[Illustration]

It is delightful to talk to a bishop,” smiled Egeria; “it immediately

becomes a serious duty to be frivolous.”

“And why, pray?” The bishop looked slightly bewildered.

“To afford you the pleasures of contrast. To convince you from the

start that one woman does not seek priestly counsel, nor intend to bore

you with the vagaries of her soul.”

The bishop smiled benignly, deprecatingly and yet comprehendingly. He

even shook his head in paternal and playful admonition.

“Oh, I know us,” Egeria assured him. “A woman, if she is young, is

always either occupied with her heart or her soul. When the one absorbs

her the other doesn’t. When she’s in love she forgets all about her

soul. When she’s out of love she turns to it again. Then she yearns

for incense, altar lights and a pale, young priest, who is willing

to devote time and prayer to assuaging her spiritual doubts. She

doesn’t care in the least to be spiritually directed by any well-fed,

commonplace parson with a fat wife and a pack of rosy children. No,

no, a wistful young ascetic, with hollows under his eyes--wan and worn

with fasting and vigils. She is perfectly aware that he has ultimately

not the ghost of a show; but she is entirely willing that he shall have

a run for his money. In fact, she hopes that the struggle may be keen

and prolonged. To play a game fish which is putting up the fight of its

life is infinitely more exciting than to languidly reel in the line

and secure a victim which has not made the least resistance.”

The bishop smiled tolerantly, tapping his finger tips together.

“Doubtless correct, doubtless correct. Your astuteness and intellectual

acumen have always elicited my admiration.”

A sparkle of annoyance brightened Egeria’s eyes.

“Checkmate,” she murmured, with a little bow of deference.

The bishop raised his brows innocently.

“Oh, you know,” continued Egeria, resentfully, “that there is one

compliment a woman never forgives, and that is a tribute to her

intellect at the expense of her power of attraction. If the lure the

serpent taught her is vain, then is her destiny barren, her desire

unfulfilled.”

“You deserved it,” laughed the bishop; “but, dear lady, have you ever

paused to consider what a debt of gratitude the world owes us? When

I listen to the outpourings of overcharged feminine hearts, and read

the diaries, confessions and novels of innumerable women, I am forced

to the conclusion that the church thoroughly understood one of the

first needs of a woman’s heart when it established the confessional.

Then man, with his restless, protesting conscience, did his best

to estrange you from the consolation, and, in consequence, some

eccentric, undisciplined creature now and again voices to the world

the disorganized, hysterical feminine emotions which should have been

discreetly sobbed into the ecclesiastical ear, decently entombed in the

silence of the confessional.”

There was a faint wrinkle of displeasure in Egeria’s brow. “Admitted,

admitted”--hastily--“and thank you kindly, dear bishop, for your little

criticism of us. It makes it quite possible for me to discuss the

clergy if I wish. Now I can ask, without being impertinent, a question

which has long puzzled me. Why is it that you prelates and the princes

of the church are almost invariably tolerant, delightfully broad-minded

and free from bias, while the rank and file are so frequently strenuous

and discomposing? For instance, last summer I was thrown, through force

of circumstances, with a sallow-faced, stoop-shouldered preacher, who

always spoke of himself as ‘a minister of the gospel.’ Whenever his

dyspepsia was especially severe he informed his parishioners that he

had girded on his armor and was prepared to rebuke evil in high places,

and that he would be recalcitrant to his trust if he did not lift up

his voice to condemn civic rottenness and social degeneracy. His wife

was ‘an estimable lady,’ with the figure of a suburbanite who only

wears stays in the evening, and a pronounced taste for the clinging

perfume of moth balls. No children having blessed their union, they

decided to adopt some definite aim in life. They were talking it over

once when I was present.

“‘There are the sick and the poor; I am sure there are plenty of them,’

suggested the lady.

“Her husband looked at her scornfully, and coldly remarked that _that_

field was full of reapers.

“‘Oh, you mean to stand up openly in the pulpit and rebuke the rich men

who make their money in queer ways!’ she exclaimed, excitedly.

“‘And offend half my wealthy parishioners by branding them as thieves

on insufficient evidence?’ he thundered. ‘Are you insane?’

“Finally, however, being a shrewd creature, he solved the problem and

incidentally won for himself a great deal of gratuitous advertising.

They organized a society for the suppression of bridge--aware that

the public loves sensational details regarding women of position;

the insidious cocktail--the public delights to know that the social

leaders look too often upon the wine when it’s red; ostracising

divorcées--women thus having the sanction of Heaven for attacking

their own sex. Oh, it was a holy crusade in a teapot, and made him

quite famous; and, bishop, what do you think was the motto of the

organization?”

The bishop shook his head. Mild curiosity was in his eyes; but the

shake of his head was distinctly reproving.

“The watchword chosen,” chuckled Egeria, “was, ‘Neither do I condemn

thee.’ Now, bishop, tell me, please, what makes the difference between

his type of man and yours?”

A humorous twinkle shone in the bishop’s eye, then he leaned forward

and whispered one word in Egeria’s ear: “Money.”

She laughed, and then returned to her muttons. “But, really, quite

under the rose, do you not become fearfully bored sometimes by the

various manifestations of the feminine temperament?”

“It may be a trifle self-conscious, a little inclined to regard itself

pathologically,” admitted the bishop, with caution.

“It is frequently yellow,” said Egeria. decisively. “Why don’t you

clergymen and novelists occasionally tell us the truth?”

“We must fill our churches and sell our books, I suppose,” returned the

bishop, half whimsically, half regretfully. “What would you say, Lady

Egeria, if we put you in orders, and disregarding St. Paul’s advice,

let you occupy the pulpit? Would you thunder denunciations at poor,

defenseless women?”

“I’d have a fine time,” cried Egeria her eyes alight. “I would do what

you sermonizers and novel writers haven’t the courage to do--just tell

them the truth about themselves. Chide them for their frivolities and

extravagances and vanities? Not I. They don’t care a straw for that.

No, no, I should have a new evangel and a new text. It should be:

‘Play the game gamely, and don’t whine if you lose.’ Now, bishop,

confess that you never meet a strange woman that you do not observe a

speculative gleam in her eye which long experience has taught you to

interpret as: ‘How soon can I tell him my troubles?’”

“Poor ladies! You have so many,” sighed the bishop, sympathetically.

“Of course we have, we multiply them by three. To sedulously observe

all tragic and harrowing anniversaries is a part of our religion.

‘It’s just five years ago to-day since Edwin left me for another,’ she

says, mournfully, and then, shrouding herself in gloom, lives over

each poignant, past moment. If anyone ask the cause of her dejected

demeanor, she murmurs, in a sad, sweet voice: ‘It is an anniversary.

Would you like to hear of my grief?’

“But what does a man do? He says: ‘Jove! It’s just a year ago to-morrow

since Jemima was run down by an automobile. I must keep myself well

amused or it may be a depressing occasion.’

“Seriously, bishop, if I were you, I’d have a phonograph in my study,

and the moment a woman set foot within the door it should begin that

good old hymn: ‘Go bury thy sorrow, the world hath its share.’”

“But what can the poor things do,” asked the bishop, “if they may not

turn to their clergyman for consolation and comfort?”

“Twang on Emerson’s iron string: ‘Trust thyself.’ Why always twine

about a pole, like a limp pea vine, and flop on the ground the minute

the upholding stick is withdrawn? Imagine the emotions of the pole, if

it were sentient! At first it would say: ‘Delicate, dainty pea vine,

lean on me, the clasp of your myriad tendrils fills me with rapture.

How sweet is your adorable dependence!’ But in time: ‘Oh! stifling,

smothering pea vine, I am suffocated by your deadening passivity. Would

I could tear myself free from your throbbing tendrils.’”

“You evidently believe in the dead burying their dead,” said the

bishop, meditatively.

“No sounder philosophy was ever enjoined on a living world. Let the

dead--dead pasts, dead lives, dead loves, dead memories--bury their

dead. Ah, bishop, the great art of life is the art of forgetting.”

“You, Madame Egeria, are inclined to philosophize.”

“Sir, do not remind me of it! When we offer sacrifices at the altar

of laughter, you may look for gray hairs and crows’ feet. Tears and

passion belong to youth: that season of fleeting and exquisite joys,

of tragic and fugitive griefs, of tempestuous and restless longings.

Youth, with the passionate voice of Maurice de Guerin, cries eternally:

‘The road of the wayfarer is a joyous one. Ah, who shall set me adrift

upon the waters of the Nile?’”

“And in maturity we learn to fold our hands and stop our ears and

take refuge in the commonplace.” The bishop’s tone was tinged with

bitterness.

“Ah, no, no!” Egeria was vehement. “We learn that the Nile, with its

dream-haunted shores, flows by our door; that wherever a patch of

sunlight falls is beauty, wherever a morning-glory blows is art.”

The bishop fell in with her mood. “That is it. Maturity is nothing if

it is not expansion.

“’Tis life of which our nerves are scant.

’Tis life, not death, for which we pant,

More life and fuller life.”

He loved to quote.

“Yes,” exclaimed Egeria, “‘more life, fuller life, more work, more

play, more experience, more of the dreams that scale the stars, more

of the splendid, inexorable life of earth. But”--looking at him

doubtfully--“we are getting horribly didactic and prosy, and we are a

thousand miles away from the feminine temperament.”

“Is there anything left of it?” inquired the bishop, mildly.

Egeria ignored him. “You have only expressed yourself guardedly, while

I have talked and talked,” she complained.

“I shall be equally fluent.” The twinkle shone again in his eye. “But

my opinion is given in confidence. I throw myself on your discretion.”

“Assuredly,” murmured Egeria.

“Very well, then”--lowering his voice--“I am like the old Englishman

who said: ‘I have always found a most horrid, romantic perverseness in

your sex. To do and to love what you should not is meat, drink and

vesture to you all.’ And I also know that--

“Every day her dainty hands make life’s soiled temple clean,

And there’s a wake of glory where her spirit pure hath been.

At midnight through the shadow-land her living face doth gleam,

The dying kiss her shadow, and the dead smile in their dream.”

[Illustration]

IN THE GARDEN

The lily lifts her bridal whiteness up,

And leans a list’ning to th’ impassioned rose,

The dewdrop answer trembles in her cup,

Shines on her silver lip and overflows.

They lean and love for all the world to see,

But thou, my love, thou leanest no more to me!

Oh, mocking-bird, that bosomed in the height

Of yon magnolia, warblest all alone

Thy liquid litany of heart-delight,

While the pure moon steps slowly tow’rd her throne.

Lo! Thou hast lured all joy to soar with thee,

And thou, my love, thou sing’st no more to me.

Oh, one white star in all the blue abyss!

Oh, trembling star that lookest on my pain!

So shook my soul beneath his parting kiss,

So waits my heart, alone and all in vain.

Oh, Night, sweet Night, I bare my grief to thee--

Oh, world, far off, give back my love to me!

MARGARET HOUSTON.

ELLEN BERWICK

BY ANNE O’HAGAN

[Illustration]

Before I went away from Agonquitt I was not, even by the most egotistic

stretch of my imagination, a very important or an overwhelmingly

popular person in the community. The girls from the village did not

swarm out to the farm to see me; they did not hang upon my words with

reverent attention. Even during the two years when I was at college,

my holidays were not periods of public rejoicing; my clothes were not

copied or my style of hairdressing regarded with imitative admiration.

But ever since I went to New York the attitude of my acquaintances has

changed. At first I was touched and flattered by the interest which

all my old companions took in me when I came home; gradually, however,

it glimmered upon my consciousness that it was not myself, but the

glamour of the great city, which drew them--as though the atmosphere of

New York were a tangible thing, and shreds of it clung to me through

the long journey down into this remote country. I think I was a little

more touched, though not so flattered, when I learned this; there is

something pathetic to the initiated in the eager wonderment and awe of

the neophyte.

Sometimes the girls have asked my advice, confiding to me their

yearnings to leave home, to make “careers” for themselves in the world.

