

"Do you really have to?"

"I'm afraid I do."

Jean pushed back her chair.

"I know you warned me. But won't you come soon again? I know how busy you are and so I'm not going to set a day. Just ring up any time, if you don't mind the informality. Perhaps, between us, we can convert him."

Jean moved into the living-room to get her things and Margaret followed.

Gregory stood where he was. In a few moments Jean would be gone. The maid would clear the things. He and Margaret would be sitting in their usual places in the living-room. He would pretend to read to still Margaret's comments on Jean. Jean's rumpled napkin lay beside her plate. It seemed to belong intimately to her, although it had a large embroidered "A" in the corner. It was a possession of Jean's and she had gone a long way away and left it behind. She would never come back. Gregory was positive of that. Why had Jean come? He did not know. But she would never come back.

Gregory went into the hall and took his hat and overcoat from the cupboard. Margaret's voice was insisting that Jean "ring up any time." Jean was not answering.

Gregory came back into the dining-room with his overcoat on. Margaret's surprise escaped in a swift glance, and then a smile of triumph lit her eyes. She had won after all. She had forced Gregory from his usual indifference to their guests into at least a semblance of what Margaret called "common social decency." It was true that he did not look over-gracious at the thought of escorting Jean home, but it was more than he ever did for Frances or Mabel.

"Really, there's not the slightest need. I'm going straight down——" Jean tried to remember what she had told Margaret she had to do, or whether she had told her anything.

"I'm going down anyhow. I've got some things to do at the office."

Margaret followed to the elevator and they dropped from her world together.

Outside Jean turned to Gregory.

"There is no need, really."

Her voice almost begged him not to come.

"I have to go to the office."

Without a word they began to walk, straight ahead, although that was not the direction of the Subway station. Myriads of stars looked down from a black, cold sky and the bare trees along the pavement creaked in a rising wind. A few people hurried by, but the street was almost deserted. Just before they came to the end, where it swerved into a more brightly lighted one, Gregory stopped.

"Jean, why did you come?"

His voice was harsh, and Jean felt the rigidity of his body, although they were almost a foot apart, and he did not touch her at all. She tried to turn her eyes away. If she did not look at him she could lie. But the desperate need in his drew her back.

"I had to. I had to know."

"You—didn't know?"

Jean shook her head.

"But you know, now?"

"Yes. I know."

There was a long silence in which all the tangle and pain of the last weeks were swept away. In the next block a taxi rattled to a stop before one of the huge gray stone apartments. A noisy trio got out and went laughing across the sidewalk. That was another world, with noise and confusion and aimless talk. In the world closing tighter and tighter about them there was no noise, no confusion, no aimless talk. It was still, filled with a depth of understanding beyond the reach of words.

The chauffeur slammed the door, mounted, and the taxi came swaying and rattling toward them. Gregory signaled and it lurched to a stop at the curb. With her hand still in his, Jean moved toward it. She got in and Gregory stepped in after her.

"Where to, sir?"

"Gramercy Park," Jean said quietly, and Gregory closed the door. He took her in his arms and kissed her to weakness.

"It had to be, Jean, from the beginning."

"I know." Jean drew closer in his hold.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Jean's work now took shape to her as something visible and apart. It was the system of wires that ran through life, connecting the days. The dynamo that kept it all vibrating was her love.

The depths of its peace surprised her. She loved, in secret, a married man. She had met his wife, eaten at their home, held their child in her lap. She had not only broken the standards of society, which did not matter at all, but she had broken what she had believed were her own. These did not matter either. There was nothing degrading in slipping away to meet Gregory, for nothing could degrade their love any more than a small boy could degrade the sun by throwing mud at it.

Christmas came. Applicants flooded the office, but Jean snatched as many hours as she could. When it was possible they had lunch together, and she often worked at night to make up for the teas they had in the quiet tea-room in the upper Thirties. They always went a bit earlier than the crowd and had an alcove to themselves. Jean had a sensuous delight in the contrast of leaving the office behind her, the waiting room never empty, the staff of extra helpers, the jangling 'phone, and then—this other world with Gregory. The place had once been a brownstone mansion, with carved staircases and pendulous chandeliers of crystal. Heads of baby angels looked down from the cornices and the shadows of stately men and women seemed always to lurk in the corners, aloof and disdainful, but curious of this new generation that smoked and talked immoderately on all subjects, at fragile tables, painted in strange colors. Waitresses, in chintz polonaises and powdered hair, served tea and muffins at extravagant prices. The same girl always served them, and Jean felt as if the alcove was theirs. It was the nearest they had to a home together. Here they retailed gossip and talked over their work. Gregory was giving every spare moment of his time to the designs for the auditorium and Jean loved to have him consult her even when the technical details were beyond her understanding. That he needed her in this way filled Jean with a warm glow, a distinct physical reaction that softened the outlines of her whole body. Coming from a happy hour with Gregory, Jean tackled problems that had troubled the office for weeks, and, as Berna said, "simply bored through them!"

Jean rarely thought of Margaret, and, when she did, it was as of one of their acquaintances. If Margaret had not been Gregory's wife, Jean would have enjoyed telling him about her. She could not feel personal about Margaret. She did not even resent her. In the natural world there were peacocks and orchids and slugs and worms; there were small, useful animals and needful growing things, and beautiful poisonous fungi that seemed to exist for no definite purpose. They all followed their own law. So there were Kittens and Tigers and Herricks and Marys and Jeans and Margarets and Pats. They were all different, and all needed. The mistake was in misunderstanding and confusing values. She had done this when she had married Herrick and Gregory had done it when he married Margaret.

But the really wrong thing, the wicked thing, was to be afraid. To refuse because one had not the courage to accept. To grow too weary spiritually to reach out and grasp the next rung of one's development and so swing up and up to the height of one's possibility. After a meeting with Gregory, Jean had often to make an effort to keep from running, so close was this tie between the spirit and the flesh.

On Sundays, when Gregory could get away without too greatly disturbing the plan of life in which he had so long acquiesced, or too greatly disappointing Puck, they went for long walks in the country. Jean lied to Mary and to her mother about these walks. She wanted every scrap, even the knowledge of their existence, to herself. Sometimes, at the last moment a complication arose, impossible to overcome, and the walk was postponed. Neither Jean nor Gregory ever asked why or referred to it again. They accepted, without the indignity of complaint, the conditions of their loving.

Gregory was happy, too. And, although, unlike Jean, he never realized in his muscles the spiritual values of their love, he did feel that life was a bigger and deeper thing than he had ever dreamed. Margaret's well-meaning scratching at his interests no longer annoyed him. He felt that she had been cheated, made in one of the small molds, when there were so many larger ones in which she might have been shaped.

The day before New Year, Jean took the afternoon off and they went for a long tramp through the snow in Jersey. It was a glorious day with blue sky and sunshine, faintly warm on the hill crests. They walked until dusk and then had tea before a log fire in a little French roadhouse, where the fat wife of the proprietor insisted on Jean's taking off her shoes and putting on a pair of Gustave's red carpet slippers while the shoes dried.

Jean laughed. "I shall never understand why such a healthy-looking, able-to-manage-herself being gets so much mothering. Every night in winter I have to restrain mummy by force from feeling if my stockings are damp. I wish you knew mummy, Gregory. She's so impossible to describe, but she makes such ripping anecdotes."

"I do feel rather cheated, but I have a pretty clear conception. I think she's like this."

He drew a small shaft, firm at the base, tapering to a point.

"Mummy to the life," Jean chuckled. "Now do Mary."

"That's harder." The pencil poised over the paper some time before he made a line.

"There. That's as near as I can get, but I'm not sure that the proportions are right."

It looked like two triangles, one imposed on the other, apex to apex.

"What's that in geometry? It's not like anything in life. Poor Mary, why does she come to a point in the middle and then flare again?"

"Because that's what she does. I always had the feeling with her, more than with any one I ever met, that she was spiritually constructed in sections. She has the ground work of one kind of person, but she isn't that kind. She started out planted firm on the earth, then she spired to a point, refused to end there, wanted to get back to earth again, couldn't, and so her soul built another triangle, on top of the first. She ends in a firm base again, but it's in the air. Now what do you suppose she would say if you told her—about us? She might say almost anything."

"Why, I know exactly what she'd say."

"What, Infallible One?"

"She'd say that it was none of her business."

Gregory laughed. "I suppose she would. After all, she is almost always right."

It was dark before they started back. With the ending of their days they always grew a little silent. Small, clear stars pricked the black and the moon peered timidly over the ridge top. They walked through the dry snow hand in hand. Twice Gregory stopped, drew Jean into his arms and kissed her. It made them both giddy to kiss like that, alone in the open, under the stars. Jean's lips clung to his, and when his hold loosened, she drew him to her again.

The deck of the ferryboat was deserted and they stood together in the stern, watching the ice cakes swirl in the black water. A cold wind swept down the river and whipped their faces. When the boat docked, Gregory took a quick kiss.

"It was a great walk."

Jean nodded.

"Happy New Year," she whispered, and led the way down the gangplank.

On New Year's morning Jean astonished Martha by going to early church with her. Martha asked for no reason, but her heart sang its thanksgiving as they trotted along through the clean crispness of the New Day. It was only six o'clock, but the church was full. The high altar, white in its frostwork of sheerest lace, blazed with candles. The air was heavy with the odor of thick white flowers and incense that never quite died out. Through it, like a refreshing draft, came the woodsy smell of greens and berries.

Abject with gratitude and humility, Martha slipped into the last pew and Jean knelt beside her. It was like dropping back through the years into her childhood. From force of association, Jean leaned her head on the pews in front and closed her eyes. She did not pray but she felt strangely near a God.

After a moment she stole a look at Martha, just as she used to do when she was little and wanted permission to get up and sit in the seat. It was queer how a motion could start an old train of thought. As strongly as if she were feeling it now, she remembered the anger that had always stirred her when her mother went on praying, without seeing the look. She had always hated the way Martha knelt, almost crouched, in the last pew. It had always made her want to walk straight on, up to the very altar itself, and face God standing, with her eyes open. If people loved God, as they said they did, why were they so afraid of him? If this was His house, why did they sneak around in it like burglars? How furious it had made her! And now, nothing had changed: Martha still crept into the last pew and crouched before her God, and it did not make Jean angry at all. Instead, it made a lump come into her throat, and down to the depths of her she was glad that Martha had her God.

She had Gregory.

A young priest entered and the service began. Jean rose and knelt and made the proper responses. Words that she could not have recalled in any other setting, came spontaneously to her lips. While row after row of communicants went to the rail, she knelt, her head bowed. The monotonous murmur:

"Take and eat this—the body and blood of Christ which was given for thee, preserve thy body and soul to everlasting life."

Over and over, row after row, hung a background for her thoughts.

"Take, eat—preserve thy body—everlasting life."

Against it, she walked in the dark with Gregory and felt his lips seeking hers.

"—and may the blessing of God Almighty and His Son Jesus Christ remain with you always. Amen."

The young priest, followed by his assistant, moved across the chancel. Every head bowed before his going. There was a moment of silence, as if the earth had stilled, while God Himself went back to His own; then a rustle and people rose.

Martha and Jean were the first out. Jean slipped her arm into her mother's.

"Mummy, I'm terribly disappointed, but that belated Christmas present isn't done yet. You can't have it before Tuesday."

Martha pressed Jean's arm.

"I've had my present, Jeany, and it's made me wonderfully happy."

Jean smiled down at her. They walked along quickly for a few blocks, and then Martha said:

"Which do you think Mary would like better, Jean, chestnut dressing for the turkey, or just plain?"

CHAPTER THIRTY

In March, before the actual building of the tenements began, Jean and Gregory went away for a week-end. They had decided on the spur of the moment and taken the train like two truant children. Their plan was to get off wherever it looked attractive and stop at the first farmhouse that would take them in.

The train was a popular express and crowded, so they had to stand until the first stop was reached. Then Jean got a seat and Gregory went into the smoker. With her elbow on the windowsill and her chin in her hand, Jean gazed into the fleeing fields and was glad that Gregory was not there. It was almost too much, the deep hollows still snow-filled, the bare earth of the upper stretches, the faint green of swelling buds, and the two days before them. No duties to intervene, no appointments to keep. It was their first interlude of almost perfect freedom. But there were going to be many more in the summer ahead.

The train had made two stops. There were plenty of seats now. Jean looked up and saw Gregory coming towards her. For a moment she had a mixed feeling of complete possession and at the same time of personal isolation. He was hers, so completely, so inevitably hers, and yet this was the first time they had gone away together, stolen a little piece of life for their own. It was a diminutive honeymoon, but she couldn't say that to him. As she moved over and made room for him beside her, she realized how little they knew of each other's daily habits, their methods of doing personal things, and yet the way Gregory dropped into the place she made for him, gave her the feeling of having been married to him for a long time. She wondered what he was thinking.

But evidently Gregory was concerned with no such complicated analysis, for he turned to her presently:

"No place has hit the mark yet?"

"I don't believe I've been looking. I've just been soaking."

"Let's toss. Heads, the next; tails, the one after."

It was heads. Jean settled in her seat. Gregory looked at her and smiled. The smile deepened. He could not help but think of Margaret. Whichever way it had fallen, she would have suggested throwing again. The second station "might be so much better."

"You're a brick."

"Perfectly true, but why at this particular moment?"

"The explanation's much too subtle for your feminine mind."

"Because I didn't suggest tossing again?"

"Well, I'll be darned! How did you guess that?"

"You're a brick," Jean grinned. "As dense, every bit."

They got off at the next station, to the astonishment of the solitary native waiting for the down train, and struck across the fields. When they came to a forked road they stopped.

"We'll take turns at these decisions. You first."

"North."

They walked a mile between rickety fences that seemed to go on forever. Gregory looked out of the corner of his eye and Jean laughed.

"Did you do it on purpose?"

"If there isn't a break before that big maple down there, we'll call that a turn."

They reached the maple.

"Left," shouted Gregory, without stopping to reconnoiter.

They crossed a field, boggy with snow-filled ruts, and climbed a low rise. Directly beneath lay an old farmhouse with a sagging brown roof and red window casings, dulled by generations of sun and storm. A woman in a blue apron moved across the brown, bare earth behind the house to a white chicken run. Jean thought of the Portuguese ranch where she and Herrick had gone on their honeymoon, with the silent woman and the cows wandering over the hills.

"It wasn't me, that's all; it just wasn't me."

A very old dog rose from the sunshine, sniffed dutifully as they came up on the stoop, and lay down again. Gregory knocked on the screen door, and a girl with a baby in her arms opened it. She listened without interest while Gregory explained, and went off without a word. In a moment they heard her shrill:

"Ma, oh ma!"

The woman who had been feeding the chickens appeared, wiping her hands on her apron. She had a lumpy, overworked body, but her face had in it the patience of the earth, and there was something of spring in the pale blue eyes.

"Well, I guess we kin fix you up, seein' it's only for a couple of days. We couldn't take permanents yet, the spring cleanin' ain't done."

"There's the little room up back, ma?"

"How about the one over Uncle's? You could fix that up—it don't want much more than airin'."

Jean and Gregory waited while the two women settled the matter. The decision was in favor of the big one over Uncle John's.

"Mattie'll show you." The older woman took the baby and the girl led them up a narrow white staircase, uncarpeted and spotless, that zigzagged to the floor above.

At the end of the hall she opened a low door, painted white and fastened with a hand-made latch. They entered a huge room, whitewashed, with white wainscoting, white matting and a great white bed, the most spotless room Jean had ever seen. Ancient apple trees brushed the four gleaming windows and the cluck of chickens came from the yard. The smell of the earth, warmed slightly in the spring sun, and a faint fragrance from swelling trees, flooded it.

Jean reached out and touched the baby green of apple leaves. It made her think of the old pine and her attic room, and of how often she had reached out to shake the fog diamonds from the needles and wish that something would happen, anything to break the monotony. The old pine was thousands of miles away and that self years in the past. Inwardly and outwardly she now lived in another world. And yet, looking down the years, Jean could put her finger on no moment of sudden change. It must all have been there, from the beginning, in herself; her right of way through the world of action, which she had once believed held no entry for her; her marriage with a man who came to her from one woman's arms and left her for another; this wonderful love that was so right in spite of the world's standards. And the future? It was there, just as the present had been in the past. Jean leaned out of the window and drew the warm sweetness into her. For the first time in her life she felt part of a scheme, obedient to a law that worked on without her will.

The girl went out of the room and Gregory put down the grip. He came and stood beside her. She turned and laid her face against his shoulder. He stroked her hair gently, a new tenderness in his touch.

After a moment she raised her head and smiled.

"Let's go out and explore."

From the kitchen window Mrs. Morrison watched them. "Seems like a nice couple and powerful fond. Look, Mattie, he's holdin' her hand."

Hand in hand, Gregory and Jean were peering into the chicken run. The girl shrugged:

"I guess they ain't been married long. He won't be doin' it this time next year."

"Don't talk so shaller, Mat. What if he ain't? It can't be spring all year."

"No need fur it to be winter, either."

"The sooner you git over thinkin' them things, the better it'll be fur you, my girl. You got one of the best men livin'. There ain't a better provider than Jim in this county. Kissin's good enough, but it don't fill the wood box or spread the table."

The girl looked sullenly after the retreating figures.

"I'm sick o' livin' with people that's good providers. It's like havin' nothin' but bread mornin', noon and night. I want some——"

"That'll do, Mat, I don't stand fur no such talk as that. When Jimmy begins runnin' round and needin' shoes, his ma and pa kissin' ain't goin' to put 'em on him. Besides a woman shouldn't want things like that. It's fur men to think of them things. Hand me out the bread pan; I'll mix up some biscuits, seein' we ain't enough loaves."

The girl handed it to her. "I suppose I'd better spread a clean cloth."

"Take the big one in the second drawer, and you might put the wax plant in the center."

As the girl worked, she kept glancing to the window, but Jean and Gregory were out of sight, beyond a dip in the orchard.

"It is nice," she said wistfully.

Then the baby whined and she went to him. As soon as he saw her he stopped and gooed. The girl laughed and picked him up.

"You old false alarm you!" She burrowed in his neck and he squirmed with delight.

Out in the orchard, Gregory and Jean wandered under the apple trees, great old things, cumbered with dead branches.

"They can't have made a cent from this place for years, and it would pay with a few hundreds put into it. But this eastern land, a lot of it, is just like the families, run to seed. The men who have enough kick in them to do anything go away. A place like this always makes me feel wonderfully business-like and efficient, as if I could make the dead thing live again."

"It doesn't make me feel business-like. It makes me feel vague and poetic and—and unresponsible. I can't imagine anything more peaceful than those old, useless, unfruitful things, all budded over with baby green. I wish humans could grow old like that, keeping the possibility of spring."

"That's properly vague and poetic, but I don't know that it would be such fun. Think of looking seventy and feeling twenty!"

"It would be better than looking seventy and feeling it. A wee bit of spring, every year, right to the end, would be better than none. Wouldn't it?"

Gregory laughed. "Half a loaf better than none? Not for me. I'd rather have nothing than a tantalizing dab like that."

A cold finger touched Jean's heart. Were their snatched hours more than a "dab," a half loaf to him? They were glorious hours, but after all they were only crumbs. Jean shook off the feeling, and her hand slipped into Gregory's.

"Well, when you're seventy and I'm sixty-five, you'll be so jealous of my little green leaves, you won't know what to do."

"Will I?" Gregory held her close and rubbed his cheek softly against her hair.

"We're never going to grow old and gnarled, Jeany."

"I'll come and stick a little green leaf on your deadest bough."

"Better give it to me now." Gregory turned her lips to his and kissed her. "That was a nice little leaf," he whispered.

They rambled on again, turning up dead leaves for the small celandine that peeped out in surprise that spring was really come. As they turned to go back, the clang of a bell, mellowed by distance, reached them.

"I'll race you." They started, Jean a yard ahead. In a moment Gregory was in front of her. He shook his head reprovingly.

"Why, Jean Herrick, I'm astonished! What would Dr. Fenninger say?"

"Put me under observation in a psychopathic ward."

Gregory kissed her in the hollow of her throat.

"For that, he'd commit me to Matteawan."

The midday dinner was a heavy affair, but both Jean and Gregory won Mrs. Morrison's approval by their appetites.

"I do despise to cook for them peckish people, that looks as if they was choking down every mouthful. We're all hearty eaters here; even Uncle treats his vittles like he enjoyed 'em."

The old man at the end of the table looked up. "You're a powerful good cook, Mary. I ain't never sat down to a meal at your table that didn't hit the mark."

He was a very old man, small and withered, with a wrinkled brown face and kind blue eyes that peered like the wildflowers from the dead leaves. His meal was a bowl of oatmeal, covered with yellow cream, and a special kind of brown bread on a blue willow plate. His defense of his niece's cooking was his only part in the conversation, but he filled the room with the sense of his presence. Like spring warmth from the frozen earth, peace radiated from him. When he had finished his cereal and cream he left the room.

Mary Morrison looked after him.

"He's the best man that ever lived. I've ate and slept in the same house with him for almost fifty years and I ain't never seen him cross or heard him say an unkind thing."

"He ain't got nothin' to cross him, ma; not that I'm saying he ain't good."

"There's always things to cross folks, when they're the crossin' kind. I never seen any one yet that couldn't git crossed, give 'em half a chance. Sometimes you shame me, Mattie, with that shaller talk."

The girl began scraping the plates without answering. Mrs. Morrison went on to Jean.

"Mattie here's the kind that no chip gets by, but life'll learn her. I kin remember when Uncle had things to upset anybody when he was younger, but he never let 'em. He'd just go off and read the Book a spell and come back among folks smilin'. Why, he's read the Bible clear through most two hundred times, and there's a stack of Christian Heralds out in the barn that reaches to the second loft. He don't read nothin' else and he reads 'em all the time."

Mattie carried off the scraped plates, and her mother gathered up the knives and forks. With the touch of the dirty dishes, she came back to her everyday manner.

"Now you folks kin do anything you like. There's some books on the shelf in the parlor, if you want to stay in, but most city folks want to be outdoors every minute. It's right pretty over in the woods, but the ground's damp yet, even in the sun. You'd better take a buggy robe; we got a lot of old ones in the barn fur that."

Jean was already at the door, when Mrs. Morrison added:

"I clear forgot to ask your names; seem like I always know people when they like the place."

Jean stepped into the outer hall.

"Murray," Gregory said after a brief pause.

"Murray. That's easy. We git some awful queer ones in summer, and I was never no good at names. Mattie has to keep 'em straight."

She passed through the swing door with the tray of forks and knives,

"It's Murray, Mattie; Mr. and Mrs. Murray," Jean heard her say.

Jean went quickly out into the sunshine. Gregory waited until his pipe was drawing well before he joined her.

For an hour they kept to the road that led up hill and then down into the dogwoods, just beginning to swell with spring. At last they spread the robe where the sun splattered through in golden pools and a little creek gurgled as if it had done something very sly and clever in stealing away from winter. Gregory lay with his head in Jean's lap and they talked, the silences growing longer and longer, until, looking down after an unusually long one, Jean saw that he was fast asleep.

It was the first time that Jean had ever seen Gregory asleep. She wanted, with an almost irresistible need, to draw him closer. The thought of Margaret Allen stabbed as it had never done before. Margaret had nothing that was hers, but she had so much less than was her own. And Gregory had so much less than was his. Between them Margaret stood, clutching with each hand a part of what was theirs, giving nothing in return.

Then the need to make Gregory happy, to yield for his happiness every scrap of herself, to give everything that was beautiful, to drown in this beauty the ugliness over which she had no control, and, if there was anything unbeautiful in their own relations, to make it perfect, swept Jean. There should be nothing but peace and content in her. Her hand moved lightly over Gregory's hair. It was thick and soft, with a deep wave that drew her hand.

Herrick's hair had been fine and rather silky. Again Jean wondered at the separateness of her two selves.

The sun was going when Gregory woke. He had slept deeply and woke with a dazed, child look in his eyes. Jean wished for a moment that he were really a child so that she could pick him up in her arms and carry him away, follow the sun, and never be separated any more.

"That was some sleep!"

"You almost snored."

"Impossible. Even my prosaic soul couldn't snore in the spring woods—with a lady."

He reached both arms and drew Jean's head down.

"Such a nice lady! I love her."

"I don't believe it. Sleeping! While the lady has to stay awake and drive away—malaria. Look, the sun has almost gone, it's only just touching the very edge of the farthest strip."

Gregory heard none of this. He was watching the light in Jean's eyes. They were so gray and deep, so like quiet pools, touched with sun, in which one could go down and down and never reach the bottom.

"I don't believe it," Jean repeated; "I can't possibly, in view, or rather sound of, the evidence."

"Then you shouldn't be here with me. To go off with a gentleman who doesn't love you! You ought to be ashamed."

"I'm not." Jean laughed and laid her face against his. His lips touched her chin. "Maybe I love him enough for both," she whispered.

"No—you—couldn't—love—him as much—as that, because he loves you—just that—much himself." Little kisses on her neck and cheek broke the words. And Jean felt part of the soft, black earth, the tang of the rotting leaves and the spring budding.

They walked back through the woods, chilly now that the sun was gone. It was dusk when they came to the road again. The lamp was lit and there was a homey smell of fried potatoes and fresh cake. Mattie had put on a clean dress and done her hair low on her neck. The break of outsiders had penetrated her consciousness and she was looking forward to the evening, Uncle John had already had his supper, and was reading the Bible in his armchair by the stove. There was no sign of Mattie's husband. But near the end of supper a wagon stopped.

"Good land, that'll be Jim, and we've et most everything clean."

"I'll scramble him some eggs, if it is. Don't you go fussin', ma. He ought to let us know."

But the wagon went on and no one came.

Jean insisted on drying the dishes and after the requisite amount of objection Mrs. Morrison gave her a towel. She often talked over with Mattie this strange eagerness of city women to do dishes. Mattie always concluded that it was only because they never did them any other time. But Jean really wanted to do them. She liked the feel of the low-raftered room, all skewed out of plumb with age, dim in the corners, where the lamplight did not touch. Through the uncurtained windows the fields stretched away under the cold night sky. They framed the warm comfort within, gave it a permanence it did not really have. With the filling of the dishpan Mrs. Morrison began a story of a family feud that had gone on for years and was all about a chicken, in the beginning. From time to time she stopped while she held long arguments with Mattie on exact names and dates. Jean caught snatches of it between her own thoughts.

At last the dishes came to an end, and Mrs. Morrison hung up the checked apron.

"Now, if you folks likes music, we got some pretty records and Mat'll be glad to work 'em fur you."

"You're coming, too?"

"I don't mind if I do, until it's time to set the bread. But I'm an early bedder, like most country folks. Now, Mattie, she'd stay up gassin' all night."

The girl frowned. "Country folks got such silly notions they fix to live by. You got to go to bed at seven so you kin git up at five, whether there's anything to git up fur or not."

"Honest, Mat, sometimes you make me think of old cousin Beggs that hadn't all her senses. If country folks didn't git up till the time you want 'em to, who'd feed the chickens?"

"Seems like most people just keep 'em so they can git up to feed 'em. Not more'n a third of 'em lays, anyhow. What tunes do you like, Mrs. Murray?"

"Won't the graphaphone wake the baby?" Jean made a last attempt to save herself and Gregory.

"He always wakes up round this time anyhow and he likes it. When he's old enough I'm goin' to git him music lessons."

"You have quite a little time to look around for a teacher! How old is he?"

"Four months. But it'll take all that time to find one in this hole." The first spark of mischief lit the girl's eyes. Mrs. Morrison laughed.

"Go along with you and put on 'I'm Waiting at the Gate.'"

She rolled down her sleeves, lowered the lamp and followed them. She sat on the step that raised the "parlor" from the living-room and leaned back against the door jamb, as if the Axminster rug and plush rockers with which the delightful old room was desecrated, was unfamiliar ground. Mattie put on the record and it began its wailing call for some one to meet some one else at the old gate and not to forget.

The woman in the door closed her eyes. Mattie sat beside the machine, her cheek in her hand, staring at the carpet. They were lost in the sentiment of words and music.

"Pa always liked that terrible," the woman murmured, as the plaint ended in a mournful throb. "Mattie used to play it by the hour fur him."

For a moment something fleeted across her face and Jean saw it in the face of the younger woman, too, hopeless longing, desire without strength to demand.

Was that it, the bond that had held them, pa and ma, and Mattie? Was that why the girl had married and stayed? Would the baby, too, generation after generation, until the stock died out?

As if in answer, a small cry came from the room beyond.

"You kin put 'em on. It's easy. I got to go."

She went out. Jean followed. In the center of a fourpost bed, an atom kicked its flannel-swathed legs and puckered its face for a real howl, if its first warning did not bring immediate attention. But as Mattie lifted it the puckers smoothed, the incipient howl turned into a gurgle.

"Some day I'm just goin' to let you howl and howl and howl until you get so hungry, you old greedyguts! Don't you think I've got anything to do but feed you? Hey, answer me!"

She kissed and tickled him and he writhed with delight.

"There, satisfied now, ain't ye?" She held him close and the baby's doubled fists dug into her breast. The only sound was the faint hiss of the baby's sucking. Suddenly the girl looked up.

"Got any babies?"

Jean shook her head.

"Been married long?"

Again Jean moved her head slowly in negation. Her eyes never turned from the small black head against the girl's white breast.

"It's just as well not to begin right off. I was a fool, but nobody told me. I'd like to have waited a while till I'd been somewhere and seen somethin', besides trees and chickens."

The baby made his first stop, withdrew his milky lips and smiled at Jean. She knelt and laid her chin in the warm crease of his neck.

"You ought to have one if you like 'em that much." The girl nodded backwards to the room behind. "He kind of looks like he might like 'em, but you never kin tell. Most men don't care a rap after they're here."

Jean got up. The baby went half-heartedly back to finish. The girl began rocking him and humming the refrain of the couple that never met by the gate after all. The baby's eyes closed. Jean tiptoed from the room.

Gregory lay on the couch reading. In the kitchen Mrs. Morrison was setting the bread. Jean drew a glass of cold water from the pitcher pump on the sink, drank it slowly and went upstairs without going again into the parlor.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Although for the last year Dr. Pedloe had objected to many things that Jean had done, he really was proud of the energy and magnetism that made her district better known than all the other districts combined. He had rather enjoyed reproving Jean, but had never considered removing her. Now, when he understood that she had not only thought of leaving, but was about to leave, he offered to raise her salary. Nothing else occurred to him.

"It's nice of you, and I appreciate your appreciation of what I have tried to do, but really, Dr. Pedloe, it is not a question of money, at all. I have just outgrown it. I am not making any criticism, but I feel stifled. I want a bigger coat. The old one is too tight."

To refer to the elaborate organization of which he had been the head for fifteen years, as an old coat possible to outgrow in six, annoyed and amused him.

"Really, Mrs. Herrick, I don't see where you are going to find a fitting garment. Expanding—er—coats are rather tricky garments."

The remark pleased him and he smiled.

"I have found one." Jean outlined her idea of a Woman's Congress, in time to grow to national proportions.

"It will take years, Mrs. Herrick."

"It may. And then, again, it may not."

"In the meantime it will be just as suffocating as anything else."

"That's where we don't agree. It's constructive. We shall be building towards something, slowly, no doubt, but surely. We shall not be—patching uselessly."

Dr. Pedloe's smile vanished. "I wish you every success, Mrs. Herrick. No doubt we can still be mutually helpful. If there is anything I can do, please believe that the patched coat is at your disposal. I understand that you wish to sever your connection by the end of the month?"

"I should like to very much. We are going to try and get into running order as a definite organization before the summer vacation takes every one out of town, and be ready to plunge in head first in the fall."

"I see."

"But of course, if you have no one in mind for my district, or would like me to stay on a few weeks to break in my successor——"

"I don't believe, Mrs. Herrick, I need to trespass on your new interest to that extent. I have in mind Miss Carlisle, of Upper West. She is much more fitted by experience and temperament for your district than for her own simple one. I have been wanting to put her in a larger field for some time."

"Then perhaps——"

Dr. Pedloe nodded. "I don't mean to suggest—but if you care to assume your new duties before the end of the month, I should not want you to feel that we stand in your way. You are taking Miss Grimes with you? Then Miss Carlisle might come down for a couple of days, shall we say the beginning of the week, to get a general idea of your office system. Would that be perfectly satisfactory?"

"Oh, quite. It's very kind of you to be so considerate."

Dr. Pedloe rose, his dignity saved. "Perhaps I shall call upon your organization some day for a return favor."

Jean wanted to wink at him, but she held out her hand.

"We shall be more than glad."

They shook hands, and Dr. Pedloe turned to his desk as if, in the half hour's talk, mammoth duties had accumulated. Jean let herself out.

Down on the sidewalk she stood still and laughed until she realized that people were staring.

"He did it, got it in by the tail, but got it. Fired, by Gosh!"

She could scarcely keep from telling Ben as he took her up in the elevator to her own office, or Miss Grimes, who was the only one in. But the former would have been so puzzled and the latter so indignant, that she refrained. Besides, only two people could get the full flavor, Mary and Gregory. She was going to have tea with him at half past four, and there was not a spare moment before that. Mary would have to wait.

In the privacy of her own office, Jean stood in the middle of the floor and stretched her arms to the spring air pouring in at the open window.

"It's going to be another glorious summer. A perfectly ripping summer."

Then she turned to work and refused to think of anything else until the clock struck four. On the first stroke she closed and locked the desk.

Usually Jean reached the tea-room first. She liked it so. She liked to be there a few moments ahead, to listen to the hum of women's voices, catch scraps of conversation from a world of other interests, and then, to look up and see Gregory cutting through it straight to her. It set her apart, made her a direct choice in a concrete way that never failed to make her heart give an extra throb.

But to-day Gregory was already there. He was sitting with his elbow on the table, his chin in his hand. With his free hand he traced idle designs on the tablecloth. At the sight of Jean he rose and drew out her chair, letting his hands rest for a moment on her shoulders, which was the only caress the publicity allowed. But as he took his own place again, Jean saw the worried look in his eyes. Gregory rarely came troubled to tea, and when he did, it took only a few moments to drive it away. Sometimes she liked him to be a little tired, for the joy of dissipating it.

"Well, how did things go to-day?" It was their stock beginning, but to-day there was a forced interest in the tone that struck through Jean's gayety.

"Great! I've been fired."

