PART III

CHAPTER FORTY

"Are you sure you feel all right, mummy? You don't look as if you had

slept very well."

"Nonsense, dear. I slept at least five hours straight off and you

know----"

"Oh, yes, I know. Napoleon never had more than four hours and Saint

Catherine or Winifred or somebody else did mighty works on ten minutes.

But they're not you."

Jean laid her arm across her mother's shoulders and drew her close.

"You won't be silly, will you? If you don't feel well you'll 'phone me?

There's nothing very special to-day."

Martha's face, smaller and frailer than ever, glowed with love

satisfied, and for a moment she closed her eyes in the old spirit of

humble gratitude. But Jean, looking down, saw only the thin hair, white

now, and her throat contracted.

"Jean, sometimes I feel as if all my life, this last year has been

waiting for me, one whole year, just exactly as it has been. Now that I

waste so much time just sitting round, I think of it a lot."

The lines along the corners of Jean's mouth deepened and she looked

old and tired. But her voice had the same brusque quality with which

she had always forestalled any emotional demand. If the year had been

wonderful to Martha, it had not been useless, and Jean was grateful.

"Of course, if you are trying to tell me, Martha Norris, that I used to

bore you to death----"

"Don't be flippant, Jean. You know perfectly well----"

"There. That sounds more natural. I guess you're all right. But don't

go and overdo. Will you promise me that?"

"I never do. I'm a regular parasite."

"Well, it agrees with your disposition, so keep it up." Jean bent and

kissed her. "You're really much nicer than you used to be, mummy.

Pneumonia must be good for the soul."

"Got me into line at last, haven't you? But remember, even the effects

of pneumonia wear off."

"Then I'll take my innings while they're going. Remember, if you go to

service this afternoon you are to call a taxi. Do you hear? You are

not to take any of those 'nice, quick walks' you are so addicted to.

There's a wind like a knife blade to-day. Will you promise?"

"I'll use my judgment, dear."

"I leave you in peace. You are yourself. I don't believe you ever had

pneumonia. Mummy, you've been faking."

Jean gave her mother another quick kiss, and went. From the street

below, she looked up and waved. Martha waved back.

But when Jean was out of sight, Martha crossed to the side table where

Jean had laid Mary's letter. Part of it Jean had read aloud, the first

two paragraphs and on from the middle of the third page, but the part

unread she had returned to twice, and when she slipped the letter back

into its envelope, Martha had seen her hands tremble. Martha's own

hands shook as she unfolded the pages, scrawled with the doctor's heavy

black writing, vigorous and violent as Mary herself.

"Now listen, Jean, it's one chance in a million and you can have it if

you want. I shall expire with envy, but I've just enough sanity left

to know that I'm too old. To go to China and organize a kind of Red

Cross--Associated Charities--Relief of the Poor, with trifles like

directing the education of feminine China thrown in, because, years

ago, little Wong Lee used our gymnasium and I treated him half way

decently! He is now minister of something-or-other in New China and he

throws this pearl at me. I would give twenty years of my life to do it,

but I haven't twenty left, not ten even of any great use in such a big

undertaking. But you! The old courage would come back. Things would be

worth while again. You would----" Here a word had been scratched, but

Martha bent long and close over the paper and at last she made it out.

"You would forget."

After the third effort, Martha succeeded in folding the sheets and

getting them into their envelope. Then she went back to the chair by

the window and sat down. Dampness came about her lips and temples and

she closed her eyes.

It would be a new life for Jean. Jean would forget.

Why did Jean need a new life? Had this wonderful year, so full of

peace to Martha, been stagnation to Jean? Had the deep gentleness and

understanding which had come to Jean been only a masque? Had it been

possible only with an outlet of confidence to Mary? What was it that

Jean was to forget? Back and forth through the last eighteen months

Martha's memory went, gathering forgotten looks, stray phrases, quiet

evenings when Jean lay on the couch reading, evenings so full of

contentment to Martha, that she had thanked God for each one.

Twice the maid came to the door to clear the breakfast table and went

back to the kitchen on tiptoe. The third time Martha heard her.

"All right, Katy, you can clear away now."

At twelve o'clock Jean telephoned, as the habit had grown since

Martha's illness in the early winter. Martha assured her that she felt

all right and would go and take her nap "as ordered."

"Be sure you do. And I'll be home early. It's Katy's afternoon out,

isn't it?"

"Yes. I think I'll tell her she can have the evening, too, because she

wants to go over to Montclair to see her cousin."

"But don't you do a thing for supper. I'll stop in at a delicatessen."

Martha went back to her room and lay down. The effort of answering had

exhausted her, so that now she shook as with a chill, and her heart

thudded sickeningly. When Katy came to call her to lunch, Martha did

not want any. She heard Katy eat a hurried meal in the kitchen, clear

the dining-room and go. After a while the perfect stillness of the

house rested Martha a little, and she got up and went into the kitchen.

Usually, she enjoyed these afternoons when Katy was gone and she was

free to putter about and make little delicacies, for which Jean always

scolded her, and ate with tremendous relish. But to-day, Martha had to

rest often as she made the chocolate cake that was Jean's favorite, and

she did not ice it at all.

In her private office, Jean made her third effort to write to Mary.

In the outer room two typewriters clicked and from across the hall,

through the open transom, she heard Jerome Stuart, of the Men's City

Club, dictating.

"I will take the matter up with Mrs. Herrick of the Women's Civic

League, as it seems to me both organizations working together can

accomplish better results."

Mrs. Herrick of the Women's Civic League. That meant herself and the

eighteen busy, empty months since Gregory's letter.

Jean's hands dropped to the keys and she sat looking down into the

street. The wind had swept it almost clean of people and the few who

had to be out, beat along, muffled in clothes, like unthinking bundles

propelled against their wills.

"If only mummy could stand it. But she couldn't, and she would be so

utterly miserable."

Across the hall, Jerome Stuart was talking again:

"It seems to me that this is a matter for women rather than men. I will

refer the matter to Jean Herrick of the Women's Civic League, and can

assure you of prompt action."

Jean ripped out the paper and closed the machine.

"Nothing in the world is worth making mummy miserable for, and,

besides, Mary would see through me in a minute, if I wrote in this

mood. She'd know that I'd rather go to China than do anything else in

the wide world. Never to see these streets again, nor the river, nor

the people. To go where there are no memories unless I call them up.

But mummy----"

Jerome Stuart was crossing the hall now, coming to consult with Mrs.

Herrick of the Civic League. This tall, quiet man, with his unshakeable

faith in humanity, would look at her with his deep gray eyes, eyes too

gentle unless one had seen them flash against injustice, and, in a few

moments, she would find herself starting some new piece of work. Jerome

Stuart had done this often in the six months he had headed the Men's

City Club, and Jean had been glad. But to-day she wanted no burden of

another's enthusiasm forced upon her. She wanted nothing except to get

away by herself. She heard the secretary tell Jerome Stuart that she

was busy and she heard him go back again to his own office and close

the door.

A little before five Jean left. The wind had reached a point of cold

fury that made it almost impossible to breathe.

"I do hope she hasn't gone to service, even in a taxi." The possibility

worried Jean all the way home. "I wish Lent came in the summer." As she

let herself into the apartment she called gayly:

"Hello!"

There was no answer.

"Oh, mummy, it _is_ silly. If God's everywhere, why can't you talk to

Him here?"

It was half past five now, and, at the latest, Martha would be in by

six. Jean put the kettle on the gas and the cold chicken and ham into

the ice-box. The chocolate cake stood on the lowest shelf of the pantry.

"It's no good. I can never change her. I might just as well let her go

peacefully on."

She turned the gas low under the kettle and went into her own room to

take off her things. The connecting door to Martha's was ajar, and the

wind, whistling down the light-well, rushed at Jean, striking like a

hand.

"Whew!" She threw her things on the bed and hurried to close the window.

Sitting in the rocker by the bed, one shoe on, the other by her side,

her hands quiet in her lap, her head back, tilted a little as if

listening, and with a terrible smile on the open lips, sat Martha.

Jean swayed on the threshold, and then moved slowly and heavily toward

the chair. The curtain blew in and the end flapped against Martha's

shoulder. Jean put it aside. Without a sound she dropped beside the

chair and her arms closed about her mother. The little figure lurched

sideways and the cold cheek lay against her own. As cold and still as

the dead, Jean knelt.

The mechanism of her brain had stopped, back there ages ago, on the

threshold. Her will, her power to feel, had dropped into an abyss of

nothingness. Jean knelt, knowing that her mother was dead, that she

had died in the act of getting ready for service, that she must have

died about three hours ago, while she was trying to write to Mary, that

there were many things to do and she would have to begin doing them.

But she could neither move nor think of what they were.

All her life came to this point and stopped. Tiny incidents, forgotten

to consciousness, rose from the mass of memories piled upon them. They

had neither relation nor sequence, but tumbled chaotically in the void.

Martha making a dress for her doll; Martha on graduation day; Herrick

and their Sunday dinners with Martha; Tom and Elsie; the months with

Gregory in which Martha had no part and the night she had come home

to find Martha mending and had been glad. The two terrible weeks she

had passed alone by the sea, after Gregory's letter. The return--Mary

gone West and Martha happy again in the solitude with Jean. And the

long months since, when her mother was the realest thing in the world

and Jean had felt the narrow binding bands of Martha's love and been a

little comforted.

Now the band had snapped and she was alone.

Across the light-well, a woman put a child to bed. It knelt and said

its prayers, just as she had used to do, and afterwards the woman

tucked it up, opened the window and turned off the light. The elevator

clanked from floor to floor. Children scampered across the apartment

above. Dishes rattled in the kitchens. Men were coming home to dinner.

The great building was vibrant with the sounds that mark the definite

closing of a day. That small period of finite time, man's working day,

was ended. But here, there was no light, no sound in the still rooms.

The small, intimate ending of the hours was lost, engulfed in this

tremendous ending of all things.

A sputtering noise broke on Jean's consciousness. It had been going on

a long while. She laid the little head gently against the chair back

and rose. A strange odor filled the apartment. She went out into the

kitchen. The water had completely boiled away and the solder had melted

from the kettle. Jean turned off the gas and went back.

There were so many things to do, and now she would have to begin doing

them. Death, the most silent, private thing in the world, necessitated

many outward offices, the presence of strangers, an official routine.