And when I try--as perhaps I too often do--to discourage them, they

look at me reproachfully, mutely accusing me of a selfish refusal to

share with them pleasures and glories. They talk of the theaters,

the opera, books, pictures, the glittering press of life, as though

a ticket to New York insured one these things. I talk of loneliness

and discomfort, of the pinch of poverty. They speak of enlarged

horizons; and I of the hall bedrooms which would bound the outlook of

most of them. They glow with the thought of new friendships; and I

dash their ardor with tales of isolation, of snubs in the effort to

escape isolation, of tawdry relationships begun for the sake of mere

companionship. But their eyes are always full of incredulity. And

sometimes, remembering the delights which were no less a part of my

life in the big city than the depression, remembering the wholesome joy

of work, the natural pride of feeling oneself an integral part of the

great onward-pressing stream of life; yes, and remembering the sweet

and the bitter-sweet that came to me there, I wonder if my prohibitive

wisdom is not a little hypocritical. Would I myself forego any of my

New York experiences?

Sometimes it has seemed to me that my own adventures--or lack of

adventures--set down as plainly and truthfully as I can recall them,

might be of more illuminating, perhaps--perhaps--of more deterrent,

effect than all my spoken generalizations. For though my existence had

its peculiar features, rose to its individual climaxes, yet in the main

it was typical--the duplicate in most essentials of that of thousands

and thousands of young women, not greatly gifted, who come to New York

to seek their fortunes.

I shall never forget how the whole thing came about. I was in the

poultry yard, doctoring some of my chickens for the pip, when I

heard a great puffing and chugging in the road. It was the Hennens’

automobile, and instead of dashing past the house, scattering terror

before it, it snorted itself to a standstill before our old carriage

block. I knew that mother’s annual ordeal was before her, and I half

laughed as I went on forcing the broilers’ throats open.

Mother hated the yearly visitation of Mrs. Hennen with all the

intensity of her very gentle, very proud nature. Thirty-five years

before she and Letitia Bland had been the rival belles of the Agonquitt

region, and the legend was that Letty Bland had taken to her bed for

three days when mother’s engagement to father was made known, and that

she went to visit relatives in Eastport at the time of the marriage.

After a triumph like that, no wonder mother hated the magnificent

summer descent upon her of Mrs. Letitia Hennen, widow of the oil-field

king, mother of George Hennen, the banker, broker, yachtsman and what

not; of Mrs. Letitia Hennen, owner of the feudal castle on the shore

three miles from the village, whose splendors put to utter rout the

modest opulence of all the rest of Agonquitt’s summer colony. I was

always sorry for mother at the season of her recurrent Nemesis, and yet

I was always amused at the thought of time’s revenges.

To-day, when I had finished doctoring the broilers, I strolled into

the house and greeted the great lady. She was a kind, stout, motherly

soul--very gorgeous in raiment, very imposing in a white pompadour; her

good-natured, round face always looked forth half bewilderedly between

the effort of her dressmaker and that of her hairdresser. This time her

eyes were frankly wet as she took my hand and patted it.

“And so you’ve lost your dear father,” she said. “And you’ve come home

from college--what a pity, my dear! And you’ve been down to Bangor

and learned stenography--what a brave girl you are, your father’s own

daughter--and you’re selling broilers to the hotel; why not to me, my

child?”

Mother’s cheeks were pink with badly suppressed mortification, her

eyes sparkled, her lips were on the quivering point.

“Thank you ever so much, Mrs. Hennen,” I interposed, hastily, before

mother could say anything, “but the Agonquitt House contracted for them

all. Next year----”

“But I must do something for you,” the dear, kind lady blundered on.

“It’s all too sad; it’s too like your dear father’s own case. You’ve

heard how he had to come back from college to take charge of the farm

when his father had the stroke, and he--your father, I mean, dear, not

your grandfather--had so wanted to be----”

“Of course Ellen knows all about that,” interrupted mother, icily. “And

I would have done anything to spare her the sacrifice”--her voice grew

human again--“but----”

“I’m sure she knows everything there is to know already”--Mrs. Hennen

beamed, benignly. “And stenography! My, my! Doesn’t it make you feel

ignorant, Marietta? And so you’re going to get a position in Bangor or

Portland, your mother says, in the fall?”

I nodded. Mrs. Hennen looked at me with an air of silly, puzzled

admiration. Suddenly she clapped her hands--the fingers were like

little bleached sausages in the tight, white gloves.

“The very thing!” she cried. “You shall be George’s private secretary.

His Miss O’Dowd is going to be married in October. The very thing! I’ll

speak to him to-night.”

She puffed up, the kind lady, and kept saying, “Not a word, not a word;

I won’t hear a word against it; not a word, Marietta, not one, Ellen,

my dear.” And she panted off, leaving mother on the verge of tears, and

me quivering with excitement.

“A favor from Letty Bland I will not endure!” mother proclaimed. “I

will not endure her patronage.” Then she broke down entirely and

sobbed: “Oh, I can’t stand in your way, my poor little girl, and I

can’t bear to let you go so far from me.”

The end of the whole matter was that the close of September found me on

the way to New York, warmly clad in the clothes over which mother had

reddened her pretty eyes and pricked her pretty fingers, an emergency

fund of a hundred and twenty-five dollars--those blessed broilers!--in

a chamois bag between my excellent woolens and my stout muslins, a

room in the Margaret Louisa Home engaged for me for any period up to a

month. Our clergyman’s wife had recommended that refuge, and mother’s

premonitions of battle, murder and sudden death for me grew a little

less insistent when she had been finally convinced that I could go

almost without change of cars from the safety of Agonquitt to that most

evangelical of shelters.

Oh, the tremors, the breathlessness, the excitement, of that journey!

Oh, the fairly dizzy rapture and pain of it! I had a vision of streets

brilliant with lights, of a press of carriages, of shops, flowers,

buildings; of unknown faces, each one the possibility of interest, the

invitation to adventure, and I exulted. Then I saw the big, square

house where I had been born, shabbily in need of paint; the lonely

fields sloping away from it, the woods of yellow birch and pine, the

lonely blue reaches of our Northern bays, and my mother sitting in

her poor black frock alone by the fire in the early evening. Then I

strangled sobs behind my clinched teeth.

My journey from Agonquitt had been broken by one night’s stay in

Portland with our second cousins. Mother regarded a sleeping car as

an unpermissible atrocity--and wider experience compels me to share

her views--and I made the trip by daylight stages. No one had paid any

particular attention to me; no adventure had paused by my chair in the

car. Nothing happened until I emerged from the train into the murky,

glittering evening at the Grand Central Station. Then for a few minutes

I was really dazed.

I had spurned the assistance of porters, being forewarned of tips, and

I carried my bag through the yard toward the street. There I gasped

and nearly reeled. Never had I heard such a clamor, or seen such a

whirl and tangle of lights, such recklessness of darting figures, such

insistent greed of beckoning fingers and whips.

“Keb, keb, keb, keb!” The maddening din rang in my ears. “Keb, keb,

keb, keb!” The arms, the eyes, all echoed the cry. “Keb, keb, keb,

keb----” Beyond the barricade of that shout there was tempest, turmoil,

clatter; I turned and fled backward toward the train yard, which seemed

to me calm and sane now, though a few minutes before it had been a

smoking, roaring understudy for Purgatory. Never could I breast that

tumultuous tide of madness without.

Another train was unloading. I was jostled by a great many persons

who had evidently determined to reach the bedlam on the sidewalk in

less than half a second. I dodged. I looked for a uniform which might

remain stationary long enough for me to reach it. I saw one--baggage

man, carriage starter, train announcer, I didn’t know or care what--I

made a sidewise dash for him and collided violently with a dress-suit

case, whose owner towered several feet above. He muttered an apology,

I muttered an excuse, and then we both stopped, to the damming of the

torrential haste behind us.

“Ellen Berwick!”

“Bob Mathews!”

Never had human face seemed to me so friendly as this one. Never had

words sounded so honey-sweet as my name ejaculated by a voice which,

if not lately familiar, was at least friendly and recognizable. The

Agonquitt stamp was already the hall mark of worth, of excellence,

in my mind. And Robert Mathews was Dr. Mathews’ son; no amount of

Beaux-Arts-ing it, no amount of rising-young-architect-ing it, could

alter that blessed fact.

“Where are you going? Why are you here? Where is your mother? Oh, you

are, are you? To the Maggie Lou! Why do I call it that? It’s a pet name

for an excellent institution given by its intimate admirers. The George

Hennens--you----”

Questioning, answering, tossing information back and forth as a

Japanese juggler might balls, he somehow managed at the same time to

deposit me and my bag in a cab. I breathed a sigh of relief to think

that it was the driver’s problem and not mine safely to cross the noisy

flood in front of the station.

Sometimes since then I have marveled at the chance which caused me,

just down from Maine, to collide with Bob Mathews, just in from

New Rochelle. But I have learned that it is a miracle of frequent

occurrence that newcomers to Babylon should run upon acquaintances.

It is only the old residents who go abroad day after day and see no

familiar face.

Should I have gone back to Agonquitt in despair of Forty-second Street

if I had not met Bob? I suppose not. But how meeting him simplified the

problem of reaching the Margaret Louisa!

“I’ve a dinner engagement with a fellow at the club to-night, or I

should carry you off to dine with me,” said Bob, as the cab drew up

in front of the brownstone building between the home-rushing roar of

Broadway and the early evening glitter of Fifth Avenue. “But I’ll

tell you what I’m going to do: I’ll cut away early and see you before

bedtime. I know some girls who keep bachelor’s hall in a Harlem flat,

but they used to live in boarding houses, and I’ll telephone them for a

list of addresses and bring it around to you.”

The door of the evangelical shelter swung open before me. I am not a

timid person, but a chill crept up my backbone. There was something

depressing in the air of prim rectitude that pervaded the hall. But

Bob was gone, and my bag--by the way, it had looked old-fashioned and

shabby beside his in the cab--stood within the portals.

I don’t know why I should have expected the woman at the desk to beam

upon me, or to have a brass band ready with a pæan announcing that

Ellen Berwick had come to town to conquer fortune. But her politeness

was so impersonal, her civility so thinly cloaked her _ennui_, that

I had difficulty in controlling the quiver of my lips. How friendly

and dear the Agonquitt station suddenly seemed, with the neighbors

clustered on the platform with their little last gifts!

“Oh, yes,” said the lady at the desk--“Berwick. Your pastor and

Mrs. Hennen recommended you.” I felt that I was being weighed for a

housemaid’s position, and the blood tingled behind my ears, but she

went on indifferently: “Your trunk must be sent to the trunk room

within twenty-four hours.”

“It--it can’t have reached here yet,” I murmured.

“Within twenty-four hours from the time when it does come.” I felt that

I had been guilty of levity.

“I thought,” I faltered, “since this is only a temporary--er--stopping

place, that I wouldn’t entirely unpack----”

“Within twenty-four hours. You need not unpack entirely. If it is ever

necessary for you to get anything out of your trunk while you are here,

you may be admitted to the trunk room. Jenkins, 44.”

“When is dinner?” My question trailed between the desk and Jenkins, the

elevator man, who miraculously preserved an air of jauntiness as he

lounged at the door of his wire cage. I made up my mind to ask him how

he did it.

“Going on now.” The elevator slammed upon me, and I was borne aloft to

a room of exquisite order and freshness. But either I saw double or

there were two white beds, two oak bureaus, two oak wardrobes, two----

“This can’t be my room,” I protested.

“Oh, yes, miss,” declared the maid to whom I had now been delivered.

“No more single rooms left. A lovely lady has this one with you. You’ll

like her.”

“But I don’t want----”

The chambermaid passed lightly over the question of my desires. The

door closed firmly upon my protests, and I proceeded to remove the

marks of travel from my clothes and person.

Oh, the Olympian indifference of the lady at the desk to my plea for

a room by myself! In two seconds it reduced me from a state of angry

protest to one of humble gratitude that I had obtained any shelter

at all. Oh, the big dining rooms, with the narrow tables, and women,

women, women, packed along them! Oh, the hum of feminine voices, the

shrill of feminine laughter, the weariness of feminine faces! Never

shall I forget how dreary my own sex seemed to me when I had my first

sight of it, massed, unindividualized, hard working, poor, tired. I was

suddenly appalled at the number of us in New York--homeless, laboring,

impoverished; for to dine at the Maggie Lou was tacit proclamation of

all these things.