"That's a good cause for gratitude." For a moment they smiled in understanding of their own viewpoint. Then the tea and muffins came and Jean began to describe Dr. Pedloe's disapproval of her and all her works. Gregory listened and his eyes appreciated the points as Jean made them. But he offered no comments of his own and suddenly Jean wondered whether he was listening at all. Gregory never sat attending in that absent way. Fear crept on Jean, but she pushed it aside. If it were something serious he would tell her. But nothing very terrible could have happened in the twenty-four hours since she had seen him. His work was going well and he was pleased with the designs for the contest. Still he sat there, crumbling the muffin which he made no pretense of eating. Jean went on with the telling, but her own interest lessened.

Across the table, Gregory believed he was listening with the outward show of interest he always felt. But there was no real interest in him. For Puck was sick. She had been ailing for several days, and this morning the doctor had come, and after he had looked at Puck and talked a little with Margaret, he had telephoned for a nurse. Gregory's nerves were still taut with the anxiety of waiting for the doctor to come from Puck and tell him what was the matter. Like all persons unused to illness, he wanted the relief of a specific name. It localized the danger and brought the enemy into the open. He had steeled himself to anything, for Margaret's excited helplessness had ended in a burst of hysteria and he knew he would have to face it alone. Then the door of Puck's room had opened and the doctor beckoned to him. Puck's fever-bright eyes looked at him without recognition, and Gregory knew that if Puck died he would remember her always like that, so small in her white bed, with no smile of welcome for him, and unconscious of Lady Jane by her side.

"There is nothing to worry about, but I will be frank with you, there is a lot to look out for. Your child is one of the finest samples of modern, high-strung baby nerves that I have seen in a long while. That fever doesn't amount to anything and she will be up in a few days. It won't be necessary for me to come again, so I will tell you now, keep her back. She is too old for her years already. She has inherited a rather hysterical nervous tendency, but she's got a will of iron too. She rarely cries, does she? No, I thought not. If she threw things around and had what old-fashioned parents used to call 'a bad temper,' she would let off the steam that way. But she doesn't. We grown-ups forget all about our own childhood. There, I guess that's all. Keep her back. Don't reason with her too much. She thinks too hard, anyhow. A little of the plain old-style faith in what mother says or father says is wonderfully restful, like believing in God when we grow up. See that she has other children to play with, and keep an eye on her yourself. We men so often think that children are—any woman's special province."

Gregory had sat on beside Puck's bed until the nurse came. And for the first time since they had put Puck, a wailing mite, into his arms, he had felt helpless, inadequate, lost in the problem of the small person, so distinctly a bit of himself. And of Margaret....

He had come to meet Jean, full of the need to talk about this, to get a little of her sanity. But now, sitting opposite her, he could not do it. It belonged so completely to the world outside their world. How could he tell any one, Jean least of all, this fear that Puck might grow up like her mother? For the first time, tea with Jean was an effort, held something of the same quality that the forced cheerfulness of dinners with Margaret had. As he crumbled his muffin and listened, Gregory tried to be just. It was not fair to Jean to drag his worries into their hour, but the effort to keep them out tangled his already too complex world almost to breaking.

Jean watched the nervous working of his fingers and her fear grew. Something must be very wrong. Her longing to comfort him struggled with her pride against asking a confidence he might not wish to give. At last pride went to defeat.

Jean covered his hand with hers.

"What is it, Gregory? You look worried to death."

Her touch assured him sympathy. He would tell her. What? Ask her to understand all that Puck meant to him? Show her a part of his life that she did not touch at all?

"Out with it." The forced gayety of the tone rasped. He wanted to withdraw his hand. Where was the boasted intuition of feminine love? Why didn't Jean know what he wanted to tell her? The firm fingers pressed his, as if to give him courage. He looked up. Jean was waiting with a calm strength in her eyes. What on earth did she think was the matter? The situation became suddenly overtuned and ridiculous. Gregory pushed back his chair and rose.

"Nothing, really. Have I been such an awful bore? I'm sorry, but I'm terribly tired. I was up all night."

"Why?"

Jean's eyes, on a level with his own, demanded the truth. Gregory felt trapped and angry.

"Oh, that damned contest. I've been working for the last two weeks on the wrong tack." He held her coat and Jean turned to slip her arms into the sleeves.

What a silly she had been! As if any man ever lost a night's sleep and was the same the next day. After all, she was rather like Martha sometimes. Jean smiled to herself.

As he turned up the collar of her coat, Gregory's fingers brushed her cheek. She turned her head and kissed them swiftly.

"Well, rub it out and do it over again, because you know you're going to win."

Gregory met the nurse in the hall. She carried Lady Jane in her arms and smiled reassuringly.

"She is ever so much better. She had a fine sleep and woke with no fever at all. She asked for you."

Puck was propped up with pillows, her eyes fastened on the door waiting for Lady Jane. At the sight of Gregory she wriggled with delight.

"Well, Pucklets, all better?"

He sat down on the side of the bed and put an arm about her. Lady Jane was forgotten. Puck reached up and stroked his cheek. It was an old gesture of Margaret's, and brought back sharply the days of his brief engagement when, sitting on the arm of Margaret's chair before the library fire, with the slender grace of her pressed near, he had wanted sometimes to crush her to him. But always she had seemed to sense the ferocity of his mood and to stave it off by this gentle stroking of his cheek, as she might have quieted her pet Angora. Gregory drew a little beyond the reach of Puck's touch, and she nestled to him.

"Quite all well, Puckie, sure?"

Puck nodded. "I got all better when I went to sleep. I can get up to-morrow, can't I, Miss Burns?"

"I don't know about that, but very soon, if you're a good girl and don't talk to father too much."

"I won't." Puck's lips snapped as if she were never going to say another word and the nurse went out laughing.

Gregory's hold tightened. He had always thought of Puck as another self, very small and feminine, but still a great part of himself. Now he knew that she was Margaret, too. And something else, beyond them both. She was herself. She was a part of his experience, his reaction, his fate. And yet her own experience, her own reaction, her fate could never be his. Sitting with his arms tight about Puck, who soon fell asleep, Gregory felt the terrible isolation of every living soul. No one could ever reach another. He and Margaret were worlds apart. They had never really touched at all. They had created Puck and Puck was distinctly herself and apart. She would grow up and marry and have children of her own....

Gregory put Puck back on the pillow and tiptoed from the room. Annie was just bringing in the soup. In a few moments he and Margaret were eating, and Margaret was retailing the misfortunes of the Burns family, which had forced pretty Gertrude Burns to take up nursing.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

At the end of the week Miss Burns left and in a few days Puck was running about the house as usual. The only reminder that something had changed somewhere in his world, were the advertisements of summer resorts that littered Margaret's desk. The doctor had ordered "bracing air, salt water and everything as unlike the city as possible." So Gregory rented their own bungalow on Long Island to Benson for the summer and tried to be patient with Margaret in her search. She finally decided on a small boarding house in Maine, as far from civilization as she could get, where there were other children for Puck to play with. Margaret did not expect to enjoy the summer and measured her devotion to Puck by the degree of her own discomfort.

Puck was not told until it was necessary to pack Lady Jane's things. Then she was hysterical with excitement at the idea of going "a long, long way on a boat." She invested Maine with all the magic details of Gregory's bed-time stories. But when she found that he was not coming with them, her joy died as suddenly as if it had been turned off with a spigot.

"I don't want to go 'a long, long way on a boat' without my daddy." She squared her shoulders and looked quietly at Margaret.

"But it's too far, dear. Daddy has to stay and work for us and we mustn't tease him."

"I don't want my daddy to stay and work for us."

"But, Puck, it's a lovely place, with the great big green sea rolling in almost to the house and little boats to go out in when it's calm."

"I don't want the sea to roll into the house, and who'll take me out in the little boats?"

"The man will. He takes all the children every day."

"I don't think I want to go."

Margaret did not argue the matter further and went on packing the trunks. Puck, however, stopped all preparations and sat with her brows drawn in a frown exactly like Gregory's, hugging Lady Jane.

She did not run to meet Gregory that night and through dinner scarcely spoke. Gregory watched her anxiously. At half past eight, without being told, she went to get ready for bed.

"What's the matter with Puck?"

"I had to tell her this afternoon that you can't come with us."

Gregory put down the evening paper. "I suppose you exaggerated it's being a long way, and she thinks she's going to the ends of the earth?"

"You needn't be rude. Please remember that it will be no particular pleasure taking a nervous child on a sea trip alone."

"Damn!"

Margaret bit her lip. "If you could control your temper until we're out of the way, it would help. I have had about all I can stand with her and finding the place and settling the details."

Gregory was ashamed of his outburst. After all, Margaret could not help being herself and he was sorry for her in an impersonal way.

"But I wish you wouldn't talk so much about her nerves. A baby scarcely six. You'll make her so."

"I don't think you can tell me anything about Puck that I don't know. Remember, I am with her all day, not just at night in time to tell her stories. If any one excites and makes her nervous, it's you. Remember, you never hear the versions of those stories she gives Lady Jane."

Margaret had used this shaft so often that the barb had dulled. "Well, she's not going to have any of them for some time."

Puck's bare feet pattered along the hall and she entered ready for her bed in her little white pajamas, that buttoned up the back out of her reach. Gregory buttoned them and swung her into his lap.

"Where's Lady Jane? Is she too tired for a story to-night?"

"Lady Jane don't feel like stories to-night."

"Dear me! She's not sick, is she?"

"No, she's not sick, really. But she isn't very happy."

Across Puck's head, Margaret made warning signs to Gregory to drop the subject, but his hold only tightened and he rubbed his chin on Puck's soft hair.

"That's too bad, Puckie. What's she unhappy about?"

Puck herself had been warned not to mention Maine but nothing had been said about Lady Jane. And Lady Jane was desperately unhappy, almost as miserable as Puck herself.

"I—don't—think—she wants to go to—Maine."

"Oh, she'll like it after she gets there. Especially if you take Priscilla and Dorothy along too."

"They don't want to go either."

"Well, I'll tell you what we'll do. You go along with mother on Monday, and then, if you want Lady Jane or Priscilla, I'll bring them when I come."

Puck jerked upright in his arms. They looked at each other. Slowly Puck smiled. Gregory smiled back. With his hands on the slight shoulders, he looked into her eyes.

"I can't come up with you and mother, Pucklets, but I'll come later, before the summer is over and stay a whole month."

There was a pause during which Margaret wondered why men were so annoying. Without a doubt, Gregory had intended to come up, but it was just like him to give no one the satisfaction of knowing it.

"I think, daddy, I'll take Lady Jane and Priscilla. You couldn't take care of them very well, could you?"

"I think that would be better. I don't quite understand about their food," he added, remembering suddenly that Lady Jane and Priscilla were in the stage of being babies for the last two weeks.

Puck cuddled into his arms with a deep sigh of relief. Her tottering world was stable again.

"Tell me about Pergameleon," she demanded, and Gregory obeyed with the garbled version that passed for the story between them.

A week later he saw them off on the boat and came back to Gramercy Park to have dinner with Jean.

It was going to be a happy summer.

After much deliberation Dr. Mary had taken a second year's leave from the Neighborhood House, and gone to London for the summer to study conditions in the East End. The house was theirs.

Gregory felt young and carefree as he touched the bell button, with the one long and two short, that was his ring.

Enveloped in a kitchen apron, her hands covered with flour, Jean opened the door.

"Why, how do you do?"

"How do you do? I thought I should find Dr. MacLean. She's not in?"

"No, I'm sorry, but she's just run over to London for a minute. Will you leave a message?"

"If I may. Will you tell her, please, that you're the most glorious thing in the world and I love you?"

The last words were buried in the warm smoothness of Jean's neck. She turned her head and their lips met.

"Now, if you'll go and take off your coat and put on an apron you can help me make some Martha Norris biscuits."

Gregory did as he was told, and they got dinner together. Afterwards they went into the living-room where they had sat so often the summer before, good friends, disturbed in no way by the presence of the little doctor, and Jean wondered what power had arranged this summer, so far beyond her dreams. Mary in London, Margaret and Puck in Maine, beyond the reach of week-ends even. There was only Martha.

Deep in the leather chair, with Gregory's arms about her, his fingers moving gently over her cheek and throat, Jean wished that Martha would go away too. She wanted them all out of her life, every one, for the next three months. Beyond that she did not think.

It was perfect. So perfect that Jean marveled and was humble. The days themselves, the actual passing of time took on personality. As the givers of happiness, the hours became conscious. They were servants bringing gifts.

Jean's duties were light and she and Gregory spent a part of each day together. The quiet tea-room was now a thing of the past, so far in the past that Jean smiled whenever she remembered how homelike it had once seemed. They had long, lazy afternoons on the sands of nearby beaches, making comments on the human shadows that moved beyond their own world of reality. They chattered like children or were silent as the mood dictated. They had dozens of gay meals, like the first they had prepared on the night that Margaret and Puck had left. And quiet hours in the warm stillness of the summer nights, with the voice of the city coming in echoes over the dusty trees of the Park. These were the best of all. In those moments it seemed to Jean that their souls mingled, and that the law of each human soul's separateness was set aside for their benefit.

Hampered only by such demands as Jean felt to be her duty to Martha, the weeks slipped by. Ringed about by their freedom, Jean felt that their love was striking into a deeper and deeper reality. A quality of peace and security enveloped it that she did not know had been lacking before. Its roots went down below her personality, the accident of her "Jeanness," down into the stuff of life itself. Often, when she and Gregory sat silent, Jean felt that this love was not theirs at all; they were the possessed, not the possessors.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

The third week in August, Dr. Mary returned. She came without warning, so that, late in the afternoon, when Jean came rushing in to start dinner, she stopped, staring at the figure upon the couch with surprise so intense that it deprived her of motion.

"Sunstroke, Jean?" Mary threw back the two braids of white hair, drew the hideous blue dressing gown closer and put on her slippers.

"Mary!"

"The same. Come in and sit down, won't you?"

Jean smiled and managed to get her arms about Mary and hug her.

"Well, that's more like it." Mary paddled back to her couch and Jean dropped beside her. "My, but it's good to be home again."

"We've missed you," Jean ventured and when she heard the ease of her own tone, a little courage came back. "Now, begin at the beginning and tell me the whole thing."

To her relief, Mary did. Jean listened with a fixed smile of understanding, made the expected comments, laughed in the right places, and waited for the one long and two short rings that meant Gregory. While Mary disposed in scathing terms of all English Social Betterment work, Jean wondered whether she had seen the fruit and vegetables that must be waiting on the dumb-waiter and how to explain them. As far as Mary knew, Gregory had dropped from their lives. And any moment, it would come, the one long and two short, and she would have to say something.

"I tell you, Jean, I thought there was no brand of human left alive, who could make me despair of the race. But a middle class Englishman does. He's insulated, absolutely insulated in his own righteousness. He would rather——"

There it was, the one long and two short.

"Good Heavens! Jean, are you giving a party? I saw a whole box of things on the waiter."

"No. It's only Gregory. I stumbled into him accidentally one day and, now the family's in Maine, he comes to dinner sometimes."

"Well, I'll be darned. What was the matter with him? Did you ever find out?"

"Never asked him," Jean remarked from the door. "I forgot all about it, myself. I don't believe he ever thought it needed any."

"A regular homefest! Run along and open the door. I won't bother to change my things."

Jean opened the door, but before Gregory could take her in his arms, she stepped back with a warning look.

"You're much too early! I haven't even begun to get dinner." She motioned to the living-room. "Mary," her lips formed.

"Hell!" Gregory almost said it aloud.

"Well, go into the other room and wait as patiently as you can," she whispered.

Jean went into the kitchen. The table was strewn with the things for dinner just as Mary had dumped them out. Jean's eyes filled with tears. "I won't let it end, I won't, I won't." In the other room she heard Gregory's well-feigned surprise and Mary's laugh.

Jean put on her apron and began to get dinner. Mary's anecdotes flowed on like a river, breaking every now and then on the rock of Gregory's laughter. After all, perhaps it did not make so much difference to him. Last evening they had sat for almost an hour, silent, with their hands linked across the intervening space between the chairs and Jean had been wonderfully happy. Had he been happy, too? How did she know that he had not been a little bored? Jean's eyes blurred and the tomato she was peeling slipped into the sink with a plop.

"You fool. What do you expect? She is interesting and he can't sit there like a statue." Jean scooped up the tomato and threw it viciously into the garbage pail.

"Jean! Oh, Jean, come here a minute," Gregory called. "Do it again for Jean. It's a scream."

Mary twitched the dressing gown so that it trailed like a royal robe and twisted the white hair into a knob not unlike a coronet.

"Mamie Horton, of Chicago, now Duchess Mary of Belfort, doing the East End, visiting a family of eight living on three dollars a week." The doctor's face froze into a mask of horror and she pointed dramatically to what was supposed to be the laborer's dinner table. "Most unhygienic. I will send you a case of shredded wheat to-morrow!"

"Never, Mary. That's too much. You've spoiled it."

"Well, it wasn't shredded wheat, but it was just as bad. Jean, I longed for you. If there had been anything in thought transference you would have hopped on the next boat. You think your committee is bad! You ought to see real caste at the business. And worse than that are the Mamie Hortons. Why, when I told a group of the reals and the pseudos, at a luncheon, about the tenements, and how you had raised the money and had the whole thing going in a few months, they stared at me, and Horton actually said: 'Reahlly,' in that exasperating English voice that means: 'You're a liar.' It takes a year to call a meeting over there."

"I suppose she wouldn't believe the evidences of her senses if she saw them. They're finished except a few last touches."

"Not really, Jean!"

"Infected, Mary! 'Not reahlly!'"

"Score! But, Jean, you don't mean they're all ready for tenants? I hope they're not in yet."

"They will be in another week."

Dr. Mary bounced out of her chair. "Let's go out and see them."

"What? Now?"

"Yes, now. It won't take long. Gregory can call a taxi while I get on my clothes. You don't know how I've come to love those things, Jean. Whenever that cumbersome machine of 'British thoroughness' lumbered over me I used to say,

"There's a land that is fairer than day,

Where things get done right away."

"What's the objection to going now? Won't the food keep?"

"If you've made up your mind, it doesn't matter whether the food keeps or not. I don't suppose there is any reason not to go, except that you ought to be tired."

"I almost died resting for the last five days. I could walk there."

Jean went back to take off her apron and Gregory followed.

"It'll be better than staying here," he whispered, with his arms about her. "And it was going to be such a nice evening."

Jean patted his cheek. "Never mind. We'll have a lot more. Now run along and call a taxi."

Dr. Mary was indefatigable. She insisted on inspecting every floor and getting the view from every side. And, in the end, she pronounced it "a darn good job." But Jean did not feel it was "a job" at all. It was a bit of her life and Gregory's. It was built of the hours they had spent together. It was not an insensate thing. It was alive. She and Gregory had created it. Her hand moved on the clean, white wall.

"You nice living thing. Make everybody well and don't let anybody die."

Jean smiled. It was somewhat like a prayer.

When there was nothing left but the solarium on the roof, they sat down to rest on one of its green benches. In the afterglow, the East River ran a stream of gold. The span of the bridges hung airy webs in the heat-hazed air. Far below little tugs chugged up and down, whistling. The gray of their smoke filtered through the gold, softening it to filmy gauze. But across the river, on the workhouse island, a bell clanged. From the last sunny spots, old men and women came reluctantly, and the hideous red buildings swallowed them, one by one. Soon they would all be asleep, the old men in their wards and the old women in theirs. Perhaps in the night some would die quietly in their sleep. In the morning the superintendent would look up the names on the books, notify any relatives he could find, and send blanks to charity organizations that there was room for a few more of the homeless old.

Not one of them had ever expected it to end like that. The race had speeded faster and faster, beyond their strength. They had stumbled, gone down, and been trampled under. Strong in the faith of their own ability, she and Mary and Gregory, all the well-groomed men and beautiful gowned women about them, went securely on. But what guarantee had they that this strength would last forever? Each human being was such a tiny obstruction, a mere grain of sand against the force of a terrific current. Even in the small trickle of the stream which one called one's own personal affairs, it was impossible to guide the force. Here was the course of her summer twisted suddenly by an event over which she had no control.

"I won't let it. I will have the next four weeks."

"A penny, Jean. You look as if you were settling the affairs of nations."

"I was doing what mummy calls 'guiding Providence.'"

"Too strenuous for summer, Jean. Leave it 'til winter."

"No. 'Now's the appointed time.' 'To-night the Lord may come.' Hence, you and Gregory go home alone, Mary. I go to Jersey. I've had a revelation."

Nor would Jean let Gregory go even to the ferry with her, but insisted that he go back and hear more of the East End.

"But, dear, I want to see you terribly to-night. I want——"

He had dropped behind as they were following Mary out so that for a moment he and Jean were alone. Jean smiled and shook her head.

"Can't be helped. I've got to go really. Besides it's—it's your revelation too."

"I don't want any revelation. I want you," he added hotly.

"So do I, that's why I'm going." The words came in a low rush, and then Mary was looking back to them.

But it was only when Jean actually stood with her finger on the button of Pat's bell, that she realized how astonished Pat would be, and how she had neglected Pat and the babies that summer. And once Pat had known almost every thought that crossed her mind.

"I'm besotted, absolutely dippy, and I'd use God Almighty if I needed Him."

The door opened and Pat herself stood gazing as if she doubted the evidence of her senses.

"Jean!"

Two small naked figures, lurking in the shadow of the upper landing, came tumbling down at their mother's cry and Jean was lost in a tangle of arms and legs.

"Jean! It's Auntie Jean!"

"Jeanie, Frank!" Pat clutched at the waving legs, while Jean held them closer and laughed across at Pat.

"At least they're glad to see me, Pat, and you've only shrieked 'Jean!'"

"I am so glad to see you, Mrs. Herrick. Won't you come in? I was just putting the children to bed."

"So I see. And we're going right on with the process." Jean hoisted her namesake to her shoulder and started for the stairs, dragging the rotund Frank by the hand.

When they were safely tucked in and Jean had recounted as much of the old witch who was turned into a gingerbread house as she could remember, and promised to come soon, "very, very soon, lots soon," Pat turned off the light and she and Jean went down to the cool dark piazza. And then, for the first time, in her gratitude for the darkness, Jean realized how deeply she hated to lie to Pat. She would have given much to be able to throw both arms about Pat and say:

"Patsy, I want you to help me. I want you to take mummy out of the way. I want this last month, free and beautiful for the most glorious thing in my life. There is only one little month left, Pat, four short weeks, and I want them so."

"I thought you were never going to come any more, Jean, and I was beginning to get 'hurt,' like mummy."

"It wasn't because I didn't want to come." Jean looked out into the moonlit garden. "But I've been terribly busy, and mummy hasn't been well. The words left Jean with the feeling that something very deep inside her had been ripped out.

"Mummy not well? Why, Jean, what's the matter?"

"I don't know, Pat. You know she never complains and would sit up in her coffin to explain that she was perfectly well. But she isn't. I want her to go away for a rest, but you know how likely she is to do that. I can't go along, too."

"The summer has been a fright. Even Frankie got rather peaked last month, and it takes a great deal to wear an ounce off him."

There was a short pause, and then Jean added, with an effort at a laugh:

"Perhaps she's just homesick for a little trouble or illness. Now if Elsie lived in some nice quiet suburb and was going to have one of her horrible babies, or Tom would cut off a leg, she'd pack up and be right there on the dot."

"And you're so disgustingly efficient and healthy! Poor mummy, you were never meant for her daughter. I say, do you suppose she would come over here if I could develop something that doesn't have to show? I couldn't turn pale or faint, not to save me, never did in my life, but I might manage a general breakdown. Worry over the children and Big Frank's raise in salary?"

Jean looked away. "Are you sure it would be all right? She loves the babies and she would come in a minute, if she thought you needed her."

"Well, I do. I'll 'phone her to-morrow."

"She'll come—and thanks, Patsy."

Blurred by the porch screening, a small patient face looked quietly at Jean. Jean got up quickly.

"Let's go inside, Pat. I believe it's cooler."

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

Gregory Allen had never intended to let three months pass without telling Jean of his promise to go to Maine. But at first his going had seemed a distant point, and then, as it crept nearer and nearer, the right moment for the telling never came. Now, how could he say: "I am going to Maine to-morrow for a month. I promised Puck when she was ill." He had said nothing of the illness at the time. How drag out his own state of mind on the afternoon he had had tea with Jean and lied to her?

Gregory wished that Jean would say something, almost anything, to break the silence. Not a soul seemed to be alive in the great building about them. On the river occasional excursion steamers turned their dazzling flashlights, lighting the room and Palisades to uncanny, whitish glow. They were huge phantoms moving in the stillness. All the worlds of the universe hung motionless in perfect adjustment. Jean sat utterly at rest, so near him that by the smallest motion he could touch her. But Gregory did not move.

"Did you ever feel anything so restful? It's positive, the silence, not negative. Listen to it. I could almost 'go into the silence' myself, if I didn't have to shut my eyes and concentrate. If I could keep them open and—and dissolve instead. I believe it would be rather restful."

"Do you?"

If he hacked at this peace with words he would force an opening through which an opportunity might come, and Jean would know that he did not want to go, except for his promise to Puck. But Jean drifted back into the stillness again and it seemed to Gregory that she actually dissolved into the unfathomable silence.

With a nervous gesture he rose at last.

"It's almost two o'clock."

Jean laughed. "Frightful. What will the hallboy think?"

But Gregory did not answer the laugh. He had yet to tell Jean, and now there was no time to lead up to it. He had to say baldly: "I am going away to-morrow."

Jean was smiling at him.

"There's no need to look so desperately serious about it, Mr. Allen, I just mention it casually."

"It is late, and I have to be up early." Gregory said and went into the hall for his hat. "I'm going up to Maine to-morrow for a month and I have several things to do before I go."

It seemed hours before he could pull against the force holding him where he was and turn to Jean. She had followed him and was standing near, the teasing smile still in her eyes. For a moment they looked at each other and then Jean said:

"It will be glorious up there now, but—don't forget—the contest closes the first of October."

In his relief Gregory took Jean's hands and bent cavalierly over them.

"Your command, Fair Lady, is obeyed. I promise not to forget." He did not trust himself to kiss her again and went quickly.

Was there another woman in the world like Jean? The sanity of her love made everything possible. In its light even the month ahead did not loom so gloomily. There would be happy hours playing with Puck and good, stiff work to finish the plans in time.

Jean stood for a long time in the hall and then went slowly back and sat down by the window. Something had struck her violently and stunned her power to feel. She saw it as distinctly outside herself, and at the same time it was in some way connected with her. It was like a part of her which Gregory's words had suddenly cut away.

There they lay separated from her, the deep peace and security of the summer, the assurance of her own sensations, that wonderful clarity in which she had seen their love and perfect understanding. And there had been no understanding at all. The world that they both ignored, because it was not a real world, was a real world to him. It was not only real to him, but he must believe that it was so to her. Otherwise he would have told her before.

Jean looked stupidly about the room. Last night she had come back from Pat's and found Martha reading by the table. This morning, at breakfast, Pat had telephoned, and she had helped pack Martha's few things and taken her to the Tube. After that she had rung up Gregory and they had stolen the afternoon together. It was only a few hours ago that they had come in, the first time Gregory had ever been here.

It was all exactly like a game she had played when she was a child. It had been a game of much elaborate preparation. It had required the most violent upheavals of the doll's house, terrific cleaning and washing of everything. Martha always made special cookies and Jean was given ten cents for lemons and candy. Early in the morning of the day itself, Jean began telephoning along the clothes-line to imaginary guests. But no guests ever came to the party, because no children lived near, and in the end Jean had always had her party alone.

At dawn, weary with the endless round, Jean went to bed.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

Mary had decided to stay on and work for an M. A. at Columbia. She was busy choosing courses of study and quarreling with professors about prerequisites, so Jean, by pleading extra work herself, managed to keep away from Gramercy Park for the first days of Gregory's going.

In the morning she went to the office and at night she came back. She tried to read and turned page after page with a detached sense of accomplishment in which all understanding of the words was lost. Finally, one night, when she had read from eight till eleven, and found that it was not the same book she had been reading so dutifully for days, Jean threw it across the room, and, standing defiantly in the center of the floor, faced the thoughts that she had refused entrance since the morning she had crept to bed in the gray dawn.

"Well? What are you going to do about it? What can you do about it? Why is this any different from his going away for a week-end?"

With her hands in the side pockets of her skirt, Jean paced up and down. It was the way she straightened tangles in her work, and the familiar rhythm seemed to throw this problem to an impersonal distance, beyond the haze of her own emotions.

"Well? What are you going to do? Are you going around always clouded up in this tragedy? He isn't any more married now than he was in the beginning, and you knew it from the very first. You knew he had duties and obligations. You rather prided yourself on your logical attitude toward them. You weren't being logical. You couldn't deny them because they were right there in front of you. But the first minute you got a chance to close your eyes, you shut them so tight that—that it's taken an operation to open them."

Jean stopped before the window and leaned with both hands on the sill, frowning into the night.

"He would have gone on living his life and so would you, and you would have done your work, too, if you had never met at all. Yes, you would, and so would he." The corners of Jean's lips twitched, for always before, when she had thought of Gregory's home, she had thought of it as something he had acquired by accident, not as something that he had made, an expression of himself. "We do mean something to each other, something terribly real, but it won't be real, if you begin to mess it up with jealousy. That's what it is—jealousy. You know that nothing in the world could have dragged you out of town this summer and you're mad and hurt and jealous clear through. There! Put that in your pipe and smoke it whether you like the flavor or not."

Jean began walking again. She went very carefully through the summer, picking up the happy hours from the scattered heap into which Gregory's going had shattered them, and built them anew.

"The trouble was that you never recognized the conditions; all you did was to ignore them, until you came to believe they weren't there." Again and again Jean dragged this fact forward from the background into which it was always slipping. "You never mentioned his wife or Puck and you slopped it all over with 'delicacy and broad-mindedness.' You were afraid, that's what you were, whether you knew it or not."

Jean came to a halt again in the middle of the room.

"Now, Jean Norris, from now on you're going to face things as they are. You are not going to ignore the existence of his wife, or of Puck. You're either going to—or quit."

But the idea of quitting was so ridiculous that Jean laughed out loud.

At the end of the week she wrote a long, cheerful letter to Gregory and went to have dinner with Mary.

Gregory answered by return mail. He said he was working on the plans, which were getting along, but he was so sick of them he didn't know whether they were good or bad. He never mentioned the country nor how he passed his time when he was not working. Only at the very end there was a line clear across the paper of extremely thin and wobbly columns, under which he had printed: "These are the other boarders. Christian Scientists."

Jean kissed the letter and tore it up. "I don't want to take to 'carrying it in my bosom.'"

A week later Jean came home early one night, after a cheerful evening with Mary, to find Martha quietly mending under the lamp.

"Why, mummy Norris!" Jean took Martha's sewing and laid it on the table. Squatting on her heels, she grinned with mock reproof. "Why, Mrs. Norris, may I ask? Did I tell you you could come home?"

Martha's eyes twinkled. "You may be a very important person in the outside world, Jeany, but you're my baby yet, and I think I'll come and go a few years longer without asking permission. Besides, Pat is all right and has a thousand times more sense than you have and is far better able to look out for herself." Martha pointed to the mending on the table.

"It's not inability, mummy, it's a question of belief. It's an economic principle. Why should I mend stockings when I ought to be resting my mammoth brain for further world efforts? And if I could make you understand, think of the extra pennies some poor woman might earn."

"Economics! Fiddlesticks!"

"All right! I'll bring you home a brochure to-morrow on Conserving Mental Waste. Maybe you'll believe it when you see it in print."

"You'll never make me believe it's good economics or anything else, to wear stockings like those." Martha held up a pair run from heel to knee, with a great gap at the toes.

"And you'll never make me believe it isn't a wicked waste of time to mend them like that." Jean seized a pair from the neat pile. "You can't tell which was the original thread and which was the mend."

"I suppose it would be all right if I mended them so they would hurt your feet. After all, Jean, logic is not your strong point, whatever you or your brochures may say."

Jean hugged her. "I'm rather coming to that belief myself, mummy. What time did you get back?"

"About five. I didn't suppose you came home to dinner, but——"

"Mummy, is there some sherbet in the ice-box?"

"I——"

"Is there some mousse in the ice-box?"

"There is."

"And is it pineapple? Answer me!"

"I rather think I did make pineapple."

"What's the matter with my logic, now?"

Martha laughed and picked up the mending. "It's not the same thing at all, but you'll only talk me down anyhow. So go and get the sherbet. I believe I'll have some, too."

While they ate it Martha talked of Pat and the children and for some reason Jean felt that life was safe and sure again. There could be nothing very terrible in a world where little children said the delightful things that Pat's babies did, where women like Mary kept their belief and enthusiasm undimmed, and the Marthas thoughtfully made pineapple mousse as a surprise.

Four weeks to the day, Gregory wired that he would be back and to keep Sunday for a walk. The world was a nice place, a very nice place, indeed.

Sunday was a day of blue haze and golden sun.

"It was made expressly for us; I ordered it," Gregory declared, as he and Jean swung along, under arching maples that were just beginning to turn crimson, with here and there a brilliant scarlet leaf among the green. The fences were buried under honeysuckle and wild blackberries. The summer was passing in one last passionate abandonment of giving. The bare brown earth, freed from the burden of crops, like a woman released from family cares, went back to its youth. The air was pungent with the sting of sun-warmed loam. The old world frolicked in a second love.

Gregory felt that he was physically leaving the dismal month through which he had just passed, behind him. He strode along and knew in every nerve that Jean was there beside him, just as strong and unwearying as he, stepping step for step with him. He had thought of her so, very often in the last four weeks, even when he was wading out into the breakers with Puck perched on his shoulders, beating his chest with her small, hard heels and shrieking with delight.

Gregory seized Jean's hand and they shot down the green-roofed lane. Terrified birds winged with shrill calls into the blue and an old cow, chewing her cud in a quiet corner, lumbered away to safety. At the end of the lane, Gregory stopped unexpectedly and Jean spun round him like a top at the end of a string.

"Gregory! Whatever's struck you?" In the circle of his arms Jean got back her breath.

"The earth and you, a most intoxicating combination."

Between each word Gregory kissed her. Jean rested against his clasped hands. "Well, don't make me drunk too. One's enough."

"Do I make you drunk, Jeany?" Gregory whispered and leaned to the white hollow of her throat. But Jean suddenly dodged under his arms and stood off, laughing at him.

"All right. But I'll make you answer me later."