Jean lifted her mother's body and laid it on the bed. She closed the

parted lips and bound them. Then she began to undress her. Never,

in her whole life, had Jean done such service for Martha, and now

it seemed as if, from some vast distance, her mother was watching,

embarrassed and reluctant, so that Jean felt awkward and ashamed. One

by one she took off the garments, noticing with detached numbness the

beautiful mending in Martha's stockings, the neat tying of the corset

laces. Jean had never seen her mother undressed, and the youthful

quality of the skin astonished her. She felt inhuman, perverted, to

notice this, but the feeling ran only on the surface of her brain, as

if she had taken an anæsthetic, strong enough to deaden sensation, but

not strong enough to kill consciousness. Suddenly she recalled Herrick

passing his fingers over the smooth satin of the painted canvas and she

covered the little body hastily in a white night dress, as if shielding

it from stranger eyes.

How small and still she looked like that, and, at the same time, so

terrible! A little while before and she had been Martha, her mother,

narrow in her beliefs, jealous in her love, full of obstinate faith

and human weakness. Now she was part of the universe, of the terrible

law of life and death. What tremendous finality to be centered in that

small body! And how young she looked! Only the white hair seemed to

have marked the years. A few short hours before and Jean had felt her

throat tighten at the frail body and the thin white hair. And now, in

a moment, Martha had outlived time, defied human laws. Age was a cloak

imposed by Time and removed by Death. At some distant spot, Martha,

young and happy, was talking to her God.

The mechanical movement of lifting and undressing her mother stirred

Jean's consciousness, and she realized now that the window was still

open and the freezing wind blowing in. She reached for the comforter at

the foot of the bed and drew it up. This covering the small body was

one of the useless, sentimental things people did with their dead. But

she had no power over her actions. Years of association with the flesh

had created habits that fulfilled themselves mechanically. A lifetime

with the shell of the body had given it an existence of its own, and

although the closed eyes and bound lips proved Martha beyond the need,

the very flesh and shape had created demands of their own.

Jean covered the body snugly and stood looking down. With this, her

work was done. Never again would she do anything for her mother.

Jean shivered and then something beat its way through the numbness

of the last hours and she dropped to her knees. With her face on the

small, still breast she sobbed, dry, tearing sobs that ripped the last

eighteen months to shreds and buried her beneath them.

She was alone in the world. There was no one now to consider. No need

to pretend. No one in the whole writhing mass of humanity belonged to

her nor she to any one.

The desperate emptiness of Gregory's going rose in a gaunt specter from

the grave where she had tried to heap it to stillness by the small

duties of loving and caring for Martha; trying to make up, out of her

own realization of loneliness and pain, some of the empty years of

her mother's life. Now the need was over. She would never again have

to take a book and pretend to read in order not to worry the patient

figure sewing under the lamp. She would never again have to take the

image of happy hours and lift it from her brain, that it might not

claim the moments that were Martha's. There was no need to do anything,

anything at all. She was alone, free in a terrible freedom, alone in an

infinity of emptiness.

The front door opened and Jean heard Katy come down the hall into the

kitchen. She got up and went out and told her. Katy began to cry,

and although Jean knew that Katy had been fond of Martha, there was

something so officially appropriate in these instant tears, that Jean

frowned. Katy choked her sob into a sniff.

"If you would make some strong black coffee, Katy, I should like it."

Then she went into the hall and telephoned to the doctor who had

attended Martha during the pneumonia of the earlier winter. He lived

nearby and came in a few moments. He pronounced it death from heart

disease and told Jean that her mother's heart, weak for years, had

never recovered from the strain of pneumonia.

"Did she have anything special to worry her? Any shock to-day? Still,

there was no reason that it should have terminated so soon."

"Not that I know of."

"No special shock to-day?"

"No. We live very quietly and there would be nothing without my knowing

it."

"Um. Sometimes these things take sudden and unexpected turns. There

is not always a definite explanation." He stopped as if something

more personal and sympathetic was expected of him. Taller than he,

Jean looked down coldly. He was used to women crying or going into

hysterics, and although he was always scornful of such procedure,

years of habit in meeting these emergencies had given him a tactful

gentleness of which he was vain. But now there was going to be no need

for restoratives or sedatives and so he took his hat.

"If there is anything that I can do to make it easier, please feel----"

"Thank you. There is nothing."

When the doctor had gone, Jean drank the black coffee that Katy brought.

"Could I be seein' her, Mis' Herrick?"

Jean did not want Katy to see her. But she could not refuse, for the

feeling persisted that Martha was no longer her mother, her own special

human property. She was part of the law of life and death, day and

night, the seasons. She had entered the cosmos. Personal preference was

washed under in this tide of law.

Jean heard Katy go into the room and drop to her knees. There was a

moment of sobbing and then a mumbled prayer. In a few moments the girl

came out. Jean heard her muffled sobbing in the kitchen.

"If you would rather go home to-night you may, Katy."

"And leave you?"

"Certainly. I do not mind. There is nothing to be afraid of," she added

more gently.

"I know." Katy took advantage of the gentleness to sob openly. "The

dead can't hurt us--God rest their souls--and such a gentle sweet

lady--but it does give me the creeps--it always done----"

"Then, Katy, I would rather you went. In fact I would rather be alone.

You can come early. Be here by seven-thirty."

Jean went into the living-room. Martha's chair stood pushed back from

the window, as she had left it when she had gone to get ready for

service. Her glasses lay on the window-shelf. Jean sat down in the

chair. In a few moments she heard Katy tiptoe out. The streets were

empty, except for the wind. It moaned about the corners of the big

building, shutting Jean in from the rest of the world. And beyond the

wind, the black river ran swiftly to the sea.

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

"I am the resurrection and the life."

Alone in the church, Jean sat upright in the first pew. The stained

windows, the fine linen of the young priest's cassock, his deep-toned

chant, the odor of incense, the satin-grained wood of the pews, the

exquisite lace of the altar cloth, impressed themselves in a setting

warm and intimate for the small gray coffin resting at the altar rail.

Jean sat dry-eyed, as if she were witnessing a rite in which the priest

and Martha had a part. They belonged. She had handed Martha over to

this young man, and now he and Martha and God were carrying on some

ceremony. She was an outsider.

The stinging sweetness of the incense rose in a blue cloud as the

priest incensed the coffin. His voice ceased. He looked inquiringly

toward Jean. Alone in the apartment, just before the undertaker had

come, Jean had kissed her mother for the last time. But in the depth of

the waiting silence, a need to look once more on that restful little

face gripped her, and she rose and went slowly to the casket, Against

the white satin of the pillow, so lightly that even in death she seemed

resenting this comfort, Martha was resting. It seemed to Jean that

the eyes under the thin, veined lids were quietly happy and that the

mouth, so oddly young now, smiled. In the beloved atmosphere of prayer

and adoration, Martha had gained consciousness. Loosed from the flesh,

all the emotional capacity, the power of love and devotion and joy

suppressed had been freed at last by the cessation of earthly cares

and prejudices to express itself and claim its own. In the interval of

rest below the altar, Martha had come to life, a life in which the body

had no part.

Jean touched the thin hair on the temples. "You're happy, dear, aren't

you?" And, afterwards, Jean often had the feeling that the little head

had moved in acknowledgment.

She went back to the pew. The cover was screwed down. The young priest

preceded the coffin to the door. In stole and surplice he stood beside

the open grave. "Dust to dust." The earth and dry snow powdered upon

the lid. It was all as Martha would have wished--calm, beautiful, alone

with Jean and God.

Jean came back to the apartment. The trees on the Palisades were hidden

under a burden of white. Thick white snow muffled passing footsteps.

She was alone, absolutely alone in the still, snow-muffled universe.

The next day Jean went back to the office. Jerome Stuart made no

conventional reference and Jean was grateful. He suggested their

getting to work on a new Child Labor law and they talked over details

for an hour. When he had gone back to his own office, Jean wrote a

brief note telling Mary. But even Mary was not real, She, too, was off

beyond the barrier that shut Jean from the rest of the world.

At the end of the week Katy returned. The routine of life settled.

Trained by Martha, Katy duplicated to her best the comfort that Martha

had infused. Each night as Jean closed the door behind her, she felt it

claim her, this grotesque, terrible duplicate of Martha's devotion. For

thirty dollars a month, Katy created a home, followed the small customs

that had sprung from Martha's love.

As the days slid by, one exactly like another, Jean felt as if she were

being walled forever in Katy's ordered emptiness. She left earlier

in the morning and returned later at night, but it was there waiting,

until the day came to center in the moment when she would have to

turn the knob and enter the warm, lighted vault; sit alone at the

well-prepared meal and afterwards try to read in the silence. All day

she was conscious of it waiting.

Strange fears rose in Jean and she was helpless before them. Sometimes

she left the office in the middle of the afternoon and went home to

face and conquer the terrible emptiness, and sometimes she walked in

the night until she could scarcely stand, and it was there waiting

for her. Gradually in the depth of the emptiness, something formed,

a shadow-shape that Jean could neither annihilate nor grasp. It was

as if, in her going, Martha had left a door open behind her, a narrow

crack through which Jean could neither see clearly, nor quite close.

And the thought of death began to sift down through life, absorbing its

reality.

Jean saw herself, her work, her smallest act, as a pebble in the

conglomerate mass of time. Like a gigantic rock crusher, Time reduced

all effort to powder. In the vacant hours of the night, under the

gleam of the cold, gold stars, the endings of things came to obsess

Jean. Everything ended, everything. No matter how deeply indented the

surface, the ending washed it clean again. Separation washed out human

relationships, old age washed away physical effort and interest, death

washed away all. Everything ended, books, buildings, days, nights,

work, rest, love, life. Everything lasted for a while and then stopped.

Hour after hour Jean sat, staring out to the river, stifled by the fact

of death, that great ending containing within itself all the ends of

one's smallest acts.

Where was Martha now? Was there nothing anywhere of that patient

little figure that had trotted so busily through its daily rounds?

Were all the habits and preferences one built up through the years,

but things of flesh? Was there nothing left anywhere, in any form, of

that gigantic faith? Did man impose upon himself this sentence of life?

Summon himself from nowhere, to struggle for a moment, and go back to

nothingness again? In his terror of the immense quietness of Death,

had he invented Heaven, an escape from the inconceivable peace he had

never known in life? Had he invented God because he dared not be alone

beyond the grave? And if Man had not imposed his own sentence, who had?

Martha's God, the Tyrant who hurled us into life, whipped us through

the years, snatched us away at the end, never for one single moment,

revealing His purpose. Or was it all some huge machine set going in

the unthinkable beginning of Time, grinding purposelessly on to an

unthinkable end?