The food was excellent--plain, homely, plentiful. It was handed

dexterously over one’s shoulders and planted firmly and noisily on the

table. There was danger in unexpected movements while the waitresses

scurried up and down the narrow aisles between the tables, as a young

woman opposite me discovered. She leaned forward at a critical moment

in her discourse to emphasize the statement that “the fleece-lined

cotton were quite as warm as the woolen”; and she jarred the waitress’

busy arm by her vivacity, receiving a stream of yellow squash down her

back as penalty.

At a desk, commanding an excellent view of both exits from the

dining room, a lady sat with the same somewhat morose expression of

countenance which I was beginning to believe the universal New York

badge. (Later I corrected this opinion. It is only the women doomed

to constant dealing with their sisters in the mass who acquire it.)

This particular woman had the presumably pleasant task of receiving

the money of the diners. In return she gave them cards, without

which egress would have been impossible, for other disillusioned

persons guarded the doors, and only the surrender of the oily piece

of pasteboard enabled one to escape. During the whole period of my

incarceration--I was about to say--in the Margaret Louisa I used to

linger about the dining room hoping that some day some reckless,

abandoned soul would attempt to flee without the delivery of her card.

But it never happened. Meekly, automatically, we all paid, received the

token of payment, and slipped out into the wide halls.

The parlor was a most inviting room, mellow in tint, comfortable in the

cut of the chairs and sofas, and inviting with magazines and pictures.

I wandered into it after my first dinner in New York. I turned the

pages of the magazines, I looked at the pictures on the walls, and I

wondered with all my powers of bewilderment why every other woman who

entered the apartment should immediately sit stiffly down, clasp her

hands in her lap or against her stomach, and gaze at me reprovingly.

As the number of these women grew, I became convicted in my mind of

indecorous conduct, though I was only turning the pages of the _North

American Review_. The rustle of the leaves sounded noisy, blatant even,

in the ominous stillness. Suddenly I understood why.

A stout lady in widow’s weeds cleared her throat twice, warningly,

and the after-dinner prayer meeting was upon us. The _North American

Review_ slid from my guilty fingers, and I almost lost my balance

as I stooped to recover the magazine. Then I composed my features,

folded my own hands and listened to the leader of the meeting. Once I

raised my eyes, and through the door that led into the hall I saw Bob

Mathews standing. He was staring into the parlor with an expression of

arrested protest and strangled mirth upon his nice, homely face. At

that precise moment the worthy leader was besieging the throne of grace

with intercessions for “the one new come among us,” and I felt vulgarly

prominent.

It did not last long, that prayer meeting, and when it was over there

was a little gentle conversation. The leader had just advanced to me

with a smile of professional kindness when Bob bore down upon me. She

withdrew, disapproval squaring her shoulders. My unfortunate caller

and I retired to the remotest corner of the room and conversed in

guilty whispers, alternated with sudden trumpet blasts of sound as we

realized that our subdued manner was unnecessary and open to suspicion.

All the others sat around and looked at us. They were all quite sure, I

think, that the list of boarding houses with which Bob furnished me on

departing was a document of very sinister import.

The next morning, armed with this list and with one furnished by the

uninterested lady at the office, I set out in search of a permanent

abode. In Agonquitt I had seemed to myself a person of the furthest

reaching prudence because I had left for New York a whole fortnight

earlier than my engagement as Mr. Hennen’s stenographer required. The

two weeks were to be devoted to “settling comfortably” and to “learning

the city thoroughly.” By the end of the first forenoon I asked myself

bitterly if a year--if a lifetime--would suffice for either of these

results.

I had told six landladies that the hall bedroom I sought was for myself

alone, and I had been banished at once, without further parley, from

their presences. I was discouraged to learn that spinsterhood, which

we in Agonquitt regard as a state normal, admirable and even a little

high-minded, was frowned upon here. The number of front doors that

closed upon me because I could lay claim to no husband!

I have never satisfactorily solved the problem of the average

landlady’s dislike for the single woman. Is the married boarder less

addicted to bathroom laundry work? Does she consume less gas in the

front hall and the parlor? Is she not so apt to keep the wearied

purveyor of her meals and lodgings from the folding bed which adorns

the front drawing room with a pretense of being a curio cabinet

during the day? Or is it merely that even in these strenuous days of

wage-earning women, a husband seems to the mediæval-minded landlady a

guarantee of payment securer than any number of salaried positions?

I don’t know. I only know that my first forenoon’s search for a

habitation was rendered uncommonly difficult because I could not assure

six gimleteyed landladies in rusty black that I was “wooed an’ married

an’ all.”

There were other ladies--a considerable number of them, too--who

gave one look at my cloth turban, made by Miss Milly, our Agonquitt

milliner; and at my reefer, which Miss Keziah, who goes out by the

day, had helped mother to make; and smilingly shook their heads. These

informed me, interposing their plump persons between me and their

stairways, as though they feared a forcible entrance on my part, that

they had nothing which would suit me--nothing under twenty dollars

a week. At first this abashed me, for ten dollars was the utmost

which I could allow for lodgings and meals; and I departed, gurgling

apologetically in my throat. Later, anger began to stir my pulses, and

I gave these haughty ones level glance of scorn for level glance of

scorn, and said: “Ah, I am looking for a suite of two rooms and bath;

breakfast upstairs, of course; you have nothing of that sort?” And we

separated in mutual incredulity and respect.

During that day and the soul-racking, foot-blistering days that

followed, I gained a fairly clear idea of what I might hope for in a

boarding house for the small sum which I was prepared to spend. The

cheaper places were, of course, the least attractive; the halls seemed

dingier, the odor of dreary, bygone dinners more pervasive in them; the

servants were more slatternly, the landladies themselves more rusty,

dusty and depressing. There were innumerable parlors furnished in

upholstery that made up in accumulated dust and aroma for what it had

lost in freshness of color during the years of its service; there were

folding beds of every sort; there were lace curtains, and there were

pier glasses between the long front windows. Then, somewhere up on the

top floor, there was a hall bedroom without a closet, without heat;

but “the last lady”--marvelously adaptable female!--had always found

the hooks under the cambric curtain on the door an ample refuge for

her gowns, and as for the temperature, she had been compelled to keep

her window open during most of the winter before, so intense was the

heat from the hall. She had moved, apparently, in search of a harder

spiritual discipline than she could obtain among such comfortable

surroundings. Certainly there was no other reason for her leaving.

Sometimes, departing from the lists furnished me, I stumbled upon

wonderful places where “cozy corners” greatly prevailed, and where the

landladies wore trailing negligées of soiled pink or blue instead of

the tight-fitting black uniform of the other houses. Whenever such a

meeting inadvertently occurred, the gorgeous landlady and I were always

as eager as civility would permit to see the last of each other.

Then there were other places--airy, clean and bright, with parlors

guiltless of any suggestion of the folding bed, with graceful

furnishings, efficient servants, cheerful landladies. But these were

always either “full”--I don’t wonder--or what they had left was far

beyond my humble means.

I wandered through the unhomelike splendors of the woman’s hotel, by

and by. Here at least there would be no question of boarding house

parlor etiquette--there were successions of charming, big, airy,

handsomely fitted-out parlors; there were tea rooms, there were

libraries and writing rooms. The bedrooms themselves--simple, sunny,

clean--- were charming, with their chintz-frilled cots and their

substantially made wooden pieces. Here I could live, by a pretty rigid

system of economy, for nine dollars a week--four for my tiny bedroom,

five for my breakfasts and dinners. I would have to share the sparkling

white and nickel bathroom with only two others.

I was not one of those haughty souls who revolted at the rule

forbidding masculine callers above the parlor floors; in the first

place, I had not been long enough in New York to know that young women

ever did receive callers save in drawing rooms of some description,

and in the second, I didn’t expect any callers for a long time. Once

Robert Matthews saw me safely settled, I knew that his neighborly

kindness would dwindle; and he was my only possible visitor at present.

No, one might be very comfortable at the woman’s hotel, I was sure--if

one could overcome a prejudice against being one of a mass. I had been

long enough at the Margaret Louisa to know that I abhorred whatever

savored of an institution, and all women in bulk, so to speak. Even

a dingy hall room in a dreary boarding house, with the fumes of old

dinners wrought into the very web of the carpets, and a lackadaisically

suspicious landlady, seemed better and more homelike to me than the

comforts and luxuries of a big feminized institution. At least, in

the boarding house, one could be an individual, something more than a

number.

However, though I had made up my mind to the boarding house, I did

not come to it. And that was because of the unwelcome other occupant

of the room at the Margaret Louisa. She had proved to be a wholesome,

graceful, rather tall woman of thirty-three or so. She had none of my

rustic air of sullen doubt when she met strangers. She was polite,

uninquisitive, even uninterested. Her attitude was the perfection

of civil indifference; she would have been an ideal woman to occupy

the opposite section on a transcontinental train, or the other berth

in a transatlantic stateroom, for she was perfectly considerate,

unfamiliar and impersonal. She told me that she had just come from a

summer abroad--she was a teacher of some handicraft in a trade school

for girls--and that she was staying at the Margaret Louisa until “the

doctor was through redecorating the house.”

“Of course everyone makes fun of the Maggie Lou,” she said, “but I find

it an admirable refuge. It is in the center of the town; it’s clean,

cheap and respectable; it charges a fair price for the accommodations

it offers, so that there’s no taint of philanthropy about it--though

sometimes the managers seem to forget that. One doesn’t come here

for society. Once one knows its little red-tape rules, and how to

keep them from interfering with one’s personal liberty, it’s a very

comfortable place.”

It developed that a woman physician of Miss Putnam’s acquaintance had a

small house on West Eleventh Street, the upper floors of which she let

to women lodgers.

“Of course she knows us all,” said Miss Putnam. “It’s really very

convenient. There aren’t more than six of us; we are absolutely

independent, without being brutally isolated. Dr. Lyons serves us all

with breakfast in our rooms, and leaves us to solve the luncheon-dinner

problem for ourselves. It’s a charming, old-fashioned house, and she

has furnished it in character.”

I sighed bitterly. Dr. Lyons’ six lodgers paid her five dollars and

a half a week for their rooms and their simple breakfasts--as little

as I should have to pay at the huge caravansary which I was even

then considering--and they had a home! I could have wept over the

inequalities of life.

Later I wept in very truth. Robert had sent me a note inviting me to a

glee-club concert. I had accepted the invitation. Then I had rubbed my

aching body with witch hazel--it’s no small athletic feat to climb to

the top of twenty-seven New York houses in one day--and I had lain down

to rest. A little before seven I bethought me of clothes. The black

silk which mother had made for me, with its pretty chemisette and cuffs

of real Val and Indian mull, and my black net hat with white roses, lay

in the trunk in the trunk room. I made up my mind to swallow a hasty

dinner, invade the cellar and carry my poor little finery upstairs

after dinner, so as to be ready for Bob at eight. At seven-fifteen,

having eaten all that I could in the banging, crowded, steaming dining

room, I approached the office and made known my wish to go to the trunk

room.

“Trunk room closes at seven,” snapped the waitress of destiny.

Nor could any tale of my needs, any indignation concerning the

high-handed retention of my property, move her from that statement.

I went to my room and wept with rage. Bob impressed me nowadays as a

stylish youth. How would he like taking me to a musicale in a short

black skirt, a reefer and that dumpy turban?

Upon my fit of pettishness in came Miss Putnam. She was politely

absorbed in her own chiffonier for a while. Then she turned to me with

a comical air of balancing the fear of intrusiveness against a friendly

desire to help.

“Is it--can I do anything for you?” she asked finally.

“You can tell that wretched martinet downstairs what I think of her,

if you have sufficient command of language,” I rejoined, wiping my

eyes furiously. Then I told her my tale of woe. She laughed. Then she

hesitated and blushed.

“I’m just home from Paris, as I told you,” she said. “I’m not going

out tonight. And I knew the Margaret Louisa well enough to unpack for

an emergency. We’re about of a height--would you think me desperately

impertinent if--if----”

And she actually offered to lend me some clothes. And I--I, Ellen

Berwick, of Agonquitt, where all borrowing is regarded as criminally

unthrifty, and where the borrowing of finery would seem degenerately

frivolous as well--I went to that musicale at the Waldorf in an

absolute confection of heavy black lace over white silk, and a hat all

white tulle and roses and jet! Robert whistled rudely as he saw me.

“Is this the way they do things in Agonquitt now?” he asked.