The color ran under Jean's skin and then Gregory laughed.

"But I am so awfully glad to see you, Jean. I've got to take it out in something."

"So am I." They were now in step again. "I missed you terribly." Jean paused and added, looking off over a brown field to the right. "You're lots better at drawing than at writing, Gregory. You didn't tell me a thing. How's Puck and all the wobbly row of Christian Scientists?"

"You ought to have seen her. She did her best, but Lady Jane hasn't the right kind of eyes and they wouldn't close." He bubbled over in amusement. "You can't speak to Divine Mind with your eyes open, it seems, and so Puck has to stay out."

Jean visioned Margaret going "into the silence," for evidently she belonged, and wondered which of the wobbly columns she was.

"Is everybody in it?"

"Everybody. It was a regular epidemic. If I had stayed up there another week, First Principle would have got me sure."

Suddenly Gregory realized that they were talking about Puck and Margaret and his life in that other world. He wondered how it had begun, but before he could think back, Jean was asking:

"I suppose that means an end of economics and uplift generally? I imagine Divine Mind isn't a thing one shares with garbage or child labor."

"Hardly. 'Full realization' is a terribly absorbing state."

It was strange to be talking like this to Jean. But it was a relief. He had always felt that Jean understood, but it was nice not to have to think ahead always, to loosen the curb once in a while.

"Better than Montessori or garbage anyhow."

"Heaps."

They spoke no more of Puck or Margaret but both felt that something, somewhere, had changed. What had seemed perfect before was a little more perfect now.

Gregory told her of the plans, the final week of work, and how he had mailed them at the last possible moment.

"And if I win, I'm going to see that along with the valuables buried under the corner stone, goes a picture of the one who made it all possible."

"Who might that be?"

Gregory did not answer.

"Me?"

He nodded. His hand claimed hers.

"I shall have to have one taken then, and I've never had one since I was old enough to rebel."

"Oh, no, you won't. I'm going to draw it myself."

"What will I look like? Please don't make me in two sections, like Mary."

"You're like this." Gregory sketched a tower. It was the square Roman tower, but the top was blurred. Jean pointed to the blur.

"What is that?"

"That is a ray of sunshine."

"Silly," Jean whispered, and kissed him.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

The dead year was buried in a flare of gold and scarlet. For a little while the gray sky hung low over the earth, and chill winds blew through the empty world. Then the gorgeous dead season was forgotten and winter settled in earnest.

Jean laid away the memory of summer. Again she met Gregory in the tea-room and they were happy in the isolation of the alcove. On Saturdays, when it snowed too heavily for tramping, they went to matinées and sat through many driveling plays. They rarely spoke of Margaret, but often of Puck, and now that this ghost was no longer hidden Jean was glad of the hot, lonely nights after Gregory's going. There was nothing that could hurt because there was nothing unknown.

The old feeling of power ran high in her. She was rapidly centering public interest in her work. Compared to the mighty tree which she and Mary had pictured in moments of enthusiasm, the Congress was a tiny root, but it was striking deep and in good soil. Jean was happy. She came sometimes to meet Gregory so radiant that even he, who had seen Jean in many radiant moods, was startled.

"You look like a Gloucester fishing boat under full sail," he said once, when Jean came hurrying up late for a matinée.

"Well, I can't say that you flatter."

"But a Gloucester boat is the finest thing that floats. It has wonderful lines, and when it comes down the bay with all sails set——"

"But tearing along Broadway to get to a theater! Besides it sounds horribly overpowering. Doesn't the thing ever sink?"

"Never."

Between the acts Gregory drew a Gloucester boat and Jean insisted that she was going to pin it up in her room where she could see it on waking and get the conceit knocked out of her for the day.

But in the mornings when she woke, warm under the blankets, with the sharp air pricking her face, she liked to lie looking at it until she could hear the whistling of the wind through the rigging and feel the heave of the sea under the keel. Standing in the prow, she and Gregory went out to sea, leaving behind the echoes of a waking world, the banging of doors, the rattle of the elevator, the running of bath water from the apartment across the light-well, the whir of coffee-grinders, gearing the world to working strength for another day. Her own power to slip away on these trips with Gregory amused Jean and she wondered if Martha felt the same physical sense of cutting loose, and going out into space, when she left her body crouching in the last pew and went up to talk to God.

Christmas and New Year passed and February came in a black rage of cold, that exhilarated or depressed to the breaking point. It depressed Gregory and he came to the office one morning of black cold, late in February, convinced of the uselessness of all things. Nothing mattered, neither happiness nor pain. If one did manage to seize a little happiness, it was only an interlude. What was the good of a few moments of exhilaration and the sense of personal power, when it went before you could make it really yours?

Gregory threw the mail about on his desk and lit his pipe. He felt old. He tore open the envelopes and sorted the contents and knew that he was going to go on doing this for the rest of his life. Margaret had been exasperatingly cheerful this morning, and as Gregory recalled the gentle sweetness of her voice as she had said, when she kissed him good-by: "There is all the success and prosperity we want right now, dear," he tore open the last envelope so violently that the letter within was torn in half. The incident loosened the tension and Gregory laughed at his own childishness as he laid the pieces together and read them.

He read them once. Then he read them again. He looked round at the walls, the floor, the water-cooler in the corner, and read it again. He got up and opened the window. The freezing air rushed in and, after a moment, the world adjusted itself. Things stopped spinning and came out of the blur, but still the impression persisted that it was a joke. Gregory brought the two pieces of the torn letter to the open window and read them for the fourth time.

He had won the Chicago contest. He had covered paper with lines and figures and sent it a thousand miles away, long ago, before the leaves turned. He had never let himself really hope and, for days together, had forgotten all about it. Even Jean had not mentioned it for weeks. The thought of Jean steadied him. Jean had always said: "You will win." She had never doubted, or, if she had, had hidden it under a seeming faith that had been a comfort, even if he had not always shared it.

Gregory reached for the telephone. How should he tell her? Should he read the letter itself, or keep her guessing? To be kept guessing made Jean angry and he did it sometimes to tease her. Gregory stood with his hand on the receiver, composing a beginning. But he would have to get to the point some time and he could hear Jean's: "Oh, Gregory!" Then they would go out somewhere and tramp for miles in the pitiless cold, because it would be absurd even to try to go through the day's grind. Gregory took the receiver from the hook.

Slowly he hung it up again. He went back and sat down at his desk. After a few moments he got up mechanically and closed the window.

He had won the contest. He was no longer the fairly successful architect, bitter, in lonely moments, at forgotten dreams. He was "made." Everything had changed the moment he tore the letter in anger at the sameness of things. There was no doubt about that. Nothing would be the same any more. He would have to live in Chicago. The building would take several years and he would have to be on hand all the time, if he was to get all there was to it. He would have to leave Jean. He would no longer be able to ring her up when he wanted to. There would be no more long walks. No more dusky hours at the little French roadhouse, hours when the need of parting drew them so near together, Jean would no longer be there in the background of his life, so that he always felt that he could reach out and touch her.

Gregory jammed his pipe between his teeth and began walking up and down. Was there never a spot in life, never one short hour that was perfect? He saw the future that might have been, had he and Jean belonged legally to each other. Love, success, accomplishment. He and Jean—and Puck.

Gregory's face was drawn when he sat down at his desk again. He drove his mind through the day's work as if it had been a slave.

At four he closed his desk and went to meet Jean. She was already at their table, sitting partly turned to watch a group in the large room beyond. She was smiling, and when she caught sight of him the smile deepened.

"Do look at that old peacock over there. I have been watching her for the last five minutes and she's never stopped preening once."

He had come, still uncertain how he was going to tell Jean, and she asked him to look at an old woman. But he turned and then he laughed too.

"Well, what's happened exciting to-day?"

"Oh, nothing much. Nothing that will surprise you terribly."

Jean put down the teapot. "Gregory Allen, out with it!"

Gregory seized the alternative of banter, which had not occurred to him before.

"If I'm bursting, as you so impolitely suggest, it must be terribly important, and if it's terribly important you—you ought to guess it," he finished lamely.

"Now, Gregory, don't tease. Besides, I haven't an ounce of sense left. I've been struggling with a Tammany politician until I'm limp. What is it?"

Gregory took the cup she was holding to him. He felt that as long as the cup was in transit a choice was left open. But once it was beside his plate, he would be obliged to say, in the only way he had been able to frame it at all: "I've won the contest, and I have to go and live in Chicago. They want me there to talk over some slight changes by the middle of March and—I might as well stay on, because I'm going back there to live anyhow."

"Gregory, don't be silly. Please, what is it? I know it's good, because your nose is wrinkling up at the corners."

"It is good." Gregory put down the cup. "I've won the contest."

The old peacock cackled a shrill note and Gregory heard her say: "Just fancy, at her age, a deep pink, my dear, I——"

"Gregory—my dear...."

The blood rushed to Gregory's eyes so that Jean blurred to something white and shining, near but impossible to touch. He looked down.

"I shall have to go to Chicago. They've asked me to be there by the middle of March."

"Of course. Why, I'd want to take the next train and rush out, whether they'd asked me or not. Oh, Gregory! I always knew it but—I feel all wiggly inside."

Her hands moved to him across the cloth but Gregory's did not come to meet them.

"But I shall have to live there, Jean, for good; for several years anyhow. It will mean so many things. Here I should only be "that fellow who's building the Auditorium out in Chicago." I'm not young. I've got to get it all now, every scrap of it. I've got to, Jean. I've got to!"

Afterwards, Jean knew that in that moment she crossed a line and left something of herself behind forever. But now it must be the same as it had always been, until she was alone. If she yielded an inch, she would go plunging down into the emptiness.

"You do see, don't you?" Gregory's voice pleaded for her courage, but she did not answer, and he hurried on.

"If there were any other way, ... but there isn't. It will lead to all kinds of things. I've got to be there. Don't you see, dear?"

Why did he keep on saying that, over and over, as if she were a child? Why did he sit there, looking into his plate, as if he were hurting her only and against his will? Jean drew her hands back into her lap.

"Jean," he whispered, "Sweetheart, don't make it hard."

"I'm not going to. After all, you know,—Chicago's only eighteen hours away."

He looked up. "Well, I'll be damned! Do you know, Jean, I never thought of that?"

And he had not. It had seemed so final, such a complete upheaval of the present that he had pictured no thread running to the future. It would. Of course it would. Why shouldn't it? Jean would be the same. He would be the same. Each had his work. Their meetings would be farther apart, but freer. He would never have to leave Jean because he had promised to be home at a certain hour, nor invent explanations for Sunday tramps. In a way it would be more perfect, not less. And as soon as he had things going he would come back for a few days. Later he could come for longer. In summer, if he had a vacation, he would spend it with Jean.

"Jean, I'm coming straight round this table and kiss you."

"No, don't."

But he was already there beside her, and under pretext of adjusting the curtain, kissed her quickly. Jean wanted to strike him. Then he was back in his own place, talking again. All the first joy of his success rushed over him. Jean felt it, the hidden power that she had fanned with her belief and love. It was burning away her own forces and Jean felt cold.

They had a second serving of tea. The rooms emptied. Gregory was still talking, rushing away beyond her reach.

It was almost seven when she threw her crumpled napkin on the table and rose.

"I've simply got to go. Besides we could never get it all talked out, if we stayed until midnight."

"I know. I feel like a kid parading his bag of tricks. I believe I've been standing on my head for the last hour. Have I, Jean?" He was near, helping her on with her coat. His fingers touched her cheek. "Why didn't you set me right end up with a thump?"

"Oh, I adore small boys on their heads. I—I always want to do it, too." Jean wondered why he did not grip her shoulders and shake her back to consciousness, but he only laughed and they went out, past the groups of pretty waitresses resting now in the empty room.

It had turned warmer and snow was falling in great white flakes.

"I believe I'll walk. I'm not going home to dinner anyhow." Her courage was gone. She could not go down into that stifling Subway, talk nothings above the roar of the train, feel Gregory close among all those strangers.

"But it's going to be a regular blizzard. Look! It's getting thicker every minute."

Jean turned up her fur collar. "I don't mind. Maybe it's the last blizzard we'll have. I always wallow in the last blizzard. It's a kind of rite."

"Well, then, if I can't stop you...."

They were standing so close that Jean could feel his warm breath on her face. Muffled figures, bent against the driving snow, pushed by them and disappeared into the black hole of the Subway entrance. Automobiles shot noiselessly through the whirling whiteness. The world itself had changed.

"To-morrow then about four?"

"No, I can't to-morrow. I've got a meeting. Friday."

"All right." Gregory held out his hand, but Jean raised her muff to keep off the driving flakes and only smiled across it.

She went back to the office. They had all gone. There was a note tacked to the lid of her desk and Jean read it. She tore it up and threw it into the waste-basket but some of the pieces fell upon the rug and she bent to pick them up carefully. She opened a window, and covered one of the typewriters that had been left uncovered. Then she telephoned to Martha that she would not be home to dinner. Martha urged her not to work too late and Jean hung up the receiver.

Now she was alone, utterly alone, with the thoughts she had beaten back.

Gregory was going away. He was going out of her life for months at a time. Three short weeks and it would be as it had been before his coming—empty, work-filled days. Jean bowed her head on the desk.

"You fool, you fool, you helped to do it."

She had been so glad to give and give and give. Never to falter in her faith, or let his courage drop below the standard she had set for it. He had needed her and now he did not need her at all.

Jean slipped to the floor and clutched the cushion of the chair.

"Don't let me feel like this. Don't let me," she begged, but there was no answer. The reasonable machine of her universe held no God. It ran itself.

When she was sure that Martha would be asleep, Jean went home.

During the next two weeks they saw no more of each other than usual. Jean was busy, and Gregory had to leave things in order for Benson, who was to take on the office. Besides, it kept up the fiction of there being no big change. But on Tuesday, the day before he was to leave, Jean did not go to work.

It was a day of sparkling sunshine and hard snow, packed firm. They went into the country. They talked of little things, rested, made snowballs and glided, hand in hand, over the ice of a small pond. It was a day like many they had had.

It was almost dark when they stopped at the French roadhouse. There were no other guests, and Madam Cateau lumbered forward in her felt slippers to greet them as old friends.

"It is a long time that you do not come. I think you forget me. Then I remember and say—But the chicken they do not forget. Me, yes, but not the chicken." She shook with laughter and waggled her great red forefinger under Gregory's nose. "I am right? Yes? The chicken you do not forget. Two plates it was. Three, maybe?"

"Three at least. I wouldn't swear that it wasn't four."

"And to-night I have the same, with the mushrooms. Why do I make it this morning? It is not the right day. Le bon Dieu, maybe?"

She waddled off and Jean took a table close to the fire.

It was impossible that they were doing this for the last time. The fire burned with a deep glow. Outside the bare trees, ladened with snow, creaked in the wind that came creeping with the dark from hidden places. In the kitchen Madam Cateau scolded the waiter. Dishes rattled and finally the perspiring Gustave came running with the soup. It was rich and thick, and across the table, so near that she could see a tiny black speck on Gregory's white collar, he was eating it, smiling at her between spoonfuls, his face damp with the soup's heat and the reaction from the long walk in the cold.

When dinner was almost through, Madam plodded in again.

"The same room? Yes? Perhaps a smaller one is warmer."

"No. The same. Make a good fire. It will be all right."

They drank the coffee in silence and smoked, listening to the woman's feet plopping on the floor above. It was quiet in the kitchen now. A loosened shutter creaked and ashes fell softly in the grate. Upstairs the door closed. Madam came thumping down and they heard her settle with a grunt into her chair by the parlor stove.

They went upstairs. The room was just the same. They might have been away only an hour. The same colored print of Napoleon stared above the dresser; the same stiff, white tidies covered the chair seats. The same red and white counterpane spread over the bed, with its nosegay of red and white embroidered roses in the exact center. The curtains were drawn half down, but below, through the spotless panes, the field stretched bare and silent under a clean young moon. Gregory went over and pulled down the shades.

Jean took the plush rocker that Gregory dragged to the hearth. He sat on the floor, his head against her knees, and together they listened to the breathing of the fire, the whispering wind, and the branch scraping on the glass. Gregory drew Jean's hands down and held them against his lips.

The little noise outside died in the throb within. His lips pressed hot in her palms. With a sob, Jean bent and drew him into her arms.

In the morning they went silently back to the city while it was still early. The wind had risen in the night and blown the last snow from the branches. The trees cut thin and black in the new day.

Gregory was to come back in May.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

Spring was late, but when it came, it came with a rush. In a day, the trees swelled in buds and blades of grass pricked the frozen earth. Jean woke one morning, late in April, to the feeling of a new force in the world and in herself. It was as if she had been walking through a tunnel, and now, unexpectedly, stepped into the light. Time had somehow slipped its leash; it no longer strained behind but ran forward. Jean jumped out of bed and went through the morning exercises that she had neglected for weeks. Raising and lowering herself on her toes, she drew in deep breaths of the spring air and with every breath the last two months receded, the future brightened, until, her whole body glowing, Jean came to a final halt, planted firmly on both feet.

She entered the dining-room humming, so that Martha, who was shirring eggs in the kitchen, poked her head through the swing door, as if she expected to see a stranger.

"Why, Jean!"

"Why, mummy!"

Martha smiled. "All the problems in the universe must be solved this morning."

"Not exactly. But I confess they don't seem quite so hopeless. I guess it's the spring. Who could be altogether miserable on a morning like this? In the spring tra la!"

Martha went back to the eggs. Such a sudden change of mood was beyond her, for it was weeks since Jean had come humming to breakfast and, although Martha had said nothing, she had worried. But there had been nothing to worry about, since Jean could hum because the sun shone and the earth-smell came through the open windows. Martha wondered why intelligent people gave way to moods, when they must know what a little thing in the end would dispel them.

At the office Jean found a letter from Gregory. It was the longest she had had and the writing of it had stretched over a week.

"It's the only way to do," Gregory wrote, "because if I don't, things pile up to tell you until there are so many I can't tackle them all. Sometimes I want to get right on the train and come over, when something very good happens. And it's just the same when something bad happens, so you see I want you pretty much all the time."

At this point, Jean rang for Josephine Grimes and told her there would be no dictation ready until eleven. When Josephine had gone, Jean locked the door.

"I don't care if it is silly. I have to be sensible enough the rest of the time."

Jean came back to the desk and read and re-read Gregory's letter until she felt that they had been together through the days of its writing. They were interesting days, filled from morning until night with new impressions and new people.

"At first it felt queer and unreal, to have millionaire pork packers and mayors and things like that consulting my convenience. I felt about the way Puck does, just before Galatea comes to life. Not that I want to convey that a pork packer is like a Greek statue. It felt like this——"

Here followed a marginal drawing of himself standing before a group of pedestals at various angles of motion, but the flagstone on which he stood was anchored at the four corners with the words, I did win the contest.

"I'm afraid I'm getting too cocky about winning, as if I had done it all by myself, when it was you, more than half. Yes, it was, and you needn't smile as I am positive you are doing, and insist it was all my great ability. Of course I have ability, tons of it. Does that satisfy you? But when I look back now on the hopeless, dreamless creature you rescued, I want—well, I never claimed to be any good at words, and even drawing fails me here. I want you close. I want your arms round me and that glorious cool hair hiding all but your eyes. Why do you come so often, dear, just at dawn, and wake me that way, as you did that first morning at Morrison's? It was just about a year ago, wasn't it? Maybe that's why I've been thinking of them lately, or maybe it's because you came every morning last week. You shameless, brazen——" Here was the figure that he usually drew instead of writing her name, the Roman tower with the shaft of sunlight across the top.

The division for that day stopped here and the next was about some changes in the plans that he had decided to make. The description was brief and technical but Jean knew the old design so well that she could reconstruct it without an effort. Evidently he had been interrupted, for he broke off short and when he began again it was about Puck. Puck was delighted with Chicago and as far as he could judge it was because she would never again have to be nice to Squdgy.

"I believe Squdgy was your Dr. Fenninger and my Amos Palmer to her. I hadn't any idea that she really disliked him so much. Funny little entities children are, changing right under your eyes every minute. Sometimes she looks like this and the next day she's this."

Jean's lips quivered. How closely he must observe Puck! It hurt in a way and yet it made her very tender, too.

There was no direct mention of Margaret but in the last division, written the day before, Gregory said that she need not think New York was doing everything. Chicago had an institution, a group rather, whose motto was The Ultimate End.

"So what's the good of fiddling with any little by-products of social uplift or religion? Fascinatingly logical, isn't it? You dive straight at The End. It's the weirdest yet, a lot more simple than garbage or the Divine Mind."

And Jean could see Margaret, slim and blonde and graceful, diving to The Ultimate End.

There was only one sentence more.

"From the way things look now, I believe I can make it before the fifteenth. So 'put your house in order.'"

Jean folded the letter and laid it in the drawer with the others. Then she called Miss Grimes and dictated steadily for two hours.

Ten days later, Jean took down the receiver to hear Gregory's familiar: "Hello! You see I made it."

"So I see. But where are you?"

"At the Grand Central, where you will be in about ten minutes—unless you want me to come over."

"No. I'll come down."

Afterwards they laughed, but at the time there had seemed nothing else to say.

Gregory stayed three days. Two of his business appointments and one of Jean's took part of their time, and made it impossible for them to go to Morrison's as Jean had hoped they would be able to do. But she tried not to think of it, and held firmly to what they had.

During these two days the feeling Jean had so often experienced in the past, of having to beat through an outer covering to get at the real Gregory underneath, was gone. At moments, Jean felt as if some subtle atomic process had taken place, regrouping the elements of the man, without changing them in their nature, but re-combining them in such a way that the effect produced was quite different. But it was not a permanent feeling, or rather, it was true only at times. In the close hours of the second afternoon, which they spent at Madam Cateau's, there was no room for analysis in the content that held them, and Jean felt that Gregory had never been away at all. But coming back, he told her of a possible commission, the first that had come through his new connection, and Jean felt the difference again sharply. And simply because it was a change, Jean resented it until her sense of justice and humor conquered. She had always known and believed Gregory had it in him to do big things and now that he was proving it she had a queer feeling of hollowness inside.

"You're going to be disgustingly successful, Gregory. You ooze it already."

"Do you mean that I really act conceited?" He asked it with such desire to be answered honestly that Jean laughed.

"I didn't say that. Of course you don't. But you—let me see how to put it. Here, give me a pencil, maybe I can draw it."

Gregory watched with a grin while Jean constructed figures unknown to geometry.

"Words are clumsy, I grant, but those things! Which is the 'is' and which the 'was'?"

"That's the 'was.' It's one of the Egyptian pyramids, with curlycues. Those are the moods when the spirit inside got away from you."

"And the 'is'?"

"That's a geometric eagle."

"With the curlycues become audible in one horrible screech."

"That isn't his mouth open. It's his under-beak where the pencil slipped."

"That's better. You had me quite scared." Gregory took back the paper and pencil and Jean's hands with them. "For which I am going to punish you."

Again and again, in the soft dusk, under the budding elm, he kissed her, and then he held her close and they did not speak at all.

When they began walking again they were serious.

"You see, Jean, you don't really know how it feels, because you never quit on the game as I did. I did honestly believe that it was all over for me and that I was never going to get anywhere. I felt like a little cog in a huge machine, whose place could be taken by any other little cog just as well. That's a damnable feeling. I felt at the mercy of whatever power kept the machine going."

"But we are all cogs, in a way."

"Look out. You'll be an Ultimate Ender yet."

"Is being a cog the ultimate end of everything?"

"Something like it. We are all specks in a cosmos that's more complicated than a Chinese puzzle. You reincarnate and reincarnate for millions of cycles, and when you get through you're only a sphere with a face in the middle. Did you know that? Your spiritual you, when it's been perfected through a billion æons is going to be a kind of gas bag with features in the center. The latest discoveries in all occultism prove it."

Jean laughed. "I believe I'll stop off half way. The Ultimate End doesn't appeal to me."

"I'll stop off in that place, too,——" Gregory did not finish, and Jean did not ask him what he had been going to say. Hand in hand they walked along, until they came in sight of the brightly lit station.

"It's been a glorious afternoon, hasn't it?"

Jean nodded.

On the next night, which was the last of Gregory's stay, they had dinner at The Fiesole. Jean did not want to go there, but when Gregory proposed it, she could think of no good reason and so they went. Gregory filled their glasses, and across the raised rim of his, smiled to Jean.

"Amos Palmer!"

"To the Turkish lanterns and Japanese wind-bells!"

And Rachael. Should she say it? It was such a long, long time ago. Jean did not know whether Gregory remembered that the night he had told her of Amos and the pergola, was the night they had gone to Rachael's. What a big thing it had seemed at the time and now it was so little. Was the course of all human relationships just that—a series of steps, from one desperate need, to a temporary peace, and then on to another need? Did one never come to a lasting peace, a flat, restful spot with no more steps? Or did one just step off at last into nothingness?

"What is it? Are you yearning for Japanese wind-bells and an electric pergola?"

"Was I looking like that?"

"Rather abstracted, Jeany. And——" Gregory was on the point of adding—"and this is our last night," but changed it. They both knew that well enough. So he said: "And besides it's rude."

"I was just wondering whether she has outgrown the pergola yet or whether Amos is still happy."

"I don't know. I saw in some paper not long ago that an English Duke was one of the guests on a yachting trip with Mr. and Mrs. Amos Palmer. From what I know of the Duke's reputation—Good-by wind-bells and maybe Amos."

They kept the talk at this level until they had almost finished dinner. Then, in spite of their efforts to hold the mood, it slipped from them. Brief silences fell, which were hastily dispelled as soon as either one could think of something to say, sufficiently unimportant. But they came again, until at last Jean made no effort to escape them, and Gregory sat rolling breadcrumbs in the old way and frowning into the tablecloth.

He did not know when he could come again. The months ahead were going to be busy ones and he would have to snatch an interlude when he could. And yet, going without the definite point of a return, left these days unfinished. He wished Jean would ask him.

But Jean said nothing. If Gregory knew he would tell her and if he did not know she did not want to be told that this, for which she would wait alone, week after week, as she had waited, was to be left to chance, thrust into an unfilled moment.

"Let's walk to the station, up Second Avenue and across, I haven't been down this way for ages." There was an hour yet before train time and Jean knew that she could not sit here, filling the lessening hour with nonsense and silences.

"All right." Gregory signaled the waiter and paid the bill. He was disappointed, but what had he expected? He did not know. He only knew that he had not thought of spending their last hour sauntering among pushcarts. But if that was enough for Jean——And he succeeded so well that Jean's heart grew heavier and heavier and she kept back the tears only by a desperate effort.

But when the reality of separation detached itself in a concrete crowd, in long lines waiting before the ticket windows, the starter booming the trains through a megaphone, and the red-cap who hurried up for Gregory's grip, Jean's pride slipped beyond her hold. She stared ahead and her lips trembled. His arm slipped under hers and drew her closer.

"Jean," he whispered. "Jean, dear." His fingers closed about her bare wrist above the glove.

The hand of the huge clock jerked itself forward another minute. And there was nothing to say. Less than if they had been strangers. With another jerk, the hand touched ten. Gregory dropped Jean's arm. Without a word he hurried through the gate and it closed behind him.

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

The summer passed. Once in September Gregory came on a flying business trip and left the next day.

Winter closed early with a jealous grip, and Jean worked as even she had never worked before. She managed committees, lobbied bills, spoke at meetings and drove her plans through all opposition.

Dr. Mary was busy with her final thesis. Evening after evening Jean and Martha sat reading quietly as they had done in the old days, and Martha was happy.

Just before Christmas Gregory came unexpectedly, solely to see Jean. They went out to the French roadhouse where he had ordered dinner by a wire to Madam Cateau.

It was a Christmas dinner. The table was already laid in their old room, when he threw open the door and ushered Jean in with a flourish.

"Merry Christmas."

He closed the door and would have taken Jean in his arms, but the look in her eyes stopped him.

"Why, Jean, what is it?"

For Jean stood staring at the table and fighting desperately not to cry.

"I—thought——"

Jean turned and buried her face on his shoulder.

"What is it, dear? Can't you tell me?"

Jean fought fiercely to stop, but she wanted to shriek, to laugh, to let down utterly, to sob out all the hurt, the suppression of the last ten months, close in Gregory's arms. And all the time, at the back of her brain, her burning eyes pressed into Gregory's coat, she saw the gay little table with the wine glasses and the white chrysanthemums and the ridiculous turkey, with the foolish paper frills about its brown legs.

Gregory held her gently, stroking her hair and wondering what had happened. For he had expected Jean to be as surprised and delighted as he had been when the idea occurred to him.

Slowly Jean's nerves relaxed and the sobs lessened. She must be happy now, while they were together. In a few hours Gregory would be gone and if she spoiled these hours there would be nothing, not even the memory, in the months ahead.

Jean raised her head and smiled. Gregory smiled too with a warm little feeling deep inside for this sudden, unexpected weakness.

"Whatever was the matter, Jean girl?"

"Nothing—only—I was wishing—we could have—Christmas and—we've got it."

Gregory laughed so that down in the kitchen Madam Cateau heard and laughed, too.

"Of all things to cry about! Because you get something you want. I'm glad it doesn't affect me that way." He punctuated the words with kisses and then, lifting her bodily, carried her across the room and put her down at the table, a little out of breath with the effort.

"You're no feather-weight, Lady of My Dreams. Or maybe I am hungry."

It was a good dinner and Gregory enjoyed it, although they had to hurry at the end to get back to the city in time for him to catch his train.

Jean waited behind the iron grill until the train pulled out and she could no longer distinguish Gregory waving his hand from the Observation. Alone she turned into the months ahead.

Weeks of waiting, snatching, losing, waiting again. Years broken by flying visits, some longer, some shorter. No calm, no peace, no sureness. Their lives would touch, run close for a few hours, a few days at most, and part. No foothold, no smallest spot their own, no door they could close against every one but each other. And it would always be like this. The happiness of the moment must be clutched, until the force of the holding almost strangled it to death, just as to-day's dinner had done.

It would go on and on. Their meetings would grow more and more the result of circumstances, be wedged in the unfilled places between the world's demands.

She would fill her days, fuller and fuller, to keep the thought of Gregory away. She would do bigger and bigger things, and people would speak more and more admiringly of her. While she struggled not to wonder when Gregory was coming again!

Or he might never come again. An accident in the lives of either might separate them forever. Gregory might be called to the ends of the earth and she could not follow. He would go with Margaret and Puck and she would remain behind.

They would grow older. They would hold to the small, common interests of each other's lives by an effort. A little while, and they would no longer talk of this person and that without elaborate explanations. Gregory's little sketches of people she did not know would grow meaningless. Their lives would run two paralleled streams, mingling only in the moments snatched together. And what would these moments hold? No shared interests, no mingled hopes. Their hands and lips would cling, on to the very end, because something in Gregory would always call and something, beyond her brain or will, would always answer.

The white face of a clock peered at Jean through the snow. It was almost twelve. After all, she would have to go home some time.

The holidays passed and a new year began. Jean took long walks through the snow and believed, sometimes, when she came back tired and hungry, that she had left the tangle behind. There were moments when, whipped by the cold to an almost drunken ecstasy of health, the old sureness returned. Her love and Gregory's was clean and big, like the open, eternal as the earth.

But the snow went.

It grew warm again on the upland, cool in the hollows, as on the days she and Gregory had stolen two springs before. Jean battled to hold her peace but it slipped from her as the grass pricked the earth again and buds swelled on the branches.

She proposed a national campaign to awaken interest in other states, and link the women of the country in a common bond. But, while she listened to the applause that greeted her first suggestion, she heard beyond it the wailing gramophone wrapping the rebellious Mattie and her mother in sensuous peace. She worked until far into the night on this new project, but the old apple trees rustled in the orchard and dogs barked from farm to farm across the fields. She went to special luncheons to meet important people, but Uncle John was always there, eating his porridge in the blue willow bowl. And at night, when she lay alone in the dark, too weary with the crowded days to sleep, there was always a baby's dark, fuzzy head and wet, groping lips. Jean tried to push it away, but it would not go. In the morning, when the coffee-grinders set the world in motion, it was always there, smiling and pummeling with its fists.

And in the end, Jean let it have its way.

It came and went with her, at home, in the office and to Mary's.

Jean thought of Amelia Gorman and the gray house on the windy hills. If she had a child, nothing ever again could shut her off from the current of life. It was the only real thing in all the world. It was the past and the future down to the end of time.

Jean weighed the price. A child of hers and Gregory's against a national congress of strangers. Any one of a dozen other women could manage that, but her job, her very own job, no one else could do. Before the miracle of her own power Jean was humble.

A strange new softness came over her, so that Martha wondered, but Mary referred to it outright, one night during her last week in New York when they sat talking before the open window as they had not done for months, with Madame la Marquise budding to youth before them.

"Jean Herrick, I wish to goodness you'd stop looking like a large blonde angel, just about to fly beyond mortal ken. It makes me feel a hundred years old, and as if I hadn't accomplished a single thing the whole time I've been here."

Jean laughed. "I'm sorry that I look like such a foolish thing as a large, blonde angel, but I'd rather you felt a hundred than I, Mary."

"But I'm not stuck on it myself, Jean."

"Then don't. It's all in the mind, anyhow. No one needs to grow old."

"Piffle. There's a lot of rubbish talked like that these days. There's no need to grow grumpy and useless, but, after all, we can't turn back the hands of the clock. We do grow out of one possibility into another—and they don't come back either."

Jean shrank a little, as if Mary had touched the glowing spot inside.

"Then—live every possibility up to the hilt and take the next."

"Logical and doubtless true. But I wish you wouldn't look so much as if your next was an ascent straight into Heaven. It makes me feel old—and a little lonely, Jean."

"Don't, Mary; please don't, I don't want you to feel like that."

"Oh, it's not as bad as all that. But, really, Jean, I never did think of the difference in our ages until lately. We always seemed to be walking along at the same gait, but these last few weeks you look as if you had been doing it out of politeness, and if you really wanted to you could pick up your skirts—and run forever."

"I do feel like that, Mary; exactly as if I had wings."

Dr. Mary looked up, but the joke on her lips did not come. There was a short pause and then Jean said:

"Mary, I'm going to tell you something that I believe I've wanted to tell you for a long time."

And she did, looking out over the Park while Dr. Mary sat silent.

Jean went back to the beginning, to the sense of a fuller world because Gregory was in it. Calm and unashamed, she spared nothing.

