Howard Maitland's departure in January for the Philippines surprised
several people.
"Why should he take such a long journey?" Miss Mary Graham said to Miss
Eliza--"unless it is that he discovered that Miss Payton is not the sort
of girl to make any man happy, and simply left the country."
"I wager he carried a mitten with him!" Miss Eliza said.
"What! You think she refused him? Maria Spencer says she's only too
anxious to get him. Meeting him in empty apartments! Perhaps that
disgusted him. A gentleman does not like to be pursued."...
"Why has he gone away?" Mrs. Childs asked Laura, mildly interested.
"Because he wants to hunt for shells."
"But I thought he was so attentive to Freddy?"
"Maybe she turned him down."
"She'll get a crooked stick at last, if she doesn't look out," her
father said, over the top of his newspaper.
Laura came and sat on the arm of his chair. "Fred doesn't need a stick,
Billy-boy; she can walk alone."
"Every one of you needs a stick," Mr. William Childs assured her; "and I
don't know that I would confine it to the thickness of my thumb,
either, as the English law does." He reached up a plump hand and pulled
her ear. Afterward he told his wife that Lolly was down by the head:
"What's the matter with her, Mother?" he said. His two sons might have
failed in their various businesses, or taken to their beds with mumps or
measles, and he would not have looked as anxious as he did when he heard
the little flat note in Laura's voice. "Is she off her feed because I
won't let her walk in that circus parade of Fred's?"
"Well, she's disappointed."
"I won't have a girl of mine tramping through the mud--"
"Perhaps it won't be muddy."
"It will! It always is. Anyway, I hope it will be. But if she is upset
about it, I'll take her to St. Louis with me that week, so she won't
feel she's backed out. Mother, you don't suppose _she's_ missing that
Maitland chap, do you? Hey? What?"
"Oh, dear me, no! Why, Mr. Maitland has been paying attention to Freddy
for the last year."
"Why doesn't she take him, and stop all her nonsense? I hear she told
those poor, silly strikers in Dean's rubber-factory to support Smith,
the 'Woman's Candidate'! Much 'supporting' they can do! And the joke of
it is, Smith himself owns the controlling stock. She had better be at
home, darning her stockings."
"Oh, now, Father, you must remember it isn't as if Ellen didn't have
plenty of servants to do things like that."
"I hear she's signed that petition to have certain kinds of diseases
registered. _I_ don't know what the world's coming to, that girls know
about such things!"
"Well, of course, girls are more intelligent than they used to be."
"If she's so intelligent, I'll give her a book on Bacon-Shakespeare that
will exercise her brains,--and she can stop concerning herself with
matters that decent women know nothing about. Thank Heaven, our Laura is
as ignorant as a baby! Or, if Fred is so bent on reforming things, let
her have a Sunday-school class," said Mr. Childs, puffing and scowling.
"Look here, Mother, if you have any influence over her, try and get her
to take young Maitland. I should sleep more easily in my bed if I
thought she had a man to keep her in order."
"But he has gone away," Mrs. Childs objected.
"That's because she has turned him down. Maybe he'll never think of her
again; I wouldn't, if I were a young fellow! I'd want a _woman_, not a
man in petticoats. But if he does get on her track again, tell her to
take him; tell her I say she'll get a crooked stick if she waits too
long. You're sure Laura isn't blue about him?"
"Now, Father! You are the most foolish man about that child!..."
"Why has Maitland gone on that expedition, Fred?" said Mr. Weston.
"You can search me," said Miss Payton.
Arthur Weston's hands, concealed in his pockets, tightened. "She has
refused him!" he said to himself. (Alas! shooting ducks on the marshes
had not helped him!) He had dropped in at 15 Payton Street, and Fred had
taken him up to the flounced and flowery sitting-room.
"Mother'll be in pretty soon," she said; "so let's talk business,
quick!" She was apparently absorbed in "business," which, as the winter
thawed and drizzled into spring, flagged very much. "And the office rent
goes right along, just the same," she told her trustee, ruefully. "I
think, if I could have a little car to run around and look at places--"
"Maitland put that idea in your head!"
Frederica did not defend her absent adorer. Instead, she wailed over the
rapacity of her landlord.
"You ought to have made your rent contingent on your customers," Mr.
Weston teased her; and roared when she took it seriously and said she
wished she had thought of it. "Give me some tea, Fred," he said; "these
questions of high finance exhaust me." Then he asked the usual question,
and Fred gave the usual answer. "But what do you hear from him?" Weston
persisted. "I suppose you write to him occasionally? You mustn't be too
cruel."
"Well, I don't hear much," she said. She took a letter out of her pocket
and handed it to him.
When he had read it, he was silent for a while. ("If this is the sort of
letter a blighted being writes," he reflected, "love has changed since
my time.")
"_Dear Fred_," the letter ran, "_I'm having the time of my life. Tell
Laura Childs I saw a shell necklace that she'd be perfectly crazy about.
The dredging ..._"
Then followed two pages about shells, which Mr. Weston, raising a bored
eyebrow, skipped.
"_Those books you sent were bully. They look very interesting. I haven't
had time to read them yet. Tell Laura they use boa-constrictors here
instead of cats; and tell her that the flowers are perfectly
wonderful._"
Then came something about suffrage, ending with a ribald suggestion that
the suffragists should get a Filipino candidate--"_He wouldn't cost so
much as the chief of bosses, Mr. Smith; a Moro will root for 'votes for
women' if you promise him a bottle of whisky._"
"He is not losing sleep over being rejected," Arthur Weston thought, as
he handed the letter back to her.... He had lost some sleep himself,
lately: "And there's no excuse for it," he told himself; "I didn't
_fall_ in love, I strayed in--in spite of sign-posts on every corner!
And now I'm in, I can't get out. Damn it, I will get out!" But each day
it seemed as if he 'strayed' farther in....
"Why has H. M. gone off?" Laura asked Frederica.
"Why, you know! Shells," Fred said, astonished at the question.
"Tell that to the marines. Freddy, you bounced him!"
"I did not."
"Well, then, if you didn't, what color are the bridesmaids' dresses to
be?" Laura retorted.
"Get out!" said Frederica.
"Why has Mr. Maitland left town?" Mrs. Payton asked her daughter.
"Shells."
"Oh," Mrs. Payton said; "but I thought he--you--I mean, I supposed ...
Freddy, he's a nice fellow. I wish--"
"Oh, nice enough," Fred admitted, carelessly.
"She's refused him," Mrs. Payton thought; and sighed.
Even Flora had to ask her question: "Mr. Maitland has gone away, they
say, Miss Freddy?"
"So I hear."
"Men," said Flora, heavily, "is always going away! Why can't they stay
in one place, same as ladies?"
"They are not so important as we are," Miss Freddy assured her.
"If they was all swep' out of the world, it would be just the same to
me," said Flora, viciously.
Fred kept a severely straight face; all the household knew poor Flora
had had another disappointment.
"Why?"--"Why?"--everybody asked. But Frederica only thought "why." Her
first feeling when he went away had been a sort of blank astonishment.
Of course, it was all right; there was no reason he shouldn't go,
only--"Why?"
Every day, as she worked at her desk, or took a trolley-car to the
suburbs to inspect some apartment, or sat in absorbed silence opposite
her mother at the dinner-table, she was saying, _why_? She was certain
that he was fond of her. "Did he go because he thought I was so deep in
business that I wouldn't bother with him? Or because he wanted to show
me he could put in really serious licks of work? Or because he was
afraid I'd turn him down? Of course, I am awfully matter-of-fact," she
admitted; "but all the same, he's blind if he thinks that!"
Sometimes, when her mother commented vaguely on the weather, or on
Flora's indelicacy in being so daft about men, or Miss Carter's
perfectly unreasonable wish to go to the theater once a week, besides
her regular evening out--"_I_ don't go once a year," Mrs. Payton
said--Frederica would start and say, "Beg your pardon? I didn't hear
you." Nor would she hear her mother's dreary sigh.
"Freddy has nothing in common with me," Mrs. Payton used to think, and
sigh again. It did not occur to her to say, "I have nothing in common
with Freddy." Certainly, they had nothing of mutual interest to talk
about.... Mrs. Payton was wondering dully whether she had not better
take a grain of calomel; why they would not eat cold mutton in the
kitchen; whether Flora wouldn't be a little more cheerful now, for Miss
Carter said that the McKnights' chauffeur was making up to her.... Fred
was wondering how soon her last letter would reach Howard Maitland;
foreseeing his interest in its contents--the news that Smith had been
beaten, but pledged to the support of suffrage in his next campaign;
calculating as to the earliest possible date of his reply.... Mrs.
Payton was right; they had nothing in common. By and by, as the weeks
passed, the mother and daughter, together only at meals, lapsed into
almost complete silence.
"I love both my children _just_ the same, but Mortimore is more of a
companion than she is," Mrs. Payton thought, bitterly.
There was, however, one moment, in April, when Frederica did talk....
Mrs. Holmes had come in to dinner, and somehow things started badly.
Mrs. Payton had said, sighing, that she was pretty tired; "I really
haven't got over the Christmas rush, yet," she complained. And
Frederica, with a shrug, said that the Christmas debauch was getting
worse each year. Then the suffrage parade was discussed. It had taken
place the day before, in brilliant sunshine, and on perfectly dry
streets, which greatly provoked Mrs. Holmes, who had prayed for rain.
Naturally, she made vicious thrusts at the women who took their dry-shod
part in it. She was thankful, she said, that William Childs had locked
Laura up; anyhow, _she_ hadn't disgraced the family!
"Do you call taking her to St. Louis 'locking her up'?" Fred inquired.
"Laura gave in to Billy-boy, which was rather sandless in her. She is a
dear, but she hasn't much sand."
"She has decency, which is better. To show yourselves off to a lot of
coarse men--"
"Mr. Weston watched the procession."
"Only coarse women would do such a thing! And Arthur Weston might have
had something better to do!"
Frederica held on to herself; she even refrained from quoting Mr.
Weston's comment on the parade: "No doubt there were women in the
procession who liked to be conspicuous; but there were others who
marched with the consecration of martyrs and patriots!" But of course
it needed only a word to bring an explosion. The word was innocent
enough:
"That Maitland boy," said Mrs. Holmes--"I've dropped my napkin, Flora;
pick it up--why did he suddenly leave everything and go off?"
"Freddy says he's gone to dig shells," said Mrs. Payton.
"Dig what?" said Mrs. Holmes; "people mumble so nowadays, nobody can
understand them! Oh, shells? Yes. Funny thing to do, but I believe it's
quite the thing for rich young men to amuse themselves in some
scientific way. I suppose it doesn't need brains, as business does."
"It isn't amusement," Frederica said; "it's work."
Upon which her grandmother retorted, shrewdly: "Anything you do because
you want to, not because you have to, is an amusement, my dear. Like
your real-estate business."
Frederica's lip hardened.
"However," Mrs. Holmes conceded, "to make his way in the world, a rich
man, fortunately, doesn't need to be intelligent, any more than a pretty
girl needs to be clever"--she gave her granddaughter a malicious glance;
"all the same, young Maitland had better settle down and get married,
and spend some of the Maitland money. (There goes my napkin again,
Flora!)"
"I'd have no respect for him, if he did," Fred said. "He would be too
much like this family--living on dead brains."
Her grandmother turned angry eyes on Mrs. Payton. "You may know what
your daughter means, Ellen; I'm sure I don't!"
"I'll tell you what I mean," Frederica said, "you and Mother simply
live on the money your husbands made and left you when they died. Since
you were a girl, when you had to work because you were poor, you have
never done a hand's turn to earn your living. Mother has never done
anything. You are both parasites. Well, I am, too; but there's this
difference between us: I am ashamed, and you are not. I am trying to do
something for myself. But the only thing you two will do for yourselves
will be to die." She looked at her speechless grandmother, appraisingly.
"Yes, death will be a real thing to you, Grandmother. You can't get
anybody else to do your dying for you."
"Ellen! _Really!_" Mrs. Holmes gasped out.
"Freddy, stop!" her mother said, hysterically.
"Well, what have either of you ever done to earn what you are at this
moment eating?" Fred inquired, calmly.
Mrs. Payton was speechless with displeasure, but Mrs. Holmes, shivering
from the chill of that word Fred had used, helped herself wildly from a
dish Flora had been holding, unnoticed, at her elbow. "Ellen, I simply
will not come here, if you allow that girl to speak in this way--before
a servant, too!" she added, as Flora retreated to the pantry.
"I merely told the truth," Fred said, with a bored look.
"Well," said her grandmother, "then _I_ will tell you the truth! You are
a very unpleasant girl. And I don't wonder you are not married--no man
would be such a fool as to ask you! A girl who cheapens herself by
locking herself up in empty flats with any young man she happens to
meet, and signs indecent petitions, and rants in the public streets to a
lot of strikers--why, you are not a _lady_! You are as plain as a
pike-staff; and you have no manners, and no sense, and no heart--you've
nothing but cleverness, which is about as attractive to a man as a hair
shirt! Maria Spencer told me she expected you would be ruined; but I
said I would think better of you if you were capable of being ruined, or
if anybody wanted to ruin you. You are not a woman; you are a
suffragist! That's why you haven't any charm; not a particle!"
"Thank Heaven!" Frederica murmured.
"Well, unless men have changed since my day," Mrs. Holmes said, shrilly,
"a man wants charm in a woman, more than he wants brains."
"It is a matter of indifference to me what men want," Fred commented.
Her grandmother did not notice the interruption--"Though when _we_ were
young, some of us had brains and charm, too! There! That's the truth,
and how do you like it? Ellen, why do you have your napkins starched so
stiffly--they won't stay on your lap a minute!"