And from something I overheard him saying to a lovely young

matron-patroness in a peach-colored crêpe, I gathered that he had

somewhat apologetically prepared her to be kind to a nice little

rustic from his old home. Thus clothes, as adornments and not merely

coverings, made their first distinct appeal to me; it was the voice of

New York, if I had only known it.

I blessed Theresa Putnam that evening, but how much more did I bless

her when toward the end of the fortnight she burst into our joint abode

with something less than her usual calm of manner, and cried:

“Clorinda Dorset isn’t coming back to the Medical School this year. Do

you want to meet Dr. Lyons? For if you do, and you like her and she

likes you----”

I did not let her finish.

“Do you mean that there’s a chance for me in the Eleventh Street

house?” I demanded. I had been to seven boarding houses in furthest

Harlem that day and had heard seven boarding house keepers declare that

the time from One Hundred and Eighteenth Street to Wall was twenty

minutes!

By the next morning my trunk had been rescued from the cave of the

trunks, and stood, unstrapped and unlocked, in my sloping-roofed, attic

room in the old-fashioned house of Dr. Lyons. The sunlight poured in

through two dormer windows. There were dimity curtains at them. There

was a blue-and-white, hit-or-miss rag rug on the floor. There was a

fireplace; there were old-fashioned chairs that might have come out

of an Agonquitt attic; there was a plain table, with blotters on it

and bookshelves above; there was a cot covered with an old homespun

blue-and-white cover. There were potted geraniums and primroses on the

wide window shelves. I sat down and fairly rocked in my delight.

“An attic!” I exclaimed. “Oh, I didn’t believe there was one in all New

York. And a rag carpet----”

But the language of jubilation failed.

Well, my fortnight of grace was ended. I was housed, by a kindly

miracle and no skill of my own, comfortably, charmingly, not

expensively. I was a lucky young woman!

I polished my boots to the highest pitch of brilliancy, I set my stock

on at the most accurate angle, and I proceeded to Mr. George Hennen’s

office to gladden his heart with the information that I had arrived.

He received me with some embarrassment--a good-looking, slender, boyish

man with an inattentive manner.

“I had meant to write,” he murmured. “Really, it has been unpardonable.

But I didn’t know until last week, and--it is really unpardonable.”

A cold chill gripped me. Was I not to have the position, after all? I

sat very rigid, my fingers frozen in their stiff calfskin gloves.

“What is it, Mr. Hennen?” I asked. “Please tell me quickly.”

“Oh, of course it can be arranged. I had meant to ask you to defer

coming until the first of December. Miss O’Dowd’s wedding has been

postponed until Christmas. But----”

Returning waves of warmth lapped me. After all, I was not to go

penniless and positionless back to Agonquitt.

“Oh, is that all?” I cried, in relief. “I think I can put in the two

months to excellent advantage, Mr. Hennen.”

“Do you, really?” He brightened. “Are you--er--prepared--er----”

“Oh, quite,” I said, stiffly, though the emergency fund on my chest no

longer seemed the oppressive weight it once had.

“If not----” he floundered, evidently groping with some idea for my

relief.

I felt the color tingle in my cheeks. My mother’s hatred of “Letitia

Bland’s” favors seemed to stiffen my neck.

“Oh, but I am,” I declared. Then the door opened simultaneously with a

rap. From the Axminster and rosewood splendors of the outer office a

man entered--tall, broad, lithe. His eyes, even in that first flash of

them upon me, I knew to be gay, and his smooth-shaven lips had lines

of laughter about them. He glanced at me with a momentary pause in his

entrance.

“Beg pardon, George. Ferritt said you were alone.”

“It’s all right. Don’t go, Archie. I want you to meet Miss Berwick.

Miss Berwick, Mr. Charter--the other member of the firm. Miss Berwick’s

going to take Miss O’Dowd’s place, you remember, Archie?”

“Very much more than that, I think,” said Mr. Charter, smiling. And

though there was something in the cool appraisal of his manner, in the

implied familiar compliment and criticism of his words, which made me

flush with displeasure, yet when I met his mirthful, amused regard, I

could not but smile in answer.

There was a little more talk, and I went out, leaving my address with

Mr. Hennen. There was an agreeable sense of buoyancy and exhilaration

in the air. I could not fix my mind upon the gloomy fact that I was

to be without employment and without salary for two months; I was

only very sure that I should like the work in the office of Hennen &

Charter, when I was admitted to it. Meantime, I had a hazy recollection

of all sorts of tempting advertisements which I had seen in the papers,

asking for the services of just such able-bodied, well-educated young

women as myself. To be an adventurer in industry for two months might

be amusing; it might be profitable. And at the end of it there was the

office of Hennen & Charter glowing like a comfortable beacon for me.

It was fortunate for my peace of mind that I could not forecast the

future, and had no premonition of my initial experience as a laboring

person. I was profoundly convinced of my ability to “take care of

myself”; I had a high respect for my own judgment. Had anyone suggested

to me that my arrogant self-confidence would nearly land me in court

and almost cover me with notoriety, I should have dismissed the

suggestion with a laugh.

[Illustration]

THE TWO RAPTURES

Two raptures are there; one is of the spring;

Life leaps down all her sources and is glad

With gladness that enfolds each humblest thing.

Furrows teem fragrant, trees with buds go mad;

Music and color and a sunbright glee

Turn sullen earth into sweet Arcady.

The autumn’s rapture is a soberer wight,

But deep in tender dreams and rich in rare

Designs, and mellow harmonies of light.

The hills lie steeped in memories most fair,

The forests blaze with visions, and the year,

Two-minded, mingles elegies of dearth

With hopeful hymns of yet triumphant birth,

When May returns, when Spring again is here.

RICHARD BURTON.

THE MARE AND THE MOTOR

BY JOSEPH C. LINCOLN

[Illustration]

In order to understand this story there are a few points of information

concerning “Lonesome Huckleberries” with which you ought to be

acquainted. First, his nationality: Captain Jonadab Wixon used to say

that Lonesome was “a little of everything, like a picked-up dinner;

principally Eyetalian and Portygee, I cal’late, with a streak of Gay

Head Injun.” Second, his name: To quote from the captain again, “His

reel name’s long enough to touch bottom in the ship channel at high

tide, so folks nater’lly got to callin’ him ‘Huckleberries,’ ’cause

he peddles them kind of fruit in summer. Then he mopes round so,

with nary a smile on his face, that it seemed jest right to tack on

the ‘Lonesome.’ So ‘Lonesome Huckleberries’ he’s been for the past

ten year.” Add to these items the fact that he lived in a patchwork

shanty on the end of a sandspit six miles from Wellmouth Port, that

he was deaf and dumb, that he drove a liver-colored, balky mare that

no one but himself and his daughter “Becky” could handle, that he had

a fondness for bad rum, and a wicked temper that had twice landed him

in the village lockup, and you have a fair idea of the personality of

Lonesome Huckleberries. And, oh, yes! his decoy ducks. He was a great

gunner alongshore, and owned a flock of live decoys for which he had

refused bids as high as fifteen dollars each. There, now I think you

are in position to appreciate the yarn that Mr. Barzilla Wingate told

me as we sat in the “Lovers’ Nest,” the summerhouse on the bluff by

the Old Home House, and watched the _Greased Lightning_, Peter Brown’s

smart little motor launch, swinging at her moorings below.

“Them Todds,” observed Barzilla, “had got on my nerves. ’Twas Peter’s

ad that brought ’em down here. You see, ’twas ’long toward the end of

the season at the Old Home House, and Brown had been advertisin’ in

the New York and Boston papers to ‘bag the leftovers,’ as he called

it. Besides the reg’lar hogwash about the ‘breath of old ocean’ and

the ‘simple, cleanly livin’ of the bygone days we dream about,’ there

was some new froth concernin’ huntin’ and fishin’. You’d think the

wild geese roosted on the flagpole nights, and the bluefish clogged up

the bay so’s you could walk on their back fins without wettin’ your

feet--that is, if you wore rubbers and trod light.

“‘There!’ says Peter T., wavin’ the advertisement and crowin’ gladsome;

‘they’ll take to that like your temp’rance aunt to brandy coughdrops.

We’ll have to put up barbed wire to keep ’em off.’

“‘Humph!’ grunts Cap’n Jonadab. ‘Anybody but a born fool’ll know there

ain’t any shootin’ down here this time of year.’

“Peter looked at him sorrowful. ‘Pop,’ says he, ‘did you ever hear that

Solomon answered a summer hotel ad? This ain’t a Chautauqua, this is

the Old Home House, and its motto is: “There’s a new sucker born every

minute, and there’s twenty-four hours in a day.” You set back and count

the clock ticks.’

“Well, that’s ’bout all we had to do. We got boarders enough from that

ridic’lous advertisement to fill every spare room we had, includin’

Jonadab’s and mine. Me and the cap’n had to bunk in the barn loft; but

there was some satisfaction in that--it give us an excuse to git away

from the ‘sports’ in the smokin’ room.

“The Todds was part of the haul. He was a little, dried-up man, single,

and a minister. Nigh’s I could find out, he’d given up preachin’ by the

request of the doctor and his last congregation. He had a notion that

he was a mighty hunter afore the Lord, like Nimrod in the Bible, and

he’d come to the Old Home to bag a few gross of geese and ducks.

“His sister was an old maid, and slim, neither of which failin’s was

from ch’ice, I cal’late. She wore eyeglasses and a veil to ‘preserve

her complexion,’ and her idee seemed to be that native Cape Codders

lived in trees and et cocoanuts. She called ’em barbarians, utter

barbarians.’ Whenever she piped ‘James!’ her brother had to drop

everything and report on deck. She was skipper of the Todd craft.

“Well, them Todds was what Peter T. called ‘the limit, and a chip or

two over.’ The other would-be gunners and fishermen were satisfied

to slam shot after sandpeeps, or hook a stray sculpin or a hake. But

t’wa’n’t so with brother James Todd and sister Clarissa. ‘Ducks’ it was

in the advertisin’, and nothin’ _but_ ducks they wanted. Clarissa, she

commenced to hint middlin’ p’inted concernin’ fraud.

“Fin’lly we lost patience, and Peter T., he said they’d got to be

quieted somehow, or he’d do some shootin’ on his own hook; said too

much Toddy was givin’ him the ‘D.T.’s.’ Then I suggested takin’ ’em

down the beach somewheres on the chance of seein’ a stray coot or loon

or somethin’--_anything_ that could be shot at. Jonadab and Peter

agreed ’twas a good plan, and we matched to see who’d be guide. And I

got stuck, of course; my luck again.

“So the next mornin’ we started, me and the Reverend James and

Clarissa, in the _Greased Lightnin’_. Fust part of the trip that Todd

man done nothin’ but ask questions about the launch; I had to show him

how to start it and steer it, and the land knows what all. Clarissa

set around doin’ the heavy contemptuous and turnin’ up her nose at

creation gin’rally. It must have its drawbacks, this roostin’ so fur

above the common flock; seems to me I’d be thinkin’ all the time of the

bump that was due me if I got shoved off the perch.

“Well, by and by Lonesome Huckleberries’ shanty hove in sight, and I

was glad to see it, although I had to answer a million more questions

about Lonesome and his history. When we struck the beach, Clarissa, she

took her paint box and umbrella and moskeeter ’intment, and the rest

of her cargo, and went off by herself to ‘sketch.’ She was great on

’sketchin’,’ and the way she’d use up good paint and spile nice clean

paper was a sinful waste. Afore she went, she give me three fathom of

sailin’ orders concernin’ takin’ care of ‘James.’ You’d think he was

about four year old; made me feel like a hired nuss.

“Well, James and me went perusin’ up and down that beach in the blazin’

sun lookin’ for somethin’ to shoot. We went ’way beyond Lonesome’s

shanty, but there wa’n’t nobody to home. Lonesome himself, it turned

out afterward, was up to the village with his horse and wagon, and his

daughter Becky was over in the woods on the mainland berryin’. Todd was

a cheerful talker, but limited. His favorite remark was: ‘Oh, I say, my

deah man.’ That’s what he kept callin’ me, ‘my deah man.’ Now, my name

ain’t exactly a Claude de Montmorency for prettiness, but ‘Barzilla’

’ll fetch _me_ alongside a good deal quicker’n ‘my deah man,’ I’ll tell

you that.