"I was glad when you went away, Mary. It was wonderful having this place, like a home all our own. And then you came back." Jean smiled, thinking of the tragedy of the discovered vegetables, and how miserable she had been.

She told of sending Martha away, of Gregory's going to Maine, and of her own readjustment toward Margaret and Puck; of Gregory's winning the contest, his removal to Chicago and of the long months since, trying to hold intact the beauty of their love, through hurried meetings, flying trips, moods of forced gayety clutched tight against the force of circumstance always tearing them apart. And the terrible white light of logic illuminating the end.

"It will come, Mary; it must. I can see it like a wall, standing there at the end of—one year, two, five perhaps. But—it will end."

For the first time Jean's voice shook. Nor was Mary's steady as she said, after a long pause:

"But you've had it, Jean. Nothing can take it away."

Jean shook her head. "I know, Mary. But that's like the rubbish that's talked about not growing old. It's the theory of those who have never had a thing—that the memory of it can be enough."

Dr. Mary winced and lit a cigarette. "Maybe it is."

"When you've had a thing and—it goes—you have two pains, because the memory and the happiness hurts as much as not having it any more. And then—there's a third—the nothingness of everything else. That's the worst, that awful, dead emptiness, where nothing counts and you just go on because there's not even the will to stop. And the terrible, empty future."

"But he isn't dead, Jean. And you have your work. You can write, and even if you can't be always together, there——"

"I know. Those things are a lot when they're a part, but they're nothing at all when they're all. I have less even than Margaret has. Yes, less even than that. She has the shell and I have the kernel, but the kernel has to have its own shell or it dies. No marriage certificate in the world could make her really his wife, but no blindness in the world can keep our love what it is really—like this. I don't believe that society invented marriage because a man wanted to keep one woman as his property or because women wanted to be supported. They were just groping blindly to keep love alive, to bind it fast, that biggest, freest thing in all the world, and keep it safe for itself."

"Well, they've made a sad mess of it."

"I know. They didn't mean to build a prison, but they have. Some day there will be no state or church locking people in—but there will always be walls around real love—like ours. It makes its own and grows stronger and stronger behind them. And when it can't, it just withers and dies and—there's nothing left. I can't have it that way, Mary, I can't. I can't watch it grow less, and I know it will—and I can't shut it out forever. There is only one way, Mary—I want a child—terribly."

Dr. Mary dropped her cigarette so that it smoldered into the rug and burned a small, black hole.

"But, Jean——"

"I know, Mary. I've thought it out—everything, every single thing. I won't lose my job, because, of course, I shall give it up. I'll go away. I shall have to lie, right and left and all the time. I shall lie to the world and I shall lie to mummy. That will be the hardest, lying to mummy. But it would kill her, and I don't want to hurt mummy, but I am not going to let her stop my life, withhold the biggest thing in it. No one has a right to do that. It is my life and my job, Mary; the job of every woman when she really loves a man. And nothing else matters."

The little doctor gulped twice, and rapped out:

"Then go ahead and have it."

Jean slipped to the floor and laid her head on the other's knees.

"Mary, do you think—I'm—very——"

"No, Jean, I don't. I'm—I'm green with envy."

The tears ran down the doctor's cheeks and she made no effort to wipe them away.

After a while Jean looked up.

"I'm going to write to Gregory and tell him. I don't want to see him—till he knows."

Dr. Mary snuffled. "Here endeth the Congress."

Jean smiled. "Mary, a dozen other women can run the Congress and I don't give a whoop who goes on with it. Josephine Grimes can take it over if she likes."

Through the tears the blue eyes twinkled.

"Jean, you're the—most glorious—fool in the world—and I'd like to shake you."

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

"How do you like it?" Margaret turned, looking back over her shoulder to Gregory. Her fair hair and white shoulders rose from a swathing of cloudy fabric that showed now palest pink, now mauve, now faintly blue.

"It's ripping!"

Waltzing slowly the length of the dusky room, she moved with a flower lightness, a spirit-like unreality that touched the artist in him.

"You look like an orchid come to life in the depths of a forest."

Margaret stopped and swept him a curtsey.

"Thanks. To affect one's own husband like that is an achievement."

Gregory smiled. This new manner of Margaret's, half flirtatious, half cynical, amused him.

"Then what will happen to old Burnham? He'll be downright dizzy."

"Don't be coarse, Gregory. I don't like it. Besides, you know I do it for you."

"Oh, I'm not jealous. Not a bit."

"You may laugh, but it is good business. Weren't you asked to join The Meadow Club after our last dinner?"

"I was."

"Well?"

"I thank you." Gregory doffed an imaginary hat and swept a bow. "What have you in mind this time?"

"Don't be silly. Besides, it's every hostess's duty to look as well as she can."

"You've done that. Maybe Burnham will resign in my favor and I'll be president of the Architectural Society of America."

"There's no reason that you shouldn't be some day, if you go about it right. It has to have a president, doesn't it?"

"Absolutely essential." Gregory chuckled and switched on the lights. In this mood of helping-wife Margaret was delightfully naïve.

"Well, I'm doing my part. If you do yours——"

"There's no knowing to what heights I may not climb."

"But you can't get anything without some trouble in this world. You've got to work for it, in every way." Margaret spoke as if she were enunciating a divine decree, and moved with stately coldness to the door.

"Very well. I'll work to-night. You've put me next to Phyllis Henshaw, haven't you?"

"Yes. And it's Gothic Cathedrals. She's mad about them lately. That ought to be easy for you."

"I can take that trick with my eyes shut."

"But don't make her feel that you know more about it than she does. Let her talk. She loves to."

"I'll remember."

"And please get dressed. The Phillips always come too early and you're not even shaved yet."

Margaret floated away and Gregory went into his dressing-room.

This was to be the last and most important of the Allen dinners which Margaret had begun early in the winter. The guest of honor was to be James Burnham, President of the Architectural Society, with eight lesser luminaries. It would be a success because these dinners of Margaret's always were a success. Sitting beside some eminent man, whose conversation she could not follow, Margaret reached her climax. As wife and companion, she was one being, as hostess another. In the act of presiding over a dinner table, Margaret found a clarity of vision that kept her in safe paths. Men whom Gregory admired and for whose good opinion he was anxious, never refused an invitation to one of Margaret's dinners.

As he dressed Gregory smiled to think what a chasm lay between the first dinner and this. Graceful and surefooted, Margaret had scaled the social cliffs, picking with unerring instinct the right spots. The dinner to-night was to mark the apex.

And it did. Looking about the table, at the soft lights, the exquisite flowers, the well-gowned women and alert men, Gregory felt that only a sketch of the Taj Mahal would do it justice. While he talked Gothic Cathedrals he drew one mentally and sent it to Jean. The subdued abundance, restrained success, the perfect balance of personal accomplishment and concealed consciousness of it, rose in delicate spires and minarets against a background of inexhaustible possibility, Eastern in its opulence.

On Margaret's right sat James Burnham, white-haired and charming, but knowing to a hair's weight what it meant for any hostess to secure him. Yankee in the shrewd appreciation of his own value, Southern in the charm of its concealment, and Latin in his attitude to all women, the famous man bent to Margaret with undivided attention. Margaret vibrated in harmony to his note. Her eyes sparkled and she had the manner of a beautiful woman withholding an advance she perfectly understood and had full power to reciprocate. Gregory looked on amused, while he followed instructions and let Phyllis Henshaw rhapsodize among the Gothic arches. He speculated about Margaret as if she were a stranger, and wondered why men with wives like that were ever jealous of them.

Coffee was served in the living-room, a method of Margaret's for redistributing her guests. By the new adjustment, Phyllis Henshaw fell to James Pelham and Gregory could not help smiling at Margaret when he caught her eye. Skill like this amounted to an art. From time to time he glanced at the white-haired president, listening with a mechanical smile to the Gothic ravings and wondered whether any man, except perhaps a Jesuit diplomat, could have achieved his purpose better. At the first opportunity, Gregory edged his own partner to the rescue, and then realized that he, too, was weaving a pattern of the evening to Margaret's design. He had an almost irresistible impulse to call across the room to her:

"Is this the way you want it? Or have I made a mistake?"

There was neither bridge nor music, and yet most of the guests stayed until almost twelve. It was even a little after before Phyllis Henshaw kissed Margaret effusively and assured her that it had all "been simply perfect." When the front door closed behind them, Margaret dropped into a chair and yawned.

"People can say what they like, but there's absolutely no other way to do it. A dinner is the only thing."

"Q. E. D."

"But next winter I'm going to do it a little differently. We won't begin quite so early in the season—now that I know who's who. We won't give more than six either. That's enough to cover all the people that really matter."

"A kind of inverse ratio? In time, at that rate, we'll have to eat alone."

"I suppose that's awfully clever; but, really, I'm too tired to follow."

Gregory realized that he was being petty. For the evening had been just as much of an accomplishment, in its way, as Bobby Phillips' engineering miracles in the Orient, or the Auditorium itself, for that matter.

"It was all right, Margaret, and I'm sure if Burnham wrote sonnets he'd be sitting up at this minute."

A dreamy smile touched Margaret's lips. "He's perfectly fascinating. I don't wonder women fall for him." She moved toward the door. "I let Nellie go to bed, Gregory, so you put out the lights. And please don't make your usual racket in the morning. I'm all in."

Gregory finished his cigar and then went upstairs. He stopped for a moment in Puck's room as he always did. She was sound asleep. Lady Jane sat stiffly on a chair. Of late, Puck often forgot to take Lady Jane to bed. Puck was growing up. Gregory laid Lady Jane softly on the coverlet and tiptoed out.

Bunched on the dresser was the last mail that he always had sent up from the office when he left too early to get it. He tossed it aside, picked up Jean's with a thrill of pleased surprise, for Jean usually wrote once to his twice and he had not yet answered the last, and made himself comfortable to enjoy it.

Gregory read the letter from the abrupt beginning, "I want to talk to you, dear," to the ending "that's all," and laid it down. There was no haze to be cleared away by a second reading, no doubt of Jean's meaning, no possible misunderstanding. Into the three pages Jean had compressed the wonder of their love, the nuances of its beauty, the impossibility of continuing like this. She made no claims nor recognized any on her own part. Only, she could not go on. She stated it as simply as she might have said: "I cannot meet you to-morrow. I have a meeting."

Before the simplicity of Jean's mind, Gregory was helpless. With one clean blow, Jean had cut away all the elaborate superstructure of ordinary human intercourse. The scaffolding was stark before him.

Step by step, Gregory went back over the past year. There had been hours of longing that not even his work had stilled. Days when Jean had moved beside him, enjoying his triumphs, memories that had helped him through temporary difficulties. She was always there, more or less vivid, according to his need. The visits to New York he had planned weeks ahead. The Christmas dinner he had snatched at the risk of business loss. The perfect walk through the snow to Madam Cateau's; the tenderness of Jean's tears; the gay meal and Jean's cheery smile as the train pulled out; his pride in Jean's courage; desperate moments of his own rebellion, stifled in shame before her greater strength.

And all the time, Jean had been beating against this "ugliness." It had been one thing to him, another to her. He did not know her. Perhaps he had never known her.

He went back to the night he had come in with Puck to find Jean standing by the living-room window, and the storm that had raged in him through that intolerable hour of Margaret's chatter and the need that had driven him to leave the house with Jean. Again Gregory felt the silence of the street about them, then the clatter of the taxi as it stopped at his signal; and the dizzy moment when Jean had said quietly: "Gramercy Park." It was Jean who had said it. Again Gregory felt the reverence and gratitude that had stilled his passion through that dark, silent ride.

Love had meant to her what it had meant to him and he had gloried in her honesty. She had brought back the courage that the weary round of years with Margaret had almost killed, and kept it alive. She had been glad of his success. Again he felt her leaning to him across the table and heard her say:

"It is only eighteen hours away."

It was Jean who had said it, just as she had said: "Gramercy Park."

And now she said, just as quietly and simply: "I can't go on."

Cold damp broke out on Gregory's forehead.

She could not go on.

She wanted it to stop. She would fill her days without reference to him. He would fill his with no thought of her. He would make no more flying trips to New York. Never again. Not even once more, unless——

Gregory rose. If he did not get up now and move he would always sit there, staring at the three pages covered with the clear black writing, on the table beside him.

Jean with a child. A child of hers and of himself. She had weighed the price and was willing to pay. The fences that society had put up, Jean was willing to throw down. The conventions they had scorned in secret, Jean would scorn openly. Unconfused by all the little noises of the world, Jean heard the clearest call and answered.

"She doesn't realize what it would mean. She——"

The last sentence of the letter moved before him.

"I have thought it all out, dear, and I know. It's the one thing against everything else, the one thing that counts against all the things that don't."

Gregory's chin dropped to his breast and he walked up and down like an old man.

Jean with a child. A child of hers and his. Jean and their child, alone, one thousand miles away. Another human being, part of himself, just as Puck was a part.

Another Puck. The best of Jean and of himself, a fearless little Puck, whom he would see at long intervals, scarcely know, whom he could not acknowledge, but who would always be near, tearing at his heart, claiming his love. Gregory's lips went white.

"My God," he whispered, "I wish I had never seen you."

Then he began walking again, up and down, up and down.

The stars were white in the morning sky when he went back and sat down once more beside the table. He put the three sheets of Jean's letter carefully together and tore them across many times. Then on a single sheet he wrote:

"I am not brave enough. I haven't the courage. I cannot pay the price."

He took the torn bits of Jean's letter and his own and went out. He dropped his into the green box on the corner. The chill wind of dawn seized Jean's and carried them away.

He closed the front door softly and went slowly up the stairs, past Puck's door and Margaret's, back into his own room. The pen was still wet with ink. Gregory opened the window and threw it into the street. In a few moments an early milk wagon clattered along and scrunched it into the dust.

PART III

CHAPTER FORTY

"Are you sure you feel all right, mummy? You don't look as if you had slept very well."

"Nonsense, dear. I slept at least five hours straight off and you know——"

"Oh, yes, I know. Napoleon never had more than four hours and Saint Catherine or Winifred or somebody else did mighty works on ten minutes. But they're not you."

Jean laid her arm across her mother's shoulders and drew her close. "You won't be silly, will you? If you don't feel well you'll 'phone me? There's nothing very special to-day."

Martha's face, smaller and frailer than ever, glowed with love satisfied, and for a moment she closed her eyes in the old spirit of humble gratitude. But Jean, looking down, saw only the thin hair, white now, and her throat contracted.

"Jean, sometimes I feel as if all my life, this last year has been waiting for me, one whole year, just exactly as it has been. Now that I waste so much time just sitting round, I think of it a lot."

The lines along the corners of Jean's mouth deepened and she looked old and tired. But her voice had the same brusque quality with which she had always forestalled any emotional demand. If the year had been wonderful to Martha, it had not been useless, and Jean was grateful.

"Of course, if you are trying to tell me, Martha Norris, that I used to bore you to death——"

"Don't be flippant, Jean. You know perfectly well——"

"There. That sounds more natural. I guess you're all right. But don't go and overdo. Will you promise me that?"

"I never do. I'm a regular parasite."

"Well, it agrees with your disposition, so keep it up." Jean bent and kissed her. "You're really much nicer than you used to be, mummy. Pneumonia must be good for the soul."

"Got me into line at last, haven't you? But remember, even the effects of pneumonia wear off."

"Then I'll take my innings while they're going. Remember, if you go to service this afternoon you are to call a taxi. Do you hear? You are not to take any of those 'nice, quick walks' you are so addicted to. There's a wind like a knife blade to-day. Will you promise?"

"I'll use my judgment, dear."

"I leave you in peace. You are yourself. I don't believe you ever had pneumonia. Mummy, you've been faking."

Jean gave her mother another quick kiss, and went. From the street below, she looked up and waved. Martha waved back.

But when Jean was out of sight, Martha crossed to the side table where Jean had laid Mary's letter. Part of it Jean had read aloud, the first two paragraphs and on from the middle of the third page, but the part unread she had returned to twice, and when she slipped the letter back into its envelope, Martha had seen her hands tremble. Martha's own hands shook as she unfolded the pages, scrawled with the doctor's heavy black writing, vigorous and violent as Mary herself.

"Now listen, Jean, it's one chance in a million and you can have it if you want. I shall expire with envy, but I've just enough sanity left to know that I'm too old. To go to China and organize a kind of Red Cross—Associated Charities—Relief of the Poor, with trifles like directing the education of feminine China thrown in, because, years ago, little Wong Lee used our gymnasium and I treated him half way decently! He is now minister of something-or-other in New China and he throws this pearl at me. I would give twenty years of my life to do it, but I haven't twenty left, not ten even of any great use in such a big undertaking. But you! The old courage would come back. Things would be worth while again. You would——" Here a word had been scratched, but Martha bent long and close over the paper and at last she made it out. "You would forget."

After the third effort, Martha succeeded in folding the sheets and getting them into their envelope. Then she went back to the chair by the window and sat down. Dampness came about her lips and temples and she closed her eyes.

It would be a new life for Jean. Jean would forget.

Why did Jean need a new life? Had this wonderful year, so full of peace to Martha, been stagnation to Jean? Had the deep gentleness and understanding which had come to Jean been only a masque? Had it been possible only with an outlet of confidence to Mary? What was it that Jean was to forget? Back and forth through the last eighteen months Martha's memory went, gathering forgotten looks, stray phrases, quiet evenings when Jean lay on the couch reading, evenings so full of contentment to Martha, that she had thanked God for each one.

Twice the maid came to the door to clear the breakfast table and went back to the kitchen on tiptoe. The third time Martha heard her.

"All right, Katy, you can clear away now."

At twelve o'clock Jean telephoned, as the habit had grown since Martha's illness in the early winter. Martha assured her that she felt all right and would go and take her nap "as ordered."

"Be sure you do. And I'll be home early. It's Katy's afternoon out, isn't it?"

"Yes. I think I'll tell her she can have the evening, too, because she wants to go over to Montclair to see her cousin."

"But don't you do a thing for supper. I'll stop in at a delicatessen."

Martha went back to her room and lay down. The effort of answering had exhausted her, so that now she shook as with a chill, and her heart thudded sickeningly. When Katy came to call her to lunch, Martha did not want any. She heard Katy eat a hurried meal in the kitchen, clear the dining-room and go. After a while the perfect stillness of the house rested Martha a little, and she got up and went into the kitchen. Usually, she enjoyed these afternoons when Katy was gone and she was free to putter about and make little delicacies, for which Jean always scolded her, and ate with tremendous relish. But to-day, Martha had to rest often as she made the chocolate cake that was Jean's favorite, and she did not ice it at all.

In her private office, Jean made her third effort to write to Mary. In the outer room two typewriters clicked and from across the hall, through the open transom, she heard Jerome Stuart, of the Men's City Club, dictating.

"I will take the matter up with Mrs. Herrick of the Women's Civic League, as it seems to me both organizations working together can accomplish better results."

Mrs. Herrick of the Women's Civic League. That meant herself and the eighteen busy, empty months since Gregory's letter.

Jean's hands dropped to the keys and she sat looking down into the street. The wind had swept it almost clean of people and the few who had to be out, beat along, muffled in clothes, like unthinking bundles propelled against their wills.

"If only mummy could stand it. But she couldn't, and she would be so utterly miserable."

Across the hall, Jerome Stuart was talking again:

"It seems to me that this is a matter for women rather than men. I will refer the matter to Jean Herrick of the Women's Civic League, and can assure you of prompt action."

Jean ripped out the paper and closed the machine.

"Nothing in the world is worth making mummy miserable for, and, besides, Mary would see through me in a minute, if I wrote in this mood. She'd know that I'd rather go to China than do anything else in the wide world. Never to see these streets again, nor the river, nor the people. To go where there are no memories unless I call them up. But mummy——"

Jerome Stuart was crossing the hall now, coming to consult with Mrs. Herrick of the Civic League. This tall, quiet man, with his unshakeable faith in humanity, would look at her with his deep gray eyes, eyes too gentle unless one had seen them flash against injustice, and, in a few moments, she would find herself starting some new piece of work. Jerome Stuart had done this often in the six months he had headed the Men's City Club, and Jean had been glad. But to-day she wanted no burden of another's enthusiasm forced upon her. She wanted nothing except to get away by herself. She heard the secretary tell Jerome Stuart that she was busy and she heard him go back again to his own office and close the door.

A little before five Jean left. The wind had reached a point of cold fury that made it almost impossible to breathe.

"I do hope she hasn't gone to service, even in a taxi." The possibility worried Jean all the way home. "I wish Lent came in the summer." As she let herself into the apartment she called gayly:

"Hello!"

There was no answer.

"Oh, mummy, it is silly. If God's everywhere, why can't you talk to Him here?"

It was half past five now, and, at the latest, Martha would be in by six. Jean put the kettle on the gas and the cold chicken and ham into the ice-box. The chocolate cake stood on the lowest shelf of the pantry.

"It's no good. I can never change her. I might just as well let her go peacefully on."

She turned the gas low under the kettle and went into her own room to take off her things. The connecting door to Martha's was ajar, and the wind, whistling down the light-well, rushed at Jean, striking like a hand.

"Whew!" She threw her things on the bed and hurried to close the window.

Sitting in the rocker by the bed, one shoe on, the other by her side, her hands quiet in her lap, her head back, tilted a little as if listening, and with a terrible smile on the open lips, sat Martha. Jean swayed on the threshold, and then moved slowly and heavily toward the chair. The curtain blew in and the end flapped against Martha's shoulder. Jean put it aside. Without a sound she dropped beside the chair and her arms closed about her mother. The little figure lurched sideways and the cold cheek lay against her own. As cold and still as the dead, Jean knelt.

The mechanism of her brain had stopped, back there ages ago, on the threshold. Her will, her power to feel, had dropped into an abyss of nothingness. Jean knelt, knowing that her mother was dead, that she had died in the act of getting ready for service, that she must have died about three hours ago, while she was trying to write to Mary, that there were many things to do and she would have to begin doing them. But she could neither move nor think of what they were.

All her life came to this point and stopped. Tiny incidents, forgotten to consciousness, rose from the mass of memories piled upon them. They had neither relation nor sequence, but tumbled chaotically in the void. Martha making a dress for her doll; Martha on graduation day; Herrick and their Sunday dinners with Martha; Tom and Elsie; the months with Gregory in which Martha had no part and the night she had come home to find Martha mending and had been glad. The two terrible weeks she had passed alone by the sea, after Gregory's letter. The return—Mary gone West and Martha happy again in the solitude with Jean. And the long months since, when her mother was the realest thing in the world and Jean had felt the narrow binding bands of Martha's love and been a little comforted.

Now the band had snapped and she was alone.

Across the light-well, a woman put a child to bed. It knelt and said its prayers, just as she had used to do, and afterwards the woman tucked it up, opened the window and turned off the light. The elevator clanked from floor to floor. Children scampered across the apartment above. Dishes rattled in the kitchens. Men were coming home to dinner. The great building was vibrant with the sounds that mark the definite closing of a day. That small period of finite time, man's working day, was ended. But here, there was no light, no sound in the still rooms. The small, intimate ending of the hours was lost, engulfed in this tremendous ending of all things.

A sputtering noise broke on Jean's consciousness. It had been going on a long while. She laid the little head gently against the chair back and rose. A strange odor filled the apartment. She went out into the kitchen. The water had completely boiled away and the solder had melted from the kettle. Jean turned off the gas and went back.

There were so many things to do, and now she would have to begin doing them. Death, the most silent, private thing in the world, necessitated many outward offices, the presence of strangers, an official routine. Jean lifted her mother's body and laid it on the bed. She closed the parted lips and bound them. Then she began to undress her. Never, in her whole life, had Jean done such service for Martha, and now it seemed as if, from some vast distance, her mother was watching, embarrassed and reluctant, so that Jean felt awkward and ashamed. One by one she took off the garments, noticing with detached numbness the beautiful mending in Martha's stockings, the neat tying of the corset laces. Jean had never seen her mother undressed, and the youthful quality of the skin astonished her. She felt inhuman, perverted, to notice this, but the feeling ran only on the surface of her brain, as if she had taken an anæsthetic, strong enough to deaden sensation, but not strong enough to kill consciousness. Suddenly she recalled Herrick passing his fingers over the smooth satin of the painted canvas and she covered the little body hastily in a white night dress, as if shielding it from stranger eyes.

How small and still she looked like that, and, at the same time, so terrible! A little while before and she had been Martha, her mother, narrow in her beliefs, jealous in her love, full of obstinate faith and human weakness. Now she was part of the universe, of the terrible law of life and death. What tremendous finality to be centered in that small body! And how young she looked! Only the white hair seemed to have marked the years. A few short hours before and Jean had felt her throat tighten at the frail body and the thin white hair. And now, in a moment, Martha had outlived time, defied human laws. Age was a cloak imposed by Time and removed by Death. At some distant spot, Martha, young and happy, was talking to her God.

The mechanical movement of lifting and undressing her mother stirred Jean's consciousness, and she realized now that the window was still open and the freezing wind blowing in. She reached for the comforter at the foot of the bed and drew it up. This covering the small body was one of the useless, sentimental things people did with their dead. But she had no power over her actions. Years of association with the flesh had created habits that fulfilled themselves mechanically. A lifetime with the shell of the body had given it an existence of its own, and although the closed eyes and bound lips proved Martha beyond the need, the very flesh and shape had created demands of their own.

Jean covered the body snugly and stood looking down. With this, her work was done. Never again would she do anything for her mother.

Jean shivered and then something beat its way through the numbness of the last hours and she dropped to her knees. With her face on the small, still breast she sobbed, dry, tearing sobs that ripped the last eighteen months to shreds and buried her beneath them.

She was alone in the world. There was no one now to consider. No need to pretend. No one in the whole writhing mass of humanity belonged to her nor she to any one.

The desperate emptiness of Gregory's going rose in a gaunt specter from the grave where she had tried to heap it to stillness by the small duties of loving and caring for Martha; trying to make up, out of her own realization of loneliness and pain, some of the empty years of her mother's life. Now the need was over. She would never again have to take a book and pretend to read in order not to worry the patient figure sewing under the lamp. She would never again have to take the image of happy hours and lift it from her brain, that it might not claim the moments that were Martha's. There was no need to do anything, anything at all. She was alone, free in a terrible freedom, alone in an infinity of emptiness.

The front door opened and Jean heard Katy come down the hall into the kitchen. She got up and went out and told her. Katy began to cry, and although Jean knew that Katy had been fond of Martha, there was something so officially appropriate in these instant tears, that Jean frowned. Katy choked her sob into a sniff.

"If you would make some strong black coffee, Katy, I should like it." Then she went into the hall and telephoned to the doctor who had attended Martha during the pneumonia of the earlier winter. He lived nearby and came in a few moments. He pronounced it death from heart disease and told Jean that her mother's heart, weak for years, had never recovered from the strain of pneumonia.

"Did she have anything special to worry her? Any shock to-day? Still, there was no reason that it should have terminated so soon."

"Not that I know of."

"No special shock to-day?"

"No. We live very quietly and there would be nothing without my knowing it."

"Um. Sometimes these things take sudden and unexpected turns. There is not always a definite explanation." He stopped as if something more personal and sympathetic was expected of him. Taller than he, Jean looked down coldly. He was used to women crying or going into hysterics, and although he was always scornful of such procedure, years of habit in meeting these emergencies had given him a tactful gentleness of which he was vain. But now there was going to be no need for restoratives or sedatives and so he took his hat.

"If there is anything that I can do to make it easier, please feel——"

"Thank you. There is nothing."

When the doctor had gone, Jean drank the black coffee that Katy brought.

"Could I be seein' her, Mis' Herrick?"

Jean did not want Katy to see her. But she could not refuse, for the feeling persisted that Martha was no longer her mother, her own special human property. She was part of the law of life and death, day and night, the seasons. She had entered the cosmos. Personal preference was washed under in this tide of law.

Jean heard Katy go into the room and drop to her knees. There was a moment of sobbing and then a mumbled prayer. In a few moments the girl came out. Jean heard her muffled sobbing in the kitchen.

"If you would rather go home to-night you may, Katy."

"And leave you?"

"Certainly. I do not mind. There is nothing to be afraid of," she added more gently.

"I know." Katy took advantage of the gentleness to sob openly. "The dead can't hurt us—God rest their souls—and such a gentle sweet lady—but it does give me the creeps—it always done——"

"Then, Katy, I would rather you went. In fact I would rather be alone. You can come early. Be here by seven-thirty."

Jean went into the living-room. Martha's chair stood pushed back from the window, as she had left it when she had gone to get ready for service. Her glasses lay on the window-shelf. Jean sat down in the chair. In a few moments she heard Katy tiptoe out. The streets were empty, except for the wind. It moaned about the corners of the big building, shutting Jean in from the rest of the world. And beyond the wind, the black river ran swiftly to the sea.

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

"I am the resurrection and the life."

Alone in the church, Jean sat upright in the first pew. The stained windows, the fine linen of the young priest's cassock, his deep-toned chant, the odor of incense, the satin-grained wood of the pews, the exquisite lace of the altar cloth, impressed themselves in a setting warm and intimate for the small gray coffin resting at the altar rail.

Jean sat dry-eyed, as if she were witnessing a rite in which the priest and Martha had a part. They belonged. She had handed Martha over to this young man, and now he and Martha and God were carrying on some ceremony. She was an outsider.

The stinging sweetness of the incense rose in a blue cloud as the priest incensed the coffin. His voice ceased. He looked inquiringly toward Jean. Alone in the apartment, just before the undertaker had come, Jean had kissed her mother for the last time. But in the depth of the waiting silence, a need to look once more on that restful little face gripped her, and she rose and went slowly to the casket, Against the white satin of the pillow, so lightly that even in death she seemed resenting this comfort, Martha was resting. It seemed to Jean that the eyes under the thin, veined lids were quietly happy and that the mouth, so oddly young now, smiled. In the beloved atmosphere of prayer and adoration, Martha had gained consciousness. Loosed from the flesh, all the emotional capacity, the power of love and devotion and joy suppressed had been freed at last by the cessation of earthly cares and prejudices to express itself and claim its own. In the interval of rest below the altar, Martha had come to life, a life in which the body had no part.

Jean touched the thin hair on the temples. "You're happy, dear, aren't you?" And, afterwards, Jean often had the feeling that the little head had moved in acknowledgment.

She went back to the pew. The cover was screwed down. The young priest preceded the coffin to the door. In stole and surplice he stood beside the open grave. "Dust to dust." The earth and dry snow powdered upon the lid. It was all as Martha would have wished—calm, beautiful, alone with Jean and God.

Jean came back to the apartment. The trees on the Palisades were hidden under a burden of white. Thick white snow muffled passing footsteps. She was alone, absolutely alone in the still, snow-muffled universe.

The next day Jean went back to the office. Jerome Stuart made no conventional reference and Jean was grateful. He suggested their getting to work on a new Child Labor law and they talked over details for an hour. When he had gone back to his own office, Jean wrote a brief note telling Mary. But even Mary was not real, She, too, was off beyond the barrier that shut Jean from the rest of the world.

At the end of the week Katy returned. The routine of life settled. Trained by Martha, Katy duplicated to her best the comfort that Martha had infused. Each night as Jean closed the door behind her, she felt it claim her, this grotesque, terrible duplicate of Martha's devotion. For thirty dollars a month, Katy created a home, followed the small customs that had sprung from Martha's love.

As the days slid by, one exactly like another, Jean felt as if she were being walled forever in Katy's ordered emptiness. She left earlier in the morning and returned later at night, but it was there waiting, until the day came to center in the moment when she would have to turn the knob and enter the warm, lighted vault; sit alone at the well-prepared meal and afterwards try to read in the silence. All day she was conscious of it waiting.

Strange fears rose in Jean and she was helpless before them. Sometimes she left the office in the middle of the afternoon and went home to face and conquer the terrible emptiness, and sometimes she walked in the night until she could scarcely stand, and it was there waiting for her. Gradually in the depth of the emptiness, something formed, a shadow-shape that Jean could neither annihilate nor grasp. It was as if, in her going, Martha had left a door open behind her, a narrow crack through which Jean could neither see clearly, nor quite close. And the thought of death began to sift down through life, absorbing its reality.

Jean saw herself, her work, her smallest act, as a pebble in the conglomerate mass of time. Like a gigantic rock crusher, Time reduced all effort to powder. In the vacant hours of the night, under the gleam of the cold, gold stars, the endings of things came to obsess Jean. Everything ended, everything. No matter how deeply indented the surface, the ending washed it clean again. Separation washed out human relationships, old age washed away physical effort and interest, death washed away all. Everything ended, books, buildings, days, nights, work, rest, love, life. Everything lasted for a while and then stopped.

Hour after hour Jean sat, staring out to the river, stifled by the fact of death, that great ending containing within itself all the ends of one's smallest acts.

Where was Martha now? Was there nothing anywhere of that patient little figure that had trotted so busily through its daily rounds? Were all the habits and preferences one built up through the years, but things of flesh? Was there nothing left anywhere, in any form, of that gigantic faith? Did man impose upon himself this sentence of life? Summon himself from nowhere, to struggle for a moment, and go back to nothingness again? In his terror of the immense quietness of Death, had he invented Heaven, an escape from the inconceivable peace he had never known in life? Had he invented God because he dared not be alone beyond the grave? And if Man had not imposed his own sentence, who had? Martha's God, the Tyrant who hurled us into life, whipped us through the years, snatched us away at the end, never for one single moment, revealing His purpose. Or was it all some huge machine set going in the unthinkable beginning of Time, grinding purposelessly on to an unthinkable end?

The door would neither open wide nor close, and Jean's hair whitened above the temples.

In April, when the trees began to bud, she gave Katy an extra month's wages and dismissed her. Jean had reached another ending; the ending of the senseless battle that had once seemed so worth while. She was going back to the gray fog, to the wide still spaces, back to the warm sands and cool salt winds and the sea, that neither sought nor promised peace but had it.

When the details of her going were arranged with the committee, Jean went to tell Jerome Stuart. Now that she was leaving, this quiet man with the stooping student shoulders and the thick gray hair, always ruffled to disorder, stood out for a moment, against the background of their work together, and Jean felt, as he sat looking at her, that he was surprised and disappointed. But it did not matter. Nothing mattered.

"You are really leaving for good?"

"Yes. I never expect to come back to New York. I've turned in my resignation and it's been accepted, with a provision of their own invention that, if I change my mind within a year, I am to return." Jean smiled. "And I let it go at that."

"Then all the schemes we've talked over are not to be? No one else can take your place and carry them through."

