THE UNPRETENDERS
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
THE CHALK LINE. 12mo. $1.25 net.
VICTORY LAW. 12mo. $1.30 net.
COMPENSATION. 12mo. $1.30 net.
THE UNKNOWN WOMAN. 12mo. $1.30 net.
THE MECCAS OF THE WORLD. 8vo. $2.00 net.
JOHN LANE COMPANY, NEW YORK
THE
UNPRETENDERS
BY
ANNE WARWICK
AUTHOR OF
“VICTORY LAW,” “THE CHALK LINE,” “COMPENSATION,” ETC.
NEW YORK
JOHN LANE COMPANY
MCMXVI
COPYRIGHT, 1916, BY
JOHN LANE COMPANY
Press of
J. J. Little & Ives Company
New York U. S. A.
CONTENTS
PAGE
I. ANNE--JUST A PLAIN WOMAN 9
II. TIMOTHY--ONLY A WRITER 33
III. GLADYS-MARIE--MERELY A MAID 59
IV. SHEILA--SIMPLY A SOCIETY PERSON 80
V. WARNER--WHAT ELSE BUT A WAG 104
VI. CHALMERS--CLEARLY A CLUBMAN 126
VII. PIX--PURELY A PHILANTHROPIST 147
VIII. RICHARD--NO MORE THAN KING 178
IX. LUCIA--A MERE WIFE 205
X. ROGER--PLAINLY AN IDLER 227
THE UNPRETENDERS
I
ANNE--JUST A PLAIN WOMAN
“Perhaps Anne----” suggested Michael.
“Why, yes--certainly, Anne,” seconded Doromea, eagerly. “Of course
Timothy’s our friend, but Anne knows that we have just this last chapter
and--all we need do is to ask her.”
“Um-m. What is she doing?”
“She was trimming a hat on the west porch a few minutes ago.”
“_Trimming a hat?_ Why, she never has one on her head!” Anne’s husband
looked at his unfinished manuscript aggrieved.
“I think it was Gladys-Marie’s hat.” Doromea struggled back of plot to
remember. “It had a look of Gladys-Marie--an incoherent sort of cloche,
you know, that was meant to have been a sunbonnet.”
Michael laughed. “If you weren’t my sister I should be afraid of you,”
he said, looking at her admiringly. “You see too deep--even in hats.”
“But I cannot trim them,” answered Doromea, seriously. “Anne can--she
can make the most delicious hat out of an old square of lace or
something. I can’t even tack a plume in place and have it look like
anything but a curled poker.”
“You can only help write books,” smiled Michael, “and this one”--he
smoothed the thick pile of closely written paper--“is the best you’ve
ever helped to write. Er--suppose we just go and speak to Anne.”
The two figures, ludicrously alike in spite of the tall stoop of one and
the trim roundness of the other, hurried around the house to the west
porch.
“Is the book finished?” asked Anne, posing buttercups with an upward
glance of amazement.
“No--that is, not quite--just that one more chapter, you know; but----”
“It must be finished to-day,” concluded Doromea, firmly, “and--the post
came a few minutes ago and there was a letter from Timothy.”
“Yes?” Anne’s voice warmed. She had never seen Timothy, but Michael and
Doromea had made him sound very nice.
“Timothy,” said Doromea, mildly indignant, “with all his excellences,
has an abominable habit of not arriving psychologically at all.”
(Michael beamed--there was not a phrase of Doromea’s turning whose
cleverness he ever lost.) “He is coming this afternoon on the
four-thirty,” plumped Doromea, with no cleverness at all.
“I had better meet him with the cart when I go to Aunt Hester’s,” Anne
reflected, “unless--perhaps you had planned to meet him yourself,
Dorry?”
“No”--Doromea magnanimously overlooked the abbreviation of her cherished
name--“no, I hadn’t. Of course you’ve never seen him, but----”
“There’s no one else to get off,” Anne answered, simply.
“Oh, I didn’t mean that. I meant you have never met him, or anything.”
Doromea always floundered in her explanations to Anne--perhaps because
she found it necessary to make so many.
“Well, that needn’t worry her any,” put in Michael. “Timothy will make
her feel at ease right away.” And he smiled at Anne with an affection
back of which lurked an impatience to be off and at work, now that
incidental disturbances were disposed of.
“Then you’ll meet the four-thirty,” reminded Doromea, impressively.
“But you’re coming in to lunch?” called Anne, seeing them about to start
off. “It’s almost time.”
“I don’t know if we’ll bother with lunch to-day,” returned Michael,
absently. “You can ring, but don’t wait for us if we don’t come.”
“Gladys-Marie wants to go to the city,” commenced Anne, but the sharp
corner of the porch cut off her audience; “and I must read to Aunt
Hester and shell the peas,” she finished. “Gladys-Marie!”
“Yes’m--yes, my lady.” There was but one woman in the world to whom
Gladys-Marie would acknowledge such subservience, but one woman before
whom she would appear instantly--and awesomely.
“Here’s the hat, Gladys-Marie. Run along with it and have a good time,
only come back so that you can get dinner; and, Gladys-Marie, perhaps
you had better leave a little lunch on the buffet. I don’t believe the
others will be quite ready to eat with me.”
“Never are,” muttered Gladys-Marie, handling the hat as though it were
Venetian glass. “Sit with their noses glued over an old pad o’ paper all
day long, ’n’ the house ’n’ the meals ’n’ Lady Elinore ’n’ me c’n go
to--c’n go hang, ’s what I mean,” she apologized to Anne. “Oh, I know
you think I’m the pert one with me nerve carried round in me side
pocket, but I c’n see, I can; ’n’ if ever I see perruls cast before
swine--Gee! it’s plainer ’n any Sunday-school chromo ever tried to be.”
She looked back at the pearl in question with a kind of wrathful
tenderness. But the Lady Elinore, apparently, had not heard a word; only
the soft part in her warm gold hair was visible above the sewing in her
hands.
“She’s awful sweet,” sighed the worldling, pityingly, “’n’ twice as
smart with hands as I am. But--my word! she ain’t clever! The way she
lets herself get done an’ don’t even squirm about it pickles me!”
* * * * *
The fussy little train steamed off with an important backward lunge, as
though to say, “There! I did the very best I could for you!” And Anne,
who alone with the station-master saw what it had deposited, could
understand how it lingered on the siding and switched back and forth
several times after it had given every pretence of departing. For the
spare, shortish person it had set down at the small station made of the
station a suddenly very wonderful place indeed.
“You are Timothy,” said Anne, gravely, going forward. “I came to meet
you--I am Anne, you know.”
“I am very glad to know.” When the spare person smiled like that the
station-master straightened his tie and began to whistle. “For you to
come to meet me is the most cordial introduction we could possibly have
had. Is that your cart?”
“Yes.” Since Timothy mentioned it, Anne thought it was not such a bad
cart, after all. “If you will put your bag inside I will get the
milk-can.”
“Oh, _I’ll_ get the milk-can, miss,” offered the station-master,
hastily, as though he were not in the habit of lounging over his pipe
while he watched Anne carry it night and morning. “There you are!” He
swung it up with a flourish.
“Thank you,” said Anne, and her eyes were bluer than before. “Did you
hear him call me miss?” she asked Timothy almost before they rattled
off. “He thinks I’m a girl.”
“I should say he was of a sound psychology,” pronounced Timothy. “I
suppose he hasn’t seen Michael following you about, then?”
“No.” Anne drew the reins a shade tighter. “You see, Michael has been
finishing his book--he and Doromea, I mean; and that keeps them very
busy. I come down for the milk by myself--unless sometimes Gladys-Marie
comes along.”
“And Gladys-Marie is----”
“My maid. She is very fond of dime novels and chews gum. I think you
will like her.”
“I am sure of it.” Timothy’s gray eyes had bent a little closer upon
Anne’s serene naturalness. “Do Michael and Doromea like her?”
“They have no time for her. They are too busy making up characters for
the book.”
“I suppose you help at that, too----”
“I?” Anne’s blue gaze marvelled at him. “Oh, no--I am not clever enough
to help Michael. Doromea is the only one who does that. Isn’t she
pretty--Doromea?”
“Yes,” said Timothy, so fulsomely that any woman would have known at
once. “But I wish she would stop being clever,” he added, after a
minute.
“Men always want wives who are not clever, don’t they?” Anne meditated.
“So many people said that when Michael married me. Are the women in
your stories clever, Mr.--Timothy?”
“Never,” asserted Mr. Timothy, solemnly--and traitorously to Doromea.
“They--they are just plain women?”
“Just plain women. That is why women never buy the magazines they’re
in.”
“But men do?”
“Oh, yes--men who have married the clever ones like to remember that
there are the other kind. And men who have married the other kind--your
kind” (this time it was Anne who straightened the little frill at her
throat)--“like to be reminded how sensibly they have done for
themselves.”
“Michael does not read your stories,” said Anne, turning a sharp corner
carefully. “He says he does not understand them in you.”
Timothy’s quaint twisty mouth grew twistier for a moment. Then he said,
“That is because he does not understand me in them--or you, or anybody
else one sees day after day--and never sees at all.”
“One doesn’t see you day after day,” objected Anne. “If one never saw
you at all, though, one would always be sure that one had--that one had
wanted to.” She looked up at his glasses without coquetry. “Doromea and
Michael have talked a great deal about you.”
Timothy groaned. “And said clever things about me, I suppose--epigrams?”
He waited, as for the worst.
“I think so. Yes, Doromea said you were a literary Roycrofter--that is
an epigram, isn’t it?”
“I’m afraid so--or a Mission-made metaphor. I wish”--Timothy’s voice
grew wistful--“she had said she hated me.”
“Said she hated you? Oh! I see”--Anne remembered--“you want her to be in
love with you.”
“She is in love with me,” admitted Timothy, modestly. “Only she thinks
it’s beneath her--being in love at all, I mean. She thinks it isn’t
subtle.”
“I suppose it isn’t,” Anne meditated, allowing the horse to walk in
zigzag laziness across the road and back. “That must be why I don’t mind
it,” she decided, as they came in sight of the house. “I’ve been in
love ever since Michael asked me to try to be--and a long time before
that.”
Timothy looked at her again more closely. “Michael should write better
books,” he murmured, getting down to open the gate.
“So you really didn’t mind our not meeting you?” Doromea’s anxiety was
most appealingly clothed in a rose-sprigged frock. “You see, Anne
offered, so we thought----”
“You thought you couldn’t be more gracious to me,” finished Timothy,
glad that Doromea’s hair curled over the ears as unsubtly as ever. “By
the way, where is Anne?” He looked about the wide homely porch, where a
work-bag and a tennis racquet spoke of some one, evidently just a plain
woman.
“She is getting dinner.” Doromea shifted uncomfortably to another chair.
“I wish I could help her, but I can’t even boil an egg--and not have it
crack! Anne is so practical.”
“And so impractical,” appended Michael. “Fancy letting Gladys-Marie go
to the city when Timothy was coming! And of course there was no one by
whom to send the manuscript, once we had finished it. Anne had gone over
to read to Aunt Hester, and Doromea hadn’t the least idea how to hitch
up.”
“Neither had you,” added Doromea, a little warmly.
“Naturally not--having been brought up in the city with you.”
“Poor people!” Timothy’s gray eyes commiserated them. “But now that the
book is done, you can begin to learn something?”
“I mean to find myself,” said Doromea, loftily. “And I shall have to go
off alone for the whole day in order to do it.”
“That would be very rude--and no help at all to you. Why not take
Gladys-Marie along?” Timothy meant it--though he had never seen
Gladys-Marie.
“I would, if she were not so typical.” Doromea was quite serious.
“Nowadays one must insist upon the unusual, or grow usual oneself. Even
one’s maid is an influence.”
Michael looked triumphantly at Timothy--they were used to holding some
argument together as to Doromea’s cleverness.
“I see--then how important we usual ones are, aren’t we?--for if it
wasn’t for us, all of you’d be usual, too!” Timothy’s smile included
Anne, who came out just at that moment, completely covered with a
checked blue apron.
“_Anne_--Timothy!” Doromea’s voice showed what she thought of aprons.
“Yes, I know--I met him.” Anne sat down, innocently, and began to fan
her flushed face. “Dinner’s ready,” she added, as an incident.
Both Doromea and Michael jumped up at once. “We didn’t have a bite of
lunch,” cried Michael, plumping down into his chair and attacking the
olives rather crudely. “By the time we had finished the book, you had
gone to Aunt Hester’s----” he turned to Anne.
“Yes,” said Anne, setting down the water-pitcher. “There was lunch on
the buffet, you know.”
“I told you!” Doromea triumphed at Michael. “I said Anne wouldn’t
forget--but you wouldn’t even go and look.”
“Oh, well----” Michael’s voice was a shade less agreeable than usual. “I
knew she was busy in the garden all morning, and trimming Gladys-Marie’s
hat--I didn’t suppose she’d think. Anyway, what does it matter? The
dinner’s tremendously good. Come, Timmie, tell us what you’ve been
doing--more Plain Stories?”
“Not so many more.” Timothy wondered inadvertently if Michael had put
Anne’s elbows in the book--they were exceedingly nice elbows. “You see,
there aren’t so many Plain People left to write about. Every one’s going
in for being extraordinary, these days--psychic or something.” He looked
at Doromea inquiringly.
“I go to New Thought lectures,” defended Doromea, promptly.
“Do you?” Timothy asked Anne.
“I don’t have time--besides, I’m afraid I wouldn’t understand. I never
went to college or anything.”
“Oh!” said Timothy, approvingly.
“You see, Anne”--Doromea interposed with a quick kindliness--“Anne
always lived in the country before she came to New York to keep house
for her grandfather--that winter we met her--so she isn’t as interested
in the new mental trend. You must take it up when we go back, though,
dear; after all, it’s the thing that counts--one’s psychic education.”
“I should say that depended on what one counts with.” But Timothy said
it so low that nobody heard him.
“Psychic education----” Michael crumpled his roll thoughtfully. “In the
book there’s a woman (Faero’s her name) who is absolutely the most
perfect psychic completion you ever encountered. Simply a _ripping_
creation, isn’t she, Doromea?”
“Wonderful!” Doromea sighed admiration; then she smiled, and all her
dimples came out, which was to Timothy much more important. “You see,
this woman, this Faero, has a way of seeing things--the most subtle,
evanescent sort of things that nobody could possibly see----”
“Eh?” Timothy bolted, involuntarily.
“And it’s she who gathers up all the threads of the plot--there really
isn’t so much plot, Michael--”
“No, not so much plot----” Michael paused vaguely over a stalk of
asparagus. “People are sick of plot nowadays. They want something less
apparent, less----”
“So this Faero is a sort of psychic gleaner,” went on Doromea, eagerly.
“All the subtleties other people let fall unnoticed she picks up and
treasures, until the mental of her, the infinitely fine sensitive
perception that’s stretched to the vibration of a thin, thin silken
string----”
“Gee whiz! Now ain’t I the late one! Me walkin’-papers ’n’ the cashless
mitt’s all I deserve, I guess--but honest, Lady Elinore, if y’ could uv
seen that Theatorium show! My word! it had Sothern ’n’ Marlowe lookin’
like two ice-cream freezers--yes’m! Why, when that girl, Phylo-Floretta,
jumped out of a forty-six story buildin’, into her waitin’ lover’s arms,
with Popper hangin’ out the winder threatenin’ air-ships--my eye! I says
to Mamie, I says, this may be riskay, but it’s life, I says! ’N’ y’ c’n
take it from me it was, too--oh!” From the window Gladys-Marie became
suddenly aware of new audience, and hunted for her vanity-bag to see if
her hat was on straight.
“A quaint person,” commented Doromea, when the buttercup hat had passed
on, to the tune of _The Rosary_, “though a trifle hectic in her
descriptive parts.”
Michael glanced again triumphantly at Timothy.
“I must go and see her about breakfast,” said Anne, rising.
“I thought you would play to us.” Michael’s voice was wistful as a
child’s. “Anne always plays to us after dinner,” he explained to
Timothy.
“I don’t play,” disclaimed Anne; “I only hum a little. There--tuck
yourself up--I’ll play for a while.” She brought his pipe over to the
hammock, and arranged two chairs undemonstratively tangent, before she
went in to the piano.
Timothy, who had wandered into the yard, gazed at Michael; he was
puffing peacefully as the simple little Irish ballad came to emphasize
his comfort.
“Does the Lady Elinore always sing like that?” Timothy asked
Gladys-Marie, who appeared (quite without reason) on the side porch.
Gladys-Marie listened. “I guess it’s you,” she said, finally, fumbling
with her pompadour. “Sometimes she sounds kind a sad, but--I guess
nobody could help pinchin’ their gladness a little when you’re
around----” Her eyes under the pompadour went from Timothy to the two
chairs Anne had left. One of them was occupied. “Her hair curls real
pretty, don’t it?” she added, generously--for Doromea and Gladys-Marie
had a vegetable understanding only. “An’ that rose-color is awful
becomin’----”
Timothy threw away his light and turned toward the rose-sprigged chair.
“It is a pretty dress, isn’t it?”
“Lady Elinore made it,” returned Gladys-Marie, proudly. “Sure it’s a
pretty dress!”
Doromea and Michael and Timothy sat on the porch. “I can’t think it has
been really two weeks since you’ve been here.” From the steps Doromea
looked at Timothy a bit dolefully. “But it must be--since it was two
weeks ago we--we sent the book off. Must you actually go to-morrow,
Timothy?”
“It seems a breach of sense to admit it,” Timothy agreed, looking at her
through the gloaming, “but my editors imagine that the summer has
created some new Plain People--at least they want me to come and see.”
“I suppose so,” Doromea sighed. “I wish some one wanted me to come and
do something,” she added, vehemently, under her breath. “Goodness knows
there’s been nothing to do here, since the book’s been finished. Anne
seems to be busy every minute,” she observed, aloud, “but I don’t sew or
cook or row, or anything--I don’t even play the piano!” This with a gust
of indignation, as some very good playing came through the window.
“It’s the book’s fault.” Michael’s voice sounded rather weary. “If I
hadn’t held you to the book every minute, you might have learned these
other things. But I never imagined for a moment that the publishers
would reject it--it seemed so much better than the first one, so much
subtler----”
“What did they say about it?” Timothy moved to where he could not see
the quiver of Doromea’s lips.
“They said”--Michael repeated with the monotony of one who has gone over
the lesson many times--“that they were much surprised and not a little
disappointed over the decided inferiority of this book compared with the
other; that I seemed to have striven for an effect rather than for a
truthful portrayal of actual life. Oh, they tore it up sharply enough!”
he concluded, breaking off as though the recital choked him.
“They did say,” Doromea comforted, wiping her eyes back of Michael’s
cushions--“they did say there was some clever dialogue in it--you
remember, Michael, where Faero talks with the rector? They mentioned
that especially.”
“Yes--yes”--Michael caught at the consolation--“where she says, ‘One can
be so many worse things than bad,’ and--Why, Anne said that, Doromea;
funny, isn’t it? Don’t you know, when we were talking about that
stable-boy who stole--the one who had been in the Reformatory? You said
you thought he was the baddest boy in the world, and Anne--why, yes, of
course!”
“What else did they say was especially good?” Timothy’s voice suggested,
with suspicious impersonality.
“Why, farther on, the scene between the kitchenmaid and the
policeman--that was a story of Gladys-Marie’s, Anne told us--awfully
natural, you know, and--er--local-colorish. They like that.”
“Yes, and the bit about the ladies’ clubs.” Doromea would not allow
Michael to omit anything.
“Surely, that--that was funny, you know----” Michael laughed heartily
for the first time since yesterday, when the book had come back. “That
was a conversation Anne had with--Doromea!” He sat all at once bolt
upright in his hammock. “Every one of those things was Anne’s! Every
single one of them--do you know that, Doromea?--and the publishers said
they were the only clever things in the book!”
“_Anne_--clever?” Doromea stumbled, dazed with the dawning of it.
“Why--why, Michael!”
“Yes”--Michael was standing up now, and almost excited--“yes, those were
Anne’s things--the clever ones--and all the rest was rot. We sat in
there racking our brains over subtle things to say, and all the time, if
we’d just listened to Anne, we could have written a perfectly
extraordinary book--the cleverest book in the world! It’s
maddening--it’s----”
“Do you know why it would have been the cleverest book in the world?”
asked Timothy, quietly--for Anne’s singing stopped just then. “Because
it would have been the story of just a plain, ordinary woman--and that’s
the rarest woman one can find to write about--women like Anne, and that
little Patsy sister of mine, and a host of others. Why don’t you go
in,” he said to Michael, gently, “and ask her to help you find her?”
As Michael slipped through the long window, Timothy moved to the step
below Doromea. “Aren’t you convinced that she’s the subtlest woman,
too--this plain, ordinary woman?” he asked. Doromea’s curly head was
bent very low. “Don’t you think you might like to cook, and sew, and
trim hats sometimes?”
His voice was so wistful that Doromea wiped her eyes quite frankly this
time. “I--I am perfectly wild to trim hats,” she burst out, laughing
between her sobs. “Oh, Timothy, I am so sick--sick--_sick_ of trying to
be clever and think up things! I am really the dullest, plainest woman
in the world.”
“I hope so,” said Timothy, gravely, taking the unskilful little hands.
“I need a heroine most awfully. You see”--turning her about to face the
library windows--“Michael has found his.” For Michael was standing by,
while Anne lit the lamp and undid a heavy pile of manuscript.
“Anne--just a plain woman----” Doromea’s voice caught--but with a
yearning desire. “Even Gladys-Marie had the sense to tell me that she
had the Duchess heroines beat by a lope! Do you suppose, Timothy”--her
hands crept to his shoulders pleadingly--“do you suppose that I can ever
learn to be as clever as Anne?”
II
TIMOTHY--ONLY A WRITER
Patsy thumped Timothy’s fattest yellow cushion viciously. “It’s all very
well for you to sit there and smile,” she scolded her pretty stepmother.
“Dad was always perfect to you, and Timmie--if he is my brother--is a
joy to keep house for. You’ve never known what it is to live with a man
from Boston!--oh, how I hate him, how I’d like to make him fairly eat
slang! The idea--my own husband saying I was r-rowdy, and--and tomboy,”
Patsy’s head went down into the yellow cushion, “and before my own
mother-in-law, too, just because I slid down the banisters! Ugh!”
The stepmother looked at Patsy’s lovely rebellious little head. Then she
looked at the ridiculous scrap of a frock she was making. “I suppose he
thought of the Angel,” she murmured.
“And why?” Instantly Patsy sat bolt upright. “The Angel’s my child, of
course--every bit as much as he is Warren’s--but why I shouldn’t slide
down the banisters when I want to, just because I happen to have a
baby--one might think it was my grandchild!” The disgust that tilted the
small impudent nose made the stepmother bite her under lip hard.
“Anyway, it’s all over now. I’ve left Warren for good, and when he gets
back from Washington and finds nobody in the house he’ll realize that
I’m sufficiently capable of action, though I can’t talk like a Macaulay
essay. When he finds not only me but the Angel gone----” she listened
suddenly--a faint cry came down from some place upstairs.
“I expect the house will seem still and--and strange.” The stepmother’s
soft voice had a little ache in it as she listened too.
Patsy got up and walked to the window of the bright morning-room with a
defiant shrug that was meant also to be quite indifferent. “He deserves
it,” she defended. “Every bit of it. He behaved like a brute--a
perfectly gentlemanly good-form Prince Albert brute; and when he has to
go to Congress and give dinners and things without any wife, he’ll be
sorry he was so abominable. He’ll remember that I could be grown-up and
dignified when I want to. As for me, I can toddle on my own----”
“H’m?” The stepmother looked up inquiringly.
“Get along by myself, I mean, and take care of the Angel quite--quite as
well as though I had a husband. I dare say Timothy won’t mind my staying
here for a bit?” Patsy’s hauteur melted into an appealing wistfulness.
“Of course he won’t mind,” returned the stepmother, warmly. “He has some
news----”
“And then,” went on Patsy, unheeding, “I can take--steps.” The vague
importance of the decision seemed to reassure her; for she came back to
her old place on the sofa and plumped down into the cushions almost
cheerfully.
“I--before you take--er--steps,” suggested the stepmother, tentatively,
“why not consult Timothy?”
“Consult _Timothy_?” Timothy’s sister faced about amazed. “W-what on
earth could Timothy know about it--about leaving one’s husband? He’s the
dearest boy in the world--a ripping good sport and all that--but, after
all, Claire, he’s only a writer. He doesn’t know anything about things
that _happen_.”
The stepmother sewed for a few minutes in silence. Then, “Nobody else
knows that--that it’s happened yet, do they?” she asked, rather
anxiously.
“No,” said Patsy, shortly. “I told the maids I was coming over to stay a
few days with my brother, that’s all. Of course, Laura Hastings was
spending the week-end with me when we had the scene--when Warren and his
mother came in from Boston, I mean, and found me--_Patricia_---- Oh,
yes,” with a wry face, “she calls me that, Warren’s mother! As I was
saying, Laura was there, sliding down too, as it happened, and you know,
Claire, Laura’s the worst gossip in New York. She has told it all over,
I suppose, that Warren simply _ordered_ me to get down--anybody might
know such a good-looking man would be a tyrant!--but she can’t say a
word about me, for I was the sweetest thing possible all the time she
was there. I wouldn’t condescend to quarrel, you may be sure, even
afterward, when only Warren and his mother were there.”
“They went on to Washington that same night, you said----” the
stepmother creased a tuck thoughtfully.
“Yes--Warren had some business. His mother”--Patsy’s scorn pelted her
words out--“went to a convention of the Women Militant, if you know what
that is. Warren’s coming back to-day. Well”--she straightened her collar
belligerently--“he’ll find a note on the pincushion that will explain a
few things.”
“Ahem!” The stepmother coughed deprecatingly. “He’s been taking some
rather tiresome trips lately, Warren, hasn’t he?”
“Oh, of course he has--but what difference does that make?” Patsy’s
guilty compassion stirred itself to impatience. “Nobody wanted him to go
to Congress except his mother--though of course I was glad he got the
election,” she admitted, grudgingly. “But it’s meant running back and
forth from New York to Boston and from Boston to Washington all the
fall. This last Sunday simply capped the climax of everybody’s
endurance. Why the goodness his mother had to come down with him, just
that time when he was going to find me on the banisters----” She shook
her pretty head despairingly.
“Hello!” whistled somebody. “So the Plain Little Sister
has come to congratulate me--what? Didn’t I see
a--er--perambulator-rocking-chair-crib, folded compactly as in the
advertisement, out there in the hall?”
“Yes.” Patsy kissed her brother with characteristic vehemence. “It is
the Angel’s. We’ve come to stay.”
“Oh,” said Timothy, curling his spare shortness into a huge chair, “how
disappointing! I mean, that is, I thought you had come to congratulate
me, you know.”
“Congratulate you?” Patsy flew at him. “On what?”
“Why, on Doromea, of course. I’ve got her to marry me.”
Patsy regarded the stepmother reproachfully. “And you never told me a
word,” she said, with an air of deep injury. “I’ve been here two hours!”
“There was a good deal to talk about,” demurred the stepmother, soberly.
“You were telling me, you know.”
“Yes--yes, of course.” Patsy’s injury transferred its object to the
primary interest. “Timothy, I’ve left Warren.”
“That was nice of you,” commented Timothy. “Stay as long as you can.” He
looked at his sister’s pretty hair contentedly; it curled over the ears
like Doromea’s.
“But you don’t understand----” Patsy was seldom impatient with Timothy;
she tried to remember that he was a writer. Then, too, they had been
chums together always. “You don’t understand. I’ve left him forever. I’m
not going to Washington with him. He--he insulted me; he called me
a----”
Timothy uncurled himself in his interest. “Yes,” he encouraged. “What
did he call you?”