“We frogged it up and down all the forenoon, but didn’t git a shot at

nothin’ but one stray ‘squawk’ that had come over from the Cedar Swamp.

I told James ’twas a canvasback, and he blazed away at it, but missed

it by three fathom, as might have been expected.

“Fin’lly my game leg--rheumatiz, you understand--begun to give out. So

I flops down in the shade of a sand bank to rest, and the reverend goes

pokin’ off by himself.

“I cal’late I must have fell asleep, for when I looked at my watch it

was close to one o’clock, and time for us to be gittin’ back to the

port. I got up and stretched and took an observation, but further’n

Clarissa’s umbrella on the skyline, I didn’t see anything stirrin’.

Brother James wa’n’t visible, but I jedged he was within hailin’

distance. You can’t see very fur on that point, there’s too many sand

hills and hummocks.

“I started over toward the _Greased Lightnin’_. I’d gone a little

ways, and was down in a gully between two big hummocks, when ‘Bang!

bang!’ goes both barrels of a shotgun, and that Todd critter busts out

hollerin’ like all possessed.

“‘Hooray!’ he squeals, in that squeaky voice of his. ‘Hooray! I’ve got

’em! I’ve got ’em!’

“Thinks I, ‘What in the nation does that lunatic cal’late he’s shot?’

And I left my own gun layin’ where ’twas and piled up over the edge of

that sand bank like a cat over a fence. And then I see a sight.

“There was James, hoppin’ up and down in the beach grass, squealin’

like a Guinea hen with a sore throat, and wavin’ his gun with one

wing--arm, I mean--and there in front of him, in the foam at the

edge of the surf, was two ducks as dead as Nebuchadnezzar--two of

Lonesome Huckleberries’ best decoy ducks--ducks he’d tamed and trained,

and thought more of than anything else in this world--except rum,

maybe--and the rest of the flock was diggin’ up the beach for home

as if they’d been telegraphed for, and squawkin’ ‘Fire!’ and ‘Bloody

murder!’

“Well, my mind was in a kind of various state, as you might say, for a

minute. ’Course, I’d known about Lonesome’s ownin’ them decoys--told

Todd about ’em, too--but I hadn’t seen ’em nowhere alongshore, and I

sort of cal’lated they was locked up in Lonesome’s hen house, that

bein’ his usual way when he went to town. I s’pose likely they’d been

feedin’ among the beach grass somewheres out of sight, but I don’t

know for sartin to this day. And I didn’t stop to reason it out then,

neither. As Scriptur’ or George Washin’ton or somebody says, ‘’twas a

condition, not a theory,’ I was afoul of.

“‘I’ve got ’em!’ hollers Todd, grinnin’ till I thought he’d swaller his

own ears. ‘I shot ’em all myself!’

“‘You everlastin’----’ I begun, but I didn’t git any further. There was

a rattlin’ noise behind me, and I turned, to see Lonesome Huckleberries

himself, settin’ on the seat of his old truck wagon and glarin’ over

the hammer head of that balky mare of his straight at brother Todd and

the dead decoys.

“For a minute there was a kind of tableau, like them they have at

church fairs--all four of us, includin’ the mare, keepin’ still,

like we was frozen. But ’twas only for a minute. Then it turned into

the liveliest movin’ picture that ever _I_ see. Lonesome couldn’t

swear--bein’ a dummy--but if ever a man got profane with his eyes, he

did right then. Next thing I knew he tossed both hands into the air,

clawed two handfuls out of the atmosphere, reached down into the cart,

grabbed a pitchfork and piled out of that wagon and after Todd. There

was murder comin’ and I could see it.

“‘Run, you loon!’ I hollers, desp’rate.

“James didn’t wait for any advice. He didn’t know what he’d done, I

cal’late, but he jedged ’twas his move. He dropped his gun and putted

down the shore like a wild man, with Lonesome after him. I tried to

foller, but my rheumatiz was too big a handicap; all I could do was

yell.

“You never’d have picked out Todd for a sprinter--not to look at him,

you wouldn’t--but if he didn’t beat the record for his class jest then

I’ll eat my sou’wester. He fairly flew, but Lonesome split tacks with

him every time, and kept to wind’ard, into the bargain. Where they went

out sight amongst the sand hills ’twas anybody’s race.

“I was scart. I knew what Lonesome’s temper was, ’specially when it

had been iled with some Wellmouth Port no-license rum. He’d been took

up once for ha’f killin’ some boys that tormented him, and I figgered

if he got within’ pitchfork distance of the Todd critter he’d make him

the leakiest divine that ever picked a text. I commenced to hobble back

after my gun. It looked bad to me.

“But I’d forgot sister Clarissa. ’Fore I’d limped fur I heard her

callin’ to me.

“‘Mr. Wingate,’ says she, ’git in here at once.’

“There she was, settin’ on the seat of Lonesome’s wagon, holdin’ the

reins and as cool as a white frost in October.

“‘Git in at once,’ says she. I jedged ’twas good advice, and took it.

“‘Proceed,’ says she to the mare. ‘Git dap!’ says I, and we started.

When we rounded the sand hill we see the race in the distance. Lonesome

had gained a p’int or two, and Todd wa’n’t more’n four pitchforks in

the lead.

“‘Make for the launch!’ I whooped, between my hands.

“The parson heard me and come about and broke for the shore. The

_Greased Lightnin’_ had swung out about the length of her anchor rope,

and the water wa’n’t deep. Todd splashed in to his waist and climbed

aboard. He cut the rodin’ jest as Lonesome reached tide mark. James, he

sees it’s a close call, and he shins back to the engine, reachin’ it

exactly at the time when the gent with the pitchfork laid hands on the

rail. Then the parson throws over the switch--I’d shown him how, you

remember--and gives the startin’ wheel a full turn.

“Well, you know the _Greased Lightnin’_? She don’t linger to say

farewell, not any to speak of, she don’t. And this time she jumped like

the cat that lit on the hot stove. Lonesome, bein’ balanced with his

knees on the rail, pitches headfust into the cockpit. Todd, jumpin’

out of his way, falls overboard backward. Next thing anybody knew, the

launch was scootin’ for blue water like a streak of what she was named

for, and the huntin’ chaplain was churnin’ up foam like a mill wheel.

“I yelled more orders than second mate on a coaster. Todd bubbled and

bellered. Lonesome hung on to the rail of the cockpit and let his hair

stand up to grow. Nobody was cool but Clarissa, and she was an iceberg.

She had her good p’ints, that old maid did, drat her!

“‘James,’ she calls, ‘git out of that water this minute and come here!

This instant, mind!’

“James minded. He paddled ashore and hopped, drippin’ like a dishcloth,

alongside the truck wagon.

“‘Git in!’ orders Skipper Clarissa. He done it. ‘Now,’ says the lady,

passin’ the reins over to me, ‘drive us home, Mr. Wingate, before that

intoxicated lunatic can catch us.’

“It seemed about the only thing to do. I knew ’twas no use explainin’

to Lonesome for an hour or more yit, even if you can talk finger signs,

which part of my college trainin’ has been neglected. ’Twas murder he

wanted at the present time. I had some sort of a foggy notion that

I’d drive along, pick up the guns and then git the Todds over to the

hotel, afterward comin’ back to git the launch and pay damages to

Huckleberries. I cal’lated he’d be more reasonable by that time.

“But the mare had made other arrangements. When I slapped her with

the end of the reins she took the bit in her teeth and commenced to

gallop. I hollered ‘Whoa!’ and ‘Heave to!’ and ‘Belay!’ and everything

else I could think of, but she never took in a reef. We bumped over

hummocks and ridges, and every time we done it we spilled somethin’ out

of that wagon. Fust ’twas a lot of huckleberry pails, then a basket of

groceries and such, then a tin pan with some potatoes in it, then a jug

done up in a blanket. We was heavin’ cargo overboard like a leaky ship

in a typhoon. Out of the tail of my eye I see Lonesome, well out to

sea, headin’ the _Greased Lightnin’_ for the beach.

“Clarissa put in the time soothin’ James, who had a serious case of the

scart-to-deaths, and callin’ me an ‘utter barbarian’ for drivin’ so

fast. Lucky for all hands, she had to hold on tight to keep from bein’

jounced out, ’long with the rest of movables, so she couldn’t take the

reins. As for me, I wa’n’t payin’ much attention to her--’twas the

‘Cut-Through’ that was disturbin’ _my_ mind.

“When you drive down to Lonesome P’int you have to ford the

‘Cut-Through.’ It’s a strip of water between the bay and the ocean, and

’tain’t very wide nor deep at low tide. But the tide was comin’ in now,

and, more’n that, the mare wa’n’t headed for the ford. She was cuttin’

cross-lots on her own hook, and wouldn’t answer the helm.

“Well, we struck that ‘Cut-Through’ about a hundred yards east of the

ford, and in two shakes we was hub deep in salt water. ’Fore the Todds

could do anything but holler the wagon was afloat and the mare was all

but swimmin’. But she kept right on. Bless her, you _couldn’t_ stop her!

“We crossed the first channel and come out on a flat where ’twasn’t

more’n two foot deep then. I commenced to feel better. There was

another channel ahead of us, but I figured we’d navigate that same as

we had the first one. And then the most outrageous thing happened.

“If you’ll b’lieve it, that pesky mare balked and wouldn’t stir another

step.

“And there we was! I punched and kicked and hollered, but all that

stubborn horse would do was lay her ears back flat, and snarl up her

lip, and look round at us, much as to say: ‘Now, then, you land sharks,

I’ve got you between wind and water!’ And I swan to man if it didn’t

look like she had!

“‘Drive on!’ says Clarissa, pretty average vinegary. ‘Haven’t you made

trouble enough for us already, you dreadful man? Drive on!’

“Hadn’t _I_ made trouble enough! What do you think of that?

“‘You want to drown us!’ says Miss Todd, continuin’ her chatty remarks.

‘I see it all! It’s a plot between you and that murderer. I give you

warnin’; if we reach the hotel, my brother and I will commence suit for

damages.’

“My temper’s fairly long-sufferin’, but ’twas ravelin’ some by this

time.

“‘Commence suit!’ I says. ‘I don’t care _what_ you commence, if you’ll

commence to keep quiet now!’ And then I give her a few p’ints as to

what her brother had done, heavin’ in some personal flatteries every

once in a while for good measure.

“I’d about got to thirdly when James give a screech and p’inted. And,

by time! if there wa’n’t Lonesome in the launch, headed right for us,

and comin’ a-b’ilin’! He’d run her along abreast of the beach and

turned in at the upper end of the ‘Cut-Through.’

“You never in your life heard such a row as there was in that wagon.

Clarissa and me yellin’ to Lonesome to keep off--forgittin’ that he

was stone deef and dumb--and James vowin’ that he was goin’ to be

slaughtered in cold blood. And the _Greased Lightnin’_ p’inted jest so

she’d split that cart amidships, and comin’--well, you know how she can

go.

“She never budged until she was within ten foot of the flat, and then,

jest as I was commencin’ the third line of ‘Now I lay me,’ she sheered

off and went past in a wide curve, with Lonesome steerin’ with one hand

and shakin’ his pitchfork at Todd with t’other. And _such_ faces as he

made up! They’d have got him hung in any court in the world.

“He run up the ‘Cut-Through’ a little ways, and then come about, and

back he comes again, never slackin’ speed a mite, and runnin’ close

to the shoal as he could shave, and all the time goin’ through the

bloodiest kind of pantomimes. And past he goes, to wheel ’round and

commence all over again.

“Thinks I, ‘Why don’t he ease up and lay us aboard? He’s got all the

weapons there is. Is he scart?’

“And then it come to me--the reason why. _He didn’t know how to stop

her._ He could steer fust rate, bein’ used to sailboats, but an

electric auto launch was a new deal for him, and he didn’t understand

her works. And he dastn’t run her aground at the speed she was makin’;

’twould have finished her and, more’n likely, him, too.

“I don’t s’pose there ever was another mess jest like it afore or

sence. Here was us, stranded with a horse we couldn’t make go, bein’

chased by a feller who was run away with in a boat he couldn’t stop!