For a moment Jean felt them dragging at her, holding her back. To what end? What would they give in return? Greater comfort, for a time, to a few people whom she would never see. A few patches put in the social fabric.

"Oh, yes, they can. Why, Charlotte Stetson's so anxious to try her hand she could scarcely be decently regretful!"

Jean tried to speak lightly but Jerome Stuart's expression stopped her.

"Please don't be insincere, Mrs. Herrick."

Jean flushed. She was destroying this man's conception of her and she had valued it.

"You are acting on a lessened impulse and it is wrong," he added quietly. "It is always wrong and so—it is always a mistake."

"Not always," Jean defended, and rose abruptly. If she stayed she might ask him of life and death and the aimless muddle of the whole. "I've thought it over carefully. I am not acting on impulse. It is a decision."

He said nothing as he followed to the door and rang the elevator bell. But as Jean stepped into the cage, he held out his hand and said with the look that had often made Jean feel that, in spite of his forty-eight years, his grown daughter, and all the years of public service behind him, he had kept unspoiled the sweet cleanness of a little child.

"Think it over again—and come back."

She shook her head. She did not want to lie again to Jerome Stuart.

The next day Jean stood in the empty apartment that had been her home for five years. With the removal of the furniture it seemed to have changed its spirit. The bare walls stared back indifferent to the pain and happiness they had encompassed. Before another twenty-four hours were gone, some one else might be looking down into the tree-lined street where, later, the fat white babies would be wheeled, and where now the trees were beginning to leaf, not as they would in the full eagerness of a few weeks hence, but in the meager, timid fashion of a chilly spring, a little leaf here and there.

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

The porter dimmed the lights for the night. In the berth above a man snored, and across the aisle an old woman breathed in gasping squeaks. Jean pulled up the blind, and, propped on her pillow, stared into the night and tried not to hear. But the breathing of the crowded car was persistent and grouped itself into strange rhythms and chords that stripped away spiritual differences and leveled the sleepers to a common physical need.

Jean remembered how she had lain so, her first night in a sleeper, ten years before, and how the hot, dark intimacy had excited her. How near she had felt to some mystery, as if she were just about to penetrate some exciting secret. Even the blackness of the prairie had quivered with it. The red and green semaphores, uncannily obedient to a hidden power, had winked their inclusion in the great adventure. The lonely little stations, specks of light in the night, had been so friendly and knowing. Now they hurt, so bravely and uselessly battling against the engulfing darkness, the thick, limitless blackness of the prairie.

Late in the evening of the fourth day, Jean stepped from the train, and Mary put her arms around her. As they crossed the Bay, they sat very near together in the bow and watched the city lights, diffused in the high fog, glow a red mist over the hills. But it was not until they stood in the small room opening from the Doctor's, that the armor Jean had raised for her own protection loosened, and then she dared not speak for fear of crying.

A gong sounded.

"We meet every night in the Assembly Hall for half an hour or so," Mary said huskily and Jean nodded. "This is going to be your room. Don't wait up for me."

When Mary was gone, Jean switched out the lights and went to the window where she had stood so often in the old days, relieved at Herrick's going, wondering at her own lack of wonder; and a year later, tingling with excitement at the offer from New York. Almost ten crowded years. And now she was back.

When the gong of dismissal sounded, Jean went into her own room and closed the door. She heard Mary come and light the light but she made no sound. After a while the light went out, but from time to time Jean heard a match strike, and she knew that the little doctor was lying there smoking. It was strange to have Mary smoking and thinking about her, as if she were "a case," but there was comfort in it too, as if she had come home and some one was watching over her. At last Jean slept.

In a few days, Mary spoke tentatively of China. But the hour of rekindled interest did not return and they did not mention it again. Jean took on a few cases and attended to them mechanically in the mornings. But no misfortune or sorrow penetrated below the surface of the mind trained to handle them. The real hours of the day were the afternoons, when Jean walked for miles alone against the clean sea wind, or through the gray fog, that now seemed to be filled with the souls of the dead; helpless things that had not been able to get through this grayness into the joy in which they had believed; or lingering souls, loath to leave the only world they had ever known.

In the evenings, Jean took some classes, and tried to mix cheerfully with the other workers, women like those whom it had once so stimulated her to feel working at the tangle with their thin, white fingers. But now they depressed her, sheltered from personal emotion behind their diffused pity for the world. Often, she left them to walk in the Latin Quarter until night emptied the streets of the dark men, forever arguing and gesticulating, and the frowsy women, terrible in their fecundity, nursing their babies from big, brown breasts. The tremendous vitality of these people rested Jean, so that watching, she herself seemed to be accomplishing.

But the days slipped into weeks and the weeks to months and she still stood aside watching. She wrote no letters to New York and received none. Sometimes she felt that she ought to write to Jerome Stuart but when she tried to think of what she would say, she could find nothing.

It was a week before Christmas, a blue, clear day between rains, that Jean sat by the sea and tried to face the coming year. What was she going to do? The waves lapped the sand, fishing smacks scudded by, and white gulls circled overhead. Jean's thoughts went round and round in an ever narrowing circle, and when she tried to slip through this closing space and grasp the coming year, Gregory, on the sand beside her, stirred. Her fingers touched his crisp, dry hair. The beach was crowded with people, but they were alone. The sand was littered with papers, and broken piers jutted into the water and the air was heavy with summer heat. But she was alive with every nerve in her.

Jean got up and began to walk back across the dunes. On and on over the shifting sand, past the straggling cottages of workmen, on through the well-kept streets of wealthy homes, dwindling again to middle-class flats, until finally, at dusk, Jean stood on the last hill looking down into Chinatown. She was tired at last, so that the weariness in her muscles corresponded to the weariness in her soul, and she had the temporary peace that comes of physical and mental accord. The odor of sandalwood and opium and strange eastern things rose to meet her as she went forward down the hill.

Stolid women pattered along, making their ridiculous purchases, haggling over a leek, a single pork chop, a wing of chicken. Calm men sat smoking long pipes in their dim shops. She might have left it the day before. The vast stability of it mocked her. It was like the ever moving, never resting sea—this human necessity to eat, to buy and sell, to move about. Hundreds of people had died since she had walked these streets with Herrick. Death had touched her own life. Thousands of walking, talking units had been taken, thousands of the little empty spaces had lasted for a second and then the moving mass had closed in again.

A woman came from a dark doorway, a rainbow bundle strapped to her back. From the bundle a small brown face with almond eyes looked calmly on the confusion of living. The mother stopped to bargain for a fried fish and Jean touched the smooth, brown cheek.

"A silly mess, isn't it, baby?"

The mother turned instantly and moved farther into the familiar safety of her own people. At the corner Jean stopped again, looking toward Portsmouth Square, the benches filled with men and boys, the familiar refuse of Babary Coast. She was still looking when a man, hurrying round the corner, brought up so suddenly that he seemed to have been thrown back upon his heels.

"I beg your pardon."

She turned quickly and looked at Franklin Herrick.

Jean spoke first. "I don't know why it is so surprising. I suppose it would have been stranger if we hadn't met."

"But I didn't know you were here."

"No, of course you didn't."

They stood looking at each other. Herrick had grown heavier, his features had coarsened. He looked untidy.

"I—I am really glad."

Jean smiled. The implication of possible regret on her part was so Herricky.

"Why, no, why should I?" She answered his unspoken thought, but Herrick did not notice. The interest of the thing claimed him as nothing had done for months. He had once been married to this large, prosperous-looking person, the one woman whom he had never been able to influence, to swerve a hair from her own path. And here she was after eleven years, looking at him with the same straight look, throwing aside all sentiment, going violently to the bottom of every little question, as if it were a matter of importance.

"Could we go and have tea somewhere? Unless you are in a hurry."

"It was you who seemed to be in a hurry."

"Well, I'm not, now. Tea, then?"

They turned, and Jean knew that Herrick would go straight to the tea house where they had had their first tea, but when he ordered the same little almond cakes and preserved ginger, Jean laughed.

"What is it?"

"I knew you would do that."

"Did you? But you always did know what I would do. I think that was the trouble, I could never feel masculine and superior. I always felt like a window with you, as if you were looking straight through me."

Jean's eyes sobered. She must have hurt deeply, more often than she had known.

"That would have pleased me terribly once on a time. I should have adored making people feel like windows."

Herrick waited until the waiter had shuffled away for more hot water.

"Doesn't it make you feel that way now?" This was going to be really interesting.

"No. It wouldn't. But then one changes a lot in eleven years."

"Less two months," he added softly.

Was he actually going to set a stage? But he looked so seedy and heavy and bored, that Jean's annoyance melted in pity again.

"When you think of it as more than a tenth of a century, there seems plenty of time, doesn't there?"

A tenth of a century! It was horrible put that way; an eternity. And so like Jean. A flush crept up to Herrick's eyes and he looked away.

"You have made good. Your tenth of a century has not been wasted."

And Jean saw, as if he had told her, the sordid sequence of the years to him. The knowledge of that dreary waste saddened her.

"I have worked. The East is full of opportunity."

Work, opportunity. The old worship of effort for its own sake. Herrick forced back the words that rose to his lips.

"Yes. I saw that you had done some big thing about tubercular tenements. The papers here had quite a bit about it. I think some one tried to start a movement like it."

Jean shrank. She could not talk of that to him.

"Yes," she said shortly. "I had something to do with it, but so had a lot of other people."

But she would lead. It was her way to lead and then to share the credit. It was the old, maddeningly generous way. No, she had not changed, not really, no matter what she said. Her life had gone as she had planned it. Nothing had swerved her from her ideal of work and success. Hard and cold and intrinsically selfish, she had forced life to her will. And he: a cloying affair with The Kitten, more and shorter affairs, always seeking, never finding, wasted through his own capacity to feel, dragged down by the biggest thing in him, the weakness that might have been a strength.

If Jean had cared! It would have taken such a little from her store of patience and faith in herself. She had been niggardly, hoarded it for herself.

"You have had a lot," he said at last, "everything you ever wanted."

From the tragic emptiness of his eyes Jean turned her own. Before his, the emptiness of her days stood clean and filled with happy memories.

"I have had a lot."

The grotesquely carved balcony vanished into the tea-room of the upper thirties. Instead of Herrick, heavy and soft with regret, Gregory sat, strong and happy in his success, and she had wished for a moment that he had not won, and had been proud and miserable and weak with love. Tears rushed to Jean's eyes and she bit her lip to keep them back.

Herrick started. Not even to Jean could work alone bring that look. Slowly the color left his face.

"You—have found out what love is, too."

Jean nodded. Herrick covered his face hastily with his hand. He had been right then, right in his first analysis, so long ago, by the camp fires in the sandy coves. It had been in Jean always. In those silly, idealistic first weeks of their marriage, when he had been content with so little. It had been there the night he had seized and kissed her and she had pushed him away. It had been there, hidden so deep from his touch, that he had ceased to believe in its existence.

And some one else had touched it to life. He sat with his shoulders bowed, his face hidden. After a long time he said:

"You are married, then?"

His hand still hid his face. The hand, too, had coarsened and grown thick. There was black hair along the joints and the nails were ill-kept. And once Jean had liked Herrick's hands. They had held hers so surely, racing along the sands.

"No," she said quietly. "Not legally. He was married and had a child." After all, it was not much to give in atonement, this little confidence, but it was the best she had.

For a moment Herrick did not move. Then his hand came slowly down. He stared, puzzled. Amazement and finally understanding flashed across his face. Herrick leaned back in his chair and laughed aloud.

"Good Lord, Jean. You—an affair!"

Jean rose. Her knees were shaking and she was cold.

"Don't," she commanded in a whisper, and Herrick, half risen from his chair, sank back. Seeing nothing, Jean crossed the balcony, walked swiftly through the great banquet hall and down the stairs to the street.

Herrick sat where he was until the waiter came and asked him to move his table to make room for a group of long-coated merchants in gowns of silk. Then he paid the bill and went. It was night.

In her room at the settlement, Jean walked up and down, her hands gripped behind her in the old habit. Twice Mary came to the door and listened to the even stride, and went back to her book and tried to read. It was close on one o'clock when the door opened and Jean came in. Instinctively, Mary rose as if to meet a crisis. At the movement, Jean laid her hands on the doctor's shoulders and forced her gently down. Then, just as she had done on the night she had left The Kitten standing by the greasy table, and on the night when she had told Mary of her desire for a child of Gregory's, Jean dropped to her knees, and, sitting back on her heels, said quietly:

"Mary, I'm going back to New York just as fast as a train will take me. I'm a weak, cowardly idiot."

"Really? I don't know that I would put it quite so strongly myself."

Jean smiled. "That's not strong enough, Mary, not by half."

"Maybe not. But why this sudden realization?"

"I had tea with Franklin this afternoon."

"Well?"

"Poor Boy Blue! Poor, weak, vain, longing Begee!"

"Jean!" Mary gripped her shoulders. "What fool thing are you contemplating now? You're not going to tow That back East, are you?"

"Good Lord, no!" Jean laughed as Mary had not heard her laugh since her arrival. There was a silence so long that the doctor drifted down a dozen false paths of conjecture before Jean said:

"Mary, do you remember that vacation I took suddenly, after telling you that night—just before you left? You knew, didn't you?"

"Yes. I knew. I would have stayed, Jean, only it wouldn't have done any good."

"No. I was glad you weren't there. It made it easier, in a way. And I was glad when Pat went, too, and the children. I had only to deceive mummy, then—and keep going." Jean stopped and Mary smoked two cigarettes before she began again.

"And then mummy died and there was no need to pretend any more, no need for anything. Mary, it wasn't true that I came West for a vacation. I didn't come to see you. I came to leave it all. I let go."

There was another long pause, before Jean went on.

"I had loved a man so that his going took all the meaning out of life. And I went on for a while through a kind of inertia and because, from a baby, mummy had beaten a sense of duty into me. It was no force of my own. I had jumped into a stream, and when the current was too strong for my strength I went down, just as Franklin and Flop and The Kitten, and all those whom I used to despise, went down when their particular current was too strong for them. Why, on the night I got Gregory's letter, if I could have gone to him I would have. I would have had it all back, under any conditions, at any price. Nothing mattered, nothing in the whole world, but to feel his arms about me, to know that it had not finished. I would have gone to her, just as The Kitten came, and asked her to give him to me."

"But you didn't, Jean."

"No. Because something in me, that I hated for its clearness, saw that if it had been to him what it had been to me, he would never have written that letter. I had had nothing, Mary, or such a little part of what I had believed I had."

Jean shivered. Mary's hand moved to comfort, but did not.

"And then, this afternoon, when Franklin said I had had everything, and I saw him sitting there heavier and coarsened and so empty—Mary, he's so tragically empty—it came to me suddenly that I had had a lot. I have always had friendship, Pat and you, and unshakeable love like mummy's, and I had those wonderful months with Gregory, and not even the ending of it can really take them away, and I wanted to give Franklin something, so I told him that I had loved a married man and that we had never been legally married."

A little smile twitched the corners of Jean's lips.

"And he leaned back in his chair and laughed and said: 'Good Lord, Jean—you—an affair!' and I have been listening to that laugh and hearing that 'you—an affair?' ever since. And in a way, he is right."

"Jean!"

"Yes, he is. You see, I had never thought of it like that, stripped of all the personal element, just bare and stark as it would sound in a court of law. It was me, and so it was different. What is an affair, technically? It's a love, without legal bonds, that breaks up or dies of its own accord. Never mind what it is to the parties concerned, that's what it is to the world. That's what my love for Gregory is to the world, to Franklin; what his and The Kitten's and Flop's and The Tiger's was to me."

"Jean, you're crazy. Isn't the spirit anything?"

"Everything. But I am trying to make it clear what it was to Franklin——"

"Of course it would be that to him."

"And what he made me see. How do I know the measure of the force that drove him to The Kitten? We have no measure but our own needs. Fifteen years ago, would I have thought it possible, when the days wouldn't pass fast enough to get me into life and work, that a day would come when success, achievement, the chosen work of years, would all shrivel to nothing because one certain man had gone out of them? Three years ago, would I have believed that Gregory could fill his days without me, could have gone on without my sympathy and love and understanding? That he could have nothing deeper in his life than that chattering doll? Mary, there's only one thing that I am sure of, and that is that we don't know a single thing about any one else, or ourselves, either."

Jean rose and stood looking down at Mary.

"And so you are going back?"

"Yes. I am going back. I am not going to drift, here, beside the sea and hills, which are my Kitten, my succession of sordid loves, my easiest way. I am going back. It won't be easy. I know that. There will be times—Mary, you don't know what it means to die inside, to see and never to feel, not even anger, to have nothing sharper than memory."

"And you don't know, Jean," Mary spoke slowly and rose from her chair as if she had grown very tired, "what it means to have been emotionally comfortable all your life. Never to have gone down nor up. Never to have died nor been alive. To have grown old in comfort. A kind of paradox, isn't it, to have been always so comfortable that sometimes it hurts."

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

It was late in the afternoon of a cold, clear day two weeks later that Jean stood outside the Grand Central Station and looked at the moving streams of strangers, all touched to faint friendliness by the accident of being in the same city, on the same street, at the same hour as herself. She felt as if she knew them all, but had slipped back noiselessly without warning among them, and as yet they had not seen her.

Jean was smiling to herself, when one of the moving units escaped the stream, and came to a halt beside her.

"Well, Jean Herrick, of all people! I thought you were in California."

Jean turned to encounter the sharp face and mouse-bright eyes of Catherine Lee, whom she had neither seen nor thought of for years, although, during the first winter in New York, Catherine had been the center of a group that met every Sunday evening for tea, usually at Jean's.

"I was!"

"When did you get back?"

"About ten minutes ago, and I feel as if I had been dropped from a parachute. I was just debating the Y. W. C. A. or the Martha Washington. I loathe hotels——"

"I say, do you mean you have no plans at all? Because we can put you up at our place if you care to—ten rooms down on Grove Street, a garden the size of a handkerchief, a fountain the size of a lemonade straw, four, free, feminine souls, and an empty attic. Yes?"

"It sounds like a Demonstration. Till I get my bearings, and thank you a thousand times."

"Come on. We'll walk, unless you're tired."

"Of sitting still for a week!"

They swung away, Jean shortening her step to the quick patter of Catherine's. As they went, Catherine told of her work and Jean listened enough to make out that Catherine had built herself a firm place in this city she had once hated: that any woman with brains and grit could force New York to recognize her and that managing concerts and readings paid "like the devil" if you got in right.

The patter of the crisp voice went on until, as they turned into Grove Street, Catherine broke off so sharply, that Jean feared her inattention had been discovered, and was just about to apologize when she caught a flush on Catherine's dry, brown cheeks, and followed her eyes to the heavy-set figure of a man, standing on the curb, throwing pennies into the slush, while a horde of street urchins shouted and fought for them. The man's clumsy body was convulsed with laughter, and he made false motions of throwing, with ungainly sweeps of his arms.

Catherine hurried forward and Jean felt that she wanted to reach the man and put an end to the spectacle. But as they came to the red brick house, with white window facings and green window boxes, the man turned and crossed to them.

"Jean, let me present Philip Fletcher, Nan Bonham's cousin and the nearest thing we possess to a male inmate. Philip, Mrs. Herrick of the Women's Civic Leagues."

Philip Fletcher ripped off his hat with absurd exaggeration and made a low bow. Now that she looked at him closely, Jean saw that the man's features were well cut, his eyes were clear, blue and kind, a trifle too far apart, and that his mouth was weak. Jean's first impression that he might not be quite normal mentally, vanished. He was evidently a simple soul, without dignity, but of a vanity that demanded attention even at his own expense.

He followed them in, and as Catherine led the way up to the attic, Jean heard him go on laughing down the hall and into a room at the end. She was sure that he had often thrown pennies before and would often do it again, and be overwhelmingly amused each time.

"Well, how do you like it?"

The attic ran the whole length of the house and had a big open fireplace at one end. The original windows had been replaced in the front by leaded glass doors, opening on a small balcony. The walls were burlapped and the furniture upholstered in gay chintz. It was a woman's room but it reminded Jean in a way of Flop's, as it might have been if The Bunch had never entered it.

"It's glorious!"

"I'll have a fire lighted right away and the bath's across the hall. There's sure to be plenty of hot water, because the old souse that Philip's wished on us for the last furnace man, nearly explodes the furnace every day." She was at the door, when she turned and added, "Phil's in one of his annoying moods to-night. Don't take it too seriously."

Jean laughed and promised that she would make allowances. But she fancied that Catherine flushed again at this, and wondered why she took him so seriously.

An hour later, refreshed by her bath, Jean heard the dinner-bell and went down with a pleasant sense of curiosity to meet the "four, free, feminine souls." They were seated when she entered and Catherine made the introductions, by pointing each out with her forefinger from the head of the table.

"Beth Marshall, that healthy blonde who looks as if she did Swedish exercise every morning, private secretary on Wall Street. That dark, artistic being next, Gerte Forsythe, magazine writer, and furnishes our emotion. Nan Bonham, deceives the world with her white hair, has the soul of a baby and runs the Presbyterian Relief in Brooklyn. Girls, Jean Herrick, head of the Women's Civic Leagues. It's stew, again."

"And, verily, I say unto you, the stew shall follow the roast, and the hash the stew, until the third and fourth generation of them whose parents come from New England."

"Shut up, Phil. Nobody invited you to come to-night, anyhow." Nevertheless Nan's blue eyes twinkled and Jean knew that she found her cousin's humor amusing.

As Jean spread her napkin, she felt Philip Fletcher sizing her up and she knew that Catherine was watching. She tried to think of something flippant that would show she could enter the mood, but before she could think of anything, more to reassure Catherine than from any desire of Philip Fletcher's approval, Gerte claimed his attention, and Catherine, in evident relief, was talking easily again of her own work, as she had during their walk from the station.

Nan joined with Gerte and Philip. Beth ate in placid silence. With this grouping of interests the meal continued, until coffee, which was served in a small basement room, cozily furnished, before an open fire.

Immediately after the coffee, all but Catherine went their way. No one said good-night, or made any mention of seeing Jean again, although Jean was sure that they had liked her. Their "freedom" had hardened to a ritual of incivility. If she stayed for a week or a month, she would see these women, tired, gay, bored, happy, and they would see her in these many moods too. They would call each other by their first names. But, if she left to-night they would probably never think of her again, nor she of them.

Jean stared into the fire, and a little of the feeling that she had had long ago on Flop's balcony, of there being so many people in the world with the threads of their lives all crossing, came back. She thought how strange it was that a few hours ago she had known nothing of these women or Grove Street, and now she was there, and Catherine was explaining the community plan on which the house worked and, finally, asking her if she wanted to come in.

"Of course we'll take a vote on you, it's part of the charter, but it's only a form." She hesitated and added, almost shyly, "I think you would be comfortable and we would really like to have you."

But as Jean began to thank her, Catherine's manner changed.

"Matter of business and—general comfort," she said in her short, snappy way. "Such a lot of people wouldn't fit."

"Then I'm a candidate for the vacancy?"

"We'll notify you formally but I guess, if you want to, you can be one of The Theses?"

"The Theses?"

"As against the rest of the world, The Theses. Gerte's distinction."

Jean laughed remembering the Tiger, not so unlike the thin, dark Gerte, and wondered why people who dabbled in the arts needed these meaningless distinctions between themselves and others.

But later, as she lay on the couch drawn close to the open window in the attic, and looked out across the buildings, rising in the outline of a fever chart as far as she could see, Jean was glad that she had met Catherine and that she was going to live here with them. And although she knew that, at any previous period of her life, it would have been impossible to her, now, contrasted with the lonely nights staring out to the river after Martha's death, the paid hominess of Katy's effort, the smoothly running indifference of these women would be pleasant. She was beginning a new life, in a new manner. And as she dropped to sleep, Jean had a hazy notion of owing something to Franklin Herrick.

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

The next day Jean went back to work. Charlotte Stetson, who had taken her place, tried to evince genuine pleasure but could not quite convey it. Jean felt that she had been suitably mourned for as dead, and that this sudden and unexpected resurrection was an intrusion in questionable taste. So it was with mingled amusement and curiosity that, about eleven o'clock, Jean knocked on Jerome Stuart's door, and, at his short "Come in," entered.

"Well—I'll be——" he had risen, but dropped back into his chair with an amended "Thank God."

Jean laughed, "Now I do feel like a returned corpse. I suppose I ought to have written but it never occurred to me."

"I'm glad you didn't. Nothing exciting has happened for weeks, and I always did like a surprise."

"I'm glad you take it that way. Charlotte Stetson made me feel that I ought to creep back into my tomb. She——"

"Oh, to——" Jerome Stuart broke off, realizing that he was about to say aloud what he had so often said in the last eight months, "To the devil with Miss Stetson," and added clumsily, "To be quite honest, you know, it was only a kind of surface surprise. I've always known you would come back."

There was no conceit of assurance in the tone. This quiet man who did things quietly had learned. Perhaps he, too, had run away from life once and come back.

"Thank you," Jean said, following her own train of thought, and Jerome Stuart seemed to understand. There was a short pause and then he said, smiling:

"Well?"

"Well, begin at the beginning. What has been going on in the world?"

"How much do you know? I suppose you know about the Sweat Shop law?"

"No. Did it go over? I am glad. No, really I don't know a thing that's been going on."

Jerome Stuart handed her a bunch of clippings, but Jean could not focus her attention on them, because she felt that the man before her was studying her quietly. He might have known that she could return because he knew that one didn't quit unless one were a coward clear through. But the details puzzled him.

She handed back the clippings. "Great. After all California is a long way off and they have their own problems out there."

"Of course. What are they doing?" Jerome accepted the implication, as Jean intended, that she had been working. She began to sketch the Hill House, what they were trying to do, and Mary. But the doctor bulked larger than any of it, and Jerome knew that this woman meant much to Jean. He had never thought of Jean with the emotional feminine associations of most women, with the "best friends" his daughter Alice had had since babyhood, and this new point of view held him to the exclusion of any interest in the Hill House or its accomplishments. It was a new background against which this large, unemotional person moved in human intimacies. So that, when a chance remark of Jean's introduced some young college girls who were working with Dr. Mary, Jerome found himself talking of Alice, her approaching marriage, her amusing frankness about life, the mixture of old-fashioned love and modern feminism that Alice called "seeing life clearly and seeing it whole."

It was after one, when the stenographer knocked on the door for her afternoon batch of letters, and recalled to Jerome that he had an appointment at two-thirty and had not yet been to lunch, He gave the girl her work and turned to Jean.

"I haven't even begun on our latest and I have an appointment at half- past two. Couldn't we have lunch somewhere? I want to tell you about Mike Flannery. He's the alderman who's going to give us the most trouble."

The suggestion fitted in with the intimacy of their long talk, so that Jean did not realize she was doing anything unusual, until Jerome drew out her chair in a corner of an attractive tea-room. Then all the teas and luncheons she had had with Gregory in just such rooms marshaled before her, and Jean wished she had not come. In time it would be easy, but now it was difficult to keep her attention fixed, and the luncheon began in a restraint that Jerome felt, but whose origin puzzled him. It was not until the meal was over that, in the relief of its ending, Jean's mood lightened to its earlier cheerfulness.

"We'll give Mike Flannery a run for his money and the surprise of his life," she said, as the waitress departed with the bill.

"I suppose you'll want a few days' grace to get rested and set up the lares and penates."

"There's not a penate to set up. I am sharing a house with four other women and all the lares are in place. I'm with Catherine Lee and Nan Bonham, Brooklyn Relief."

"Grove Street!"

"Yes. Do you know them?"

Jerome laughed until Jean demanded:

"Why? Are we very ridiculous?"

"I beg your pardon. No, of course not. But Grove Street is the skeleton in my family closet. You give teas during the winter."

"Do we?"

"Yes, indeed, large teas where celebrities and semi-celebrities are handed about with the cake. Alice adores them, drags Sidney to almost every one, 'to keep his social viewpoint broad,' and nags me to death to go too."

"I take it that you don't often oblige."

"Not if I can escape, although, as teas, they are the best of their kind. Catherine Lee's a hustler and she does manage to root out talent. She gets her business tied up with her social life and so, when she wants anything, she can generally put her finger on some frequenter of the teas who can get it for her."

Jean laughed, and together they went out into the street.

"To-morrow then? And Mike Flannery."

"To-morrow."

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

The machinery of the house on Grove Street moved smoothly and Jean was more physically comfortable than she had been at any time since Martha's death. And although, at first, she sensed very keenly in the lives of these women the undercurrent of loneliness that had drawn them together, and the accidental nature of their intimacy, in time, she accepted it without analysis. It would have been tragic if they had been conscious of it, but Jean was sure that Catherine alone ever felt a quality of chill in this perfect freedom of which they were so proud, and without definitely wording it, felt, in this perfection of adjustment, the harmony of indifference.

Philip came often to dinner, and soon Jean accepted his boisterous manner. It so fitted the man's nature that it was perfect in its way, like the capers of a puppy. It was only when Philip, in his unconsciousness of the fitness of things, capered before others, as he had on the night of her arrival, that one objected to his clambering over strangers. Jean saw nothing humorous in Philip's performances, but when she could, pretended an amusement that delighted Nan. Still, she always felt that in these moments Catherine was watching and was never quite deceived. Nor was she sure that her kindly tolerance of his horseplay deceived Philip. Often, before a more than usually outrageous effort, Philip seemed to single her out with a defiant glance as if to say, "There goes your stupid pretense of dignity. It isn't worth keeping." He was always talking about the "big, simple realities" and urging marriage and babies, but he knew no women outside the household and seemed quite content. He laughed at Catherine's affection for Tony, a musical protégé of recent discovery, thereby annoying Jean greatly, until she discovered him making Tony promise not to tell who had given him the new suit. He did not want Tony to tell, but he would have liked the house to find out. He often did things like this and then resented it when no one knew. He annoyed Jean without interesting her, but at the end of a month she found she had summed him up more definitely than any other member of the house—he had big impulses, small thoughts and no will at all. After Jean had reached this decision her manner changed toward him. She treated him with greater patience and at times with respect.

In the evenings, Jean had many appointments to organize working women's associations or speak at meetings. The idea of a national Congress of women, which after attaining the dimensions of a group of civic leagues, had lain dormant in the bitter loneliness of Jean's personal life, woke again. A certain quality of excitement and vigor was gone from Jean's conception of it but she accepted the change. She knew that no plan would ever have the same keenness as in the days before Gregory's going. Something had gone out of her then, and now all purpose was calm and subdued, like the staid friendships of middle life against the idealization of youth. She never willingly looked back to Gregory's letter. But she no longer viewed it as a terrible pit into which her life had dropped. It was a wall dividing the past from the present; turning her back upon it Jean faced the future. And the surest measure she had of her reward was the feeling that came again into the earth and sky and hills. Now, on the out-of-town trips she had sometimes to take, she found the old, living, personal spirit in the earth come back. It was as if, in the days of her loving, the earth had withdrawn its unneeded comfort. Now, the old, old earth, kind and understanding, came back into its own.

On Sundays, Jean took long walks, most often alone, sometimes with Nan when she could not refuse. But at forty-two, freed from dependent relatives for the first time in her life, Nan had an excited childish exuberance about her that rather bored Jean. She often wanted to urge Nan to snatch at life before it was too late, grasp some reality besides her love and admiration for the clumsy, capering Philip. But when she thought about it seriously, she did not know what it was she would urge Nan to snatch. The knowledge and disillusion of experience, where now Nan had curiosity and, perhaps, hope?

Catherine, Jean rarely saw except at meals, and Beth's engagements with men, mostly younger than herself, kept her away a great deal. But, on the few evenings that Jean was home, it came to be the custom for Gerte to drop in to the attic. And no matter what the subject, Gerte soon led it to her own work, burbling on about her plots, clothing the meager incidents in long words. Jean often wondered why Gerte wrote or how she sold what she did, she had so little insight, no imagination, and was so empty of any deep experience of her own. At thirty-two, Gerte was pitifully curious about love and sex and marriage, and Jean was sure that she thought almost constantly about these things. She pitied Gerte but never quite liked her.

Twice Jean had dinner at the old Stuart farmhouse on Staten Island, and these evenings stood out from all other evenings in a warm glow. She and Jerome united to tease Alice, so sure of herself and so untried, but she was almost as glad as Jerome of the girl's indestructible optimism. Sometimes she and Jerome referred to it afterwards in the office, and this happy comradeship between the quiet man and the big, blonde girl, seemed to Jean one of the most beautiful things she had ever seen. It made her feel nearer to Jerome Stuart than the successful accomplishment of any plan and softened the resentment toward her own bleak girlhood. She often wondered how Jerome would stand the loneliness of Alice's marriage and sometimes, for a moment, Alice's going so eagerly out to the happiness Jerome's loving care had made possible, seemed cruelly selfish, until Jean thought of Martha and smiled. How imperceptibly one's viewpoint glided from youth to age, and how alike was all youth and how alike all age. In middle life the wandering paths of youth met, and when one reached that spot, one picked up the waiting burden of loneliness and understanding and staggered away with it, groaning or smiling according to one's pride. She rather thought that Jerome would smile.

Early in April she and Jerome began to plan a summer campaign against the cheap dance-halls and mediocre concerts on the piers that furnished the principal recreation of the poor in summer. Sometimes Jerome got quite violent about it.

"There's no reason there shouldn't be something worth while and we'll give it to them."

"We will that—whether they want it or not."

Jerome laughed. "When you take that tone you make me think of Alice planning Sidney's future. I always feel so heavy and masculine and unnecessary. You make me feel as if my greatest privilege will be to trail along behind such energy."

"And when you take that note, you make me feel flippant and feminine and superficial."

"Not a bit of it. You just feel Machiavellian and subtle. I know."

"Solomon! Well, no matter what your feelings are, you're not going to shift any responsibility because of them."

"I don't want to. I'm perfectly willing, eager even, to pilot the way from pier to pier, dance-hall to dance-hall. I may even make small, tentative suggestions, which will tickle me to death to have considered." Jerome Stuart's eyes twinkled in a way that had once reminded Jean of Gregory, and had hurt. Now she liked it.

The teas, dreaded by Jerome, Jean easily escaped. No one took offense at her preference nor made a personal matter of it. If there was no consideration of each other in this scheme of freedom, neither was there any claim. It was not until late in April that Catherine put the matter of the last tea as a personal request.

"It's the yearly Round-up," she explained, "and is really a matter of business. This year it's specially important to me, I have several protégées I want to launch and now I've got the woman who can do it. Mrs. J. William Dalton——"

"Who!"