“A--a t-tomboy!” Patsy’s lips quivered past control. “And his mother was
there and Laura Hastings, a girl who was staying with me--and a
perfectly horrid gossip, Timothy! Oh, he was a beast, that’s all. I’m
sure,” tearfully, “I can’t think what you all ever let me marry him
for!”
Timothy glanced over the auburn head at the stepmother. The stepmother
glanced at Timothy. But neither of them smiled.
“I have never had anything against marriage,” said Timothy, mildly. “I
have even persuaded one person to get over her prejudice against it.
Perhaps I am wrong--if so, you can win the eternal credit of convincing
me. And meanwhile, why not come with me to select an engagement present?
We can argue as we go along, you know.”
It was not an unattractive proposition. Patsy brightened. “You must wait
for me to change,” she warned, jumping up. “This frock’s a wreck. But I
brought five trunks. I thought,” doubtfully, “that as long as I was
leaving for good, I had better take everything with me.”
“A sound precaution,” commended Timothy, going over to the window.
“And you’ll look after the Angel?” Patsy stopped by the stepmother’s
chair. “It may divert me to go out for a bit,” she added, plaintively.
“Of course the poor boy--Timmie--can’t understand all I’m going through.
He’s a regular brick, but in love, poor thing; and then how could he
understand? He’s only a writer.”
“Only a writer,” repeated the stepmother, with an odd little smile. “A
writer about Plain People and their Problems. Yes, dear, run along. As
you say, it may divert you. If the Angel cries I’ll--I’ll give it
smelling-salts. I dare say I sha’n’t kill it.”
“Oh, no,” Patsy called back, pleasantly. “You couldn’t. It has Warren’s
obstinacy. But it’s a darling, just the same.” She flew up-stairs as a
lusty squall blew down to them.
“She hasn’t congratulated you yet,” murmured the stepmother, gazing at
Timothy with quite an unstepmotherly gaze.
“No--but she will to-morrow,” prophesied Timothy, with only a writer’s
intuition.
* * * * *
The two short, blue-coated figures moved off briskly down the street
toward the Avenue. From the window, the stepmother smiled at the
identical cut of their shoulders, the boyish, easy swing of their same
stride; it seemed such a very little while since she had watched them
start off every day to school together--the blue coats had lengthened
such a little bit--and now---- Timothy engaged, and Patsy
married--married and half divorced; the stepmother’s nose wrinkled in a
funny smile. Ah, well! There are poignant foolish heartaches for
stepmothers as well as other people, but--just then the Angel cried. The
stepmother caught up the frilly frock and hurried upstairs; where there
is an angel----!
“For the Angel’s sake, I mean to have only a separation,” Patsy was
explaining to Timothy. “Besides, it--it will serve Warren Adams only
right not to be able to--t-to marry again. A Congressman without a wife!
Imagine it!”
“There have been instances”--Timothy was knocking leaves with his
stick--“isolated instances, I grant you,” he added, hastily, catching
his sister’s eye. “I think myself such Congressmen are to be felt for. I
suppose”--reflectively--“when Warren is sworn in, there will be nobody
there except his mother.”
“I suppose not,” returned Patsy, shortly; and ramming her stout-gloved
little hands into her mannish pockets, she began to whistle.
Timothy poked more leaves. They were scarcely at the corner of Madison
Avenue. “When one can whistle like that,” he observed to a silent
sparrow on the curb, “there is some point in letting the world know
about it.”
Patsy stopped whistling at once. “I always want to whistle when Warren’s
mother is about--even when it’s only in conversation. See here, Timmie,”
the small hand clutched her brother’s arm confidentially, “don’t
you--haven’t you always thought Warren’s mother was a bit of a muff?”
Timothy paused, over his glasses. “Muff?” he repeated--stupidly, Patsy
thought. “Muff--that was a pretty one she sent the Angel, wasn’t it? All
white and soft and fuzzy. She----”
“Oh, never mind, then,” Patsy cut him off impatiently. “If you’re not
going to agree with me, where’s the use of arguing? _I_ couldn’t help it
if she did send the Angel a muff--anyway, he sha’n’t carry it!” she
added, vindictively, under her breath. “Convention, tradition, what
people will say--booh! How sick I am of it all--wish I could make every
one of those words waltz themselves out of the big dic. forever!”
“Ah--about this present for Doromea----” When Timothy said that name,
Patsy looked up quickly; there was no earthly reason why a lump should
rise in her throat, but--“Doromea,” Timothy repeated, as though for very
spite. “It must be a very nice present, you know.”
“Then we’ll go to ----,” said Patsy, swallowing emphatically. “Everybody
goes there; my--my ring came from there, and Claire’s, and all our
family have always bought things there. It’s a sort of----”
“Habit?” supplied Timothy, kindly.
“Yes, habit.” Patsy gave a sigh of relief. If Timothy should have
guessed that she had _almost_ said tradition! “Certainly, habit--and,
well, we’re right there now, Timothy. It must be a ring, I suppose?”
Timothy’s gray eyes darkened to absorption. “I should say a ring might
do,” he deliberated.
“Sure thing!” Patsy was standing near a person who looked like Warren’s
mother, so she repeated, “Sure thing!” loudly and cheerfully. The person
started. “Diamonds--eh, Timmie? But”--to the clerk--“not a solitaire.
Solitaires”--feeling her own, under the heavy glove--“are so ordinary!”
“I rather fancy a solitaire,” protested Timothy, mildly. “Let’s see
yours, Pats!”
With a sublime indifference Patsy took off her glove. “It _is_ rather a
good solitaire,” she admitted, negligently.
“Would you take it off a minute, madam? I should like to compare----”
“Oh, no--that is, I mean”--Patsy blushed furiously--“I have never taken
that ring off--I--but I suppose I might just as well, now,” she
concluded, defiantly.
“Why not?” agreed Timothy--who was only a writer.
“I prefer not to take that ring off here,” said Patsy, with a colossal
dignity. “I--we will look at what you have in circlets.”
“Certainly, madam.” The clerk’s sandy head sank into a blue plush
show-drawer.
“There’s Laura Hastings!” cried Patsy, suddenly, “with a man--looking at
rings. And she never even hinted----! Do wait, Timothy. I must speak to
her a minute. Just like a gossipy person--never to tell one thing about
themselves!”
“Yes,” coming back breathlessly. “It’s true. They’re engaged. Laura
said”--Patsy’s breezy voice grew somewhat dry--“it was seeing me so
happy in my lovely home that really decided her--of course on top of
that I could hardly tell her--umm!” as the clerk reappeared. “Perhaps,
after all, a solitaire would be better--Laura’s getting one, and people
might say----” the minute the words were out, Patsy glanced fearfully at
Timothy; but Timothy was deep in settings. “Her friends might think,”
amended Patsy, “that you ought to have given Doromea one. Is Doromea as
pretty as she used to be?” she added, irrelevantly.
“She may sometime have been as pretty as she is now,” Timothy meditated,
“but it seems hardly probable. As a Plain Person--she wants you to show
her about things next winter,” he branched off. “The house and that, you
know. Anne and Michael are going to stay on in the country, so----”
“But I shall be in Washington,” blurted Patsy. “Oh, no--of course, I
forgot.” The blue shoulders sagged a bit forlornly as they turned again
to solitaires. “I shall be very glad to help Dorry all I can,” finished
Patsy, stiffly. “What do you think of this platinum one, Timothy?”
Timothy straightened his glasses to a critical focus. “Very nice--the
claws are so thin and fine--like those in the pin Warren gave you when
the Angel was born. I was always fond of that pin.” Timothy was talking
mostly to himself as he squinted closer at the solitaire. “I remember
Warren’s face when he went in to give it to you--‘’Tisn’t half good
enough,’ he said. And it didn’t seem to me then that it was, either.”
Patsy was staring at a case of watches--staring hard and with her back
to Timothy. Surreptitiously she got out her handkerchief.
“Then you’ll lay that one aside,” she suggested, lightly, though still
with her back turned. “And the flat one--Doromea might like that, it’s
so--so awfully subtle, you know. And Dorry always----”
“But not now,” corrected Timothy, gently. “She has advanced to the
infinite subtlety of forgetting that there is such a thing. I think we
won’t consider the flat one. What are you looking at over there, Pats?”
“Rattles,” replied Patsy, in a strangled voice. “Warren promised to come
in and get one with me for the Angel’s seventh birthday--seventh-month
birthday, you know. We bought his six-months one--that’s next
Sunday--three weeks ago!” The handkerchief went up to Patsy’s impudent
little nose, and blew it hard. “If it only wasn’t for Warren’s mother--”
she scolded, _sotto voce_, so that the clerk should not hear--“you know,
Timothy, I--but there, what’s the use in telling you? You wouldn’t
understand.”
“I might--though I do write things,” encouraged Timothy. “Why not try
me? We can pretend to be comparing rings over by the window.”
“All right.” Patsy gave a deep sigh. “You see, this is the way it is.
When--when I married Warren I was in love with him--I really was,
Timothy.”
“I remember you were,” said Timothy, gravely.
“Yes. And of course I was awfully young--_awfully_ young; though, to be
sure, I’m twenty-one now; I didn’t want to get married, you know----”
“No?” Timothy’s tone held only inquiry. He had the most tractable memory
in the world.
“Certainly not. I was talked into it. Warren and Warren’s mother kept
saying there was no sense in delaying the thing, and I supposed there
wasn’t, as we’d have to get married some time, wouldn’t we, being in
love and all?”
“Sometimes people don’t,” began Timothy. “In stories----”
“Oh, bother stories!” interrupted Patsy, rudely. “You promised to try to
forget you were a writer. Quick, look at these silly rings--that woman’s
listening. Well, so I married Warren, and for a while, you know, we
didn’t get along so badly--the first year we were married we hadn’t but
seven _serious_ quarrels; of course there were little things, but you
know yourself, Timmie, we managed very nicely.”
“It always seemed so to me,” Timothy came in promptly on his cue.
“That,” Patsy triumphed, “was because Warren was in love with me. He
didn’t care then how much slang I used or if I wore boys’ boots; I could
climb trees all day long when we were up at camp, and ride bareback all
over the place. But now,” the piquant little face grew tragic, “it’s
that same old thing--the glamour’s wearing off, and”--Patsy’s voice
sounded unpleasantly older than twenty-one--“my husband’s tired of me,
the real me. Now he wants me made to his order, to his mother’s order;
now”--a big tear splashed on her engagement ring--“I’m just the mother
of his child. I’m expected to be old and dull and mouse about in corners
with a book or some sewing. Sewing! When I can sail a boat better than
any one on Barnegat, and play hockey, and ride even the Blue Devil, that
all the Club’s afraid of! _Sewing!_”
“Claire sews,” Timothy reflected.
“Of course she does,” snapped Patsy. “Claire was born amiable and
womanly and all the sweet normal things a woman ought to be. I wasn’t.
I’ve never been anything but a harum-scarum r-r-rowdy, just as Warren
called me, I----”
“You’ve been the mother of the Angel.” Timothy spoke softly, almost
reverently. “Claire has only been allowed to be a stepmother.”
“That makes it just so much worse,” choked Patsy, flashing diamonds as
though for her life. “I--can’t you see, I don’t deserve to--to be the
Angel’s mother! Tha--that’s what Warren thinks.”
Timothy looked down at the trembling softened mouth, at the brimming
tawny eyes of his Plain Little Sister. “Warren is going to Congress,” he
said, letting Doromea’s ring slip on to his smallest finger. “I have
heard that at such times--just before they go--they hardly know what
they think. Everybody expects them to think something different, you
see. I should not be surprised if they did not even know what they
said--sometimes. There are stories----”
Patsy looked at him reproachfully. “You promised to leave out stories,”
she murmured. “You were just beginning to be comforting.”
“Um-m! So I did--so I was, I mean. The fact is, I almost believe they
forget what they have said, what they have thought, almost the minute
they have said or thought it. They--they get tired, you see. They have
to go off and make speeches, and their constituents keep dinning their
importance at them, the importance of maintaining the dignity of their
position, and that, you know; then they come home, a bit low and worn
out with it, and--they’re just plain ordinary people, Congressmen--they
lose their grip once in a while. They need----”
“Claire told you!” accused Patsy, though into her eyes had crept that
same look as when she was singing the Angel to sleep. “You knew it was
the day he came home from Boston, and went right away again.”
Timothy peered suddenly through his glasses at some one who was coming
into the store. “I did have an idea it was that day,” he
confessed--“one of those days, that is.”
“And of course,” Patsy’s voice gathered injury, “of all days his mother
had to choose that one to come along. And you know, Timmie, when
Warren’s mother comes along, it isn’t any suit-case party. There are
trunks to be checked and a maid to be hustled into the baggage-car, or
wherever it is they put ’em; and there’s a dog to be fought
about--Warren’s mother simply shrieks if they suggest putting _Toto_ in
the baggage-car--and half a dozen smaller parcels to be lost and found a
few times. Oh, I know!”--grimly. “I’ve had to play leading understudy in
the scream; and there was Warren, tired to a frazzle--you know he _was_
tired, Timothy----”
“I dare say he was,” Timothy was now the party of admission, “probably
very tired.”
“Coming into his own house---- Oh, well,” Patsy straightened her sturdy
shoulders and dabbed at one eye after the other. “It’s all over now.
I’ve left him, and where’s the good of talking about what might have
been? It’s only in stories that what might have been ever _is_. In a
story, now”--she arraigned the writer--“you’d have the hero
and the hero’s mother appear out of nowhere and fall on
the--er--pseudo-heroine’s neck, and offer a diamond necklace, while
pseudo-heroine exchanged apologies; and the whole family would trip
happily home on one another’s arms. Isn’t that so? Isn’t that just the
sort of impossible thing you have happen in those Plain stories of
yours?”
Timothy smiled, that same smile that had overcome Doromea’s prejudice
against marriage. “If you were writing a Plain story, wouldn’t you have
it end that way?” he asked, regarding diamonds unseeingly from behind
his glasses.
“I--I never wrote a story,” began Patsy, fumbling with her veil.
Timothy looked at her. “You couldn’t help writing one,” he said, and his
eyes were full of something that blinded Patsy’s. “At first, when there
was just Claire and you and me, it was a story of adventure--of wild and
thrilling dashes into the preserve-closet, and raids upon the
neighbors’ cherry trees; then”--his voice softened--“it was a
fairy-story, the story of a wonderful new world, all dazzling and
radiant with tender possibilities. Wasn’t it?” he insisted, gently.
“Wasn’t it for a while a fairy-story, Little Sister?”
“For--for a while, yes,” acknowledged Patsy, very low, “but----”
“But the castles had to fall,” went on Timothy, gazing wistfully at
Doromea’s gleaming ring, “the castles had to fall, and the Fairy Prince
had to become just a Plain Husband, or he would never have fitted this
Plain, Plain World; and the story had to become a _real_ story--ten
times more wonderful than a fairy-story, if one reads it with an eye to
life’s permanent values. Do you know”--Timothy took off his glasses and
looked at them meditatively--“we people who write things--that is, you
and I and all the world--are simply pestered to death by false climaxes?
Silly midget episodes jump up and insist that _they_--one after one--are
the great Turning Point of all our Plot. Pats, my dear”--he regarded
her seriously--“I make it a point not to believe ’em. I do really; I say
to myself: here, if you, the Big You, can’t recognize your own theme and
its outworking as you’ve planned it, as you want it, then you aren’t
much of a writer, that’s all. If you want your story to end a certain
way, and can’t make it end that way, just on account of the interference
of some puny bit of an incident, I say, well, after all, Tim, you ought
never to have been allowed to write. And so”--the gray eyes smiled
deeper--“just out of self-respect I have to make the end right, you
see.”
Patsy glanced at him suspiciously. “_That’s_ a story with a moral,” she
asserted, though her voice was rather unsteady; “the most impossible
kind of all.”
“It is,” confessed the writer, unabashed, “a story with a moral. But I
refuse to admit it’s impossible. And if you will go back again to those
rattles, I think you’ll refuse to admit it too. The----”
“Why”--Patsy had turned and walked a few steps back into the
store--“why, it’s Warren! Warren, Timothy--and----”
“His mother is over looking at necklaces,” nodded Timothy, modestly.
“Not diamond ones, but still----”
“She heard me say I wanted some pearls for my birthday,” Patsy murmured,
guiltily. “She--she’s got her bag with her. They can’t have gone up to
the house yet---- Timmie, Timmie dear--do you--do you suppose I might
speak to Warren, just to tell him not to mind the pincushion note, you
know--as long as he’s looking at rattles, Timmie----?”
“As long as he’s looking at rattles,” agreed Timothy, judiciously, “I
should say you might speak to him--yes.”
And as Patsy flew across the aisle, he deliberately turned his back and
bent his glasses once more on engagement rings. “So foolish to let
oneself fear that a Plain Story won’t end well,” he mused to the ring
with the fine platinum claws; after all, he was only a writer.
III
GLADYS-MARIE--MERELY A MAID