“Jest as I’d about give up hope, I heard somebody callin’ from

the beach behind us. I turned, and there was Becky Huckleberries,

Lonesome’s daughter. She had the dead decoys by the legs in one hand.

“‘Hi!’ says she.

“‘Hi!’ says I. ‘How do you git this giraffe of yours under way?’

She held up the decoys.

“‘Who kill-a dem ducks?’ says she.

“I p’inted to the reverend. ‘He did,’ says I. And then I cal’late I

must have had one of them things they call an inspiration. ‘And he’s

willin’ to pay for ’em,’ I says.

“‘Pay thirty-five dolla?’ says she.

“‘You bet!’ says I.

“But I’d forgot Clarissa. She rose up in that waterlogged cart like a

Statue of Liberty. ‘Never!’ says she. ‘We will never submit to such

extortion. We’ll drown fust!’

“Becky heard her. She didn’t look disapp’inted nor nothin’. Jest turned

and begun to walk up the beach. ‘_All_ right,’ says she; _goo’_-by.’

“The Todds stood it for a jiffy. Then James give in. ‘I’ll pay it!’ he

hollers. ‘I’ll pay it!’

“Even then Becky didn’t smile. She jest came about again and walked

back to the shore. Then she took up that tin pan and one of the

potaters we’d jounced out of the cart.

“‘Hi, Rosa!’ she hollers. That mare turned her head and looked. And,

for the first time sence she hove anchor on that flat, the critter

unfurled her ears and histed ’em to the masthead.

“‘Hi, Rosa!’ says Becky again, and begun to pound the pan with the

potater. And I give you my word that that mare started up, turned the

wagon around nice as could be, and begun to swim ashore. When we got

jest where the critter’s legs touched bottom, Becky remarks: ‘Whoa!’

“‘Here!’ I yells, ‘what did you do that for?’

“‘Pay thirty-five dolla _now_,’ says she. She was bus’ness, that girl.

“Todd got his wallet from under hatches and counted out the

thirty-five, keepin’ one eye on Lonesome, who was swoopin’ up and down

in the launch lookin’ as if he wanted to cut in, but dastn’t. I tied

the bills to my jackknife, to give ’em weight, and tossed the whole

thing ashore. Becky, she counted the cash and stowed it away in her

apron pocket.

“‘_All_ right,’ says she. ‘Hi, Rosa!’ The potater and pan performance

begun again, and Rosa picked up her hoofs and dragged us to dry land.

And it sartinly felt good to the feet.

“‘Say,’ I says, ‘Becky, it’s none of my affairs, as I know of, but is

that the way you usually start that horse of yours?’

“She said it was. And Rosa et the potater.

“Well, then Becky asked me how to stop the launch, and I told her. She

made a lot of finger signs to Lonesome, and inside of five minutes the

_Greased Lightnin’_ was anchored in front of us. Old man Huckleberries

was still hankerin’ to interview Todd with the pitchfork, but Becky

settled that all right. She jumped in front of him, and her eyes

snapped and her feet stamped and her fingers flew. And ’twould have

done you good to see her dad shrivel up and git humble. I always had

thought that a woman wasn’t much good as a boss of the roost unless she

could use her tongue, but Becky showed me my mistake. Well, it’s live

and l’arn.

“Then Miss Huckleberries turned to us and smiled.

“‘_All_ right,’ says she; ‘_goo’_-by.’

“Them Todds took the train for the city next mornin’. I drove ’em to

the depot. James was kind of glum, but Clarissa talked for two. Her

opinion of the Cape and Capers, ’specially me, was decided. The final

blast was jest as she was climbin’ the car steps.

“‘Of all the barbarians,’ says she; ‘utter, uncouth, murderin’

barbarians in----”

“She stopped, thinkin’ for a word, I s’pose. I didn’t feel that I could

improve on Becky Huckleberries’ conversation much, so I says:

“‘_All_ right! _Goo’_-by!’”

The WRECKER

_By Lucia Chamberlain_

[Illustration]

Mrs. Gueste looked out from the pink shade of her parasol at the cool

green curl of the breakers down the beach with an actual frown between

her fine brows. Her eyes were full of queries. Her delicate thumb and

forefinger nipped a note. It was from her favorite brother. It had

been brought to her that morning half an hour after hers had been sent

apprising him of her arrival in Santa Barbara. It ran:

DEAR LIL: Great to have you here. Awfully sorry can’t lunch.

Another engagement can’t break. See you afternoon.

WALLIE.

That _was_ a note to have from one’s favorite brother, her frown said,

as she turned to her friend.

“But if her family is so good----” she began, taking up the

conversation where they had dropped it. The sentence seemed connected

in her mind with the note, at which she looked.

“Oh, but they can’t manage her,” replied Julia Crosby, punching her

parasol tip into the sand. “Mr. Remi died when Blanche was a baby. Mrs.

Remi is a nervous invalid. Blanche has run wild since she could run at

all. If she were a boy--well, she’d be the ‘black sheep.’”

“Is she _fast_?” said Lillian Gueste, with horrified emphasis.

“Oh, _no_!” Mrs. Crosby hastened. But she seemed to find it difficult

to explain to her friend just what Blanche Remi was. “She’s--well,

she’s wild. She does such things--things none of the other girls do.

She drives a sulky. She rides in a man’s coat and red gloves. It sounds

so silly when you tell it,” she ended, feeling she had failed to

properly impress her friend, “but you can always see her coming a mile

away, whether it’s golf or a garden party.”

“You mean she’s a tomboy?” said Mrs. Gueste, doubtfully. Her smile said

that Walter would never take that sort seriously.

“Oh, if it were _only_ that!” Mrs. Crosby’s gesture was eloquent. “Do

you know what they call her here?”

“They?”

“Well, everybody. Some man, I think, started it. They call her ‘the

Wrecker.’”

“The Wrecker?” Mrs. Gueste’s inquiring eyes were on her friend.

“Because every man in Santa Barbara,” Julia Crosby went on, “has at one

time or another----”

“Run after her? Oh!” Disgust was in the last little word. Mrs. Gueste

understood it all in a moment. “She’s _that_ sort. Is she pretty?”

“Stunning! Overwhelming!” said Mrs. Crosby, generously. She herself was

little and indefinite.

“M-m-m! So poor Wallie is overwhelmed?” Lillian mused. “Julie, why

didn’t you let me know sooner?”

“But, my dear girl, it was all so vague! Even now I don’t know that

there’s anything--but there was getting to be such talk!”

“But you think he’s serious?” Mrs. Gueste’s smile was deprecating.

“I don’t know. That’s why I telegraphed. I knew _you_ would.” Her eyes

roved anxiously down the beach, and suddenly fixed. “There they are

now,” she said, with a small, sharp excitement.

Lillian Gueste started, peered under her pink parasol. Some dozen rods

distant the plaza and the beach below it fluttered with the moving

colors of a crowd. Between the plaza and the bath houses lay an empty

space of beach, and down that glittering white perspective came a

horse with a light sulky. They could make out two people in it: a man,

holding on his hat; a woman bareheaded, driving--driving so that one

wheel of the sulky spun the foam of the receding water. The man was

Wallie--Wallie laughing, hugely enjoying it.

Still at a little distance the sulky stopped; the driver gave the reins

to her escort, and sprang out with the light, certain leap of a cat. An

indifferent Englishman, who had noticed nothing before, put his glass

in his eye and stared. It may be he had never seen anything so tawny,

so glistening, so magnificent, as the undulant masses of hair gathered

up on the crown of the girl’s head. A long tan-colored ulster, the

collar turned up around her throat, fell to her feet. She stood pulling

off a pair of red gloves, looking up and laughing to Walter Carter, who

got out with his habitual lazy lurch.

The two were near the narrow plank that led from the women’s bath

houses. Bathers were coming out in bathrobes, which, five steps

from the door, they left hanging on the rope, while they hopped,

high-shouldered and shivering, down the beach. The girl kicked off her

tennis shoes and handed them to Walter, stripped off her ulster, and

stood out in a scarlet bathing dress that, covering the knees, left

bare legs, slim, brown and dimpled as a child’s. She lingered across

the interval of dry sand, calling over her shoulder to Walter something

that left him a-grin with amusement; then went joyously down the dip of

the beach for the rush of the incoming breakers, and launched into it

with the swash of a little, launching ship. The lawlessness of it was

beyond any words Lillian knew.

“You see, she does things like that,” Mrs. Crosby explained in her

friend’s ear.

“Oh, impossible!” Lillian murmured, watching Blanche Remi’s bathing

dress glimmer through the green breakers. “Do you suppose Wallie is

going in, too?” she added, glancing down the beach.

The young man was sauntering toward them, unconscious of his sister’s

scrutiny, his steps directed, probably, toward the men’s bath houses on

the left of where the two women sat. He was as lankly dawdling as ever,

but Lillian noted, with a vague uneasiness, his usual air of agreeable

_ennui_ was supplanted by one of half-wakened interest. The remnant of

a smile was on his habitually serious face.

Mrs. Gueste stood up and motioned with her lorgnon. He saw, stared,

smiled broadly, delightedly, and hastened toward her.

“I say,” he said, subsiding between them, “this _is_ luck! But why

didn’t you let a chap know you were coming a few hours before you

landed? What started you, anyway? I thought you had planned for Castle

Crag.”

Julia Crosby’s telegram was hot in Lillian’s pocket, and she thought,

anxiously, that Julia’s face was conscious enough to give the thing

away. But Walter was frankly unsuspicious.

“If I’d known just a day ahead,” he reproached her, “I could have

lunched with you as well as not.”

“But your engagement?” Lillian hinted.

“Oh, to bring Miss Remi down for a dip. I was going up for you while

she paddled ’round, but now I’ve got you here, too, I won’t have to

budge.”

Little as she liked the idea of being thus lumped with Blanche Remi,

Lillian made it a point to be lovely.

“Miss Remi?” she wondered, sweetly.

“Why, yes. Didn’t you see us?” He was just a little conscious. “There

she is at the raft,” he added. “You must meet her, Lil; mustn’t she,

Mrs. Crosby? There’s no one in Santa Barbara like her.”

“Really?” Mrs. Gueste looked through her lorgnon at the glinting speck

traveling out on the water.

Wallie frowned. He hated his sister’s lorgnon, and her lorgnon manner

was his _bête noir_.

“I am afraid we shan’t be able to wait until Miss--er”--she searched

for the name--“comes out. We must be at the house by three.”

“Oh, that’s all right. I’ll signal her to come back. Where’s

something?” His hand fell on his sister’s parasol, and before she could

protest he had it at the edge of the beach, waving over his head. It

was probably the first conspicuous performance of that very discreet

parasol; and as for the punctilious Wallie----!

“Do you suppose he gets that sort of thing from her?” Lillian

articulated.

“I suppose so,” Mrs. Crosby agreed, faintly. She felt a wish to escape

being present at the approaching introduction. “If you don’t mind,

Lily,” she excused herself, “I really ought to run uptown and see Mrs.

Herrick for a few moments. You remember I promised her.”

“Why, of course. Wallie will see me home.” Lillian smiled, remembering

how in their school days Julia’s conscience had always precipitated the

crisis, and dodged the consequences.

She sat composedly alone in the sand, watching the glinting speck

drawing landward. Wallie stood awaiting it, his toes in the water, his

sister’s pink parasol held like a saber in his hand.

As the girl came splashing through the shallow flow, dripping, glowing,

shaking the drops from her hair, Mrs. Gueste saw she carried a little

dog, a terrier, in her arms, and this seemed to put the last touch

to her conspicuousness. She came up the beach talking, gesticulating

vividly, to Walter. Once she nodded to a loose-lipped, pleasant-eyed

man who passed them, but she did not give Mrs. Gueste a glance until

she was fairly before her--until Walter spoke his sister’s name. Then,

when she gave suddenly the full glow of her face, and the strength

and light of her hot, hazel eyes, she was, as Mrs. Crosby had said,

overwhelming. The touch of her damp hand to Mrs. Gueste’s delicate

glove was the touch of compelling physical magnetism that could be

looked at safely only through a lorgnon.

But not the lorgnon, nor its accompanying manner, disconcerted Miss

Remi. Her own manner was easy, without freeness.

“You _do_ look like your brother, Mrs. Gueste,” she said, seating

herself in the sand, and warning the wet terrier away with upraised

finger.