"Exactly, if she makes you feel like that. There could not be two. Besides, I hear that hers used to be The Poor. Now it's Art, but when she gets them both combined, she just runs amuck. That's what I intend her to do. Tony Rimaldi is fourteen, the oldest of ten in a Mott Street tenement, and if you had come to the other teas you would know that Tony is a genius. He plays the violin so that even I get woozly inside, and Philip has been known to cry. Peter Poloff's nineteen, and although he will never equal Tony, he has enough of the real thing to make him a worth-while pianist, and he's never had a chance. Dalton's going to be the motif of this round-up and afterwards she's going to sponsor a concert for my prodigies and, zip, their future's settled! But every one of you has got to help. Dalton simply can't function without a back-drop, and we're going to give her one."

"Willingly, but what can I do?"

"Come. She hasn't forgotten her sociological days yet and, besides, the publicity you and Stuart are creating about legalizing illegitimate children hasn't escaped her. He has to come too. We'll give her the whole shooting match, sociology, art, pedagogy, science, society, anything we can get our fingers on. You will, won't you?"

"Certainly."

"And that Stuart hermit? His daughter can't persuade him, but perhaps you can."

Jean laughed. "What Alice can't do with her father hasn't much hope for any one else. But I'll try."

And for the next ten days Jean tried to think of some way to trap Jerome into promising. But Jean's social tact was most unsubtle and she could think of nothing but a point-blank request. To her relief, Jerome brought up the subject himself. It was only a few days before the tea, when he said, with a mischievous grin:

"Well, how's the Round-up coming on?"

"Famously. The branding irons are heating. We've got you all corralled."

"Not a loophole in the stockade. I know that."

"Not a wire loose. Don't try to find one."

"I haven't the least intention. I wouldn't miss it for the world."

"What!"

"To tell you the truth, it's no longer the distinction it was to have no opinion on Tony's genius. You haven't heard him either, have you?"

Jean leaned back in her chair and they laughed together in the way that had come to make them both feel that somehow they had outwitted the world together.

"And I was commissioned to gag and bind you and drag you there! I feel cheated. I must do something. How about that person with the theory on The Concentration of the Point of Interest, who did those weird wall paintings for the Educational Exhibit? And that psycho-analyst? I don't think Dalton's got to psycho-analysis yet and it would tickle her to death. Could you get them?"

"Perhaps. All right. I promise. Only you must promise that Dalton won't get at them too heavily. I like the men, both of them, and I don't want to spend the rest of my life paying up the obligation of this tea."

"I'll rescue them personally, if I see them in danger. I can't promise more."

"That will do. Only don't neglect me in your kind offices. I still labor under the delusion, in spite of Alice, that the main interest of a tea is the food."

"Don't worry. I'll watch over you and your digestion, too; the refreshments are going to be a wonder."

"On those conditions I expect to enjoy myself." And with the Gregory-grin Jerome went back to his own office.

But on the following Sunday, when Jean entered the already crowded rooms, she saw only Alice and Sidney in the group gathered about Tony. Jerome was nowhere in sight. Jean had deliberately waited until she had heard Tony tuning up, so that now, as the room rustled to expectant silence, she slipped into the shadow of the heavy curtains drawn to assist the candle-light and took in the scene with quiet amusement. They all looked so different somehow: Gerte in a slithery green thing that would have delighted The Tiger; Nan like a lovely duchess in palest lavender and Catherine in severe and expensive black. Jean recalled Mary's "humans functioning socially" and she felt as if she were watching some distinct psychological process.

"Fine show, isn't it?" Philip stepped from the deeper shadow of the curtains unexpectedly, but the understanding in his eyes merged so with Jean's own thoughts that his being there did not surprise.

"Really, clothes are ridiculous," she whispered back, feeling a comradely nearness to him in this identity of impression. "Perfectly harmless material cut and slashed into the wildest shapes. Take any one of those gowns and look at it long enough and it gets screamingly funny. Look." In her own interest and Philip's understanding, Jean laid a hand on his arm, turning him slightly toward a friend of Gerte's, a red-haired, slender girl in a tunic embroidered in green and gold dragons, fastened with cords and blobs of coral beads. "Now, why is that rig necessary because she sculps, and what, in Heaven's name, did it start out in life to be?"

Philip looked as Jean directed, but his eyes moved independently, for the rest of his body was concentrating at the point where Jean's fingers rested lightly on his arm.

"Li Hung Chang's combing jacket," he offered after a moment, when Jean had removed her hand. Jean laughed and was just going to ask him what he thought of some one else, when Tony began to play.

Jean still stood close to Philip, almost touching him, but after a few bars she forgot him, the crowded rooms, the too strong fragrance of expensive flowers. She forgot that she did not really like Tony, petted and spoiled by over-attention. She did not see the look of satisfied accomplishment on Catherine's face, nor Felix Arhn scowling his deepest foreign scowl of approval; nor Mrs. Dalton sitting quietly, her jeweled hands in her lap. She did not even hear the music distinctly. It created about her a medium into which she dissolved in feeling; and when her brain registered, it was not notes or present impressions, but memories of the first happy days with Herrick, and deep moments of love with Gregory. Her face softened, so that Philip, stealing glances, felt his throat tighten, and his eyes were hot and moist. He wanted the music to go on forever, to keep Jean close with that look on her face. And he ached for it to stop, before his hands should reach to her. When it stopped, Jean would be again the hard, clear-headed woman who scorned him and tried so hard sometimes not to show it. He had hated her often for her conceited assumption of superiority, but he knew now that he could never hate her again. That slightly quivering mouth had taken his weapons from him.

The music ended. Philip turned to Jean, but she was acknowledging the efforts of a tall man with gray hair and smiling eyes to negotiate the buzzing groups and reach her. In another instant Jean was introducing him.

"Mr. Fletcher, let me present Jerome Stuart."

As they shook hands, Philip felt Jerome size him up and dismiss him. For a few moments Philip stood where he was and then, unnoticed either by Jean or Jerome, moved away.

Tony played twice more and when he laid aside his violin, Jean and Jerome looked quietly at each other.

"It makes me feel like two cents," Jerome whispered and Jean nodded.

"It's usually the way, isn't it?"

"Nearly always, I haven't enough conceit left even to tease Alice. I shall confess."

"Come and do it now. I should like to hear you——"

But, before they could reach Alice, Mrs. Dalton spied Jean and billowed down upon her. In vain Jean tried to insert Jerome between them, dragging in every public effort in which he had been concerned for the last year. Mrs. Dalton heard none of it. Catherine was right. She had not forgotten her sociological days.

"It had such definite results," she cascaded, quite lost in this renewal of acquaintance with the head of the Women's Civic Leagues. "Such definite, concrete results, don't you know. While this other—heredity is such a factor, don't you think? One never knows what strange strain will crop out. Genius has so many strands intermingled. Now, take our own little Tony. What are we going to do about that impossible family of his? We must rescue him. We simply can't let him smother there in those hideous rooms."

"They are pretty impossible," Jean conceded with a frown. "But it's the very best possible thing for him at present. How long it will be, I don't know, and in the end, of course, he will go. He would, even if no one did anything for him. But now, he is just one quivering plate for impressions and, although he may never realize it himself, it will mean a lot—the hot, crowded rooms, the crying babies, the fierce fight for life and the inherent joyousness of his people that nothing can quite kill. Out of this jumble Tony ought to draw into himself something that nothing else could give. He comes from the People and he ought to give his gift back to them."

"Oh," Mrs. Dalton gasped, but Jean went on impatiently: "There's such a lot of talk these days about The People and their Power and most of us don't know what we mean by it. We hear such a lot about the Will of the People, and the Spirit of the People, and the Literature and Soul of the People, and we are beginning to hear about Music of the People. But here in America it seems to mean negro melodies or Indian lyrics, the plaints of a dying race. Why shouldn't there be modern, industrial music, not the blaring of factory whistles, but the spirit of industrialism, the life of the immigrants, the economic fight, the whole struggle of this great Melting Pot—sound etchings, like Pennel's skyscrapers and bridges. Tony ought to be able to do it. He has the genius, the heritage and the environment."

"Oh, my dear Mrs. Herrick, you must come and talk to the Lost Art. You put it all so vividly, but then you always did. Do you remember, in the old days——"

"Pardon me," Jean interposed hastily, "but Miss Lee is signaling me," and, feeling that she was not playing fair, Jean escaped. A few moments later she looked back and saw Jerome, whom Mrs. Dalton had at last connected with the Sweat Shop law, being drowned under a similar cataract, to the great amusement of Alice, who stood by, making not the slightest effort to save him.

It was Catherine who released him at last. The next moment, Jean was barricaded between two tea trays and Jerome was looking at her in real reproof.

"Well, have you any decent excuse? Is that the way you keep a promise?"

"Promise? Did I make a promise?"

"You certainly did. You let me suppose that I was not to be thrown to the lions without a saving effort on your part. And then you went and threw me yourself."

"But she would have gotten you in a little while, anyhow."

"You can't prove it. I've dodged that kind for many years now, long before you knew what a Civic League was."

"I thought this was your first tea," Jean parried.

"All the more reason for seeing that I enjoyed it. I may come to others."

"You know you're safe on that score. This is the last."

"Well, you've got to atone, in some way, for that performance. Will you come to supper?"

"Supper!"

Jerome smiled. "I don't care if you've eaten a whole cake. I hope you have. Your punishment will be no worse than mine. I promised Alice that I would trot along with her and Sidney to a little joint they always go to after these functions. How much longer will this last? The music is over, isn't it?"

"It is. But this may dribble along till almost eight and there are always a few to stay and eat the scraps. I believe Catherine expects you and Alice and Sidney to be among the chosen few."

"Don't tell Alice; I rather fancy the little joint." Jerome's raised brows indicated Mrs. Dalton, and Jean nodded.

"How soon can you slip away? In ten minutes?"

"I'll try. Go over and keep Dalton anchored where she is and I'll start my escape."

Jerome obeyed and Jean began to make her way out, stopping only when she was forced to. Once she was halted close to where Philip Fletcher stood, apart, silent, his mouth drawn downward like a hurt child's. As Jean passed close, he moved toward her, but some one else claimed her attention, and Philip went on into the hall. He watched for Jean but she went upstairs by a back way, and when she came down he saw she was ready to go out.

"Will you tell Catherine that I'm going out to supper? I tried to get at her but she is too busy."

"If I see her," Philip replied and knew that Jean, already joined by Jerome Stuart and Alice and Sidney, did not hear. They left the house together and Philip stood staring at the door Jean had closed so quietly, like a child slipping away on an adventure. Across the threshold of the living-room, Catherine caught the look on Philip's face, broke off a sentence in the middle, then grasped the thread almost instantly, and went on.

When the household and the Chosen Few sat down to the scraps, there was much speculation on Gerte's part as to what had become of Philip. But Catherine said nothing.

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

Philip did not come for a week. Every day, after the first three, Nan rang up the office, but either Philip had just left or had not yet come. Every night Gerte wondered why, until Catherine finally advised her to write if she was so anxious. And then, on the second Wednesday, Philip appeared. He came late, in his most boisterous mood. Gerte fussed over him, touched him, patted his shoulder, insisted that they had been worried to death about him. Even Beth showed a slight sense of restored comfort, as if some special piece of furniture to which she had grown accustomed had been replaced. Nan was almost as exuberant as Philip. Catherine alone refused to confess any anxiety or relief.

Jean fancied that Catherine's attitude interested Philip, and that in some way he had changed. His hilarity was still diffused to include them all, but when he spoke to Jean directly, he seemed to clear a little space of this boisterous litter, to enter with her an interval of reality. Jean was too busy, however, with her own work and helping Catherine with the coming concert to give it much attention.

The concert was to be on Friday and on Monday Jean had her secretary send out a list of complimentary tickets. Jerome came in while Jean was dictating names, waited until she had finished, and, when the girl had gone, said:

"Well?"

"Well?"

"I didn't hear mine; don't I get a ticket?"

"Do you want to go?"

Jerome smiled. "You can't make me mad that way, not a scrap. You're in league with Alice. I can see that, but you can't get a rise out of me that way. I'm going to the concert because——"

"Never mind. Don't bother to invent a reason. You're going because you want to."

"Oh, feminine intuition, deep, unfathomable and always right! Exactly. I'm going because I want to. Do you know a better reason?"

"None. What did Alice say?"

"She doesn't know yet. I can't reform all at once. I'm going to appear and astonish her."

Jean took a ticket and handed it to him.

"Where is it?"

"Between Alice and myself."

Jerome fingered the ticket as if he were about to say something, didn't, and slipped it into his pocket.

"But please don't forget that some one has to be responsible for me. With Tony I guess I shall be safe, but with that Poloff person there is danger. I never know when the end of one of those classical selections has arrived and I may disgrace you by clapping at the wrong place."

"Never fear. I'll see that no harm comes nigh thee."

"See to it better than you did at the tea," Jerome shot back from the doorway as he left.

On Friday, Jean did not go to the office at all. Gerte had left some alterations on her dress until the last moment, and all afternoon an excitable French seamstress buzzed about the house like a gnat, getting in every one's way, calling incessantly on Le Bon Dieu for needles of the right size, her thimble, for Madamoiselle. Catherine, maddeningly calm in any confusion caused by others, went quietly about, saying bitter, sarcastic things in a gentle voice, and only the realization that this evening was something of a trial for Catherine prevented them from retaliating in kind.

Not until the pickup supper was over, and the French gnat gone, did peace descend. Then, stretched on the couch before the open window of her attic, Jean looked up into the soft spring dusk and let its peace wrap her. The little stars still twinkled with some of the crisp, business-like twinkle of winter, but spring had already come. Down in the narrow streets it was warm. Soon summer would be there. In a short while, a few weeks at most, the house would be empty and still as it was now. The others would be gone on their summer vacations. Jean felt that she would like the house, alone in the silence.

There was barely time to dress when Jean at last jumped up and turned on the light. It was three years since Jean had worn an evening dress and that had been a very simple affair compared to this. Nan had insisted on the lowest possible neck and not the vestige of a sleeve. As Jean hurried into the filmy chiffon, the intricacies of its hooking amused her.

"I feel exactly as if I were a puzzle putting myself together."

She was preening anxiously before the glass, making sure that she had solved the puzzle correctly, when, without waiting for an answer to her knock, Catherine hurried in.

"Just this one hook, please. I simply can't manage it and Gerte—why——"

Catherine stopped and took Jean in from top to toe and back.

"Jean Herrick, are you going to wear your hair like that?"

"Why, what's the matter with it?"

"It's the way you talked to that labor crowd last Monday."

"Surely. I always do it that way."

"It's impossible with that gown. Nine-tenths of you looks like the real thing and the other tenth——"

"You've got it twisted. One-tenth looks like me and the other nine-tenths are somebody else. I feel—like an idiot—in this thing."

"You come darn near looking like it with your hair that way. Fluff it up some."

"Oh, come on, Catherine, and get hooked. I don't know how to fluff it and wouldn't if I did. What difference does it make, anyhow?"

Catherine looked at her queerly. "None—I guess."

Jean finished the hooking. "There, you're gowned enough for the whole bunch." Catherine's dress was very simple and apparently made no effort to be anything but a covering. In reality it was a frame and shadow box, that softened the sharpness of Catherine's face to piquancy, made her thirty instead of forty, mischievous instead of caustic.

"You're ready, then?" Catherine spoke as if she were giving Jean a last chance to redeem the hair, drawn back in the low, tight knot.

"Been ready for hours and mapped out a whole summer waiting."

Catherine, standing near the switch, turned off the light.

"Do you mean that, too, about not going out of town all summer?"

"Yes, except, perhaps, for week-ends."

Catherine did not answer, but Jean had the feeling of something moving between them in the darkness. Then Catherine passed into the hall.

"Come on. There's Philip with the taxi."

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

The others had already arrived when Catherine, Jean and Philip took the three vacant seats on the center aisle. From her box, Mrs. Dalton, resplendent in black lace and diamonds, recognized the arrivals and waved graciously.

"Thinks she's slumming, I suppose. We're a cross between Mott Street and Society. What do you suppose she'd do if I fingered my nose at her?"

"I haven't the least idea. Why don't you try and find out." Since the tea, Jean often considered Philip's foolish suggestions amiably.

But before he could say anything more, Alice leaned across the vacant seat.

"Who on earth is this one for? We've been guessing for the last five minutes."

"Why waste so much energy? Whoever it is will probably be here in another five and then——"

Standing in the aisle, Jerome included the entire row in a welcoming nod, took the vacant seat and looked inquiringly at Alice.

"Any objections, kiddie?"

"Daddy Stuart, you are the most annoying male thing in captivity."

"Now, Alice, if you will think back, slowly, carefully and logically—a most difficult performance for you, I own, you will remember that I never actually said I would not come."

"You nice old fake—I don't care why you came as long as you're here. Everything's going to be wonderful to-night, I feel it in my bones."

"Perhaps it will be beyond me altogether."

"Never mind. I'll take care of you. Don't applaud on your own initiative and stop the moment I do."

"Oh, you're not going to be burdened with the responsibility. I've arranged to be tutored through this already."

"You have, have you? Well! So you were in the plot, too." Alice leaned to Jean again.

"Not exactly. I——"

"You're both as bad, one as the other. Manage it yourselves." The laugh was more a caress than a sound, as Alice turned to Sidney.

"Thanks." Jerome faced Jean, fully, for the first time, and then, almost instantly, picked up his program and began to study it carefully. For, in that passing glance, Jean had detached herself from the background of bright light, evening dress and subdued chatter into which his first general impression had plunged her, and stood apart, unfamiliar and strange. Jerome read the program through once, and then again, giving meticulous attention to each selection, but, as if there were a magnet beside him, the change in Jean kept drawing him away.

What was it? Jerome was used to the transformation of evening dress which he insisted reduced all women to a common denominator. But Jean was not at all reduced to a common denominator. Nor was she herself. She was and she wasn't, in an annoyingly confused fashion that made Jerome feel, if he kept his eyes long enough on the program, that Jean was exactly the same, except that she wore a low-cut light dress instead of the everyday high-cut dark one. But at his faintest move to verify this by a direct glance, she was somebody else altogether.

Jerome picked out certain numbers and considered these especially. He must turn and get this thing reduced to a phrase and so eliminate it. The concert would last for at least two hours and a half, and he could not sit there staring at his program and wondering why Jean Herrick was and wasn't Jean Herrick. He wanted to look at Jean, but he did not want Jean to look at him.

Then Catherine spoke and Jean leaned across Philip to answer. Her back was to Jerome, and without moving he glanced up sidewise.

There was the same heavy knob of hair, low on her neck. The same threads of gray, which Jean might easily have concealed but never did, ran through the thick mass into the tight wad. The same bone hair-pins inserted in exactly the same way. It was an unbecoming way to do her hair, ugly even in office clothes, and preposterous with a low-cut gown. Jerome studied the tight wad with puzzled intensity. He had an idea that the solution lay here somehow. He had heard Alice say that a woman's character showed in the way she did her hair and the sweeping assertion had amused him as Alice's large generalizations always did. But perhaps Alice was right. Surely such a fashion of doing one's hair was more than an exterior detail. It shrieked aloud of lack of taste, of a sense of fitness, of indifference to accepted standards. It stood for a kind of density or conceit in a way. It was a glaring discord, just as if Jean had brought her black leather wallet or worn her white chamois gloves, or carried a fountain pen concealed in the chiffon. Jerome's eye ran along the row of seats in front. That was it, that impossible wad of hair screwed into a cumbersome knob. It was so incongruous that it might well strike one, a man especially, used to taking in a woman's appearance as a whole, as something quite wrong, wrong enough to make a distinct impression. Relieved, and amused at his own interest, Jerome's eyes returned to Jean.

And then, he was suddenly and overwhelmingly aware of Jean's neck and shoulders, of the soft, white velvet of the skin, the warm smoothness of the flesh, the firm muscles molded in curves that called to every tingling nerve of his fingertips. It seemed to Jerome an interminable time that he sat so, conscious to the depths, of that velvet whiteness. Until Jean moved and released him.

The green and gold curtain drew back and Tony, clutching his violin as if it were a weapon of defense against the staring enemy, advanced to the footlights. From her box, Mrs. Dalton made comforting signals, and J. William himself, a meager black and white figure just behind her, clapped his thin, cold hands in encouragement.

Jean leaned back. Jerome could feel her relaxed, lost completely from the first notes. Jerome moved, so that in no way did he touch even the wooden arm of Jean's seat, and tried to listen. But he heard only the opening measures, and, after that, did not know that Tony was playing at all.

This was not the Jean Herrick with whom he had worked so pleasantly. It was another woman. That Jean Herrick made no demand apart from intellectual sympathy. While this—something in the very fiber of the woman, akin to the soft velvet of her skin, those definite curves, called to him. He had never even thought of Jean's age or whether she were good looking. Although if any one had asked him he would have said she had a fine face. But her body had never entered his thought at all. He might have known, if he had considered it, that her flesh would be firm and white, her muscles well molded, but ... Jerome drew still farther away. He did not want to touch her now. Instead there was a distinct repulsion, as if Jean had offered him a caress uninvited.

He was not used to thinking of women in this way. Unrestrained emotion had never played any part in his life. Other men might have moments of physical surprise like this, but he had never had them. He felt unclean and at the same time, as if the fault were not his. Jean had done something, tricked him, taken him at a disadvantage.

When Alice's hand on his arm catapulted him back to reality, he found that Tony had played entirely through the first division of the program and disappeared.

"Aren't you glad you came? Isn't he wonderful?" Alice was pinching him in her enthusiasm.

"Yes ... of course ... yes, he's wonderful."

"Then apologize like a little man and confess that you've been bigoted and silly and will never be so obstinate again."

"I ... apologize."

"Forgiven. Now apologize to Mrs. Herrick."

Jerome turned reluctantly to Jean, and away again, without speaking. For Jean was staring straight before her, and although he could not see her eyes, he knew they were full of tears.

Jean Herrick crying! What reserves of emotion she had! What reactions he had never glimpsed!

The applause was tumultuous now but Tony did not come back. After a short interval, Peter Poloff, all very black hair and violent gestures, appeared and fussed about, having the piano moved this way and that. At last it was arranged to suit; he perched on the edge of the stool, pulled up his cuffs, and crashed down upon his instrument in pitiless technique.

Jerome drew deeper into his chair and made no effort to listen. If he did not get this matter straightened in his own mind before the concert ended, he felt that to-morrow and the next day and always after, whenever he spoke to Jean, he would see, under the high-cut, ugly clothes she wore to the office, those calling curves and that white flesh.

But he had settled nothing when, with a final crash, Poloff extricated himself from the keyboard, received the applause with exaggerated bows, and, most patently jealous of Tony, walked off the stage.

Jerome picked up his program and so escaped Alice's claiming enthusiasm. But he knew every pressure of Jean's fingers. He felt her move as if she were going to speak to him and hoped she would not. He did not want Jean to speak to him yet.

Then Philip whispered something and she leaned away. The buzzing of Philip's voice continued until Jerome wanted to reach across Jean and strike him. To his taut nerves it was like the sting of a pestiferous insect. When he felt that it was beyond his silent endurance, it stopped and Jerome wanted more than anything else for it to continue, anything to keep Jean from turning to him yet. But when she did not, only settled quietly in her seat, waiting for Tony to come again, Jerome was angry. And then Tony was back for the last time. From sun-soaked vineyards across the sea, the music called in folksongs and old dances of the people. The simple, plaintive things stirred Jean to the depths, interpreted all the inexpressible beauty in the sky and sea and earth and human love. Jerome knew that her lips were quivering and his own were parched and dry.

Not a sound broke the stillness until Tony drew the bow in the last note. Then a clapping and stamping forced him back again and again, until, forgetting his pose of grown-up artist, Tony stamped his foot in childish rage and shook his head. There was no mistaking that. The audience rose laughing and went out.

A few moments later they were all together on the street, and Myra Cohen was explaining about "eats" at her studio to which they had promised to go en masse.

"But you must come, Mr. Stuart; please don't break the party, it's been too utterly lovely." With one eye on Gerte and Felix, who already showed signs of starting off by themselves, Myra made a last effort. "Please, Miss Stuart, won't you make him, and you, Mrs. Herrick?"

"Don't count on me. But Mrs. Herrick is a miracle worker." Alice shrugged her incompetence before Jean's superior influence, and as Myra dashed away to intercept Gerte and Felix, she and Sidney moved after them. "Put it over," she called back to Jean, "and you'll go down in history with my thanks."

Jean looked at Jerome with understanding. Neither did she want to go to the studio and eat unhealthy messes until weird hours. But she had no good excuse.

"It really won't be a long affair, and you can leave when you want."

"Sorry. But I can't. To-morrow I leave early for that St. Louis convention and have a dozen things yet to do."

Jean smiled. "I wish I had one half-as-good as that. But I guess I'll have to go."

Jerome did not answer the smile. Jean thought he looked annoyed for some reason and offered no further suggestion. With a short "good-night" he left. When she turned she found only Catherine and Philip waiting.

"What's the matter with your friend?" Catherine demanded.

"A good excuse. Twice as good as I'd need myself to escape."

Catherine stopped. "You don't have to go, if you don't want to."

"Please don't desert us," Philip said, with the genuine courtesy that was his at unexpected moments. "It won't be the same, at all."

"Flattered, I yield." Jean swung to step beside him.

But at the corner of the street, Catherine brought them to a sudden halt. "Excuse or no excuse, I'm dead tired and here I quit."

She left them staring after her.

"I don't believe Catherine's well," Jean said, troubled, as they started again. "Sometimes lately, she looks so terribly tired."

Philip did not answer.

Three times in the few hours remaining before dawn, Jerome awoke, each time to full and instant realization of the thing that had happened. It was incredible, ridiculous, disgusting. Each time Jerome reached this conclusion, he turned over, thumped his pillow to momentary coolness and forced sleep. But each time, before he quite succeeded, a small, shamed relief crept over him, that he would not be seeing Jean again before he left and that he was to be away three weeks.

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

A week after the concert Catherine gave up hope for Poloff. Mrs. Dalton did not like him. Some reason, connected with an absconding Russian maid who had once stolen some jewelry, had cut all Russians from her interest. She was very gracious about it and very obstinate.

"But Tony's another matter. She's sickening about Tony. If I didn't really love him she would make me hate him. Then, why can't she come out and say what she intends to do? How do I know she won't go off to Europe or Asia or Africa for the summer, and every week makes a difference to Tony."

"Why don't you ring her up?" Jean advised. "She's already spoken about it you say, it wouldn't be like attacking her from the blue. It would be easy to make a reasonable excuse."

"Would it?" Catherine asked in such a suddenly changed tone, that Nan and Gerte as well as Jean stopped eating and stared. Jean flushed, but Catherine had not been herself since the concert and now her sharp face looked almost drawn and her lips were a tight line.

"I think so. I'll do it, if you like, drop the seed anyhow. I used to have to do a lot of indirect managing of her in the old days."

"Thank you," Catherine said after a pause, "but this is my affair. You don't love Tony and I do."

Catherine did not wait for dessert and left the table. As soon as the door closed, Gerte burst out:

"What in the world is the matter with Catherine? She's been like a loaded pistol ever since the concert and now she's just about ready to go off."

"She's tired out," Nan said shortly and then began, in a most unusual fashion for Nan, to talk about her work. Neither Jean nor Gerte paid much attention, but it bridged the gap, and Jean felt, that for some reason, this was all Nan wanted it to do.

But the next day, when Mrs. Dalton rang up and begged Jean to help her manage the Rimaldis, Jean at first refused. It was not until she saw that it was either a question of doing as Mrs. Dalton asked, or having the whole matter dropped, that she at last reluctantly consented to see Giuseppe Rimaldi and force him to reason.

"I'll see him this afternoon and let you know," Jean promised and Mrs. Dalton hung up.

The arrangements took longer than Jean expected and the others were at the table when she came in, a little excited and triumphant, as the contest with another will always left Jean. Giuseppe Rimaldi had been hard to handle, and it was only by threatening him with the law, which would take away from him both Tony and the new violin presented by Mrs. Dalton, that he had yielded and promised to let Tony give up selling papers and have this time for practice. In her success. Jean forgot Catherine's rudeness of the night before, and launched into a picture of Giuseppe Rimaldi, surrounded by wife and children, all except Tony, defending his poverty.

"Like a captain defending a fortress," Jean explained. "No wonder Dalton couldn't handle him."

"It was a miracle that you were on hand to do it," Catherine said in a cold, detached tone, each word like the prick of a knife.

Jean's eyes flashed. "If there had been any other way, I should not have interfered."

Catherine pushed back her chair. "You needn't apologize. But from now on you can have Tony—as well."

Gerte made no comment this time on Catherine's going, but Jean saw Nan's face flush scarlet. As soon as the meal was over, Jean went up to her own room.

What had Catherine meant by that "as well"? What unfounded hurt to her own vanity was she harboring? There was something more than temporary fatigue, or nerves, the matter with Catherine, and whatever it was, Nan knew.

The days passed, a sultry spring moved toward a scorching summer, and Jean did not change her mind. Catherine was different, so different that it was impossible to seek an explanation, even if Catherine had allowed the opportunity. Her wit, always sharp, stabbed now with a venom that penetrated even Gerte's imperviousness. She dipped her slightest remark in a well of hatred, and sent it tipped with personal animosity straight to its mark. Nan alone escaped. It seemed to Jean sometimes that Nan was mentally tiptoeing through this tension, as a nurse moves with a patient.

All the old charm of the winter was gone now. The meals were disagreeable interludes of forced effort that grew more and more difficult to make. The only nights in the least approaching the pleasant dinners of the past, were the nights when Philip came. Then, for some reason that Jean did not seek to analyze, they all united to drag together the tattered shreds of the old gayety to cover this ugliness. Catherine did not help, but neither did she hinder. On these nights coffee was served on the tiny lawn under the full-leafed ailanthus. The lights in the rear tenement shone through the leaves like low-hung stars, the fountain was turned on to the full capacity of its trickle, and there was a definite feeling of relief in the air. But Philip did not come often. Not nearly so often as he had in the winter.

Jerome's three weeks lengthened to four, then five. Jean did not hear from him. The original date of Alice's wedding passed with a hurried note from Alice that her father's return had been delayed, she herself was going to the mountains, and the wedding would take place whenever he got back. Then she, too, dropped into the silence.

Gerte went to the Berkshires. Nan took a cottage with a co-worker at Rockaway; Beth went to Maine. Catherine and Jean were alone. Catherine made no explanation of why she was staying beyond her usual time in town and Jean did not ask her. There was little talk between them. Jean's efforts at meals rebounded from the wall of Catherine's mechanical replies like rubber balls.

At last in mid-June Jean reached the snapping point of her endurance. Either Catherine would have to force a pleasantness she did not feel, or else Jean would take her meals out. She could not eat another dinner sitting opposite Catherine's bitter, cynical eyes and tight lips.

It was a suffocating evening, threatening thunder, and the air, like hot wool soaked in glue, crushed Jean's last scrap of strength to keep up this senseless and annoying pretense. They had finished dinner, and Jean was standing by the French window opening to the garden, while Catherine still sat at the table.

"Suppose we eat out here after this." At least the sky would give a feeling of space and freedom, and the trickle of the fountain and noises from the tenements fill the strained silence. Jean passed into the tiny garden and took the steamer chair by the fountain. Catherine came as far as the window and stood looking at her curiously.

"Why? Do you object to the dining-room?"

"It seems empty for just two—as if the others had died."

Catherine shrugged. "Rather sentimental, mourning three able-bodied women gone on their summer vacations."

"You know very well it's not that." Jean looked at Catherine framed in the window. She was dressed in white and now, in the twilight of the unlit room, her thin face was strained and gray. Jean broke off and turned on the fountain. The little tinkle rested her when she was very tired.

"It's so stupid to care—about anything," Catherine murmured, as if she were not talking directly to Jean. "If you never let any one in—you don't have to drag them out."

"But that's too high a price to pay for anything," Jean said more gently. "It would take such a lot of happiness to pay for such little escapes."

Catherine laughed harshly. "You don't pay for it all at once. You string it out over the years—all through your life—like buying peace on the installment."

The last words she seemed to hurl at Jean and went. Jean watched her disappear through the farther door; heard her go up the stairs and close the door of her room.

Jean sat on alone. The misunderstanding of the last few weeks spread through the heat. Catherine's bitterness saturated the heavy air and it seemed to Jean that mystery and bitterness were pressing down upon her physically. Nothing was the same as it had been. The clean precision of the winter was gone. Motives were no longer clear. Every one and everything was confused and blurred in the water-sogged air. Jerome stayed away, long after the supposed date of his return, without an explanation. Things were piling up in his office and every day his secretary wanted to know if Jean knew when he would return. Catherine was almost ill with bitterness and hatred of something concealed. Philip came rarely and then he, too, was different. And since the others had gone, he had not come at all. Everything was shrouded in a thick mist of misunderstanding, and Jean felt that it was, somehow, all meshed together, Jerome's unexplained delay with Catherine's bitterness and Philip's strangeness with Alice's postponed wedding.

The leaves hung motionless in the breathless night. Jean felt that if she did not get up and out into a wider space, she would be walled forever in that ridiculous garden. As she passed Catherine's room on the way to get her things, she saw that there was no light. The silence reached through the paneling and Catherine's bitterness was a living thing, with which she was closed in alone in the darkness.

Jean passed quickly on her way down again, and opened the front door quietly.

As she stepped out she almost collided with Philip, his hand stretched toward the bell button.

"Why the get-away? Will you divide the loot?"

"Did it really look as stealthy as that? It's this weather, all messy and heavy and silent, a thunderstorm gum-shoeing about, afraid to come out into the open."

Jean stood aside and waited for him to pass. "Catherine's upstairs, but I don't think she's going out."

Philip paid no attention and closed the door behind Jean. At the click, Jean thought she heard a noise at Catherine's window, but when she looked up there was only the white curtain, limp in the heat.

Philip did not ask whether she objected to his coming but strolled along beside her in one of his quiet moods, so that, after a few blocks, she did not mind his being there. From time to time he made some quiet comment, surprising in its keen appreciation of the color and drama about them. He saw none of the squalor and dirt and tragedy in the swarming streets, but like Herrick, long ago on that first walk through Barbary Coast, a beauty, that Jean, too, saw when it was pointed out.