The door would neither open wide nor close, and Jean's hair whitened

above the temples.

In April, when the trees began to bud, she gave Katy an extra month's

wages and dismissed her. Jean had reached another ending; the ending of

the senseless battle that had once seemed so worth while. She was going

back to the gray fog, to the wide still spaces, back to the warm sands

and cool salt winds and the sea, that neither sought nor promised peace

but had it.

When the details of her going were arranged with the committee, Jean

went to tell Jerome Stuart. Now that she was leaving, this quiet man

with the stooping student shoulders and the thick gray hair, always

ruffled to disorder, stood out for a moment, against the background of

their work together, and Jean felt, as he sat looking at her, that he

was surprised and disappointed. But it did not matter. Nothing mattered.

"You are really leaving for good?"

"Yes. I never expect to come back to New York. I've turned in my

resignation and it's been accepted, with a provision of their own

invention that, if I change my mind within a year, I am to return."

Jean smiled. "And I let it go at that."

"Then all the schemes we've talked over are not to be? No one else can

take your place and carry them through."

For a moment Jean felt them dragging at her, holding her back. To what

end? What would they give in return? Greater comfort, for a time, to a

few people whom she would never see. A few patches put in the social

fabric.

"Oh, yes, they can. Why, Charlotte Stetson's so anxious to try her hand

she could scarcely be decently regretful!"

Jean tried to speak lightly but Jerome Stuart's expression stopped her.

"Please don't be insincere, Mrs. Herrick."

Jean flushed. She was destroying this man's conception of her and she

had valued it.

"You are acting on a lessened impulse and it is wrong," he added

quietly. "It is always wrong and so--it is always a mistake."

"Not always," Jean defended, and rose abruptly. If she stayed she

might ask him of life and death and the aimless muddle of the whole.

"I've thought it over carefully. I am not acting on impulse. It is a

decision."

He said nothing as he followed to the door and rang the elevator bell.

But as Jean stepped into the cage, he held out his hand and said

with the look that had often made Jean feel that, in spite of his

forty-eight years, his grown daughter, and all the years of public

service behind him, he had kept unspoiled the sweet cleanness of a

little child.

"Think it over again--and come back."

She shook her head. She did not want to lie again to Jerome Stuart.

The next day Jean stood in the empty apartment that had been her home

for five years. With the removal of the furniture it seemed to have

changed its spirit. The bare walls stared back indifferent to the pain

and happiness they had encompassed. Before another twenty-four hours

were gone, some one else might be looking down into the tree-lined

street where, later, the fat white babies would be wheeled, and where

now the trees were beginning to leaf, not as they would in the full

eagerness of a few weeks hence, but in the meager, timid fashion of a

chilly spring, a little leaf here and there.

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

The porter dimmed the lights for the night. In the berth above a man

snored, and across the aisle an old woman breathed in gasping squeaks.

Jean pulled up the blind, and, propped on her pillow, stared into the

night and tried not to hear. But the breathing of the crowded car was

persistent and grouped itself into strange rhythms and chords that

stripped away spiritual differences and leveled the sleepers to a

common physical need.

Jean remembered how she had lain so, her first night in a sleeper, ten

years before, and how the hot, dark intimacy had excited her. How near

she had felt to some mystery, as if she were just about to penetrate

some exciting secret. Even the blackness of the prairie had quivered

with it. The red and green semaphores, uncannily obedient to a hidden

power, had winked their inclusion in the great adventure. The lonely

little stations, specks of light in the night, had been so friendly and

knowing. Now they hurt, so bravely and uselessly battling against the

engulfing darkness, the thick, limitless blackness of the prairie.

Late in the evening of the fourth day, Jean stepped from the train,

and Mary put her arms around her. As they crossed the Bay, they sat

very near together in the bow and watched the city lights, diffused

in the high fog, glow a red mist over the hills. But it was not until

they stood in the small room opening from the Doctor's, that the armor

Jean had raised for her own protection loosened, and then she dared not

speak for fear of crying.

A gong sounded.

"We meet every night in the Assembly Hall for half an hour or so," Mary

said huskily and Jean nodded. "This is going to be your room. Don't

wait up for me."

When Mary was gone, Jean switched out the lights and went to the window

where she had stood so often in the old days, relieved at Herrick's

going, wondering at her own lack of wonder; and a year later, tingling

with excitement at the offer from New York. Almost ten crowded years.

And now she was back.

When the gong of dismissal sounded, Jean went into her own room and

closed the door. She heard Mary come and light the light but she made

no sound. After a while the light went out, but from time to time Jean

heard a match strike, and she knew that the little doctor was lying

there smoking. It was strange to have Mary smoking and thinking about

her, as if she were "a case," but there was comfort in it too, as if

she had come home and some one was watching over her. At last Jean

slept.

In a few days, Mary spoke tentatively of China. But the hour of

rekindled interest did not return and they did not mention it again.

Jean took on a few cases and attended to them mechanically in the

mornings. But no misfortune or sorrow penetrated below the surface

of the mind trained to handle them. The real hours of the day were

the afternoons, when Jean walked for miles alone against the clean

sea wind, or through the gray fog, that now seemed to be filled with

the souls of the dead; helpless things that had not been able to get

through this grayness into the joy in which they had believed; or

lingering souls, loath to leave the only world they had ever known.

In the evenings, Jean took some classes, and tried to mix cheerfully

with the other workers, women like those whom it had once so stimulated

her to feel working at the tangle with their thin, white fingers.

But now they depressed her, sheltered from personal emotion behind

their diffused pity for the world. Often, she left them to walk in the

Latin Quarter until night emptied the streets of the dark men, forever

arguing and gesticulating, and the frowsy women, terrible in their

fecundity, nursing their babies from big, brown breasts. The tremendous

vitality of these people rested Jean, so that watching, she herself

seemed to be accomplishing.

But the days slipped into weeks and the weeks to months and she still

stood aside watching. She wrote no letters to New York and received

none. Sometimes she felt that she ought to write to Jerome Stuart but

when she tried to think of what she would say, she could find nothing.

It was a week before Christmas, a blue, clear day between rains, that

Jean sat by the sea and tried to face the coming year. What was she

going to do? The waves lapped the sand, fishing smacks scudded by, and

white gulls circled overhead. Jean's thoughts went round and round

in an ever narrowing circle, and when she tried to slip through this

closing space and grasp the coming year, Gregory, on the sand beside

her, stirred. Her fingers touched his crisp, dry hair. The beach was

crowded with people, but they were alone. The sand was littered with

papers, and broken piers jutted into the water and the air was heavy

with summer heat. But she was alive with every nerve in her.

Jean got up and began to walk back across the dunes. On and on over the

shifting sand, past the straggling cottages of workmen, on through the

well-kept streets of wealthy homes, dwindling again to middle-class

flats, until finally, at dusk, Jean stood on the last hill looking down

into Chinatown. She was tired at last, so that the weariness in her

muscles corresponded to the weariness in her soul, and she had the

temporary peace that comes of physical and mental accord. The odor of

sandalwood and opium and strange eastern things rose to meet her as she

went forward down the hill.

Stolid women pattered along, making their ridiculous purchases,

haggling over a leek, a single pork chop, a wing of chicken. Calm men

sat smoking long pipes in their dim shops. She might have left it the

day before. The vast stability of it mocked her. It was like the ever

moving, never resting sea--this human necessity to eat, to buy and

sell, to move about. Hundreds of people had died since she had walked

these streets with Herrick. Death had touched her own life. Thousands

of walking, talking units had been taken, thousands of the little empty

spaces had lasted for a second and then the moving mass had closed in

again.

A woman came from a dark doorway, a rainbow bundle strapped to her

back. From the bundle a small brown face with almond eyes looked calmly

on the confusion of living. The mother stopped to bargain for a fried

fish and Jean touched the smooth, brown cheek.

"A silly mess, isn't it, baby?"

The mother turned instantly and moved farther into the familiar safety

of her own people. At the corner Jean stopped again, looking toward

Portsmouth Square, the benches filled with men and boys, the familiar

refuse of Babary Coast. She was still looking when a man, hurrying

round the corner, brought up so suddenly that he seemed to have been

thrown back upon his heels.

"I beg your pardon."

She turned quickly and looked at Franklin Herrick.

Jean spoke first. "I don't know why it is so surprising. I suppose it

would have been stranger if we hadn't met."

"But I didn't know you were here."

"No, of course you didn't."

They stood looking at each other. Herrick had grown heavier, his

features had coarsened. He looked untidy.

"I--I am really glad."

Jean smiled. The implication of possible regret on _her_ part was so

Herricky.

"Why, no, why should I?" She answered his unspoken thought, but

Herrick did not notice. The interest of the thing claimed him as

nothing had done for months. He had once been married to this large,

prosperous-looking person, the one woman whom he had never been able to

influence, to swerve a hair from her own path. And here she was after

eleven years, looking at him with the same straight look, throwing

aside all sentiment, going violently to the bottom of every little

question, as if it were a matter of importance.

"Could we go and have tea somewhere? Unless you are in a hurry."

"It was you who seemed to be in a hurry."

"Well, I'm not, now. Tea, then?"

They turned, and Jean knew that Herrick would go straight to the tea

house where they had had their first tea, but when he ordered the same

little almond cakes and preserved ginger, Jean laughed.

"What is it?"

"I knew you would do that."

"Did you? But you always did know what I would do. I think that was the

trouble, I could never feel masculine and superior. I always felt like

a window with you, as if you were looking straight through me."

Jean's eyes sobered. She must have hurt deeply, more often than she had

known.

"That would have pleased me terribly once on a time. I should have

adored making people feel like windows."

Herrick waited until the waiter had shuffled away for more hot water.

"Doesn't it make you feel that way now?" This was going to be really

interesting.

"No. It wouldn't. But then one changes a lot in eleven years."

"Less two months," he added softly.

Was he actually going to set a stage? But he looked so seedy and heavy

and bored, that Jean's annoyance melted in pity again.

"When you think of it as more than a tenth of a century, there seems

plenty of time, doesn't there?"

A tenth of a century! It was horrible put that way; an eternity. And so

like Jean. A flush crept up to Herrick's eyes and he looked away.

"_You_ have made good. Your tenth of a century has not been wasted."

And Jean saw, as if he had told her, the sordid sequence of the years

to him. The knowledge of that dreary waste saddened her.

"I have worked. The East is full of opportunity."

Work, opportunity. The old worship of effort for its own sake. Herrick

forced back the words that rose to his lips.