“Flattered, Lillian?” Wallie murmured, with cloaked satisfaction.

“Oh, you’re very nice looking, Wallie,” Blanche Remi told him, with a

frank, smiling, up-and-down glance.

Mrs. Gueste’s lorgnon rose sharply to this sentence, but her voice was

gentle.

“Don’t you find it rather cold going in this morning?” she asked.

The girl’s faint change of expression appreciated the round turn that

had been given the conversation.

“Oh, it’s always pretty cold, but I keep moving, so I keep warm,” she

said. There was a glint of mischief in her wonderful eyes.

“But don’t you feel cold while you’re out?” Mrs. Gueste persisted.

The girl, sitting unwinking, unfrowning, in the glare, looked like some

luxurious creature sunning itself. A faint, fine powdering of freckles

gave even her skin a tawny hue. Even down the throat, where Lillian was

milk white, she showed a tint like old ivory, with creamy shadows under

the square chin. She looked up at Lillian Gueste’s face in the dainty

shadow of her parasol.

“Do I _look_ cold?” she laughed. “You must let me show you how to keep

warm. Do you swim? Oh, you should! It saves your nine lives. You ride,

of course?”

“If I can find a horse that suits me.” Mrs. Gueste’s soft reply

suggested she was hard to suit.

“You must try my Swallow. She’s perfect. We must have a saddle party,

mustn’t we, Wallie?” the girl appealed to him. “But first you may take

me to call on Mrs. Gueste. I know she’ll have too many engagements to

risk calling on her hit-or-miss.”

Mrs. Gueste’s reply was a murmur, as she rose, shaking out her soft

linen skirts.

Walter Carter felt indefinitely uncomfortable. Blanche Remi stood

beside his sister, slightly taller, more vigorously, more carelessly,

more brilliantly made. She looked rather commanding, as if she were

used to having things her own way; which was precisely what Lillian,

little as she looked it, was used to having. But now her manner toward

Blanche was almost appealing.

“I am going to beg your escort away from you, Miss Remi, if you will

permit it, just to drive me back to Mrs. Crosby’s. I haven’t seen him

for three months, you know.” Her voice and eyes somehow made three

months seem interminable.

Blanche did not show by the flicker of an eyelash that she appreciated

the cleverness of this maneuver. “Why, that’s a dreadful loss of time

for Wallie,” she said.

He thanked her with a glance that made his sister wince.

“Then shall I come back for you--Blanche?” The name came out after a

moment’s hesitation.

“Oh, no! Blair Hemming will drive me back.”

Lillian felt a vague resentment that the girl should be so sure.

“And don’t forget about to-morrow,” Blanche warned Wallie, bidding

good-by, and left him wondering what had been to-morrow. Nothing had,

but the words, as Blanche had wickedly foreseen, lingered in Mrs.

Gueste’s mind, and vexed her.

“You have so many engagements, I wonder whether I shall see you at

all,” she hinted, as he handed her into the runabout.

He flushed slightly. “Well,” he said, genially, as he took the reins,

“you know there are mighty few of ’em I wouldn’t break for you, Lil.”

As they spun down the spongy asphalt of the boulevard, between the

palms and electric-light poles, she was asking herself why it was that

good, unsuspecting fellows like Wallie were always pounced upon by

such women. She felt it was horrid to meddle, but this creature was so

astonishingly impossible, and yet so overwhelming, that Wallie could

hardly be expected to rescue himself. But she was cautious.

“Did you meet Miss Remi here, Wallie?” she asked him.

“Yes, at something at the country club.”

“Does she go _there_?”

“Why, of course. All the nice people go there.” He looked at her in

lazy surprise.

“Oh!” she said, with a falling inflection. It was discouraging to find

him so unconscious. “Does she go much?”

“Everywhere. She’s awfully popular. How does she strike you?” He tried

to be casual.

“She’s not like anyone else I’ve seen in Santa Barbara,” Lillian

replied.

He fairly glowed. She had never seen Wallie so enthusiastic.

“You’re just right, Lil! There _is_ no one like her. She makes

every other girl look like a dough doll! It’s not only that she’s

beautiful--she isn’t afraid of anything, she don’t care how she

looks--she’s just crackling with life.”

“Do _you_ admire her so awfully?” Lillian said, with such an amazed

emphasis on the personal pronoun as brought him up short.

“Why--er--of course. Why not? Don’t you?” The color came up under his

brown skin.

“Well,” she said, slowly, “of course I’ve only met her once; but

really, Wallie, is she quite--fine?”

“Fine? What do you mean?”

She knew that he knew what she meant. The word was not a new one from

her. It was her measure, her ruler by which she judged the world. He

was not so unconscious, then, as he seemed.

“I mean what you’ve been so accustomed to in women, you dear, that you

don’t know they can lack it,” she said, caressingly. “Is she _nice_?

_Is_ she a lady?”

Something threatening looked out of her brother’s eyes. “Well, I

introduced her to you.”

“I know. You put me in rather a difficult position, Wallie.”

“See here, Lil”--he dragged out his words with slow emphasis--“I don’t

know who you’ve been listening to, but you can take it from me that’s

she as fine as silk and as good as gold.”

“Oh, as to her goodness, I haven’t a doubt, of course.” She seemed to

set this aside as a trifle. “But as to fineness, now, Wallie, what do

you think of a girl driving through town in her bathing suit, with

a man, and jumping out of her coat and shoes on the beach before

everyone, as she did? She did it to make a sensation; and do you think

_that_ fine, Wallie?”

He flushed, but laughed.

“Nonsense. It was a whim--a freak. She thought nothing at all of any

effect on the beach. That’s the trouble; she thinks too little of the

effect, and so----”

“And so she wears no stockings--and so she’s called ‘the Wrecker,’” his

sister added, with inconsequent effect.

His face was grave, even disturbed. “Oh, yes, I’ve heard _that_. But

she’s so beautiful, so happy, you can’t wonder at the attraction; and

you know there’s always gossip. And then she’s run wild. She has had no

one to take care of her----” he left the sentence hanging.

His sister inwardly shivered. When a man talked about “taking care” in

that tone, she seemed to see the end.

They were winding up the wide, wandering Main Street, the rose-covered

verandas of the Arlington on their left; on the right an old garden ran

back to the white stucco fronts and red tiles of the De la Gera place.

“Wallie,” Lillian asked him, softly, “_are_ you in love with that girl?”

“Me! Oh, what a question, Lil!” He laughed at her--his nice, lazy laugh

she loved so much.

“Are you, Wallie?”

He put up his monocle to meet her lorgnon. “My dear girl, _do_ I look

pale and sunken?”

“You are dodging the question. But think”--she was light, almost

playful, over it--“is she the sort of woman you would care to introduce

as your--wife?”

Wallie looked a little startled, but he took her tone. “My dear Lil, I

haven’t thought of her in quite that way.” He grew more serious. “I

think she’s wonderful. I never saw anyone like her. You must know her

better.”

“I don’t see how I can,” Lillian sighed.

“You mean you won’t _see_ her?”

“I suppose I must, since you are going to bring her to call. But

I won’t go about with her. I can’t. Couldn’t you see there on the

beach--she isn’t our kind?”

“She looks nothing like you, certainly, Lillian,” he replied, coolly,

“if you insist on judging people by appearances, but it’s hardly a

‘fine’ way to judge.”

“Now, Wallie----” they had turned into the Crosby drive, between the

rose of sharon and syringa bushes.

“Of course,” he went on, “you’re always waving that word around as if

it were the only thing worth being, and every virtue hung on it. But

what about honor, and generosity, and simplicity, and courage? Are they

nothing compared to it?”

The runabout had stopped before the piazza steps, but Lillian sat still

a moment, frowning faintly.

“When I said ‘fine,’” she answered, “I didn’t mean fine finish,

cultivation, which is a surface thing, but I meant fine fiber, which

goes deep and counts in every way with everything. One judges the

big things by the small ones,” she said, as Wallie handed her out,

“and remembering mother, and the way we were brought up to feel and

understand, I think you will presently agree with me that Miss Remi is

hardly--fine.”

She gave him a smile with the last word; and her look, the movement of

her graceful head in the turn, the poise of her delicate body, the fall

of her delicate dress, showed forth every shade of meaning which that

word could contain.

The memory of her thus was with him all the afternoon. It buzzed like a

bee in his brain that night through the dinner at the Crosbys’, though

Lillian, ravishing in daintily blended shades of chiffon, referred

by no suggestion to the talk of the afternoon. She and her word, he

thought, mutually described one another. Lillian was fine, and fine

meant Lillian.

Deep down or on the surface, he knew she was the real thing. And the

inevitable, following question was, what was Blanche Remi? She was

the real thing, too. He was sure of that. Lil was ’way off, he told

himself, when she said the big things showed up in the little. He had

been bothered all his life by the petty goodnesses of women, and now

that he had found one who had the great goodness he was not going to

be disturbed by Lil’s scruples. As for being “in love” with Blanche

Remi--Lillian had put it to him as he had never put it to himself.

From the first night her marvelous eyes had flashed into his indolent

notice, he had felt an inclination to exterminate every other man

who talked to her. And there were _so_ many. The supposition on the

tongues of Santa Barbara that all these men made love to her he had

not believed--could not have tolerated. Why he had not made love to

her himself was not from lack of impulse, but something in the very

greatness of the emotions and passions she roused in him, something in

her fine, free ignorance of the trifles that make up the virtue of most

women, had made any trifling with her impossible to him. But he felt

himself brought down to facts. What was he finally intending toward

this girl whom he never saw without wanting to kiss, to carry off? His

wife?

Well, Lil was right. Blanche did lack the superficial polish. Strange

he hadn’t noticed that before. But that was just the use of Lil. She

could be a lot of help if she could only be made to like Blanche, and,

of course, all that was necessary was that Lil should know her better.

He would, he decided, take Blanche to call there to-morrow.

With a little telephoning this was arranged, and Wallie had it all made

out just how beautifully he would direct that interview and carry it

through. But the direction was reversed at the beginning by so small

an incident as a woman’s hat. Not that the hat was, in itself, so

slight an affair. Indeed, when Blanche came out to where he waited her,

curbing the most impatient horse in Santa Barbara, the hat was the

first thing he saw.

It was wide. It was hung about with lace--too much lace. It was covered

with pink roses--too many roses. Walter did not quite know what to

think of it, but he had a feeling that Lillian would.

As Blanche sprang into the cart with that vigorous, energetic lift of

her body in which the muscles seemed always tense with action:

“Where’s that little white, flyaway thing you used to wear?” he

ventured.

“Oh, I don’t know--this is a new one. Don’t you like it?”

“Isn’t it a little--large for driving?”

She flushed but smiled. “Not for calling. Now, Wallie, that’s the first

time since you met me that you’ve noticed my clothes. I don’t believe

you’ve known whether I’ve had any. Is it because you’ve been having

ideals put under your nose? Is it”--she laughed, drawing on a pair of

extremely long lavender gloves--“because you are afraid your sister

won’t approve of my hat, any more than she approved of my legs?”

It was this astonishing freedom of speech, more than the hat, that made

him uneasy of the approaching interview. Of course Blanche could say

what she liked to him. He understood. But the very idea of her talking

that way to Lillian made him shiver.

But Blanche did not talk “that way” to Lillian. There in the Crosby

garden, where the magnolias dropped languid petals on the lawn, she was

touchingly like a little girl on her good behavior. She tried, with her

anxious sweetness, to make Wallie’s sister like her. But Lillian had

seen the hat first, and got no further. It was to the hat she talked,

and it seemed to Walter that his sister’s costume, so notably discreet,

somehow set off all the daring of Blanche Remi’s gown, the telling

blacks of which were touched in at the most unexpected intervals.

Was Lillian, instead of helping, trying to put Blanche at her worst?

He thrust that thought out of sight as disloyal. He sat, wretchedly

uncomfortable, trying to remember whether he had ever seen Lillian

wear long lavender gloves, hearing Lillian deftly turn and dispose of,

unanswered, Blanche Remi’s suggestions for horseback excursions and

“plunge parties.”