Suddenly, as if they had risen from the litter, a gnarled old man and a woman with an orange handkerchief about her withered brown face came dragging a hurdy-gurdy. The man dropped the shafts and began to turn the handle. "Back To Our Mountains" wailed to the night. As the old woman fawned forward with her tambourine, Philip dropped in a dollar.

"Do you always do things as rash as that?"

"Sometimes," Philip answered quietly, and Jean was ashamed. Perhaps there was some memory connected with this melody for which Philip would pay any price. The man had hidden spots of sensitiveness like this love of music, especially thin, tuneful music, for pictures of simple scenes, and poetry, the lyric poetry of emotion and beautiful sound.

Jean surprised Philip by sitting down on the nearest step. He took a place on the step below; children gathered about them, dirty, dark-eyed children of another race. Philip and Jean were far away in another land. He scarcely heard the tunes wheezed out, one after another, twice around the repertoire. It was a mist through which he moved with Jean. He wanted Jean as he had never wanted anything in all his life, and his hour was come. It frightened him a little.

At last the old man got between the shafts of his cart, the old woman pulling feebly on one. Smiling and nodding to the two on the steps they stumbled away. The children plunged again into their games.

Half an hour later, Jean found herself sitting opposite Philip in an East Side tea-house. The table was covered with dirty oilcloth and the sawdust on the floor reeked with sour dampness. Shabby men with broad Slavic faces drank Russian tea from tall glasses and argued of life and death and government. In one corner a black bearded Russian in peasant clothes strummed a balalaika, and a small boy in flaming red and with a tinsel cap, stamped and writhed in a Cossack dance.

"It's great, isn't it?"

Jean nodded. "I often used to wish that I could draw or paint when I first came to New York." And although she knew that she would have striven to get on canvas the battle in the souls of these aliens and that Philip would have painted the picturesque clothes of the balalaika player, and the tinsel cap of the dancer, she felt nearer to him than she ever had.

"I used to try it, but I could never get it. I'll show you the sketches if you like." Jean knew that Philip was proud of these things and glad to show them. "I should like to see them."

It was after eleven when Philip paid the check and they turned homeward. The air was broken now with little puffs of hot wind. Philip took off his hat, so that the puffs of air stirred his hair, and made him look like a contented baby in a draught. But the evening had been pleasant and Jean was ashamed of noticing how his fine hair, leaping suddenly erect, made him look foolish. As they turned into Grove Street, the first heavy drops splashed, and before they could reach the door, were coming in a steady patter.

Philip followed Jean into the dark living-room, now filled with a mysterious cooling breeze like a presence. In a rush the storm broke, lashing the ailanthus in the garden, beating out the breeze, and the air stung with the smell of rain and the little square of earth. Somewhere above, a window slammed. "Catherine," she whispered, and Philip felt that he and Jean were alone against the world, with all its silly notions, like shutting windows in a thunderstorm.

Jean moved toward the garden and Philip stood beside her. The rain beat like shot poured through the opening between the tenements. A little strip of earth held fast between bricks; thunder, crashing against tenements; a jumble of majesty and squalor.

"I bind the sun's throne with a burning zone

And the moon's with a girdle of pearl.

The volcanoes are dim, and the stars reel and swim

When the whirlwinds my banners unfurl."

The lines slipped in between the crashes and Jean felt the clouds racing across mountain peaks.

"It would be wonderful," she said in the same low key, as if they alone were articulate in a world lashed to silence. "I have never been in the real outdoors in a big storm and I have always wanted it. It would be glorious——"

"With you," Philip whispered. His face was white, as if the lightning had touched it, and his eyes blazed. Jean stood silent before them. And while she stood looking at him, the thunder broke in a deafening roar that rocked the earth and smashed all subterfuge, all petty social pretense at misunderstanding; so that when the last reverberation died away and Philip said softly: "You know, don't you?" Jean nodded.

"Well?" he said with an effort. The sternness of his lips weakened in nervous twitching, a pitiful betrayal of the thin veneer of his composure. Jean turned to the garden and leaned her forehead against the frame of the window. Weariness weighted her, weariness too heavy to struggle with explanation, too deep to resent this demand so unexpected and unwelcome. Philip did not move. Jean's bowed head was more eloquent than words, the dejection and weakness of her strong body more cruel. In mockery of his momentary hope, a faint echo of the thunder rolled out to sea.

"Never?"

Jean shook her head.

Philip stared at the thick knot of hair, the broad shoulders, the long, strong lines of Jean's body, and the blood rushed into his eyes. His hands clenched on her shoulders and he swung her round, gripping her beyond the power to move.

"You think I'm weak and silly, and you try not to laugh at me. Laugh if you like, you couldn't hurt me, neither you nor any woman like you. You think you're terribly honest and straight, don't you, and you never tell the truth, not even to yourself. You know how I feel when you are near me; you must know it. You've got it in you, the call of a woman to a man and you pretend, you smother it all up under a sham of companionship and interest, and it's a lie."

Jean tried to release herself, but the fingers dug deeper into the muscles of her shoulders.

"I think you'd better go."

"I'll go when I'm ready, not before. Nobody has ever told you the truth about yourself."

"Don't say any more, please," Jean begged.

But the pity in her voice fanned the rage in Philip.

"You're successful in your little fiddling two-by-four job, but if you died to-night, the silly interfering would go on. You haven't got a spot in the whole world that really belongs to you. You've got nothing. Nothing at all——"

Jean shivered. "Don't," she whispered pitifully, "oh don't, please don't!"

Suddenly tears filled Philip's eyes. "I want you so; I want you so. It isn't enough, is it? It's only outside, isn't it, sometimes, now when it thunders, and the earth smells? I'm not worthy of you, Jean. You're the most wonderful thing God ever made. You want it too, don't you, something near and close, the thing in the thunder and the sweet earth, and I can give you that, Jean, even if you can't—give so much to me. But just tolerate me, Jean, I will ask so little, just be kind and——"

The tears ran in tiny globules down Philip's cheeks.

Jean shivered with nausea, and stepped back. Philip's hand clenched and his face became evil in its baffled longing.

"You——" His voice broke in a squeak.

Jean raised her head and looked with white, set face at him. Then she made a motion as if to pass and leave him standing there, but he stepped before her.

"You fool, you poor blind fool. You can draw men now," in his pain his eyes clung to her body, "but in a few years you won't. I'm coarse. I know it. You're so damned honest, but you don't like the truth any better than any one else. For a few years you'll be a woman yet and then—you'll be hungry and furtive like—like—Catherine."

With a quick motion Jean passed him, and without looking back walked out of the room. Philip heard her go quickly up the stairs and then the house was absolutely still. The rain dripped from the ailanthus, and a single light high up on the fifth floor of the tenement went out. Philip took his hat and went slowly, like an old person, from the house.

Staring down from her attic Jean saw him turn the corner and his bent head and sagging, unexercised body made her feel ill.

It was a long time after that when she heard Catherine pad away from her window to her bed.

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

A little before dawn Jean got up. The narrowness of the couch, the heat of the sheets, the motionless air of a scorching day cramped her. She tried to hold her mind with unaccustomed attention to the details of dressing, but everything was different, the walls, the feel of the room, the furniture, even the toilet articles that she had had for years. They no longer formed part of an unnoticed background, but stood out as distinct points, drawing her attention. They thrust themselves into her consciousness, as familiar things do when seen again after a long absence or a serious illness. Between yesterday and to-day something had happened so that the person who was handling the comb and brush, moving the clothes from one chair to another, turning on the bath water, was different from the person who had done these things yesterday.

When Jean thought of Philip gripping her shoulders, disgust rushed over her in scorching waves that left her cold and quivering with anger. All night she had grown hot and cold at the memory. She had gotten up to escape it but now as she dressed she felt it stronger even than she had during the night. The thing was not a grotesque exaggeration of the darkness, but a reality persisting into the light. And as she put on her clothes she tried not to know that she was doing it hurriedly, covering from some need to her own peace, the white arms and neck.

She never wanted to speak to Philip again, nor see him, nor hear of him. The thought of Catherine creeping back to bed, her gray hair in two plaits down her back, sickened her. Catherine, stealing about catlike in the night, and Philip weak and angry in his baffled desire, and she, Jean, so far from desire and jealousy and need like this, all mixed up in this unclean situation. Jean felt that she would never be able wholly to free her shoulders from Philip's clutching fingers, or forget the things he had said. She would never again be exactly the same person who had opened the front door and found Philip on the landing, Philip, with his flat jokes, his heavy, flabby body, his grotesque caperings.

"For a few years you will be a woman yet."

Jean's face flamed. She wanted to go downstairs and out of the house and never come back. She did not want to see Catherine, and yet, if she went out at this extraordinary hour of the morning, the need of an explanation, or some reference to it, would bulk between her and Catherine when next they met. And for her own sake and Catherine's they must pretend. They would drag through breakfast together. Perhaps Catherine would even refer in some way to Philip, as if their coming in late at night had disturbed her. She would do it casually and well, better than Jean could meet it.

The sun touched the tips of the flagpoles on tall buildings, and another day crept out from night.... It was not true. None of it was true. And yet, the words sounded as clearly in her ears now as they had when Philip had hurled them at her. "You've got it in you, the call of a woman to a man."

Nothing personal, nothing her own, part of her conscious choice. But something hidden, impersonal, something that she shared with all the pitifully weak victims of lust and their own senses.

The breakfast bell sounded. Jean went slowly across the room and opened the door. She stepped into the hall and heard Catherine come out from her room below. She stepped back and closed the door quietly.

When she was sure that Catherine had gone, she went downstairs. The stairs and the hall had the same quality of strangeness as the familiar toilet articles and her own attic. As Jean took her usual seat at the table, the quiet dining-room seemed to retreat and Jean felt physically smaller in it. And as she closed the front door, the whole house seemed to be whispering about her. She turned and looked up at the mellow red bricks with cool spots of ivy grown window boxes, the white curtains of Catherine's windows, up to her own attic. The whole house was strange, inimical, self-righteous in its aloofness, as if she had betrayed its trust.

It would be impossible to go on living there. She could not stand living under pretense to Catherine and, besides, Philip would no longer come. It was the nearest thing he had to a home and it had been his long before she came. And if Philip stayed away, something would go out of the days for Nan, and Nan had so little. Nan's life seemed emptier than ever now, when Jean thought of it in relation to Philip, all possibility of love and warmth centered on the fat body slouching away into the night.

Jean stayed at the office only long enough to attend to the most important matters and left before noon. The rest of the day she spent looking for a place to live. But it was difficult to find. She walked all that day and all the next and the next, going home long after the dinner hour, when she was sure she would not meet Catherine. And then, on the fourth day, she found it, a four-room apartment, a penthouse on the roof of a quiet, middle-class apartment house in Old Chelsea. High above the street, it perched on a secluded corner of the roof, and faced the Jersey shore.

Jean scarcely looked at the rooms as she followed the caretaker and even while the latter was still pointing out the usefulness of a drop-table in the kitchen, Jean was back in the little living-room, facing west, just where the widest space between distant factory chimneys opened to the Jersey shore. The roar of the city below rose in a pleasant murmur that gave an added feeling of peace and a deep security, as if nothing dangerous or violent, no matter how it tried, could ever reach up to this sun-drenched peace. For the first time in five days Philip's hold loosened and he slipped back into a roaring vortex that could not reach her.

That night Jean went home to dinner. She had determined to wait up in case Catherine was not there, but Catherine was, and they had an uncomfortable meal during which Jean made repeated efforts to introduce the subject of her moving and could not. At last she said abruptly, just as they both rose and Catherine moved toward the living-room as if afraid Jean was going to suggest the lawn,

"I've taken an apartment, Catherine."

She waited a moment for some comment, but none came. She could scarcely throw the statement at Catherine and walk out of the room, so she began to describe her wonderful new home upon a roof. But Catherine's silence made her uncomfortable, and she stopped as suddenly as she had begun.

As if she had been waiting for Jean to clear away this ornamentation of enthusiasm, Catherine said:

"When are you going?"

"This week, I think."

"I suppose that means we will not see you again."

"Not if it rests with me." Jean fancied that Catherine smiled, but it was too dark to see. If Catherine was going to be nasty, there was really no obligation to consider her any longer. Jean went on toward the hall, but Catherine's next statement stopped her.

"I suppose Nan will be the next. She's getting the home-bug, too—and she has a tremendous respect for you."

"I don't see how even Nan's energy could keep house and work with the hours she has."

"Nan might give up her job—if the home-bug gets bad enough. Philip is always suggesting that she keep house for him and Nan only needs a starter. Funny, isn't, how fashionable it's getting—to want a home? Do you remember those old teas at your place that winter? Perhaps we've all gone as far as we can."

Jean resisted the longing to switch on the lights and say, "I'm sorry, Catherine. It was the last thing that would have entered my mind. I've been happy here with you, but it's best for me to go." Instead she moved away across the living-room, for she felt that Catherine's eyes were actually touching her in the murky light.

"Perhaps we've gone so far we're coming clear round on the other side again—if you're right about it's being fashionable to want a home."

There was a faint noise as if Catherine were laughing. "I'm not accusing you of any such weakness, but Nan would like it. There have been times when Nan has been perfectly frank about it, and I recognize the symptoms coming on. Besides—Philip wants one—and Nan would do anything for—'Philly.'"

"I don't believe that Philip really wants a home."

"Don't you? Perhaps you're right. It would be tragic, wouldn't it—if he meant all he says about a home—because there's something undeveloped and silly about Philip that would keep—any woman whom he might care about from caring for him."

"I don't think that Philip is silly," Jean said quietly.

"Perhaps not. But he makes a good bluff at it then."

In spite of the darkness, Jean felt something moving between them, just as she had felt it, without understanding, on the night she had hooked Catherine before the concert.

"Perhaps he does. But then, I think that men, as often as women, make pretenses and—hide behind them."

"I don't doubt that, but they don't put it over—any better than most women do."

As Catherine passed and went quickly out of the room, Jean wished that she had not forced her to that last. Catherine's voice had trembled so.

The next morning when Jean came down, the maid said that Miss Lee had gone on her vacation.

On Friday Jean had her things taken from storage and by Saturday night, her new home was in order. Jean cooked her own dinner and ate it on a small table in the shadow of the house, where she could watch the sun sink over the Jersey hills.

CHAPTER FIFTY

The evenings from early dusk until late, Jean spent upon the roof, and her first feeling, of being high and safe from all turmoil, deepened. Its peace was tangible. Something within herself reached out to meet it, as something within had reached toward the spirit of the hills and sea in the blue days with Herrick. Something within herself was part of a universal spirit, and here upon her roof, the spirit was one of peace.

On Friday a note was forwarded from Alice. The wedding was to be on Saturday afternoon at four o'clock. "Don't forget, four means four because we have to catch the seven boat," Alice wrote, as if she were inviting Jean to a tennis match and four o'clock marked the limit of the entries.

Jerome must have returned. The wedding was to take place. Things were going to be as they had been, untangled and proceeding logically. Jean was happy. The last miserable days on Grove Street, dimmed by this wonderful week, high on her quiet roof, faded to sincere pity for Catherine, bitter, caustic, and slyly watching from windows; and Philip, weak, servile, lonely Philip.

On Saturday, a little before four, Jean entered the Stuart living-room, and then stood wondering whether, after all, she had not mistaken the hour and the ceremony was not over. Alice, in a pale yellow dress, a favorite of Jerome's, was laughing with the minister, a venerable, white haired person with twinkling, merry eyes. Sidney and two friends were moving a victrola and Jean caught Jerome's voice arguing with Malone about the supper seating. The next moment, Alice caught sight of her and hurried over.

"Awfully glad you made it. We're just about to begin."

"I'm glad it's not over."

"It would have been only Sid forgot to tell the minister and so we had to scratch round and get old Dr. Gillet. Isn't he a dream?"

"Made for the part."

"Looks like one of the Prophets after a good dinner, doesn't he? The old duck!"

Just then Sidney joined them.

"Ready, dear?"

"Yes. If dad's through. Oh, there he is. All right, come on."

Passing through the French window Jerome saw Jean standing a little apart, the smile at Alice's flippancy touched with sadness at the thought of what Martha would have felt at having to "scratch round" for another minister who looked "like one of the Prophets after a good dinner."

In the six weeks of absence, Jerome had settled the matter of the concert night to his own satisfaction. Away from Jean, he had analyzed it thoroughly and was glad, by the time he had put a few hundred miles between them, that it had happened as it had. It would never happen again and it had taught him much. Now, as he saw her standing, a little lonely it seemed to him, with that look of mingled amusement and sadness on her face, he felt a deep tenderness, almost as if she were Alice, a tenderness which had in it no room for passion. He was crossing the room to stand beside her—Alice absolutely forbade being given away—when the minister opened his book and the short service of the Episcopal Church began. Jerome stood where he was, and after a moment forgot Jean.

Standing aside from the group of young people, all strangers, Jean listened and, as she listened, the room faded into the walls of the little western church at the foot of the Berkeley Hills. In the pew behind, Martha stifled her sobs and Elsie dabbed with surreptitious slaps at the fidgeting Tommykins.

What a dreary affair it had been. Jean felt again her rebellion and shame at the sordid ugliness of Martha's sobs and Elsie's whispered rebukes.

"Do you, Alice, take this man, to be your wedded husband ... to love, honor and obey, in sickness and in health, until death do you part?"

"I do."

She, too, had promised, firm in belief of herself, of Herrick, of any test the future might hold. And she had understood nothing, nothing at all. It was a terrible promise to make in one's youth, untried.

"Do you, Sidney, take this woman, to be your wedded wife ... succor and cherish in sickness and in health, until death do you part?"

Franklin had promised, just as clearly, and she had thrilled with the safety of his protection. How awed she had been, almost grateful, for this opportunity to build a life together, not a life with all beauty drugged to nagging duty, but a free life, brimming with opportunity, overflowing with beauty. And even while he promised—she knew now what had been Franklin's mood as he stood beside her—desire, throttled to control until the effort whitened and sharpened his face to the Galahad look.

Jean's head drooped.

And with Gregory, no open honesty like this, but smothering secrecy that she had tried to glorify.

To love, honor and obey, till Death do you part.

To seal the truth openly before all, as Alice was doing. In all her life she would never have a memory as this would be to Alice.

"In the name of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost, I pronounce you man and wife."

There was a moment of deep silence, in which it seemed to Jean that these two people as individuals, were effaced in this Thing they had just done, and that, never till the end of time could they again be two.

Then every one was crowding about, laughing and talking and trying to kiss the bride. But Alice fended them all off and Jerome took her in his arms. Jean saw his face twitch as he let her go.

"How he is going to miss her," Jean thought and then Jerome was crossing the room to her.

"Well, I thought you had decided to live in St. Louis. How did the conference go? I'm dying to hear."

With this flippant greeting, Jean pushed memory from her.

"Great. And I'm dying to tell about it. I tried to get over to the office this morning, but Alice discovered me. You haven't any idea what a lot of people and how much effort it takes to keep a wedding simple. I saw only the tag end of proceedings but if I had another daughter she should have everything from organ march to flower girls. It's a lot easier."

While he spoke he looked about for a quiet spot in which to tell Jean of the conference. The garden offered the only chance and he was just going to suggest it when Alice swooped down upon him.

"No, you don't, Dad Stuart. This is my party. Look over there at Mrs. Cather. Belle said she couldn't vouch for her mother not crying and she's just about ready to begin. Beat it. I will not have a single weep at this wedding."

"Can't I wait till she begins? I haven't seen—I want to tell Mrs. Herrick——"

"Run along. She is beginning."

Alice watched until he was safely landed by Mrs. Cather. When she turned back, Jean saw with surprise that the blue eyes were misty.

"Do you know, Mrs. Herrick, that's the only spot that hurts in the whole business, having to leave Dad. He's going to be lonesome, whether he knows it or not."

"I'm afraid he is."

"He'll just stay over here by himself and putter with bulbs and things and get into a rut. I know he'll never go to a place except to the office when I'm not here to prod him."

"Well, the office is a pretty absorbing thing."

"Yes, I know it, but—don't you think that as people get older their work just kind of goes along without all of them that there is, and the rest gets into a groove?"

"Good gracious, what an uncomfortable thought!"

"He's gotten used to me in a whole lot of little ways he doesn't know anything about, and I'm afraid," she hesitated, took a quick summary of Jean and added hastily as she saw Sidney coming to her, "Would you mind, sometimes, just prodding him along a bit, Mrs. Herrick, till it all settles down again?"

"I'll prod to the best of my ability, but I'm afraid it isn't promising much."

"Oh, it's only for a little while. I'll be back in October to tend to the matter myself."

"Till then, perhaps I can manage it." Jean laughed, too, but she had a tenderness for this big girl who was afraid that Jerome Stuart would get into a rut.

In spite of the pleasant informality of the supper, it seemed a long-drawn-out affair to Jean, and try as she would, she could not share the gayety. With the exception of Mrs. Cather and Sidney's aunt, the rest were Alice's age, and there was a feeling of perfect assurance and untried strength in the air, that made Jean feel old. Seated between a young man interested in subnormal children and a girl cubist, who was advancing an intricate argument from which Jean could not gather whether Cubism was subnormal, or subnormality was misunderstood Cubism, Jean struggled to give her attention, but her thoughts drifted farther and farther away, and at last withdrew from the discussion altogether.

From his end of the table, Jerome snatched glances at Jean, and it was only the necessity of keeping Mrs. Cather amused that prevented Jerome, too, from sinking into a like silence, but he felt the mood, a strong wire, binding them together. He was as relieved as Jean when supper was over, and while the girls struggled with Alice to let them "do the thing as it ought to be done" and the young men began clearing the room and the veranda for a dance, he sought Jean again. As he reached her, Alice's clear voice rose above the laughter.

"Now quit it, Belle. I wasn't decorated for the sacrifice, and I'm not going to be 'started on life's journey.' I'm going to wear that tan raw-silk you've all seen a dozen times, and it would be idiotic to help me get into that. Besides, the snappers are almost all off, and nobody but myself knows the trick of pretending they're not."

Jerome smiled. "This generation's a scream, isn't it?"

"I was just thinking—do you suppose it is or that we're just older?"

"No. It is different."

"Yes, I suppose it is." Jean looked about at the young men clearing the furniture to the veranda and the girls grouped about the victrola, choosing records. "But I don't think I ever realized before, quite so clearly, anyhow, that there is a 'this generation.' I always feel as if I am this generation, and children like Tony are the future."

"Delusion, terrible delusion. But, then, you haven't a daughter Alice's age, who discusses her own children even before her marriage."

"Frightful," Jean agreed, pushing away a strange, new wish that she did have a daughter like Alice. "To be menaced with two generations at once—that would take the pep out of me."

Alice was back now, ready to leave. She sent Sidney on an errand, and joined the girls round the victrola.

"They're so terribly afraid of not being reasonable, or being sentimental, and they go to such lengths to prove their independence. Why, Alice would rather die than blush, even if she could accomplish that feat. She would think it was indecent."

"Maybe it is," Jean said lightly, hoping to keep the talk from dropping altogether to the depth of her own seriousness. For this wedding was full of intruding revelations that wearied and saddened her.

A daughter like Alice. If she had had a child. A child of Herrick's. It might have been ten or eleven years old, now. It was very strange to think of a child of Herrick's. She had never wanted a child of his, never for an instant. She remembered, vividly, the Sunday she had lain under the trees and thought of the possibility of a child that would have Herrick's high laugh. How queer it had made her feel! That was the same day she had asked her mother about the scene in the old Webster Street house, and Martha had let the match burn her fingers.

And Gregory's child. It would have been a little thing, scarcely more than a baby yet, not nearly as old as Puck the day she had told Puck stories and waited for Margaret to come home.

Franklin's child. Gregory's child.

For the first time Jean linked the two in the possibility of their fatherhood of her child. And for the first time, a child stood out as a separate entity, a distinct individual, owning its own existence. Her child. A part of herself, yet more its own self. A unit of "this generation," the generation in which she had felt, until this moment, that she herself belonged.

But she did not belong. She had no part in it. There was a chasm between it and herself. Forward across the chasm there was nothing. Back, there was Martha's grave.

"What do you think Alice told me?" The intonation caught Jean's attention and brought it to the man beside her. "I suggested that if she wanted to be really logical, she should have no ceremony at all. She said it was so inconvenient when you went to hotels, or among people who didn't understand. Imagine! Advancing that as a reason. I suggested that, under such pressure, she might lie about it, and she said, 'Lying always smothers things up. It isn't clean.'"

"She's right."

"Of course she's right. But how modern it is! She doesn't logically believe in a ceremony. She doesn't believe that marriage has anything to do with religion and she thinks, or thinks she thinks, that in time even the civil ceremony will vanish."

"It will."

"Of course it will. But nothing would induce Alice, or any of the young people here, to say honestly that they are afraid. Fear is a terrible bugaboo. They're too young to know that it is the deepest rooted instinct in the race. And so they wiggle out of the dilemma by an exaltation of—cleanliness. Terribly modern, like cold baths and exposed plumbing."

"I don't know that that's it," Jean said thoughtfully. "I feel, at the present moment, as if I could put up a perfectly sound argument on either side. That's the trouble with analyzing too hard, you always come clear round the circle and end in conservatism again. When they stood there, before the God in whom they do not believe, and promised in the old, narrow way, in the form for which they have no respect, to love, honor, and obey, till death does them part, it did seem to be more than a ceremony. For a moment it did seem to reach down below any passing desire, down into an eternal reality. I suppose it's because we have no substitute yet for the old-fashioned God, and so, in big moments, we still stand up and promise things out loud, as we used to do, when we were children, to our parents." She turned suddenly to Jerome. "Would you have liked Alice to go away without any ceremony, the useless ceremony that some day will be done away with?"

"No," Jerome answered slowly, "I don't believe that I would. No, to be honest, I would not. We haven't eliminated it yet and till then it's—safe."

"Safety—and weakness—and a fear-filled age."

"Don't! You make me feel like Methuselah in his last illness."

Jean laughed, but she was glad that Alice appeared just then. As she took the girl's hand in hers, she answered the signal that Alice sent, and her lips motioned, "Don't worry about that. I'll prod."

Then Alice put both arms about her father's neck and toned down the strain of the moment by instructions concerning the management of Malone.

"If it's any comfort, remember that I managed several housekeepers while you were in pinafores."

"I suppose you did. But maybe you've gotten out of practice." Alice gave him a last swift kiss, Sidney shook hands without saying anything, and, with a general good-by thrown among the guests as if they were going on an errand next door, Alice and Sidney were gone.

In the confusion of starting the dance that followed, Jean slipped away and got her things. She had intended to go unnoticed, but Jerome was waiting and walked to the gate. He looked grave now, as if the forced gayety of parting had taxed his pretense. Nor could Jean throw aside the seriousness of her own mood. The wedding had saddened her; against all the logic of her beliefs, against what she knew were her fixed deductions, something persisted, a fine, thin thread of regret, a sense of waste, of loss. A terrible clarity seemed to possess her, as if she could see the indestructible skeleton of all human dependence and weakness, under the conventions and forms with which society had clothed it. And Jean wanted the healing solitude of her roof.

They stood looking out over the empty field before them, each full of suppressed thoughts, each conscious of the other's absorption, very near in their understanding.

"Good-night." Jean opened the gate before he could do it for her and passed out.

"Good-night." Jerome watched her swing away, fainter and fainter through the dusk.

He did not go back again to the house, but to the farthest corner of the garden, beyond reach of the noise and lights. Here it was still and peaceful among the growing things, so still, that he seemed to be the only thing in motion on the earth, poised in ether. Time took on a quality of space, and incidents, some quite forgotten, rose near, like objects close to hand. He could see through time, all about him, back down the years, to his own wedding night. And, as he had not been since then, he was alone again with Helen.

How adorably clinging and frightened she had been, trusting in his wisdom, so little more than her own. What wild emotions had gripped him, almost as frightened as she, what longing and what desire and what denial all bound into a wonderful exaltation to make Helen happy always, to keep her trust! To hold her safe in the great love that throbbed and beat in him almost beyond his power to calm to the degree of Helen's white shyness.

He had done his best, even when the exaltation had gone, and only deep affection and tender loyalty were left for the clinging little thing who had remained to the end, the least reluctant and fearful.

The day when Alice had been laid in his arms. He had scarcely noticed her, because Helen was slipping so quietly away. And the months afterwards, stabbing remorse as if he had killed Helen, and long periods when he had forgotten her altogether, been quite absorbed in his work, Alice, and the wonderful fact of living.

Years since then. Happy years full of work and Alice.... Now Alice had gone and Sidney was only another man like himself, with all the weakness and hidden places in every man.

Then he thought of Jean, as she had looked at supper. She, too, was full of hidden places and contradictions. There was nothing simple, no absolute unity anywhere. Suddenly Jerome felt chilly. He looked at his watch. It was a quarter past one. He stopped and listened. The house was silent. They had all gone, then, while he walked in the garden.

Jerome went back. The victrola was in the middle of the floor, the records scattered about on top of the piano. The room was littered with scraps of bonbons and crushed flowers; dirty saucers, half filled with sherbet, marked a second supper.

Jerome turned out the lights and closed the door. Life was a little like the room, he felt, filled with the tag ends of others' leavings.

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

On the Monday morning following the wedding, Jerome was at the office earlier than usual. After the lonely Sunday behind him, the day ahead was filled with expectation. First, he would tell Jean about the trip. There were many things he wanted to tell her, things that no one else would quite get. And then they would lay out the program for the piers.

The morning passed quickly, with only a few lulls in which Jerome leaned back in his chair, smoked a cigar, made notes and tried not to listen too closely for sounds across the hall. As soon as she was free she would probably come in.

But by mid-afternoon it was not so easy to keep from listening. For one thing, it was suffocatingly hot, and for another, he was not sure that Jean had been in all day. He had not heard her come or leave for lunch, and usually her hours were punctual. At three o'clock Jerome closed the transom. It made him nervous to sit listening for sounds from Jean's office. As soon as she was free she would come in. It was the kind of thing Jean did.

But Jean did not come.

Neither on Tuesday nor on Wednesday. Thursday morning, Jerome crossed the hall almost to Jean's door, and came back. If Jean were so busy that she had not a moment for him he did not wish to intrude. And if Jean had lost her interest in the conference, or had only pretended one, still less did he wish to force her. Besides there were the piers. Jean had been as eager as he and it had been understood that they would begin as soon as the wedding was over.

On Friday afternoon, Jerome opened the transom. Jean Herrick could come or not, exactly as she liked. He would not mention the conference and if she felt obliged to inquire he would cut her short as gracefully as he could. As for the piers, if it suited his convenience by the time she strolled round, he would do them, and if it did not, she could do them alone.

On Saturday he did not go to the office at all, but stayed home and worked in the garden. He pulled down a summer house that had really been a charming place to sit, and finished pruning and clipping every shrub that had escaped in the long, empty evenings of the past week.

On Sunday he took Pips, and set out for a long tramp right after lunch. But he had lost the habit of tramping alone ever since Alice had been old enough to go with him; so, although he had intended to stay out until evening, at three he turned back. The heat was at its apex, but under pretense that it was really getting cooler, Jerome increased his pace, until Pips suddenly dropped panting under a tree and refused to budge.

"All right, old man, have it your own way."

Jerome stretched beside him. Pips snapped languidly at a few gnats and went to sleep. But Jerome could not sleep. His head felt hot and empty, and although he had accomplished nothing all day, he was exhausted with the effort of getting rid of the hours. He tried to find something interesting to think about, but there seemed to be nothing worth wasting a thought upon. The week ahead stretched as flat and monotonous before him as the week behind. There was nothing, except the problem of Jean's inexplicable behavior.

She had not gone on a vacation because she had told him half a dozen times she did not intend to take one. Summer, everywhere, was dull and he could imagine no work that would call her out of town. No. Jean was following some whim of her own, with no consideration of upsetting him.

That was the trouble with women who had brains, especially after they had passed their first youth; they got so set in their habits, that consideration for others never occurred to them. No doubt, Jean was quite unconscious of causing him any inconvenience.

And there he was wondering about Jean when he had definitely put her out of his thoughts a dozen times that week.

Queer how a thought persisted against one's wish.

A thought ought to be the easiest thing in the world to keep where you wanted it. A person could intrude, or an extraneous body inject itself into your cosmos, but a thought didn't exist apart from yourself, and if you didn't want it there, why did it come?

Interesting business, Thought, like a demon, dwelling inside and ordering you about at its will. Fascinating, if you got to really thinking about Thought. Jerome gripped the idea of Thought, dragged it along with him like a companion over the field of the Will and the Subconscious, until he brought up in a conversation he had had a few days before with the psycho-analyst he had corralled for Tony's tea.

But now, as soon as he thought of him in relation to the tea, Jean rose from nowhere, drove out the psycho-analyst and usurped his place. Jean as she had looked when he came in through the glass door, amused and a little sad; Jean at the gate: dimming in the dusk; as she had looked when they first talked of the piers, eager and alive in every nerve; standing close while Tony played, in the candle lighted room, with the thick, heavy odor of hothouse plants; as merry and teasing as Alice, at supper afterwards, in "the little joint"; at the concert—

Jerome jumped up. "Here, boy. It must be almost six."

He took a short cut back across the fields and entered the kitchen just as the clock struck five. On a table, covered by a white cloth, mysterious humps disclosed Malone's provision for his supper. It made him think of a country undertaker's, with grewsome appurtenances of death concealed under the cloth. Jerome lifted the edge and discovered cold meat and Malone's tragic efforts at a cake.

Now that he saw his unappetizing meal, he realized that he was hungry. But he certainly couldn't eat there in the kitchen, although it was arranged exactly as he had instructed Malone. In the living-room it might be better, but by the time he had partly cleared the litter of books and papers from the table the dimensions of the effort annoyed him and he threw them back in a worse jumble than before. There was a card table somewhere; that would be just the thing to set on the porch under the honeysuckle. Jerome went all over the house looking for the card table until he remembered that it was in the cellar. The cellar was unlit and he had another hunt for a lamp. He found it at last on the top shelf of the pantry, with just enough oil to make a feeble splutter and a very decided and unpleasant odor. The cellar steps led down from the kitchen, and if the kitchen was cheerless, the cellar was a vault. Clammy damp enveloped him, and the mystery and loneliness of unused places stored with unused things. It was like a deserted house from which the inhabitants had fled at a plague. Jerome located the table under the slats of what had been Alice's baby bed and a broken pedestal. He got it out with difficulty, covered himself with dust and found that the hinge had been broken and it wouldn't stand.