"Yes. I saw that you had done some big thing about tubercular

tenements. The papers here had quite a bit about it. I think some one

tried to start a movement like it."

Jean shrank. She could not talk of that to him.

"Yes," she said shortly. "I had something to do with it, but so had a

lot of other people."

But she would lead. It was her way to lead and then to share the

credit. It was the old, maddeningly generous way. No, she had not

changed, not really, no matter what she said. Her life had gone as

she had planned it. Nothing had swerved her from her ideal of work and

success. Hard and cold and intrinsically selfish, she had forced life

to her will. And he: a cloying affair with The Kitten, more and shorter

affairs, always seeking, never finding, wasted through his own capacity

to feel, dragged down by the biggest thing in him, the weakness that

might have been a strength.

If Jean had cared! It would have taken such a little from her store of

patience and faith in herself. She had been niggardly, hoarded it for

herself.

"You have had a lot," he said at last, "everything you ever wanted."

From the tragic emptiness of his eyes Jean turned her own. Before his,

the emptiness of her days stood clean and filled with happy memories.

"I _have_ had a lot."

The grotesquely carved balcony vanished into the tea-room of the upper

thirties. Instead of Herrick, heavy and soft with regret, Gregory sat,

strong and happy in his success, and she had wished for a moment that

he had not won, and had been proud and miserable and weak with love.

Tears rushed to Jean's eyes and she bit her lip to keep them back.

Herrick started. Not even to Jean could work alone bring that look.

Slowly the color left his face.

"You--have found out what love is, too."

Jean nodded. Herrick covered his face hastily with his hand. He had

been right then, right in his first analysis, so long ago, by the camp

fires in the sandy coves. It had been in Jean always. In those silly,

idealistic first weeks of their marriage, when he had been content with

so little. It had been there the night he had seized and kissed her and

she had pushed him away. It had been there, hidden so deep from his

touch, that he had ceased to believe in its existence.

And some one else had touched it to life. He sat with his shoulders

bowed, his face hidden. After a long time he said:

"You are married, then?"

His hand still hid his face. The hand, too, had coarsened and grown

thick. There was black hair along the joints and the nails were

ill-kept. And once Jean had liked Herrick's hands. They had held hers

so surely, racing along the sands.

"No," she said quietly. "Not legally. He was married and had a

child." After all, it was not much to give in atonement, this little

confidence, but it was the best she had.

For a moment Herrick did not move. Then his hand came slowly down. He

stared, puzzled. Amazement and finally understanding flashed across his

face. Herrick leaned back in his chair and laughed aloud.

"Good Lord, Jean. _You_--an affair!"

Jean rose. Her knees were shaking and she was cold.

"Don't," she commanded in a whisper, and Herrick, half risen from his

chair, sank back. Seeing nothing, Jean crossed the balcony, walked

swiftly through the great banquet hall and down the stairs to the

street.

Herrick sat where he was until the waiter came and asked him to move

his table to make room for a group of long-coated merchants in gowns of

silk. Then he paid the bill and went. It was night.

In her room at the settlement, Jean walked up and down, her hands

gripped behind her in the old habit. Twice Mary came to the door and

listened to the even stride, and went back to her book and tried to

read. It was close on one o'clock when the door opened and Jean came

in. Instinctively, Mary rose as if to meet a crisis. At the movement,

Jean laid her hands on the doctor's shoulders and forced her gently

down. Then, just as she had done on the night she had left The Kitten

standing by the greasy table, and on the night when she had told Mary

of her desire for a child of Gregory's, Jean dropped to her knees, and,

sitting back on her heels, said quietly:

"Mary, I'm going back to New York just as fast as a train will take me.

I'm a weak, cowardly idiot."

"Really? I don't know that I would put it quite so strongly myself."

Jean smiled. "That's not strong enough, Mary, not by half."

"Maybe not. But why this sudden realization?"

"I had tea with Franklin this afternoon."

"Well?"

"Poor Boy Blue! Poor, weak, vain, longing Begee!"

"Jean!" Mary gripped her shoulders. "What fool thing are you

contemplating now? You're not going to tow That back East, are you?"

"Good Lord, no!" Jean laughed as Mary had not heard her laugh since her

arrival. There was a silence so long that the doctor drifted down a

dozen false paths of conjecture before Jean said:

"Mary, do you remember that vacation I took suddenly, after telling you

that night--just before you left? You knew, didn't you?"

"Yes. I knew. I would have stayed, Jean, only it wouldn't have done any

good."

"No. I was glad you weren't there. It made it easier, in a way.

And I was glad when Pat went, too, and the children. I had only to

deceive mummy, then--and keep going." Jean stopped and Mary smoked two

cigarettes before she began again.

"And then mummy died and there was no need to pretend any more, no need

for anything. Mary, it wasn't true that I came West for a vacation. I

didn't come to see you. I came to leave it all. I let go."

There was another long pause, before Jean went on.

"I had loved a man so that his going took all the meaning out of life.

And I went on for a while through a kind of inertia and because, from a

baby, mummy had beaten a sense of duty into me. It was no force of my

own. I had jumped into a stream, and when the current was too strong

for my strength I went down, just as Franklin and Flop and The Kitten,

and all those whom I used to despise, went down when their particular

current was too strong for them. Why, on the night I got Gregory's

letter, if I could have gone to him I would have. I would have had it

all back, under any conditions, at any price. Nothing mattered, nothing

in the whole world, but to feel his arms about me, to know that it had

not finished. I would have gone to her, just as The Kitten came, and

asked her to give him to me."

"But you didn't, Jean."

"No. Because something in me, that I hated for its clearness, saw that

if it had been to him what it had been to me, he would never have

written that letter. I had had nothing, Mary, or such a little part of

what I had believed I had."

Jean shivered. Mary's hand moved to comfort, but did not.

"And then, this afternoon, when Franklin said I had had everything,

and I saw him sitting there heavier and coarsened and so empty--Mary,

he's so tragically empty--it came to me suddenly that I had had a

lot. I have always had friendship, Pat and you, and unshakeable love

like mummy's, and I had those wonderful months with Gregory, and not

even the ending of it can really take them away, and I wanted to give

Franklin something, so I told him that I had loved a married man and

that we had never been legally married."

A little smile twitched the corners of Jean's lips.

"And he leaned back in his chair and laughed and said: 'Good Lord,

Jean--_you_--an affair!' and I have been listening to that laugh and

hearing that '_you_--an affair?' ever since. And in a way, he is right."

"Jean!"

"Yes, he is. You see, I had never thought of it like that, stripped of

all the personal element, just bare and stark as it would sound in a

court of law. It was _me_, and so it was different. What is an affair,

technically? It's a love, without legal bonds, that breaks up or dies

of its own accord. Never mind what it is to the parties concerned,

that's what it is to the world. That's what my love for Gregory is to

the world, to Franklin; what his and The Kitten's and Flop's and The

Tiger's was to me."

"Jean, you're crazy. Isn't the spirit anything?"

"Everything. But I am trying to make it clear what it was to

Franklin----"

"Of course it would be that to him."

"And what he made me see. How do I know the measure of the force that

drove him to The Kitten? We have no measure but our own needs. Fifteen

years ago, would I have thought it possible, when the days wouldn't

pass fast enough to get me into life and work, that a day would come

when success, achievement, the chosen work of years, would all shrivel

to nothing because one certain man had gone out of them? Three years

ago, would I have believed that Gregory could fill his days without me,

could have gone on without my sympathy and love and understanding? That

he could have nothing deeper in his life than that chattering doll?

Mary, there's only one thing that I am sure of, and that is that we

don't know a single thing about any one else, or ourselves, either."

Jean rose and stood looking down at Mary.

"And so you are going back?"

"Yes. I am going back. I am not going to drift, here, beside the sea

and hills, which are my Kitten, my succession of sordid loves, my

easiest way. I am going back. It won't be easy. I know that. There

will be times--Mary, you don't know what it means to die inside, to see

and never to feel, not even anger, to have nothing sharper than memory."

"And you don't know, Jean," Mary spoke slowly and rose from her chair

as if she had grown very tired, "what it means to have been emotionally

comfortable all your life. Never to have gone down nor up. Never to

have died nor been alive. To have grown old in comfort. A kind of

paradox, isn't it, to have been always so comfortable that sometimes it

hurts."

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

It was late in the afternoon of a cold, clear day two weeks later

that Jean stood outside the Grand Central Station and looked at the

moving streams of strangers, all touched to faint friendliness by the

accident of being in the same city, on the same street, at the same

hour as herself. She felt as if she knew them all, but had slipped back

noiselessly without warning among them, and as yet they had not seen

her.

Jean was smiling to herself, when one of the moving units escaped the

stream, and came to a halt beside her.

"Well, Jean Herrick, of all people! I thought you were in California."

Jean turned to encounter the sharp face and mouse-bright eyes of

Catherine Lee, whom she had neither seen nor thought of for years,

although, during the first winter in New York, Catherine had been the

center of a group that met every Sunday evening for tea, usually at

Jean's.

"I _was_!"

"When did you get back?"

"About ten minutes ago, and I feel as if I had been dropped from

a parachute. I was just debating the Y. W. C. A. or the Martha

Washington. I loathe hotels----"

"I say, do you mean you have no plans at all? Because we can put you up

at our place if you care to--ten rooms down on Grove Street, a garden

the size of a handkerchief, a fountain the size of a lemonade straw,

four, free, feminine souls, and an empty attic. Yes?"

"It sounds like a Demonstration. Till I get my bearings, and thank you

a thousand times."

"Come on. We'll walk, unless you're tired."

"Of sitting still for a week!"

They swung away, Jean shortening her step to the quick patter of

Catherine's. As they went, Catherine told of her work and Jean listened

enough to make out that Catherine had built herself a firm place in

this city she had once hated: that any woman with brains and grit could

force New York to recognize her and that managing concerts and readings

paid "like the devil" if you got in right.

The patter of the crisp voice went on until, as they turned into

Grove Street, Catherine broke off so sharply, that Jean feared her

inattention had been discovered, and was just about to apologize when

she caught a flush on Catherine's dry, brown cheeks, and followed her

eyes to the heavy-set figure of a man, standing on the curb, throwing

pennies into the slush, while a horde of street urchins shouted and

fought for them. The man's clumsy body was convulsed with laughter, and

he made false motions of throwing, with ungainly sweeps of his arms.

Catherine hurried forward and Jean felt that she wanted to reach the

man and put an end to the spectacle. But as they came to the red brick

house, with white window facings and green window boxes, the man turned

and crossed to them.

"Jean, let me present Philip Fletcher, Nan Bonham's cousin and the

nearest thing we possess to a male inmate. Philip, Mrs. Herrick of the

Women's Civic Leagues."

Philip Fletcher ripped off his hat with absurd exaggeration and made a

low bow. Now that she looked at him closely, Jean saw that the man's

features were well cut, his eyes were clear, blue and kind, a trifle

too far apart, and that his mouth was weak. Jean's first impression

that he might not be quite normal mentally, vanished. He was evidently

a simple soul, without dignity, but of a vanity that demanded attention

even at his own expense.

He followed them in, and as Catherine led the way up to the attic, Jean

heard him go on laughing down the hall and into a room at the end. She

was sure that he had often thrown pennies before and would often do it

again, and be overwhelmingly amused each time.

"Well, how do you like it?"

The attic ran the whole length of the house and had a big open

fireplace at one end. The original windows had been replaced in the

front by leaded glass doors, opening on a small balcony. The walls were

burlapped and the furniture upholstered in gay chintz. It was a woman's

room but it reminded Jean in a way of Flop's, as it might have been if

The Bunch had never entered it.

"It's glorious!"

"I'll have a fire lighted right away and the bath's across the hall.

There's sure to be plenty of hot water, because the old souse that

Philip's wished on us for the last furnace man, nearly explodes the

furnace every day." She was at the door, when she turned and added,

"Phil's in one of his annoying moods to-night. Don't take it too

seriously."

Jean laughed and promised that she would make allowances. But she

fancied that Catherine flushed again at this, and wondered why _she_

took him so seriously.

An hour later, refreshed by her bath, Jean heard the dinner-bell and

went down with a pleasant sense of curiosity to meet the "four, free,

feminine souls." They were seated when she entered and Catherine made

the introductions, by pointing each out with her forefinger from the

head of the table.

"Beth Marshall, that healthy blonde who looks as if she did Swedish

exercise every morning, private secretary on Wall Street. That dark,

artistic being next, Gerte Forsythe, magazine writer, and furnishes our

emotion. Nan Bonham, deceives the world with her white hair, has the

soul of a baby and runs the Presbyterian Relief in Brooklyn. Girls,

Jean Herrick, head of the Women's Civic Leagues. It's stew, again."

"And, verily, I say unto you, the stew shall follow the roast, and the

hash the stew, until the third and fourth generation of them whose

parents come from New England."

"Shut up, Phil. Nobody invited you to come to-night, anyhow."

Nevertheless Nan's blue eyes twinkled and Jean knew that she found her

cousin's humor amusing.

As Jean spread her napkin, she felt Philip Fletcher sizing her up and

she knew that Catherine was watching. She tried to think of something

flippant that would show she could enter the mood, but before she could

think of anything, more to reassure Catherine than from any desire of

Philip Fletcher's approval, Gerte claimed his attention, and Catherine,

in evident relief, was talking easily again of her own work, as she had

during their walk from the station.

Nan joined with Gerte and Philip. Beth ate in placid silence. With

this grouping of interests the meal continued, until coffee, which was

served in a small basement room, cozily furnished, before an open fire.

Immediately after the coffee, all but Catherine went their way. No one

said good-night, or made any mention of seeing Jean again, although

Jean was sure that they had liked her. Their "freedom" had hardened to

a ritual of incivility. If she stayed for a week or a month, she would

see these women, tired, gay, bored, happy, and they would see her in

these many moods too. They would call each other by their first names.

But, if she left to-night they would probably never think of her again,

nor she of them.

Jean stared into the fire, and a little of the feeling that she had had

long ago on Flop's balcony, of there being so many people in the world

with the threads of their lives all crossing, came back. She thought

how strange it was that a few hours ago she had known nothing of

these women or Grove Street, and now she was there, and Catherine was

explaining the community plan on which the house worked and, finally,

asking her if she wanted to come in.

"Of course we'll take a vote on you, it's part of the charter, but it's

only a form." She hesitated and added, almost shyly, "I think you would

be comfortable and we would really like to have you."

But as Jean began to thank her, Catherine's manner changed.

"Matter of business and--general comfort," she said in her short,

snappy way. "Such a lot of people wouldn't fit."

"Then I'm a candidate for the vacancy?"

"We'll notify you formally but I guess, if you want to, you can be one

of The Theses?"

"The Theses?"

"As against the rest of the world, The Theses. Gerte's distinction."

Jean laughed remembering the Tiger, not so unlike the thin, dark

Gerte, and wondered why people who dabbled in the arts needed these

meaningless distinctions between themselves and others.

But later, as she lay on the couch drawn close to the open window in

the attic, and looked out across the buildings, rising in the outline

of a fever chart as far as she could see, Jean was glad that she had

met Catherine and that she was going to live here with them. And

although she knew that, at any previous period of her life, it would

have been impossible to her, now, contrasted with the lonely nights

staring out to the river after Martha's death, the paid hominess of

Katy's effort, the smoothly running indifference of these women would

be pleasant. She was beginning a new life, in a new manner. And as she

dropped to sleep, Jean had a hazy notion of owing something to Franklin

Herrick.

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

The next day Jean went back to work. Charlotte Stetson, who had taken

her place, tried to evince genuine pleasure but could not quite

convey it. Jean felt that she had been suitably mourned for as dead,

and that this sudden and unexpected resurrection was an intrusion in

questionable taste. So it was with mingled amusement and curiosity

that, about eleven o'clock, Jean knocked on Jerome Stuart's door, and,

at his short "Come in," entered.

"Well--I'll be----" he had risen, but dropped back into his chair with

an amended "Thank God."

Jean laughed, "Now I _do_ feel like a returned corpse. I suppose I

ought to have written but it never occurred to me."

"I'm glad you didn't. Nothing exciting has happened for weeks, and I

always did like a surprise."

"I'm glad you take it that way. Charlotte Stetson made me feel that I

ought to creep back into my tomb. She----"

"Oh, to----" Jerome Stuart broke off, realizing that he was about to

say aloud what he had so often said in the last eight months, "To the

devil with Miss Stetson," and added clumsily, "To be quite honest, you

know, it was only a kind of surface surprise. I've always known you

would come back."

There was no conceit of assurance in the tone. This quiet man who did

things quietly had learned. Perhaps he, too, had run away from life

once and come back.

"Thank you," Jean said, following her own train of thought, and Jerome

Stuart seemed to understand. There was a short pause and then he said,

smiling:

"Well?"

"Well, begin at the beginning. What has been going on in the world?"

"How much do you know? I suppose you know about the Sweat Shop law?"

"No. Did it go over? I am glad. No, really I don't know a thing that's

been going on."

Jerome Stuart handed her a bunch of clippings, but Jean could not focus

her attention on them, because she felt that the man before her was

studying her quietly. He might have known that she could return because

he knew that one didn't quit unless one were a coward clear through.

But the details puzzled him.

She handed back the clippings. "Great. After all California _is_ a long

way off and they have their own problems out there."

"Of course. What are they doing?" Jerome accepted the implication,

as Jean intended, that she had been working. She began to sketch the

Hill House, what they were trying to do, and Mary. But the doctor

bulked larger than any of it, and Jerome knew that this woman meant

much to Jean. He had never thought of Jean with the emotional feminine

associations of most women, with the "best friends" his daughter Alice

had had since babyhood, and this new point of view held him to the

exclusion of any interest in the Hill House or its accomplishments. It

was a new background against which this large, unemotional person moved

in human intimacies. So that, when a chance remark of Jean's introduced

some young college girls who were working with Dr. Mary, Jerome found

himself talking of Alice, her approaching marriage, her amusing

frankness about life, the mixture of old-fashioned love and modern

feminism that Alice called "seeing life clearly and seeing it whole."

It was after one, when the stenographer knocked on the door for her

afternoon batch of letters, and recalled to Jerome that he had an

appointment at two-thirty and had not yet been to lunch, He gave the

girl her work and turned to Jean.

"I haven't even begun on our latest and I have an appointment at

half- past two. Couldn't we have lunch somewhere? I want to tell you

about Mike Flannery. He's the alderman who's going to give us the most

trouble."

The suggestion fitted in with the intimacy of their long talk, so that

Jean did not realize she was doing anything unusual, until Jerome drew

out her chair in a corner of an attractive tea-room. Then all the teas

and luncheons she had had with Gregory in just such rooms marshaled

before her, and Jean wished she had not come. In time it would be easy,

but now it was difficult to keep her attention fixed, and the luncheon

began in a restraint that Jerome felt, but whose origin puzzled him.

It was not until the meal was over that, in the relief of its ending,

Jean's mood lightened to its earlier cheerfulness.

"We'll give Mike Flannery a run for his money and the surprise of his

life," she said, as the waitress departed with the bill.

"I suppose you'll want a few days' grace to get rested and set up the

lares and penates."

"There's not a penate to set up. I am sharing a house with four other

women and all the lares are in place. I'm with Catherine Lee and Nan

Bonham, Brooklyn Relief."

"Grove Street!"

"Yes. Do you know them?"

Jerome laughed until Jean demanded:

"Why? Are we very ridiculous?"

"I beg your pardon. No, of course not. But Grove Street is the

skeleton in my family closet. You give teas during the winter."

"Do we?"

"Yes, indeed, large teas where celebrities and semi-celebrities are

handed about with the cake. Alice adores them, drags Sidney to almost

every one, 'to keep his social viewpoint broad,' and nags me to death

to go too."

"I take it that you don't often oblige."

"Not if I can escape, although, as teas, they are the best of their

kind. Catherine Lee's a hustler and she does manage to root out talent.

She gets her business tied up with her social life and so, when she

wants anything, she can generally put her finger on some frequenter of

the teas who can get it for her."

Jean laughed, and together they went out into the street.

"To-morrow then? And Mike Flannery."

"To-morrow."

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

The machinery of the house on Grove Street moved smoothly and Jean

was more physically comfortable than she had been at any time since

Martha's death. And although, at first, she sensed very keenly in the

lives of these women the undercurrent of loneliness that had drawn

them together, and the accidental nature of their intimacy, in time,

she accepted it without analysis. It would have been tragic if they

had been conscious of it, but Jean was sure that Catherine alone ever

felt a quality of chill in this perfect freedom of which they were so

proud, and without definitely wording it, felt, in this perfection of

adjustment, the harmony of indifference.

Philip came often to dinner, and soon Jean accepted his boisterous

manner. It so fitted the man's nature that it was perfect in its

way, like the capers of a puppy. It was only when Philip, in his

unconsciousness of the fitness of things, capered before others, as he

had on the night of her arrival, that one objected to his clambering

over strangers. Jean saw nothing humorous in Philip's performances,

but when she could, pretended an amusement that delighted Nan. Still,

she always felt that in these moments Catherine was watching and was

never quite deceived. Nor was she sure that her kindly tolerance of his

horseplay deceived Philip. Often, before a more than usually outrageous

effort, Philip seemed to single her out with a defiant glance as if

to say, "There goes your stupid pretense of dignity. It isn't worth

keeping." He was always talking about the "big, simple realities" and

urging marriage and babies, but he knew no women outside the household

and seemed quite content. He laughed at Catherine's affection for Tony,

a musical protégé of recent discovery, thereby annoying Jean greatly,

until she discovered him making Tony promise not to tell who had given

him the new suit. He did not want Tony to tell, but he would have liked

the house to find out. He often did things like this and then resented

it when no one knew. He annoyed Jean without interesting her, but at

the end of a month she found she had summed him up more definitely than

any other member of the house--he had big impulses, small thoughts and

no will at all. After Jean had reached this decision her manner changed

toward him. She treated him with greater patience and at times with

respect.

In the evenings, Jean had many appointments to organize working women's

associations or speak at meetings. The idea of a national Congress

of women, which after attaining the dimensions of a group of civic

leagues, had lain dormant in the bitter loneliness of Jean's personal

life, woke again. A certain quality of excitement and vigor was gone

from Jean's conception of it but she accepted the change. She knew

that no plan would ever have the same keenness as in the days before

Gregory's going. Something had gone out of her then, and now all

purpose was calm and subdued, like the staid friendships of middle life

against the idealization of youth. She never willingly looked back to

Gregory's letter. But she no longer viewed it as a terrible pit into

which her life had dropped. It was a wall dividing the past from the

present; turning her back upon it Jean faced the future. And the surest

measure she had of her reward was the feeling that came again into

the earth and sky and hills. Now, on the out-of-town trips she had

sometimes to take, she found the old, living, personal spirit in the

earth come back. It was as if, in the days of her loving, the earth

had withdrawn its unneeded comfort. Now, the old, old earth, kind and

understanding, came back into its own.

On Sundays, Jean took long walks, most often alone, sometimes with

Nan when she could not refuse. But at forty-two, freed from dependent

relatives for the first time in her life, Nan had an excited childish

exuberance about her that rather bored Jean. She often wanted to urge

Nan to snatch at life before it was too late, grasp some reality

besides her love and admiration for the clumsy, capering Philip. But

when she thought about it seriously, she did not know what it was she

would urge Nan to snatch. The knowledge and disillusion of experience,

where now Nan had curiosity and, perhaps, hope?

Catherine, Jean rarely saw except at meals, and Beth's engagements with

men, mostly younger than herself, kept her away a great deal. But, on

the few evenings that Jean was home, it came to be the custom for Gerte

to drop in to the attic. And no matter what the subject, Gerte soon led

it to her own work, burbling on about her plots, clothing the meager

incidents in long words. Jean often wondered why Gerte wrote or how she

sold what she did, she had so little insight, no imagination, and was

so empty of any deep experience of her own. At thirty-two, Gerte was

pitifully curious about love and sex and marriage, and Jean was sure

that she thought almost constantly about these things. She pitied Gerte

but never quite liked her.

Twice Jean had dinner at the old Stuart farmhouse on Staten Island, and

these evenings stood out from all other evenings in a warm glow. She

and Jerome united to tease Alice, so sure of herself and so untried,

but she was almost as glad as Jerome of the girl's indestructible

optimism. Sometimes she and Jerome referred to it afterwards in the

office, and this happy comradeship between the quiet man and the

big, blonde girl, seemed to Jean one of the most beautiful things

she had ever seen. It made her feel nearer to Jerome Stuart than the

successful accomplishment of any plan and softened the resentment

toward her own bleak girlhood. She often wondered how Jerome would

stand the loneliness of Alice's marriage and sometimes, for a moment,

Alice's going so eagerly out to the happiness Jerome's loving care had

made possible, seemed cruelly selfish, until Jean thought of Martha

and smiled. How imperceptibly one's viewpoint glided from youth to

age, and how alike was all youth and how alike all age. In middle life

the wandering paths of youth met, and when one reached that spot,

one picked up the waiting burden of loneliness and understanding and

staggered away with it, groaning or smiling according to one's pride.

She rather thought that Jerome would smile.

Early in April she and Jerome began to plan a summer campaign against

the cheap dance-halls and mediocre concerts on the piers that furnished

the principal recreation of the poor in summer. Sometimes Jerome got

quite violent about it.

"There's no reason there shouldn't be something worth while and we'll

give it to them."

"We will that--whether they want it or not."

Jerome laughed. "When you take that tone you make me think of Alice

planning Sidney's future. I always feel so heavy and masculine and

unnecessary. You make me feel as if my greatest privilege will be to

trail along behind such energy."

"And when you take that note, you make me feel flippant and feminine

and superficial."

"Not a bit of it. You just feel Machiavellian and subtle. I know."

"Solomon! Well, no matter what your feelings are, you're not going to

shift any responsibility because of them."

"I don't want to. I'm perfectly willing, eager even, to pilot the

way from pier to pier, dance-hall to dance-hall. I may even make

small, tentative suggestions, which will tickle me to death to have

considered." Jerome Stuart's eyes twinkled in a way that had once

reminded Jean of Gregory, and had hurt. Now she liked it.

The teas, dreaded by Jerome, Jean easily escaped. No one took offense

at her preference nor made a personal matter of it. If there was no

consideration of each other in this scheme of freedom, neither was

there any claim. It was not until late in April that Catherine put the

matter of the last tea as a personal request.

"It's the yearly Round-up," she explained, "and is really a matter of

business. This year it's specially important to me, I have several

protégées I want to launch and now I've got the woman who can do it.

Mrs. J. William Dalton----"

"Who!"

"Exactly, if she makes you feel like that. There could not be two.

Besides, I hear that hers used to be The Poor. Now it's Art, but when

she gets them both combined, she just runs amuck. That's what I intend

her to do. Tony Rimaldi is fourteen, the oldest of ten in a Mott Street

tenement, and if you had come to the other teas you would know that

Tony is a genius. He plays the violin so that even I get woozly inside,

and Philip has been known to cry. Peter Poloff's nineteen, and although

he will never equal Tony, he has enough of the real thing to make him

a worth-while pianist, and he's never had a chance. Dalton's going to

be the motif of this round-up and afterwards she's going to sponsor a

concert for my prodigies and, _zip_, their future's settled! But every

one of you has got to help. Dalton simply can't function without a

back-drop, and we're going to give her one."

"Willingly, but what can I do?"

"Come. She hasn't forgotten her sociological days yet and, besides, the

publicity you and Stuart are creating about legalizing illegitimate

children hasn't escaped her. He has to come too. We'll give her the

whole shooting match, sociology, art, pedagogy, science, society,

_anything_ we can get our fingers on. You will, won't you?"

"Certainly."

"And that Stuart hermit? His daughter can't persuade him, but perhaps

you can."

Jean laughed. "What Alice can't do with her father hasn't much hope for

any one else. But I'll try."

And for the next ten days Jean tried to think of some way to trap

Jerome into promising. But Jean's social tact was most unsubtle and she

could think of nothing but a point-blank request. To her relief, Jerome

brought up the subject himself. It was only a few days before the tea,

when he said, with a mischievous grin:

"Well, how's the Round-up coming on?"

"Famously. The branding irons are heating. We've got you all corralled."

"Not a loophole in the stockade. I know that."

"Not a wire loose. Don't try to find one."

"I haven't the least intention. I wouldn't miss it for the world."

"What!"

"To tell you the truth, it's no longer the distinction it was to have

no opinion on Tony's genius. You haven't heard him either, have you?"

Jean leaned back in her chair and they laughed together in the way that

had come to make them both feel that somehow they had outwitted the

world together.

"And I was commissioned to gag and bind you and drag you there! I feel

cheated. I must do something. How about that person with the theory on

The Concentration of the Point of Interest, who did those weird wall

paintings for the Educational Exhibit? And that psycho-analyst? I don't

think Dalton's got to psycho-analysis yet and it would tickle her to

death. Could you get them?"

"Perhaps. All right. I promise. Only you must promise that Dalton won't

get at them too heavily. I like the men, both of them, and I don't want

to spend the rest of my life paying up the obligation of this tea."

"I'll rescue them personally, if I see them in danger. I can't promise

more."

"That will do. Only don't neglect me in your kind offices. I still

labor under the delusion, in spite of Alice, that the main interest of

a tea is the food."

"Don't worry. I'll watch over you and your digestion, too; the

refreshments are going to be a wonder."

"On those conditions I expect to enjoy myself." And with the

Gregory-grin Jerome went back to his own office.

But on the following Sunday, when Jean entered the already crowded

rooms, she saw only Alice and Sidney in the group gathered about Tony.

Jerome was nowhere in sight. Jean had deliberately waited until she had

heard Tony tuning up, so that now, as the room rustled to expectant

silence, she slipped into the shadow of the heavy curtains drawn to

assist the candle-light and took in the scene with quiet amusement.

They all looked so different somehow: Gerte in a slithery green thing

that would have delighted The Tiger; Nan like a lovely duchess in

palest lavender and Catherine in severe and expensive black. Jean

recalled Mary's "humans functioning socially" and she felt as if she

were watching some distinct psychological process.

"Fine show, isn't it?" Philip stepped from the deeper shadow of the

curtains unexpectedly, but the understanding in his eyes merged so with

Jean's own thoughts that his being there did not surprise.

"Really, clothes are ridiculous," she whispered back, feeling a

comradely nearness to him in this identity of impression. "Perfectly

harmless material cut and slashed into the wildest shapes. Take any

one of those gowns and look at it long enough and it gets screamingly

funny. Look." In her own interest and Philip's understanding, Jean laid

a hand on his arm, turning him slightly toward a friend of Gerte's,

a red-haired, slender girl in a tunic embroidered in green and gold

dragons, fastened with cords and blobs of coral beads. "Now, why is

that rig necessary because she sculps, and what, in Heaven's name, did

it start out in life to be?"

Philip looked as Jean directed, but his eyes moved independently,

for the rest of his body was concentrating at the point where Jean's

fingers rested lightly on his arm.

"Li Hung Chang's combing jacket," he offered after a moment, when Jean

had removed her hand. Jean laughed and was just going to ask him what

he thought of some one else, when Tony began to play.

Jean still stood close to Philip, almost touching him, but after a few

bars she forgot him, the crowded rooms, the too strong fragrance of

expensive flowers. She forgot that she did not really like Tony, petted

and spoiled by over-attention. She did not see the look of satisfied

accomplishment on Catherine's face, nor Felix Arhn scowling his deepest

foreign scowl of approval; nor Mrs. Dalton sitting quietly, her jeweled

hands in her lap. She did not even hear the music distinctly. It

created about her a medium into which she dissolved in feeling; and

when her brain registered, it was not notes or present impressions,

but memories of the first happy days with Herrick, and deep moments of

love with Gregory. Her face softened, so that Philip, stealing glances,

felt his throat tighten, and his eyes were hot and moist. He wanted the

music to go on forever, to keep Jean close with that look on her face.

And he ached for it to stop, before his hands should reach to her.

When it stopped, Jean would be again the hard, clear-headed woman who

scorned him and tried so hard sometimes not to show it. He had hated

her often for her conceited assumption of superiority, but he knew now

that he could never hate her again. That slightly quivering mouth had

taken his weapons from him.

The music ended. Philip turned to Jean, but she was acknowledging the

efforts of a tall man with gray hair and smiling eyes to negotiate the

buzzing groups and reach her. In another instant Jean was introducing

him.

"Mr. Fletcher, let me present Jerome Stuart."

As they shook hands, Philip felt Jerome size him up and dismiss him.

For a few moments Philip stood where he was and then, unnoticed either

by Jean or Jerome, moved away.

Tony played twice more and when he laid aside his violin, Jean and

Jerome looked quietly at each other.

"It makes me feel like two cents," Jerome whispered and Jean nodded.

"It's usually the way, isn't it?"

"Nearly always, I haven't enough conceit left even to tease Alice. I

shall confess."

"Come and do it now. I should like to hear you----"

But, before they could reach Alice, Mrs. Dalton spied Jean and billowed

down upon her. In vain Jean tried to insert Jerome between them,

dragging in every public effort in which he had been concerned for the

last year. Mrs. Dalton heard none of it. Catherine was right. She had

not forgotten her sociological days.

"It had such definite results," she cascaded, quite lost in this

renewal of acquaintance with the head of the Women's Civic Leagues.

"Such definite, concrete results, don't you know. While this

other--heredity is such a factor, don't you think? One never knows what

strange strain will crop out. Genius has so many strands intermingled.

Now, take our own little Tony. _What_ are we going to do about that

impossible family of his? We _must_ rescue him. We simply can't let him

smother there in those hideous rooms."

"They are pretty impossible," Jean conceded with a frown. "But it's the

very best possible thing for him at present. How long it will be, I

don't know, and in the end, of course, he will go. He would, even if no

one did anything for him. But now, he is just one quivering plate for

impressions and, although he may never realize it himself, it will mean

a lot--the hot, crowded rooms, the crying babies, the fierce fight for

life and the inherent joyousness of his people that nothing can quite

kill. Out of this jumble Tony ought to draw into himself something that

nothing else could give. He comes from the People and he ought to give

his gift back to them."

"Oh," Mrs. Dalton gasped, but Jean went on impatiently: "There's such

a lot of talk these days about The People and their Power and most of

us don't know what we mean by it. We hear such a lot about the Will

of the People, and the Spirit of the People, and the Literature and

Soul of the People, and we are beginning to hear about Music of the

People. But here in America it seems to mean negro melodies or Indian

lyrics, the plaints of a dying race. Why shouldn't there be modern,

industrial music, not the blaring of factory whistles, but the spirit

of industrialism, the life of the immigrants, the economic fight, the

whole struggle of this great Melting Pot--sound etchings, like Pennel's

skyscrapers and bridges. Tony ought to be able to do it. He has the

genius, the heritage and the environment."

"Oh, my dear Mrs. Herrick, you must come and talk to the Lost Art. You

put it all so vividly, but then you always did. Do you remember, in the

old days----"

"Pardon me," Jean interposed hastily, "but Miss Lee is signaling

me," and, feeling that she was not playing fair, Jean escaped. A few

moments later she looked back and saw Jerome, whom Mrs. Dalton had at

last connected with the Sweat Shop law, being drowned under a similar

cataract, to the great amusement of Alice, who stood by, making not the

slightest effort to save him.

It was Catherine who released him at last. The next moment, Jean was

barricaded between two tea trays and Jerome was looking at her in real

reproof.

"Well, have you any decent excuse? Is that the way you keep a promise?"

"Promise? Did I make a promise?"

"You certainly did. You let me suppose that I was not to be thrown to

the lions without a saving effort on your part. And then you went and

threw me yourself."

"But she would have gotten you in a little while, anyhow."

"You can't prove it. I've dodged that kind for many years now, long

before you knew what a Civic League was."

"I thought this was your first tea," Jean parried.

"All the more reason for seeing that I enjoyed it. I may come to

others."

"You know you're safe on that score. This is the last."

"Well, you've got to atone, in some way, for that performance. Will you

come to supper?"

"Supper!"

Jerome smiled. "I don't care if you've eaten a whole cake. I hope you

have. Your punishment will be no worse than mine. I promised Alice that

I would trot along with her and Sidney to a little joint they always go

to after these functions. How much longer will this last? The music is

over, isn't it?"

"It is. But this may dribble along till almost eight and there are

always a few to stay and eat the scraps. I believe Catherine expects

you and Alice and Sidney to be among the chosen few."

"Don't tell Alice; I rather fancy the little joint." Jerome's raised

brows indicated Mrs. Dalton, and Jean nodded.

"How soon can you slip away? In ten minutes?"

"I'll try. Go over and keep Dalton anchored where she is and I'll start

my escape."

Jerome obeyed and Jean began to make her way out, stopping only when

she was forced to. Once she was halted close to where Philip Fletcher

stood, apart, silent, his mouth drawn downward like a hurt child's. As

Jean passed close, he moved toward her, but some one else claimed her

attention, and Philip went on into the hall. He watched for Jean but

she went upstairs by a back way, and when she came down he saw she was

ready to go out.

"Will you tell Catherine that I'm going out to supper? I tried to get

at her but she is too busy."

"If I see her," Philip replied and knew that Jean, already joined

by Jerome Stuart and Alice and Sidney, did not hear. They left the

house together and Philip stood staring at the door Jean had closed

so quietly, like a child slipping away on an adventure. Across the

threshold of the living-room, Catherine caught the look on Philip's

face, broke off a sentence in the middle, then grasped the thread

almost instantly, and went on.

When the household and the Chosen Few sat down to the scraps, there was

much speculation on Gerte's part as to what had become of Philip. But

Catherine said nothing.

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

Philip did not come for a week. Every day, after the first three, Nan

rang up the office, but either Philip had just left or had not yet

come. Every night Gerte wondered why, until Catherine finally advised

her to write if she was so anxious. And then, on the second Wednesday,

Philip appeared. He came late, in his most boisterous mood. Gerte

fussed over him, touched him, patted his shoulder, insisted that they

had been worried to death about him. Even Beth showed a slight sense of

restored comfort, as if some special piece of furniture to which she

had grown accustomed had been replaced. Nan was almost as exuberant as

Philip. Catherine alone refused to confess any anxiety or relief.

Jean fancied that Catherine's attitude interested Philip, and that in

some way he had changed. His hilarity was still diffused to include

them all, but when he spoke to Jean directly, he seemed to clear a

little space of this boisterous litter, to enter with her an interval

of reality. Jean was too busy, however, with her own work and helping

Catherine with the coming concert to give it much attention.

The concert was to be on Friday and on Monday Jean had her secretary

send out a list of complimentary tickets. Jerome came in while Jean was

dictating names, waited until she had finished, and, when the girl had

gone, said:

"Well?"

"Well?"

"I didn't hear mine; don't I get a ticket?"

"Do you want to go?"

Jerome smiled. "You can't make me mad that way, not a scrap. You're in

league with Alice. I can see that, but you can't get a rise out of me

that way. I'm going to the concert because----"

"Never mind. Don't bother to invent a reason. You're going because you

want to."

"Oh, feminine intuition, deep, unfathomable and always right! Exactly.

I'm going because I want to. Do you know a better reason?"

"None. What did Alice say?"

"She doesn't know yet. I can't reform all at once. I'm going to appear

and astonish her."

Jean took a ticket and handed it to him.

"Where is it?"

"Between Alice and myself."

Jerome fingered the ticket as if he were about to say something,

didn't, and slipped it into his pocket.

"But please don't forget that some one has to be responsible for me.

With Tony I guess I shall be safe, but with that Poloff person there

is danger. I _never_ know when the end of one of those classical

selections has arrived and I may disgrace you by clapping at the wrong

place."

"Never fear. I'll see that no harm comes nigh thee."

"See to it better than you did at the tea," Jerome shot back from the

doorway as he left.

On Friday, Jean did not go to the office at all. Gerte had left some

alterations on her dress until the last moment, and all afternoon an

excitable French seamstress buzzed about the house like a gnat, getting

in every one's way, calling incessantly on Le Bon Dieu for needles of

the right size, her thimble, for Madamoiselle. Catherine, maddeningly

calm in any confusion caused by others, went quietly about, saying

bitter, sarcastic things in a gentle voice, and only the realization

that this evening was something of a trial for Catherine prevented them

from retaliating in kind.

Not until the pickup supper was over, and the French gnat gone, did

peace descend. Then, stretched on the couch before the open window of

her attic, Jean looked up into the soft spring dusk and let its peace

wrap her. The little stars still twinkled with some of the crisp,

business-like twinkle of winter, but spring had already come. Down in

the narrow streets it was warm. Soon summer would be there. In a short

while, a few weeks at most, the house would be empty and still as it

was now. The others would be gone on their summer vacations. Jean felt

that she would like the house, alone in the silence.

There was barely time to dress when Jean at last jumped up and turned

on the light. It was three years since Jean had worn an evening dress

and that had been a very simple affair compared to this. Nan had

insisted on the lowest possible neck and not the vestige of a sleeve.

As Jean hurried into the filmy chiffon, the intricacies of its hooking

amused her.

"I feel exactly as if I were a puzzle putting myself together."

She was preening anxiously before the glass, making sure that she had

solved the puzzle correctly, when, without waiting for an answer to her

knock, Catherine hurried in.

"Just this one hook, please. I simply can't manage it and

Gerte--why----"

Catherine stopped and took Jean in from top to toe and back.

"Jean Herrick, _are_ you going to wear your hair like that?"

"Why, what's the matter with it?"

"It's the way you talked to that labor crowd last Monday."

"Surely. I always do it that way."

"It's impossible with that gown. Nine-tenths of you looks like the real

thing and the other tenth----"

"You've got it twisted. One-tenth looks like me and the other

nine-tenths are somebody else. I feel--like an idiot--in this thing."

"You come darn near looking like it with your hair that way. Fluff it

up some."

"Oh, come on, Catherine, and get hooked. I don't know how to fluff it

and wouldn't if I did. What difference does it make, anyhow?"

Catherine looked at her queerly. "None--I guess."

Jean finished the hooking. "There, you're gowned enough for the whole

bunch." Catherine's dress was very simple and apparently made no effort

to be anything but a covering. In reality it was a frame and shadow

box, that softened the sharpness of Catherine's face to piquancy, made

her thirty instead of forty, mischievous instead of caustic.

"You're ready, then?" Catherine spoke as if she were giving Jean a last

chance to redeem the hair, drawn back in the low, tight knot.

"Been ready for hours and mapped out a whole summer waiting."

Catherine, standing near the switch, turned off the light.

"Do you mean that, too, about not going out of town all summer?"

"Yes, except, perhaps, for week-ends."

Catherine did not answer, but Jean had the feeling of something moving

between them in the darkness. Then Catherine passed into the hall.

"Come on. There's Philip with the taxi."

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

The others had already arrived when Catherine, Jean and Philip took

the three vacant seats on the center aisle. From her box, Mrs. Dalton,

resplendent in black lace and diamonds, recognized the arrivals and

waved graciously.

"Thinks she's slumming, I suppose. We're a cross between Mott Street

and Society. What do you suppose she'd do if I fingered my nose at her?"

"I haven't the least idea. Why don't you try and find out." Since the

tea, Jean often considered Philip's foolish suggestions amiably.

But before he could say anything more, Alice leaned across the vacant

seat.

"Who on earth is this one for? We've been guessing for the last five

minutes."

"Why waste so much energy? Whoever it is will probably be here in

another five and then----"

Standing in the aisle, Jerome included the entire row in a welcoming

nod, took the vacant seat and looked inquiringly at Alice.

"Any objections, kiddie?"

"Daddy Stuart, you are the most annoying male thing in captivity."

"Now, Alice, if you will think back, slowly, carefully and logically--a

most difficult performance for you, I own, you will remember that I

never actually said I would not come."

"You nice old fake--I don't care why you came as long as you're here.

Everything's going to be wonderful to-night, I feel it in my bones."

"Perhaps it will be beyond me altogether."

"Never mind. I'll take care of you. Don't applaud on your own

initiative and stop the moment I do."

"Oh, you're not going to be burdened with the responsibility. I've

arranged to be tutored through this already."

"You have, have you? Well! So _you_ were in the plot, too." Alice

leaned to Jean again.

"Not exactly. I----"

"You're both as bad, one as the other. Manage it yourselves." The laugh

was more a caress than a sound, as Alice turned to Sidney.

"Thanks." Jerome faced Jean, fully, for the first time, and then,

almost instantly, picked up his program and began to study it

carefully. For, in that passing glance, Jean had detached herself from

the background of bright light, evening dress and subdued chatter into

which his first general impression had plunged her, and stood apart,

unfamiliar and strange. Jerome read the program through once, and then

again, giving meticulous attention to each selection, but, as if there

were a magnet beside him, the change in Jean kept drawing him away.

What was it? Jerome was used to the transformation of evening dress

which he insisted reduced all women to a common denominator. But Jean

was not at all reduced to a common denominator. Nor was she herself.

She was and she wasn't, in an annoyingly confused fashion that made

Jerome feel, if he kept his eyes long enough on the program, that

Jean was exactly the same, except that she wore a low-cut light dress

instead of the everyday high-cut dark one. But at his faintest move to

verify this by a direct glance, she was somebody else altogether.

Jerome picked out certain numbers and considered these especially. He

must turn and get this thing reduced to a phrase and so eliminate it.

The concert would last for at least two hours and a half, and he could

not sit there staring at his program and wondering why Jean Herrick was

and wasn't Jean Herrick. He wanted to look at Jean, but he did not want

Jean to look at him.

Then Catherine spoke and Jean leaned across Philip to answer. Her back

was to Jerome, and without moving he glanced up sidewise.

There was the same heavy knob of hair, low on her neck. The same

threads of gray, which Jean might easily have concealed but never did,

ran through the thick mass into the tight wad. The same bone hair-pins

inserted in exactly the same way. It was an unbecoming way to do her

hair, ugly even in office clothes, and preposterous with a low-cut

gown. Jerome studied the tight wad with puzzled intensity. He had an

idea that the solution lay here somehow. He had heard Alice say that a

woman's character showed in the way she did her hair and the sweeping

assertion had amused him as Alice's large generalizations always did.

But perhaps Alice was right. Surely such a fashion of doing one's

hair was more than an exterior detail. It shrieked aloud of lack of

taste, of a sense of fitness, of indifference to accepted standards.

It stood for a kind of density or conceit in a way. It was a glaring

discord, just as if Jean had brought her black leather wallet or worn

her white chamois gloves, or carried a fountain pen concealed in the

chiffon. Jerome's eye ran along the row of seats in front. That was it,

that impossible wad of hair screwed into a cumbersome knob. It was so

incongruous that it might well strike one, a man especially, used to

taking in a woman's appearance as a whole, as something quite wrong,

wrong enough to make a distinct impression. Relieved, and amused at his

own interest, Jerome's eyes returned to Jean.

And then, he was suddenly and overwhelmingly aware of Jean's neck and

shoulders, of the soft, white velvet of the skin, the warm smoothness

of the flesh, the firm muscles molded in curves that called to every

tingling nerve of his fingertips. It seemed to Jerome an interminable

time that he sat so, conscious to the depths, of that velvet whiteness.

Until Jean moved and released him.

The green and gold curtain drew back and Tony, clutching his violin as

if it were a weapon of defense against the staring enemy, advanced to

the footlights. From her box, Mrs. Dalton made comforting signals, and

J. William himself, a meager black and white figure just behind her,

clapped his thin, cold hands in encouragement.

Jean leaned back. Jerome could feel her relaxed, lost completely from

the first notes. Jerome moved, so that in no way did he touch even the

wooden arm of Jean's seat, and tried to listen. But he heard only the

opening measures, and, after that, did not know that Tony was playing

at all.

This was not the Jean Herrick with whom he had worked so pleasantly.

It was another woman. That Jean Herrick made no demand apart from

intellectual sympathy. While this--something in the very fiber of the

woman, akin to the soft velvet of her skin, those definite curves,

called to him. He had never even thought of Jean's age or whether she

were good looking. Although if any one had asked him he would have said

she had a fine face. But her body had never entered his thought at all.

He might have known, if he had considered it, that her flesh would be

firm and white, her muscles well molded, but ... Jerome drew still

farther away. He did not want to touch her now. Instead there was a

distinct repulsion, as if Jean had offered him a caress uninvited.

He was not used to thinking of women in this way. Unrestrained emotion

had never played any part in his life. Other men might have moments of

physical surprise like this, but he had never had them. He felt unclean

and at the same time, as if the fault were not his. Jean had done

something, tricked him, taken him at a disadvantage.

When Alice's hand on his arm catapulted him back to reality, he found

that Tony had played entirely through the first division of the program

and disappeared.

"Aren't you glad you came? Isn't he wonderful?" Alice was pinching him

in her enthusiasm.

"Yes ... of course ... yes, he's wonderful."

"Then apologize like a little man and confess that you've been bigoted

and silly and will never be so obstinate again."

"I ... apologize."

"Forgiven. Now apologize to Mrs. Herrick."

Jerome turned reluctantly to Jean, and away again, without speaking.

For Jean was staring straight before her, and although he could not see

her eyes, he knew they were full of tears.

Jean Herrick crying! What reserves of emotion she had! What reactions

he had never glimpsed!

The applause was tumultuous now but Tony did not come back. After a

short interval, Peter Poloff, all very black hair and violent gestures,

appeared and fussed about, having the piano moved this way and that.

At last it was arranged to suit; he perched on the edge of the stool,

pulled up his cuffs, and crashed down upon his instrument in pitiless

technique.

Jerome drew deeper into his chair and made no effort to listen. If he

did not get this matter straightened in his own mind before the concert

ended, he felt that to-morrow and the next day and always after,

whenever he spoke to Jean, he would see, under the high-cut, ugly

clothes she wore to the office, those calling curves and that white

flesh.

But he had settled nothing when, with a final crash, Poloff extricated

himself from the keyboard, received the applause with exaggerated bows,

and, most patently jealous of Tony, walked off the stage.

Jerome picked up his program and so escaped Alice's claiming

enthusiasm. But he knew every pressure of Jean's fingers. He felt her

move as if she were going to speak to him and hoped she would not. He

did not want Jean to speak to him yet.

Then Philip whispered something and she leaned away. The buzzing of

Philip's voice continued until Jerome wanted to reach across Jean and

strike him. To his taut nerves it was like the sting of a pestiferous

insect. When he felt that it was beyond his silent endurance, it

stopped and Jerome wanted more than anything else for it to continue,

anything to keep Jean from turning to him yet. But when she did not,

only settled quietly in her seat, waiting for Tony to come again,

Jerome was angry. And then Tony was back for the last time. From

sun-soaked vineyards across the sea, the music called in folksongs and

old dances of the people. The simple, plaintive things stirred Jean to

the depths, interpreted all the inexpressible beauty in the sky and sea

and earth and human love. Jerome knew that her lips were quivering and

his own were parched and dry.

Not a sound broke the stillness until Tony drew the bow in the last

note. Then a clapping and stamping forced him back again and again,

until, forgetting his pose of grown-up artist, Tony stamped his foot

in childish rage and shook his head. There was no mistaking that. The

audience rose laughing and went out.

A few moments later they were all together on the street, and Myra

Cohen was explaining about "eats" at her studio to which they had

promised to go en masse.

"But you must come, Mr. Stuart; please don't break the party, it's

been too utterly lovely." With one eye on Gerte and Felix, who already

showed signs of starting off by themselves, Myra made a last effort.

"Please, Miss Stuart, won't you make him, and you, Mrs. Herrick?"