He expected, with every covert snub, that Blanche would suddenly,

diabolically turn tables on her, as he had seen her do with other

women. But Blanche, who had always had what she wanted, now, for

perhaps the first time in her life, wanted a woman to like her. And it

did not occur to her that she should fail in her desire. But what had

been her strength was now her failure. Her compelling magnetism alarmed

Lillian Gueste. She had been thoroughly convinced at first glance

that the girl was “bad form.” But now she felt her force as something

terrible and threatening to Wallie. The very sweetness of the smile

Blanche gave her in going seemed too rich.

“But the protection,” Lillian reasoned, going over the interview

afterward with herself, “is that Wallie is beginning to see.”

Wallie, bitterly irritated, saw, indeed, many trifles that he had

failed to see before, perplexing as so many pricks. Things he had

thought amusing in Blanche Remi--her red gloves, her white spats, her

man’s hunting coat, the terrier she took to receptions--would they

do for Mrs. Walter Carter? Suppose he should put it to Blanche that

way, would she take it from him? he wondered. He felt he must put it

to her some way now--the questions of Mrs. Walter Carter--for in the

background, dimly threatening him, was that aggregation, each one

a future possibility--the pasts he would not contemplate--and all

villainously responsible for the name gossip had fastened upon her,

“the Wrecker.” He knew that Santa Barbara accounted her a “dangerous”

woman, but to him, even with her fatal fascination, she had always

seemed a child. And now it came to him that it was not the help of a

woman, but the protection of a man, Blanche Remi required most.

He felt he could not wait a day, a moment, to tell her; but

somehow it was very difficult to find that moment; his time was so

unostentatiously but so thoroughly permeated and broken with Lillian’s

engagements for him. A week escaped in which, without having seen

Blanche less, he had seen her under circumstances that admitted no

opportunity.

Lillian had not, as she first threatened, ignored Blanche. She had

invited her, if not to dine, at least to a beach tea, to a driving

party; had talked with her at the country club; had kept her before

Wallie, always at arm’s length, as if to give him ample opportunity for

comparison.

Walter could find no flaw in his sister’s attitude of disinterested

politeness, of pale cordiality toward Blanche Remi, but side lights on

it now and then made him suspicious. He was bewildered--as bewildered

as a man tangled in a veil. He felt that the first fine intimacy of his

fellowship with Blanche was dulled. He was distressed with a sense of

being on a more formal footing with her. At the same time others--men

who had been very much in the background--seemed to come forward into

her notice. He saw her at the country club dances magnetize the men

too bored to dance into an interested circle round her. Dismayed, he

saw her first with one, then with another, driving, swimming, sitting

on the beach under one parasol in the association so intimate, so

informal, that, before Lillian came, he had usurped to the exclusion of

the many. Finally, out of the crowd, as the one oftenest with her, he

saw Blair Hemming, the man of loose lips and good-natured eyes, to whom

Blanche had bowed that morning on the beach.

Walter had thought him a decent enough fellow, but now he was suddenly

vile. And Blanche? Her behavior was unreasonable and unfair. But

perhaps he had let himself drift too much with Lillian’s plans. A

little self-accusing, a little self-righteous, he rang up the Remis’s

to make an appointment to ride horseback with Blanche that afternoon.

Her voice reached him, nasal, resonant, with a vibrant quality that

touched the ear with a fascination deeper than sweetness. She had a

luncheon engagement at the club.

He was annoyed that he had not known of this.

“How about to-morrow?”

“Very well,” came back; “but make it a foursome. Get your sister to

come.”

“Of course, if you would rather,” he answered, a little stiffly.

“What _has_ happened?” he asked himself. He knew he had done nothing.

Was Blanche changing? Had he only imagined her attitude toward him

differed from her attitude toward half a dozen others? It had seemed

different--but how could a man be sure?

Harassed, suspicious, he hesitated over making the proposal to Lillian

until the next afternoon at the last moment. He rode over to the

Crosbys’ and found his sister, fair and diaphanous in her mousseline

gown, crumbling bread to the gold fish in the fountain. The look she

gave his proposition, sweet as it was, made him uncomfortable. Any man

would do to fill in the fourth place, he had stupidly said.

“Any man for Miss Remi?” she had asked him. And he had fired.

She heard him with a half smile, softly beating the ground with the

dried palm leaf she prettily carried as a parasol.

Well, she told him, she did not care particularly for such an

expedition. It was such a time since she had seen him alone! Wouldn’t

it be much nicer to make it just a _tête-à-tête_ dinner at Estrelda’s?

He replied, with irritation, that if she did not care to make one of

the party, it would not prevent him from taking Miss Remi.

“Ah, a previous arrangement,” Lillian said, taking in his whip and his

riding boots as if she had just noticed them. “Well, you must realize

by this time just what sort of a person she is.”

“I am far from being sure, but I intend to find out this afternoon.”

She turned sharply. “You mean you are going to ask her to marry you?”

“Well, if I am?”

“After the way she’s been running about with this Hemming?”

“Lillian--look out,” he warned. His sister’s smile was tight and fine.

“Oh, well,” she said, with a little shrug, letting her hands drop in

a gesture that seemed to make an end of the matter. At the moment her

brother appeared to her no less than a monster. But she watched him

down the drive with a revulsion of mood. She felt he was leaving her

forever, her Wallie, her little brother! He was a year younger than

she. She had let her sense of personal injury get in the way of his

happiness--and he was going to that woman.

She stood, the palm leaf fallen from her hand. He must be stopped,

interrupted somehow. He should not do a thing in a heat to regret

forever. Calling his name, she hurried down the drive to the gate, but

he had already turned out of the side street, and was beyond both sight

and call. She fairly ran across the garden, over lawns and borders, her

gown streaming, regardless of dust or wet. Had anyone seen her running,

flushed and breathless, across the piazza and up the stairs, he would

scarcely have recognized, in her abandon, Mrs. Cornelius Gueste.

She hurried into her habit, trying to remember whether Wallie had said

they would go down through Monticito and come back by the beach, or

whether it were just the other way about. Where could she hope to catch

up with them? It would be a humiliating affair enough for her; but she

was not in the least thinking of herself, but only of Wallie, and some

way by which she could avert his catastrophe.

Walter had departed with the responsibility of what he was about to do

heavily upon him. His sister’s look had not failed to affect him. He

felt he was adventuring, risking, going to deal with unknown quantities.

He was to meet Blanche in town, where she had told him she had some

shopping to do. Halfway down the wide, wandering Main Street he saw

her mare fastened in front of the confectioner’s. Riding up, he

could glimpse through the glass door Blanche, a tall habited figure,

strolling here and there, sampling the sweets. He sat waiting, scowling

in the glare of the afternoon sun on white awnings and sidewalks. He

saw Hemming jump out of his cart a few doors down, in front of the

saddler’s, with a broken bridle over, his arm.

“Hey, Carter!” He came and leaned on the flank of Walter’s horse, his

hand on the back of the saddle.

“Beastly familiar,” Walter thought.

Hemming’s good-natured, sensual face was vivid with animal spirits.

“Where were you last night?” he said. “You _did_ miss it!”

“What?” drawled Walter.

“Mrs. Jack Castra’s dinner dance. Great!” Hemming’s eyes narrowed. He

shook his head. “I got Blanche Remi a bid. You know she wanted one like

the devil. Mrs. Jack is a terrible stickler, but we’re great pals, and

she let me have it.”

“Miss Remi went?” Walter’s voice was very lazy.

“Did she go?” Hemming laughed. “I’ll tell you what it is,” he said,

“the Wrecker’s a wonder! She’s such a wonder that most of the women

say, ‘Hands off.’ But between you and me, she makes every other woman

look like a Dutch doll.”

Walter had an impulse to strike Hemming. His own words had been flung

back at him, but he failed to recognize them.

“Oh, I had a good time,” Hemming repeated, significantly, but

unmalicious. “So long.” He sauntered into the saddler’s.

Walter watched the confectioner’s door opening. So Blanche was under an

obligation--such an obligation--to Hemming! He had not thought Hemming

such a bad lot, but now---- Things Lillian had said crowded back to

him. And Blanche’s attitude lately? The color thickened in his sallow

cheeks.

Blanche came out of the door with a swing. She was eating a chocolate.

As she stood under the rippling awning, pulling on her red gloves, he

saw she was glowing with excitement. The weight of her splendid hair

under her man’s hat, the play of color in her eyes, the slight backward

fling of her figure as she poised--each detail proclaimed eloquently

how fully she was a conscious, vital force, stupendous to reckon with.

“Where’s Mrs. Gueste?” was the first question she tossed at him, with a

straight, studying look.

“Er--she had a headache--and--er, another engagement,” he added, lamely.

Blanche laughed. “One would have been enough,” she said; but the curve

of her lip quivered. She stopped his reply with a second question.

“Who ran away as I came out?” she asked, settling in her saddle.

“Blair Hemming.” He looked at her sharply, but she showed no

consciousness; only a smile, as though Hemming were something funny.

“Did you have an amusing time last night?” he asked her.

Some vague reminder of Lillian Gueste’s voice startled her. The color

deepened in her cheeks. “Oh, lovely! Hemming”--she never gave a title

to a name--“took me to the Castras’.”

“Did he get you the invitation?”

She looked at him in surprise.

“I didn’t _ask_ him for it. He offered it.”

“But you took it?”

“Why not? Everyone does it.”

Walter looked at her uneasily. He knew well enough that everyone

didn’t. He said stiffly: “I don’t like the idea of your being under

obligations to a man like Hemming.”

She looked at him with a quick flush. It might have been anger or

pleasure. But then her lashes lowered over her eyes to cover the secret.

“_You_ don’t!” she said. “And how do you suppose Hemming likes my being

under obligations to you?”

He was aghast. “What has _he_ got to say about it?”

“What have _you_?” She let it fall gently.

“Good heavens!” he burst out. “Do you lump _us_? I thought that you and

I were--were----”

“Friends?” she filled in without a quaver. “We were. But you’ve

changed, Wallie.”

“Since----”

“Your sister came.”

“What nonsense----” he began, eagerly.

“No”--her eyes were somber, smoldering--“she _hates_ me!” Blanche

emphasized the word with her whip on the mare’s flank. “She thinks I’m

awful! Hasn’t she said that to _you_?”

“She has said nothing of the sort. She has nothing to do with it.”

“She has everything!” Blanche said, suddenly, passionately. She jerked

the mare’s head fiercely.

They had turned out of the dazzling street into a softly sprinkled side

way, where the pepper trees wept their tassels in the dust. Blanche

kept her eyes on the bit of blue sky that seemed to close the end of

the street like a jewel in a setting.

“Before she came you took me for just what I was. You believed in me,

Walter. But ever since she said things, I feel--oh, I don’t know! As if

you were a long way off, watching me, and wondering about everything I

say and do.”

He broke in: “Because once or twice I criticised some trifle!”

“Oh,” she cried, “don’t think I wouldn’t take criticism from you! I’d

take a lot. I’d even wear the sort of hats your sister does!”

“Oh, confound the sort of hats! You know that’s not it. It’s--I--love

you, Blanche.”

He brought out the little isolated sentence breathlessly, with a jerk.

His sallow face was flushed.

Blanche was very pale. The horses took five steps while there was

silence. Then:

“It’s sweet of you to say that.” The girl’s voice was shaken. “But you

know, Walter, as _she_ does, I’m not her kind.”

“But I don’t want you to be!”

“Don’t you, Walter?” She looked at him earnestly. “And I’m not your

kind, either. I mean, I’m not like the women you’ve known. _She’s_ made

me feel that--your sister. It’s one reason why I hate her. Oh, I do!”

She nodded at him. “You may as well know that. She makes me see what

I’ve missed--little things I thought didn’t matter. But now----”

“But, child,” he interrupted, exasperated, manlike, with her

self-depreciations, “those little things don’t count! It isn’t that.

But if you loved me----”

“If I _loved_ you?” She turned large, astonished eyes on him.

“Well, you wouldn’t take things from Blair Hemming. I won’t stand it,”

he broke out. “He was talking about you, Blanche.”

“What did he say?”

“That makes no difference. A woman can’t afford to be talked about in

any way. She can’t know a man in such a way.”

“In what way?” The girl was breathless.

He seemed to see long perspectives of pasts: the crowds around her at

the dances; the men at dinners, talking to her across the disapproval

of the other women; the looks following her down the beach. “Well, you

know what I mean,” he answered, sullenly.