Jerome threw the table down and went back into the kitchen. He jerked the shroud from the humps and ate an unappetizing sandwich of cold beef cut too thick and bread too thin. The cake he had just mashed into Pips' food when he remembered some jam of Alice's. He found a single glass and spread it thick on the remaining crumbs. The cake was possible this way, but now it was all gone in the mash for Pips. While he watched Pips gobbling it up, the clock struck six. And there were four hours yet until the earliest possible bed-time.

Jerome lit a cigar and went out into the garden, but the seclusion and privacy were gone. Through what had been a luxuriant privet hedge he could see the lights of the next house half a block away. At the other end of the garden it was worse. Here he had cut back a wall of hollyhocks, to give more sun to the pansies below and then left the hose running full force until it had washed out the pansy plants, and now a mournful row of bare stems guarded the empty plot.

After all, a garden was an unsatisfactory thing. It was only in the making that the thing had any power of absorption. Once it was made you never knew how much of it you would see. Last year bugs had eaten the roses, and the year before scale had destroyed the apple trees. If the shrubs got along well, then something happened to the flowers, and if the flowers acted on schedule, then the trees didn't.

Spring hit you before you had made up your mind what bulbs you wanted in; or hung back so late that you had no time to plant anything before summer scorched what little you did have. And if spring and summer acted rationally, just about the time you began to get some comfort out of the shaded spots and the smell of things, along came autumn and stripped it bare. There was always a senseless rush and change, nothing permanent accomplished, just stupid repetition over and over, rubbing in the analogy to the impermanent accomplishment of one's own effort. After forty, a man ought to live in a climate the same all the year round, where the futility of accomplishment wasn't always being preached by this eternal leafing and blossoming and dying, round and round in a purposeless circle.

Jerome stopped under a great lilac, primed to nakedness, and glared at its hideous tidiness.

"What do you think you get out of it, anyhow? A few weeks ago you were as bare as you will be again in another few weeks. And you've been doing it to my knowledge for the last fifteen years. You've never really been young or old. You just go on and on. And the little you do do, you can't help, although every spring you look as if you had chosen to be a lilac and had it all your own way. You can't help being a lilac. It was settled for you ages ago in a little brown seed. You can't even prolong your blooming a week beyond the law. You're...."

Suddenly the lilac reminded him of Jean. It was so strong, untrimmed, and indifferent to his tirade. Jerome shrugged and went back into the house. The silence was oppressive. Malone had not returned. There was no reason that she should be in, but it annoyed him that she was out.

At nine o'clock he went to bed.

CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

And the next morning, when Jerome came into the office, Jean stood waiting for him.

"Well, when are we going to begin the piers?"

Jerome hung up his hat and sat down at the desk. He knew that Jean had asked him something and was waiting for an answer. While he shuffled his mail, he knew that the welcoming smile in her eyes was quickly hardening to surprise. He did not care. His relation with Jean Herrick was no longer the untangled thing it had been. For eight days he had thought of scarcely anything but this annoying, self-centered woman. He had destroyed a perfectly good garden and acted like a school-boy. And there she stood wanting to know when he was going to begin the piers.

"I thought you had forgotten them," he said at length, still fumbling the mail as if Jean were detaining him from far more important matters.

"I don't see how you could have thought that."

"It didn't take such a stretch of imagination. We had the first scheduled for the day after the wedding—you may remember."

"Didn't you get my message?" She might have been speaking to a peevish child, so forced was the restraint of her patience.

"No. Did you leave one?"

"I told Minnie to tell you, but I suppose she forgot. Those up-state towns suddenly changed about waiting till fall to organize Consumers' Leagues. It took longer than I thought."

Jerome did not look up. Jean added no personal regret for the inconvenience she might have caused, but moved away toward the door.

"You still wish to do them then?"

"Of course. Don't you?" Jean wanted to add that if he were going to continue in this mood she hoped he didn't.

"Certainly, I do. How about to-night?"

"All right for me. I kept it free on purpose."

There it was, the high-handed assurance that her plans would suit others. But he himself had suggested to-night and he would have to comply.

"It won't be any use starting before nine, do you think?"

"No. Not unless we cover two in the same evening."

"I don't believe I feel strenuous enough for that. One will do. I'll call for you then, about half past eight?"

He swung round in his chair and Jean suddenly noticed that he looked tired, not so much physically, but as if something had gone from within. He was desperately lonely and his loneliness had escaped in irritation toward herself, because she happened to be the only outlet at hand. It was what Martha had called "a man's nature cropping out." It made Jean feel unaccountably tender. And besides she had promised Alice to look out for Jerome.

"I tell you, suppose you come and have supper with me. I've moved, and am keeping house now over in Old Chelsea. Cooking is not my forte and I won't promise anything but delicatessen. Will you be my first guest?"

Jerome did not answer instantly and when he did, said, with no perceptible change of tone:

"Thank you. I should like to very much."

"We'll quit punctually and gather up the food as we go. Till six, then."

Jerome continued to look at the closed door several moments after he heard Jean's shut. Then he crossed to the filing cabinet, realized after he had searched through three drawers, that what he wanted was at home, came back to the desk and sat down.

Suddenly he laughed out loud and began to work.

At six he locked the desk, thoroughly satisfied with the day's accomplishment. He found Jean just closing hers, and a few moments later they were going from shop to shop, collecting supper, with much happy, foolish comment on each other's preferences in cold meats and pickles.

Jean remembered the many times she had done this with Gregory, and now, that memory no longer stung, it brought Jerome near, extended their friendship far beyond the year she had known him, linked him closely with the past. So that it seemed to Jean that each little separate interlude of happiness in life was not really separate, but, by some hidden spiritual chemistry, was only an element in the larger, complex solution of all possible happiness.

And when, half an hour later, they stood together silent on the farthest edge of the roof, and watched the sun slipping over the rim of the West, Jean felt nearer to the man beside her than she had ever thought to feel to any one again. Nearer, in some ways, than she had felt to Gregory, for never, with him, had she for a moment been unconscious of her love. She had never for an instant been unaware of Gregory as the man she loved. He had always been stronger than any moment or any place. The deepest peace had held always, within itself, the power of its own destruction. But there was no personal claim in this silence with Jerome. In their mutual understanding of life's lonely hours, they shared the peace of the roof.

"It's another world—absolutely another world," Jerome said quietly.

Jean nodded. "Nothing's the same up here. Stillness is not empty and color's really sound. Sunrise and sunset are like tremendous chords on a great organ. Sometimes I feel that some day I am going to hear it, actually hear the old music of the spheres."

"It's like a garden, in that still space before the dawn."

"Sometimes it's almost terrible up here, then. As if the night were some indescribable vengeance that had blotted all life from the world, and as if everything were being created anew without any memory of death or pain. I have never seen anything, except the sea, wake like the city does to a new life. A new life, every twenty-four hours. And no matter how many you spoil, there's another waiting, and you can drop the spoiled one into the night."

The gold and scarlet were fading to saffron and silver. A star peeped from the edge of a pale green pool.

"It would do that—or else make you feel there was no use in anything."

"I don't think it would ever make you feel like that really, not for long anyhow. The rhythm in it is so evidently a law—you've got to be a part. There's nothing else for you to be."

"An absolutely materialistic logic doesn't seem to fit, exactly, does it?"

"No, it doesn't. A few dawns and sunsets shake it terribly. They make you feel like a child, listening to a fairy story, that you know is true, no matter how much the grown-ups scoff."

"May I come sometimes and listen to the fairy story, too?" Jerome asked so simply, so like a child, that Jean felt her threat tighten.

"Whenever you want to. Don't bother to let me know. Just come—whenever you're blue or lonely—or just logical and materialistic."

Jerome laughed and, on the lighter note, they began to get supper. When it was ready, Jean spread the small table outside, where space opened most widely to the Jersey shore. As they ate, and Jean told of the "kind ladies" to whom a Consumers' League was still a form of charity to the workers, the last shreds of color faded from the sky. Shy stars ventured boldly out and the gray deepened to night-blue.

Gradually they fell silent. Jerome felt the peace close about him, the tangible, unfathomable peace that Jean felt. They smoked and forgot each other, looking into the night.

At last Jerome spoke, softly, as if he were interpreting something whispered to him in the stillness.

"What a lot of useless pain there is in the world. One feels it in a place like this, almost as if we chose needlessly to be unhappy."

"Do you feel that, too? Sometimes I'm afraid all my standards are going to be upset here. Sometimes I feel as if I had gotten everything twisted a long way back and that it was struggling to get right again."

"And that process itself can hurt terribly."

Jean smiled, a little wistfully. "I am beginning to suspect that it can. It used to make me furious when I was growing up to be told that all pain was 'for the best.' But, now, I believe it was only the wording of it, the tight, prim smugness of the assurance that rasped. It's not that pain is for the best, but it's simply that it doesn't matter. It's part of a whole, and, unless we can make a new whole, with no so-called pain in it, there's no credit to a deeper insight in just kicking."

"I suppose it's because action of any kind always seems the stronger part. Rebellion, in some way, seems bigger than acceptance."

"Perhaps it is. The way an agnostic always seems to be a more independent thinker than the believer in a higher power, a God, or a Spirit, or any Force, you can't prove by logic. It seems as if a believer must have inherited his beliefs ready-made, as if he could not possibly have come to them by any real intellectual effort of his own."

"But the world is swinging back, it seems to me. Perhaps æons and æons ago we thought ourselves out of simplicity and now we're thinking ourselves back. Physicists are beginning to reduce all force to one energy and philosophers seem to be working round to the one spiritual impulse, love. I wonder whether after all we've left Christ and Confucius and Buddha far behind, or whether we haven't caught up."

"I wonder," Jean said thoughtfully. "And I suppose, till the end of time, we'll go on struggling to find out whether it's an impulse pushing up from within or whether it's a condition imposed from without; whether brotherly love is an ideal we can't quite attain or whether it's a law we can't escape."

"And then, perhaps, we'll begin all over again."

"No doubt we will." Jean pushed back her chair, and leaning for a moment with both palms spread on the table edge, smiled down at Jerome. "In the meantime, there are the piers."

Jerome did not move. "Let's not do them to-night. It's wonderful up here and 'a long, long time' the piers shall last."

"But I haven't another evening this week. And you go on your vacation the fifteenth, don't you? It would be great to cover them all by then."

Jerome frowned. "I suppose it would."

The mood was gone now, anyhow.

CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

As they went through the small side door, the band at the far end of the pier was just tuning up. Two powerful arc lamps shed their hard white light on the men, and the rows of already filled chairs about the bandstand. The place smelled of rope and tar and dust, but the lower end of the great shed was open and a faint coolness from the water penetrated for a short distance. Through the opening, the red and green lanterns of docked ships winked enticingly and at the next pier a great steamer creaked on her hawsers, as the water, washing against her sides, whispered of distant lands. Beyond the range of white light, boys and girls sauntered hand in hand, while, in still darker corners, couples stood whispering or silent.

"This—after ten hours a day with your eyes glued to your machine, afraid to move in case the needle pins you to it forever! A blinding web of machinery and then a few little hours for all your suppressed youth and longing to bubble and boil, here in the darkness, a dark full of lapping water and the breath of far-away lands. Is there anything here about sticking to your job and repressing and repressing and repressing, until you grow too dull to care?"

Jerome did not answer. His eyes followed Jean's to a thin, rouged girl and a narrow-chested, ferret-eyed boy vanishing into the farthest shadow. They stopped beside a tower of bales and the boy took both the girl's hands in his. The great steamer strained impatiently like a strong lover resenting the whimpering little waves, eager for the billows beyond. Jerome suddenly felt the heat like hot fingers on his body.

"A tenement room with people everywhere and crying babies, no spot not filled with some human, crowding body. No coolness, no privacy, or this—for a few scorching weeks when you're young—and all the weary years afterwards to make up."

"Oh, please," Jerome begged with a quiver that would not stay under the forced laugh with which he tried to cover it, "don't delve down into the instincts of the whole race for this little job of ours. You make me feel as if we had undertaken to save humanity."

Jean was still looking toward the thin, rouged girl, drawn deeper into the shadow now. "But the instincts of the race are what we're after."

"Well, please stay on the surface a bit more or—you'll make me want to slip away to the Spice Islands too." He had not meant to say it, but if Jean heard she took no notice. The girl's hands were gripped in the boy's now as he drew her to him behind the bales. The next moment the band started and the girl came from behind the bales, rearranging her elaborately puffed hair and giggling as she passed.

The band crashed mechanically through its cheap selections, and was applauded dully, until the director hung up the fourth placard, announcing a waltz. Instantly a kind of shiver ran through the crowd. Boys and girls jumped to their feet, crushing each other in their haste, so that, before the band had played a dozen bars, a mass of moving bodies was gliding and swaying in the rising dust. Round and round they went, the dust rising thicker about them, the tapping of the girls' high heels and the shuffle of men's thick shoes drowning the ripple of the water on the piles beneath and the straining of the ship at her hawsers. The waltz ended but the dancers stood linked, furiously demanding an encore. The music began again. The settling dust rose in a fresh cloud. The girls relaxed in their partners' arms, and the boys held them hungrily as if, with the certainty of its short duration, they must wrest from this bodily contact every thrill concealed in it.

Jerome shifted in his chair. He wanted to get up and go back to the peace of the roof with Jean. He could not look at her and yet he wanted to make some comment, say something that would drag these close-locked bodies and gleaming eyes back to the level of a civic problem.

Again and again the band yielded in its indifference to what it played so long as it filled the requisite hours. The partners rarely changed, and again and again the thin girl and the ferret-eyed boy passed near, dancing a little apart from the others. Suddenly the boy said something, the girl tossed her head, jerked herself from his hold and came to sit down a few seats away. The boy's eyes were evil in their rage. He took a step toward the girl, stopped, shrugged his narrow shoulders and came directly over to Jean.

"Say, don't yuh wanter dance?"

Instinctively Jerome moved to interpose, but Jean was smiling up into the pimply face and bold eyes, defiant of inequality.

"But I can't dance, really, not a step."

"Say, yuh're kiddin'. Why anybody kin dance. It's as easy as rollin' off a log."

"Not for me."

"Aw come on, git up anyhow. Yuh can't help dancin' wid me. Jes' listen to de music. One, two, t'ree, tra la la, it gits yuh by itself. Come on."

To Jerome's amazement Jean rose. The boy took a heavily scented and soiled handkerchief from his pocket, adjusted it between Jean's shoulderblades, clamped it fast with his grimy hand, and standing at a distance that marked his knowledge of Jean's difference, swung her into step. Jerome rose, shook his body as if freeing it from a net, and walked to the space beyond the last row of chairs.

In the moving mass he caught Jean's face. She stood a head above the pimply face smiling up to her. She was smiling, too. Jerome drew deeper into the shadow. He lost Jean in the crowd, then she glided again into his line of sight. She was still smiling, apparently unconscious of that disgusting hand on her back, and the red, pimply face below her own. The thin, rouged girl was crying now. Jerome stepped further into the shadow to escape the circle closing about Jean, the ferret-eyed boy and sobbing girl.

He tried to drag himself back to the first moments of the evening, alone on the roof with Jean, but he could not do it. Something within was pushing to the surface, dragging up from the years memories of his own youth, hours that did not concern Jean at all, moments of need baffled by Helen's fragile strength, her misunderstanding and colorless desire. And then, of Jean's white neck and arms and the thick, soft whiteness of her flesh.

The music stopped. Jean was on the edge of the dancers looking for him. He went slowly forward. When the boy saw Jerome coming, he sidled away with a grin.

"Why did you do that?"

"Why did I do it?"

"Yes. Why?" Jerome saw the surprise in Jean's eyes but his need to know drove him on. "Yes. Why?"

"Because I wanted to feel for myself what there is in it. I wanted to see what there is in sheer motion that makes it worth while to add to ten hours a day, three more of real, physical effort."

"Do you know, now?" Why didn't she move farther away? Jerome felt as if she were touching him, and, at the same time, as if his body were formed of the hot dust. "Do you?"

"You would have to try it for yourself," Jean answered coldly, annoyed at this fastidity of objection. "It does get you. There's something——"

"So it seems. Does the success of the experiment demand further investigation?"

"Let's go."

Without another word, they walked the length of the pier and out again through the small door. As they walked in silence back to the apartment, through the chaos in Jerome, a little thread of shame and regret drew him almost to the point of speech. What must Jean be thinking? He could not part from her like this? And yet, when he tried to grasp and hold a thought in words, it burst like a rocket from his control, in a shower of scorching sparks, looks, the feel of Jean's cool fingers, the maddening composure of her clear, gray eyes.

They reached the door with the silence unbroken.

"Good-night." Jean made no conciliatory reference to the next appointment, as she turned to the vestibule with an impersonal smile that did not touch her eyes.

In another second she would be up there alone in the inhuman detachment of her roof.

"Good-night." He held out his hand and, for a moment, hers lay in it, strong, cool, and burning the whole surface of his palm. He almost flung it from him. "Good-night," he repeated thickly and was gone.

After a few moments, Jean began to move slowly along through the lower hall and up the stairs. She walked with strange deliberation, holding her mind to the physical motions of her body by force. At the roof door she stopped, as if afraid of what lay beyond it. And when at last she turned the handle and stepped into the full moonlight of the graveled roof, her whole body was trembling. She went and sat down on the corner of the coping farthest from the spot where she and Jerome had stood to watch the death of the day.

She understood. And the past, by which she understood, rushed down upon her: the night in the studio when Herrick had asked her to marry him: the night she had stood on the dark street with Gregory, and then, so quietly and inevitably gotten into the taxi: and the night when Philip Fletcher had cried and squeaked in his angry pain.

Jean covered her face with her hands. She seemed to be on the edge of a dark and dangerous place. Suddenly the blackness was pricked with points of light. They forced themselves between her locked fingers, until her hands dropped into her lap, and she sat very still looking into the future.

Years of companionship and shared interests. Work and understanding and tenderness. The need of being needed. The future opened about her, and Jean cried.

CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

"IT'S impossible. I'm almost fifty—and there is Alice."

Whenever Jerome could grasp the fact of Alice, the night's madness dulled to acceptance of conditions. Alice was married. She would have children of her own. He would be a grandfather. Only ten or fifteen years of real usefulness lay ahead. A quarter of a century of comfortable security, uncomplicated by emotion, stretched backward.

Three o'clock. Half past. A dog barked. A distant rooster crowed. Jerome was glad of the sounds. Soon the "terrific stillness" before the dawn would be all shot through with these safe, pleasant sounds of every day. The sun would come up. Milk wagons would rattle down the lanes. Malone would clump about in the kitchen. She would call him to breakfast and he would eat it while he read the morning paper, propped against the sugar-bowl. Then he would take the eight o'clock boat, as he had for fifteen years, and go to the office.

And there he would sit waiting and listening for sounds across the hall, inventing reasons to consult with Jean. He had done it for months, incredibly ignorant of his own reactions. But now he was not ignorant. That moment on the sidewalk, had flared into the deepest corners, burned away the ridiculous tangle of logic by which he had convinced himself, the night of the concert, that his emotion had been "biological." Good God, he had called it that, a momentary spark, struck from the cold past, by the unexpected beauty of Jean's flesh!

It was no momentary spark. He did not want to take Jean in his arms and kiss her once, as he had wanted to do that night. He wanted her for always, day and night, to share with her the years before them.

And he was almost fifty. A thousand little habits, acquired through years, locked him fast. Alice and he had walked happily side by side. Jean's path would not run parallel to his. It would cross and crisscross.

She was strong. She pulsed with life. She might want a child. He and Jean and their child. And Alice and Sidney and Sidney, Junior. Like an immigrant family with the generations overlapping. Sidney Junior grinned and gurgled at him.

The sun rose. The night dew melted. The earth awoke refreshed and younger than the youngest human thing upon it. Jerome went wearily back into the house. He felt old and confused with the night's thinking, hours of balancing between—fifty and thirty. Aching with a body-hunger his brain could not appease, blind in this storm of desire, lit with lightning flashes of self-ridicule, with amazement of the thing, with disbelief in its possibility, with the gurgling of Sidney, Junior, with strange reluctance and anger.

Milk wagons rattled down the lane. The sun rose full over the hilltops. A new day was begun, one of those new days, one of those "twenty-four hours to make into what you will." Jerome smiled feebly.

"Another twenty-four hours like this and there'll be nothing left of me to do anything with."

Malone banged about in the kitchen. At last she called him to breakfast. He sugared the cereal she set before him, arranged the paper against the sugar-bowl, and stared at the headlines.

When she thought he was ready she brought the first helping of hot waffles. He saw her look at the untouched bowl and with difficulty made her understand that he did not want it. He buttered the waffles and poured the honey on them, stacking the crisp quarters one upon the other as he always did. And there they were when Malone came with the second plate. She stood holding the covered plate until Jerome told her impatiently to stop baking them. He felt that in this unreasonable world, Malone might go on baking waffles all day.

At a quarter to eight as always, Jerome pushed back his chair. He looked at the paper still folded to the front page and the crust of the single slice of toast he had attempted to eat.

"It's fifty all right—or I would have eaten it—and not known what it was."

Then he went into the living-room. He wrote two notes, one to the office and one to Jean. He was called out of town most unexpectedly. The business would take several days, and as he would be in the northern part of the State, he had decided to go on for his vacation, without returning. The notes were brief and almost duplicates, except that he added to Jean's a regret that they would not be able to finish the piers together. He sent the notes by messenger and packed his trunk.

Jean took the note from the boy and laid it unopened on the desk. Twice she picked it up and put it down again uncut. It was a scorching morning but her hands were cold and although all the windows were open, she felt that the room was airless. She crossed to the window and leaned out a little way. Below, the city, like the sea beating against a cliff, washed the base of the building, where, in a high, safe niche, she stood alone with the note from Jerome Stuart. In a moment she would open it and make a decision, although she knew that when she did open, the decision would have been already made.

Jean went back to the desk and opened the envelope. She read the half sheet and tore it slowly into bits. Her body scorched, but her fingers were icy to her own touch.

Jerome Stuart had run away. There was no love in his desire. He did not want to want her. She had disturbed his peace against his will and he had gone as he might have gone to escape the contagion of an illness. And last night she had sat for hours on the roof, almost afraid to think, because of the small, eager fear that had come upon her!

When Minnie came for the morning's dictation, Jean felt that she had been sitting at her desk for weeks. Only years of habit made it possible to pick up the day's routine, but early in the afternoon, Jean left the office and went home.

The sun beat fiercely upon the asphalted gravel. Jersey was hidden under its pall of smoke. Nearer at hand, huge chimneys belched their blackness into the quivering heat. The day was still roaring at its task.

Jean went into the little living-room and lowered the blinds to a kindly softness. Then, as in the old days, before a problem, she began to walk up and down.

But the day roared to its completion, the huge chimneys ceased to send forth their black columns, the lowering sun thinned the black pall to gold-shot gray, and still Jean walked up and down.

The thing that Philip Fletcher had found, "the call of a woman to a man," Jerome Stuart had felt. That quiet man who understood so many things. He understood himself and he had gone away.

And she had not wanted him to go. She had no passion for Jerome Stuart. His nearness left her cold. She did not long to help him as she had longed to help Franklin. But she had not wanted him to go.

What tangled threads of instinct and of need bound her? The age-old woman's need of being needed? But Jerome did not need her. He had run away.

It was her own need, not Jerome's. Her need of what? Something nearer than lives she never touched? Something of her own?

It was cool now and Jean went out to the roof. Far down in the street dwarfed figures hurried by. They had finished the day's work. They were going home.

Long after the dwarfed black figures were gone, Jean sat, staring down.

As the days passed, Jean came to wish, more and more deeply, that she had never seen Jerome Stuart. The thought of him filled her waking hours, and at night she often dreamed of the moment on the sidewalk, only, in the dreams, Jerome always came up to the roof again. And in the evenings when she tried to read, in the once peace-filled stillness, he was there across the room, his shoulders, with their student stoop, bent over a book. He stopped and read her bits and they laughed together, or she saw his anger against social injustice crackling like a fire in his gray eyes.

Three times in her life, Jean had felt the old landmarks slip away. Three times in her life she had felt the old Jean die and another woman take the place: when she had left Herrick, when she had received Gregory's letter, and when she had come home to find Martha dead. Each time she had felt as if no future experience could ever reveal unguessed depths in herself. And now, at thirty-nine, because a man whom she did not love, had desired her for a moment against his own will, she felt.... What was it that she felt? Not the ending of all things, as she had felt at Gregory's going. Not the loneliness that followed Martha's. These had been like sudden death in the midst of life. Now she was not dead. She was outside life, watching it go by. And, like the old people, whom she had watched with Gregory, following the sun about the Almshouse walls, she did not want it to go.

"For a few years yet you will be a woman."

Jean went slowly across the roof, through the living-room, to the small blue and white bedroom. She turned on the light above the mirror and looked calmly into it. In the last two years the band of gray above her ears had thickened. There were faint lines, very faint, at the corners of her eyes. The eyes themselves were clear and young, but now that Jean looked steadily into their frank depths, something rose from beneath the surface, an intangible record of the years.

Jean turned, getting almost the full view of her body in the mirror. It was wonderfully strong and straight. The throat and breasts were firm and the flesh soft. Jean remembered how soft and white her mother's body had been when she had covered it against the draught.

Her own, perhaps, would keep its youth, too, a mockery of the lessening power within. In spite of all her efforts, her enthusiasm would decay, more quickly now that she had recognized her need to keep it. Her body more quickly, her brain more slowly, would obey the law. She would sink, with tragic unconsciousness of the process, into benumbed indifference. No more stress, no more impatience, no longing, no regret. Patient acceptance.

Jean snapped off the light and went out to the roof again.

Jerome Stuart had gone away. But he would come back.

CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

Jerome Stuart grinned at the red-cap who rushed forward for his bag, at the transfer man to whom he gave his checks, to the taxi driver whom he beckoned, and finally, when he found himself sitting on the very edge of the seat as if, by so doing, he could force the vehicle more quickly through the traffic, at himself.

For a little over two weeks he had managed to stay away. And, although from the moment he had entered the train to return, he could not have told why he ever went, still less why he had stayed, he was proud of the achievement. He felt that he had acquired a power of self-control that no emergency of life could ever shake. He had fished and tramped and played tennis and, one evening, alone in his room, he had even tried to do some serious reading. At the memory of that evening, Jerome leaned against the cushions and laughed aloud.

"You poor, besotted idiot."

He might be fifty, sixty, a hundred. He might have a dozen daughters and a score of grandchildren. None of it had anything to do with his love for Jean Herrick. He had run away in a kind of perverted modesty, just as a child might refuse a longed-for present beyond its just expectations,

"It would serve you right if she had gone away and you couldn't find her."

But at the thought, Jerome perched on the edge of the seat again.

"Steady, old top, steady. If you go at things like this, you'll bungle the whole business. And then you will be in a fix. Besides, you know, you can't dash in and ask a lady to marry you, when she hasn't even the least idea you're in love. Cool down, grandpa, cool down."

Nevertheless when the elevator did not instantly answer his summons, Jerome ran up the four flights to his office.

In the middle of her dictation to Minnie, Jean heard his step and stopped. She sat, arrested, for what seemed an endless time, while Minnie chewed her pencil and stared at her own new patent leather pumps.

"The usual ending—to those three last—and that will be all for the present."

"Yes'm." Still chewing, Minnie went.

Jerome Stuart was back. In a few moments perhaps he would come in. He would come in with no memory of that last moment on the sidewalk in his manner, because that was the only way the old relations could go on. And she would meet him, with careless surprise at this return, two weeks sooner than he had expected. He would tell her of his vacation and she would report the lack of any exciting developments while he had been away. Perhaps he would suggest finishing the piers.

He would sit in that chair where she would have to face him, unless she deliberately turned her back. She would listen while he talked. Outwardly they would be the good comrades they had always been. But the man who had desired her would be there, too, and the woman who had sat on the roof and cried, who had appraised her flesh and estimated her power to rouse again his desire, would be there, too. Jean shuddered. She wished he would come now, instantly, and then decided to go before he could.

She had changed her mind for the tenth time, when Jerome's door opened, and her choice was gone. He was in the outer office, saying good morning to Minnie. He knocked and Jean rose, forced by some inner need, to meet him standing. "Come in."

"Back on the job, you see. How's the world got along in my absence?"

He was coming towards her, the outer man and the other, shifting places dizzily, coming straight towards her, lit by the glare of those moments when she had considered living with him in closest intimacy.

"You certainly do look like all outdoors." She had managed to say it.

"I feel like it. I'm afraid to breathe in case I use up all the air in poor old Manhattan at one swoop."

He took his usual place without offering to shake hands. Jean continued to stand. If she relaxed her muscles, the poise she had summoned would relax too, and Jerome Stuart would know that she had weighed her power to waken again his momentary passion.

Jerome wished that Jean would sit down. It made him feel that he had interrupted her in an important piece of work and that she was waiting for him to go. Besides, standing so, the strong sweep of body disturbed him, and his resolve to proceed slowly and carefully was shaken almost beyond control.

"So you haven't taken a vacation at all. Don't you intend to?"

"I don't know. I may." Jean looked away to her desk, covered with papers.

The first impression that she had given of pleasure at his return was gone. She was frowning slightly as if she found it a little difficult to accept this interruption.

She was so strong and self-reliant. She needed no one. The thing he had felt in her had been of his own imagining, it was a projection from within. This big woman, impatient to get at her work, had no need within her. The white softness of her flesh was a lie. She was alive in her brain only.

And he, in two short weeks had lived a lifetime.

For twenty-three years he had thought of himself as Alice's father. He had touched emotion only in relation to his child and her life. He had lived in the reflected glow of others' more intense emotions. And this woman, with her ill-concealed impatience for him to be gone, had dragged him down, in two weeks, in less, in one night, down into the rushing current, back to the very Purpose of Life. There she stood, waiting for him to go.

Jerome rose. If he stayed another minute he would tell her that he loved her. Or strike her. He did not know which.

"I'm afraid you're busy and I'm keeping you."

"No. I'm not busy—not specially. You're not keeping me."

If Jerome Stuart went before she had mastered the situation, it would forever hold its whip over her.

Jean sat down but Jerome stood where he was. This reversal of position brought him nearer, so that now he was close, looking down upon her.

"The Adirondacks must be lovely now."

"They are."

"You're back earlier than you intended, aren't you?"

"Yes."

Jean was smiling up at him.

Had Jerome Stuart always looked like that, or was it some quality the had brought back from the open? His gray eyes glowed with the same light that heralded dawn. His body radiated a spiritual fire which, Jean felt, would consume any obstruction upon which he chose to direct it. It was the Galahad quality she had imagined in Herrick, made manifest; the courage she had overestimated in Gregory, raised to the limit of human possibility. Jean began to tremble.

"I—I am rather busy this morning—only it didn't seem exactly courteous to say so."

"Please don't be insincere—ever—with me, even in things that don't matter at all."

Jean rose. "Well then—I won't. Will you please—go?"

But Jean was too near. He could feel her in his arms as he had felt her every night, alone in the mountains.

"You're so hard—so terribly un-needing—and I need you so."

Jean's hands gripped the desk-edge, but she still managed to keep the smile in her eyes. She could hear Minnie typing in the next room and out in the hall the elevator clanked. It had been so still in the studio the night Herrick asked her to marry him. And the night that she and Gregory had stood silent, the air had been touched with frost and the stars had been so bright. It was hot now and the glaring August sun beat in under the awnings. The city roared away to vast distances, and even the small spot where she stood was filled with little clickings and bangings.

"Don't look like that, please. Forgive me. I won't offend again."

The words drew Jean back to the moment.

"Don't you mean—that you love me? That—you want—to marry me?"

"Mean it! Of course I mean it. More than I ever meant anything in all my life. Jean! Do you? Do you care too?"

His hands were on her now, holding her with assured possession. And suddenly Jean's eyes filled with tears.

"I don't know. I don't know what I feel. I want to care. I want you to love me. When you went away like that I was angry—and disappointed—and I thought of how I could make you care enough but something inside——"

Jerome's hands dropped. "What do you mean? What are you talking about?"

The tears ran down Jean's cheeks. "Something inside is dead. I do care—every way—but that."

"Then you don't care at all. You're not a child. Don't you know what love means?"

Jean's head dropped until he could see only her quivering lips.

"Yes—I know."

After a long silence, Jerome said quietly: "Then, there's nothing else to say." He turned away.

He was going. In another moment there would be no bridge to the empty years ahead.

"Wouldn't it be enough—the rest, everything, friendship—interest——"

Jerome swung round. "Would those have been enough before—when you cared?" he demanded.

She stopped, almost touching him. "No, they wouldn't have been enough, then. I didn't know their value."

Her eyes were very gentle. Jerome turned away again and walked slowly over to the window. Jean stood where she was, waiting.

Could he take less? Could he? Know that there had been more, sense it in a thousand small, intimate ways that made his blood run hot at the thought. To feel it and never to share it. Or worse, to know it corpse-like, forever beyond his reach. That, or nothing of Jean at all.

He spoke without turning. "I don't know. Truly, I don't know. It doesn't seem as if I could. And yet—when I try to think of going on without you——"

He did not speak again or move, but stood with his shoulders hunched, his hands in his pockets. At last Jean went to him. At her touch on his arm, he looked up. His face was so white and fixed that Jean's hand dropped. It would have to be all or nothing to him.

"I—I hoped it would be enough."

"Why? You don't love me."

"I don't know why—only that I did hope."

Jerome's face quivered. "Why did you tell me, Jean, that you know what love is? If you hadn't—but now I will always know that you know. Why did I have to know?"

"Because," Jean said slowly, "I do care and I want your love, very, very much."

It was a long time before Jerome turned from the window again.

They stood so, looking quietly at each other and then Jean said, with a wistful smile:

"Shall we try it?"

After a moment an answering smile flickered in Jerome's eyes.

"I suppose this terrible knowledge of values is the price we have to pay for feeling at all—at our age."

"Perhaps it is worth it. I feel somehow—that it is."

"Do you, Jean? Do you really?"

Jean nodded. "I almost know it is," she whispered as Jerome drew her gently to him.

THE END.

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Table of Contents

THE SWING OF THE PENDULUM

CONTENTS

PART I

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

PART II

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

CHAPTER THIRTY

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

PART III

CHAPTER FORTY

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

CHAPTER FIFTY

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE