Somehow or other he did "put the office business through"; but the
persuading of Mrs. Payton was a job of many days. So far as opinions
went, he had to concede almost everything; of course Freddy's project
was "absurd"; of course "girls didn't do such things" when Mrs. Payton
was a young lady;--still, why not let Fred find out by experience how
foolish her scheme of self-support was?
"It mortifies me to death," Mrs. Payton moaned.
"I don't like it myself," he admitted.
"What does Mr. Maitland say to it?"
"She says he says it's 'corking,'" Arthur Weston quoted; "I wish they
would talk English! The smallness of their vocabulary is dreadfully
stupid. They think it is smart to be laconic, but it's only boring. Do
you think Fred cares about Maitland?"
"I wish she did, but she isn't--human! Rather different from my girlhood
days! Then, a girl liked to have beaux. One of my cousins had a set of
spoons--she bought one whenever she had a proposal. I don't think Freddy
has had a single offer. I tell her it's because she cheapens herself by
being so familiar with the young men. Not an offer! But I don't believe
she's at all mortified. Well, it's just part of the 'newness' of
things. I dislike everything that is new! I wish Freddy would get
married."...
"Why," Mr. Weston pondered, as, having wrung a reluctant consent from
Mrs. Payton, he closed the door of No. 15 behind him, "why do we
consider marriage the universal panacea?" But whether he knew why or
not, he believed it was a panacea, and even plotted awkwardly to
administer it to Frederica. Maitland was just the man for her; a good
fellow, straight and clean, and with money behind him. The worst of it
was that he could not be counted on to discourage Fred's folly; indeed,
he seemed immensely taken by all her schemes; the more preposterous she
was, the more, apparently, he admired her. He was as full of half-baked
ideas as Fred herself! But there was this difference between them:
Howard did not give you the sense of being abnormal; he was only
asinine. And every first-rate boy has to be an ass before he amounts to
anything as a man.
But Fred was not normal.
A week later, "_F. Payton_" had been painted on the index of the
Sturtevant Building, and Arthur Weston, pausing as he got out of the
elevator, glanced at the gilt letters with ironical eyes. He was about
to let the panels of the revolving door push him into the street when
Mr. William Childs entered and hooked an umbrella on his arm.
"Hey! Weston! Most interesting thing: do you recall the twenty-third
Sonnet? You don't? Begins:
"'As an imperfect actor on the stage';
I've made a most interesting discovery!"
His prisoner, saying despairingly, "Really?" looked for a way of
escape--but the crook of the umbrella held him.
"In a hurry? Hey? What? Well, I'll tell you some other time." Then the
umbrella was reversed and pointed to the index. "Perfec' nonsense!
What?"
"Girls are very energetic nowadays," Mr. Weston murmured, rubbing his
arm.
"She'd better put her energy into housekeeping!"
"Then Mrs. Payton would have nothing to do."
"Well, then let her get married, and keep house for herself,--instead of
laying down the law to her elders! She instructed me who I should vote
for, if you please! Smith is her man, because he believes in woman
suffrage. What do you think of that?"
"I think she's a good deal like you or me, when we want a thing put
through."
"No such thing! Smith is the worst boss this state ever had. I told her
so, and--Hey, there! Stop--I'm going up!" he called, wildly; and skipped
into the elevator. "Tell her to get married!" he called down to Arthur
Weston, who watched his ascending spats, and then let the revolving door
urge him into the street. "There it is again," he ruminated, "'get
married.' But girls don't marry for homes nowadays, my dear William.
There are no more 'Clinging Vines.' Mrs. Payton is one of the last of
them, and, Lord! what a blasted oak she clung to!" He had an unopened
letter from Mrs. Payton in his pocket, and as he sauntered along he
wondered whether, if it remained unopened for another hour or two, he
could lie truthfully to her and say he had not received it "in time" to
come and talk over Freddy. "For that's what she wants, of course," he
thought, dolefully; "it's a nice point of conscience. I'll go and sit in
the park and think it out. By the time I decide, it will be too late to
go--and then I'll open the letter! Why do women who have nothing to say,
always write long letters?"--he touched the envelope with an appraising
thumb and finger--"eight pages, all full of Freddy's sins!"
Rambling toward the park in the warm November afternoon Arthur Weston
wondered just what was the matter with Fred. When, ten years before, he
had gone abroad to represent the Payton interests in France (and,
incidentally, to cure a heart which had been very roughly handled by a
lady whose vocation was the collecting of hearts), Frederica had been a
plain, boring, long-legged youngster, who disconcerted him by her silent
and persistent stare. She was then apparently like any other
fourteen-year-old girl--gawky, dull, and, to a blighted being of
thirty-six, entirely uninteresting. When he came home, nine years later
(heart-whole), to render an account of his Payton stewardship, it was to
find with dismay that "old Andy," just deceased, had expressed his
appreciation of services rendered by naming him one of the executors of
the Payton estate, and to find, also, that the grubby, silent girl he
had left when he went to Europe had shot up into a tall, rather angular
woman, no longer silent, and most provokingly interesting. She was still
plain, but she had one of those primitive faces which, while sometimes
actually ugly, are, under the stress of certain emotions,
extraordinarily handsome. She was never pretty; there was too much
thought in the jutting lines of her brow and chin, and her cheeks,
smudged sometimes with red, sometimes rigidly pale, had no dimpling
suggestion of a smile. Her gray, unhumorous eyes still held one by their
nakedly direct gaze, even while a bludgeon-like truthfulness of speech
made her hearers wince away from her.
Now, except for her rather tiresome slang, she never bored Arthur
Weston; she merely bothered him--because he was so powerless to help
her. He found himself constantly wondering about her; but his wonder was
always good-natured; it had none of the bitterness which marked the
bewilderment of her elderly relatives, or the very freely expressed
contempt of her masculine cousins. Her man of business felt only
amusement, and a pity which made him, at moments, ready to abet her
maddest notions, just to give the wild young creature a little comfort.
Yet he never forgot Mrs. Payton's pain; for, no matter whether she was
reasonable or not, he knew that Freddy's mother suffered.
"I'd like to shake Fred!" he said; "confound it, I run with the hare and
hunt with the hounds!"
In the park, in his discouragement at the whole situation, he sat down
on one of the concrete benches by the lake, and looked at the children
and nursery-maids, and at two swans, snow-white on the dark water. He
wished he could feel that Fred was all right or her mother all wrong;
but both were right, and both were wrong. Nevertheless, he realized that
Fred's suffering moved him more than Mrs. Payton's. Think of having the
"veiled intellect" in the ell, "shuffling round" all the time! "But
that's life," he reminded himself. Duty handcuffs all of us to our
relations. Look at the historic Aunt Adelaide, who wouldn't take any of
her beaux--there were more of them every time Mrs. Payton talked of
Fred's shortcomings! Aunt Adelaide had turned her beaux down because of
this thing called Duty, a word which apparently conveyed nothing
whatever to the mind of her grandniece Miss Frederica Payton, who,
however, had her own word--_Truth_. A word which had once caused her to
describe Aunt Adelaide's self-immolation as "damned silly."
Mr. Weston, looking idly at the swans curving their necks and thrusting
their bills down into the black water, felt that though Fred's taste was
vile, her judgment was sound--it _was_ silly for Aunt Adelaide to
sacrifice herself on the altar of a being absolutely useless to society.
Then he thought, uneasily, of the possible value to Aunt Adelaide's
character of self-sacrifice. "No," he decided, "self-sacrifice which
denies common sense isn't virtue; it's spiritual dissipation!"
Then his mind drifted to Laura Childs; Laura was not so hideously
truthful as Fred, and her conceit was not quite so obvious; yet she,
too, was of the present--full of preposterous theories for reforming the
universe! Her activities overflowed the narrow boundaries of
domesticity, just as Fred's did; she went to the School of Design, and
perpetrated smudgy charcoal-sketches; she had her committees, and her
clubs, every other darned, tiresome thing that a tired man, coming home
from business, shrinks from hearing discussed, as he would shrink from
the noises of his shop or factory. "'The new wine's foaming flow'!--I
should think Billy-boy would spank her," Weston thought,
sympathetically. Furthermore, Laura detected, with affectionate
contempt, the weak places in her elder's armor of pompous authority. He
had heard her take off her father's "perfec' nonsense"! Her comments
upon her mother's lazy plumpness were as accurate as they were
disrespectful. Imagine girls back in the '70's, or even the '80's, doing
such things! Yet Laura differed, somehow, from Fred; she was--he
couldn't formulate it. He looked absently at the babies, and the
nursery-maids, and then the dim idea took shape: you could think of
Laura and babies together, but a baby in Frederica's arms was an
anomaly. Why? After all, she was a female thing; you ought to be able to
picture her with a baby. But you couldn't. "I wish," Arthur Weston
began;--but before he could decide exactly what he wished, out of the
brown haze across the park came young Maitland, swinging along, as
attractive a chap as you would see in a day's work. He hailed the older
man joyously, and, standing up before him with his hands in his pockets,
began to josh him unmercifully.
"Is She late? I bet She's jealous of all these dames with white caps on!
You should choose a more secluded spot."
"She is very late, Howard, and she will be later. She has got to have
little curls in the back of her neck, and be afraid of sitting here
without a chaperon. And she must have rubbers on, because there is no
surer way of taking cold than by having damp feet. And she must do all
that all her great-aunts have done. I won't accept her on any other
terms. So you see, I shall have to wait some time for her. In fact, I
have given her up. Sit down. I want to talk to you."
Maitland sat down, and said he thought one of those hoop-skirted,
ringleted damsels would be a good deal of a peach. "You see the
photographs of 'em in old albums, and they certainly were pretty
things."
"Howard, Freddy Payton's going into business. Did you know it?"
"Yes; she's a wonder!"
"She is," the other man agreed, dryly.
"I was talking to Laura Childs about her last night, and she told me how
tough it was for her at home,--_you_ know?"
Mr. Weston nodded.
"And her mother is an anti!" Howard said, sympathetically. "I've only
seen Mrs. Payton once or twice, but it struck me she was the anti type.
Not very exciting to live with."
"She does show considerable cerebral quietude," Weston admitted,
chuckling.
"Did you ever make a call in the Payton house, and see old Andy Payton's
silk hat on the hat-rack?"
"I have. But I'm not afraid of it;--there are no brains in it now."
"Well, I told Laura I thought she was the finest woman I knew," Maitland
said, earnestly.
"Who? Lolly?"
"Heavens, no! Fred. She's no Victorian miss, I tell you what!"
"The Victorians would send her to bed on bread and water."
"I heard her make a speech to those striking garment-women," Fred's
defender said; "she told 'em to get the vote, and their wages would go
up. It was fine."
"Whether it was true is immaterial?"
Howard did not go into that. "And then, about morals; she talks to you
just like another man. There's none of this business of pretending she
doesn't know things. She knows as much about life as you or I."
"Oh, I don't pretend to know as much as you," Arthur Weston deprecated,
lifting a humorously modest eyebrow.
"She talks well, too, doesn't she?" Howard rambled on; "I don't know
what she's talking about sometimes, she's so confoundedly cultivated.
The other day I said something about that nasty uplift play that they
tried to pull off at the Penn Street Theater; and then I jerked myself
up, and sort of apologized. And Freddy said, 'Go ahead; what's eating
you?' And I said, 'Oh, well, I didn't know whether I ought to speak of
that sort of thing.' And she said, 'Only the truth shall make us free.'
That's out of the Bible, I believe."
Mr. Weston nodded. "I know the book. I've even read it, which is
probably more than either you or Fred have done. I don't think it says
the truth shall make you free--and easy; does it?"
Howard laughed, and got on his feet. "I'm going to beat up business for
her. I took her round in my car to look up apartments for those
relations of yours. Why doesn't Mrs. Payton have a car? Haven't they
money enough?"
"Oh, yes. But that poor creature, the brother, has to go out in a
carriage. An auto would excite him, I suppose."
"I see. I told Fred she ought to have a little motor of her own, just as
a matter of business."
"Hold on!" Frederica's trustee remonstrated, in alarm. "Take her in your
car, if you want to, but please don't suggest one for her. She'd have to
put a mortgage on her office furniture to pay for a week's gasoline!
Look here, Howard--don't stand there like the Colossus of Rhodes,
looking down at me as if I only weighed as much as one of your
legs--tell me this: don't you see that this business of Fred's earning
her living is perfectly artificial? She has a little income, and she can
live on it; and when her mother dies, she'll have all the Payton money.
So it is entirely unnecessary for her to go to work, to say nothing of
the fact that she won't earn enough to buy her shoe-strings."
"Oh, but," the young man burst out, "look at the principle involved! If
you live on inherited money, you're a parasite. I know I do it myself,"
he confessed, frankly, "but I'm going to work as soon as I can get a
job. I'm going in for shells. And I believe in work for a woman just as
much as for a man. The trouble is that when a girl has money, there
isn't any _real_ work for her, so she has to manufacture an
occupation--like this social-service stunt at the hospitals they're so
hot on nowadays. Joe Gould--he's an interne--he told me the most of 'em
were nuisances. But, oh, how they enjoy it! They just lap it up. It
makes me a little fatigued to hear 'em talk about it," he said, yawning.
"Laura Childs doesn't talk much, but Gould says the patients like to
have her come round, because she's good to look at. But with most girls
it isn't real. And if a girl doesn't do real things, if she just amuses
herself, she'll go stale, just like a fellow. Fred put that up to me,"
he explained, modestly. "I wouldn't have thought of it myself."
"I bet you wouldn't!" Arthur Weston said; "but don't you see? Fred's own
occupation isn't real."
"She's rather down on me because I'm not in politics," Howard said,
drolly; "did you ever notice that reformers don't take other people's
stunts very seriously? Fred has no use for shells. Laura thinks my
collection is great. But Fred says that it's only an amusement."
"You might do worse," the older man told him; "but never mind that. What
I want to know is, why don't some of you fellows brace up and ask Freddy
to marry you?"
"She wouldn't look at any of us. I don't know any man who could keep up
with her mentally! You ought to hear her talk."
Mr. Weston raised a protesting hand. "Please! I've heard her."
Maitland laughed and strode off into the dusk, leaving Arthur Weston to
sit and look at the swans. The nursery-maids and perambulators had gone;
the Chinese pagoda on the artificial island showed a sudden spark of
light, and the arc-lamps across the park sputtered into the evening
haze like lurching moons. The chill of the water and the night made him
shiver. That youngster was so big and up-standing and satisfied with
life! And certainly he was in love with Fred.
"Then she'll be off my hands," Fred's man of business said; "what a
relief!"
And life looked as bleak and uninteresting as the cold dusk of the
deserted park.