Paul was aggrieved. He stood in the dismantled living-room of the
little bungalow, struggling between forbearance and a sense of the
justice of his grievance. "But look here!" he said for the hundredth
time, "why couldn't you let a fellow know? If I'd had a chance to show
you how unreasonable, how unnecessary--" He thrust his hands deep into
his coat-pockets and walked moodily up and down between the big trunk
and the two bulging suitcases that stood on the bare floor.
Helen, drooping wearily on one of the suitcases, contritely searched
her mind for a reply. It was bewildering not to find one. On all other
points of the discussion her reasons were clear and to her convincing.
But surely she should have informed him of her plans. He had never for
a moment been forgotten; the knowledge of him continually glowed in her
heart, warming her even when her thoughts were furthest from him.
She could not understand the disassociation of ideas that had caused
this apparent neglect of him. There was no defense against her
self-accusation.
"I'm terribly sorry," she murmured inadequately. He had already passed
over the point, beginning again the circling argument that had occupied
them since his unexpected arrival.
"Can't you see, dear, there's no reason under the sun for a move
like this? You'll no more than get settled in the city before--" His
moodiness vanished. "Oh, come on, sweetheart! Chuck the whole thing.
Come on down to Ripley. It's only for a little while. Why should you
care so much about a little money? You'll have to get used to my paying
the bills some time, you know; it might as well be now. No? Yes!" His
arm was around her shoulders, and she smiled up into his coaxing,
humorous eyes.
"You're a dear! No, but seriously, Paul, not yet. It's all
arranged--the 'Pacific Coast' is counting on me, and I've got the new
series started in the 'Post.' Just think of all the working girls you'd
rob of oodles of good advice that they won't follow! Please don't feel
so badly, dear." Her voice deepened. "I'll tell you the real reason I
want to go. If I can get really started, if I can get my name pretty
well known--A name in this writing game, you know, is just like a
trade-mark. It's established by advertising. Well, if I can do that, I
can keep on writing wherever I am, even in Ripley. And then I'll have
something to do and a little income. I--I would like that. Don't you
see how beautiful it would be?"
"It may be your idea of beautifulness, but I can't say I'm crazy about
it," he replied. He sat on the suitcase, his hands clasped between his
knees, and stared glumly at his boots. "Why do you want an income? I
can take care of you."
"Of course!" she assured him, hastily. "I didn't mean--"
"And when it comes to something to do--you're going to have me on your
hands, you know!" he continued, with a troubled smile.
"I do believe he's jealous!" She laughed coaxingly, slipping a hand
through the crook of his unyielding arm. "Are you jealous? Just as
jealous as you can be? Jealous of my typewriter?" She bent upon him a
horrific frown. "Answer to me, sir! Do you love that electric plant?
How dare you look at dynamos!"
He surrendered, laughing with her.
"You little idiot! Just the same--oh, well, what's the use? Just so
you're happy."
It was the first time there had been a sense of reservations behind
their kiss. But he seemed not to know it, radiating content.
"All right, run along and play in San Francisco. I don't care. I do
care. I do care like the devil. But it won't be long. Only I warn you,
I'm not going to be called Mr. Helen Davies!"
She laughed too, rising and tucking up her hair.
"As if I wanted you to be! I'll never be so well-known as that, don't
fear! Now if I were a real writer--" The trace of wistfulness in her
voice was quickly repressed. "Then, young man, you'd have reason to
worry! But I'm not. I wonder if that expressman's never coming!"
"You oughtn't to be trying to manage all this yourself," he said. "I
wish I'd known in time. I could have come up and done it for you."
She was touched by his whole-hearted acceptance of her plans, and she
felt a twinge of regret, a longing to acquiesce in his. But some strong
force within herself would not yield. She could not be dependent upon
him, not yet. Later--later she would feel differently.
There were six months between her and final legal freedom. The
miserable half hour that had given her an interlocutory decree of
divorce had been buried by the rush of new events; routine completion
of the court's action had no vital meaning for her. She had in reality
been long divorced from the past she wished to forget. The date six
months in the future meant only the point at which she would face the
details of a new life. Until that time she need not consider them too
closely. It was enough to know that she and Paul loved each other. All
difficulties when she reached them would be conquered by that love.
She turned a bright face to him.
"Let's go out and walk in the sunshine. An empty house is so sorrowful.
And I have heaps of things to tell you."
They walked slowly up and down the pleasant tree-shaded street, passing
the homelike porches at which she no longer looked wistfully. Her mind
was filled with the immediate, intoxicating future, and she tumbled out
for Paul's inspection all her anticipations.
Mr. Hayden had refused her last story, about immigration conditions
on Angel Island, and she had sent it to an Eastern weekly. Wouldn't
it be splendid if they took it! And wasn't it a bit of luck, getting
the "Post's" city editor to take her idea of a department for
working-girls' problems?
And the new series--the series that was taking her to San Francisco.
"O Paul, if I can only do it half as well as I want to! I'm just sure
Mr. Hayden would take it. 'San Francisco Nights.' Bagdad-y stuff, you
know, Arabian Nights. You've no idea how fascinating San Francisco is
at night. The fishing fleet, going out from Fisherman's Wharf over the
black water, with Alcatraz Light flashing across the colored boats, and
the fishermen singing 'Il Trovatore.' Honestly, Paul, they do. And the
vegetable markets, down in the still, ghostly, wholesale district at
three o'clock in the morning, masses of color and light, the Italian
farmers with their blue jackets and red caps, and the huge, sleepy
horses, and the Chinese peddlers pawing over the vegetables, with their
long, yellow fingers."
"At three o'clock in the morning! You don't mean you're dreaming of
going down there?"
"I've already been," she said guiltily. "With one of the girls, Marian
Marcy. I told you about her last week. The girl on the 'Post,' you
know?"
"Well, I hope at least you had a policeman with you."
"Naturally one would have," she replied diplomatically. Absorbed in
the interest of these new experiences, she had not thought of being
fearful; without considering the question, she had felt quite capable
of meeting any probable situation. But she perceived that she was
alarming Paul.
It seemed safer to discuss the little house she had rented, the
little house that hung like a swallow's nest on the steep slopes of
Russian Hill, overlooking the islands of the bay and the blue Marin
hills. Eager to take Paul's imagination with her, she described it
minutely, its wood-paneled walls, its great windows, the fireplace, the
kitchenette where they would cook supper together when he came to see
her.
"And you'll come often? Every week?" she urged.
"You'll see me spending the new parlor wall-paper for railroad fares!"
he promised.
"Just as well. I don't want wall-paper there, anyway!"
When the expressman had come and gone, she locked the door of the
bungalow for the last time, with a sense of efficient accomplishment.
"Now!" she said, "We'll play until time for the very latest train for
San Francisco."
Their delight in each other seemed all the brighter for the temporary
disagreement, like sunshine after a foggy morning. Her heart ached when
the evening ended and he had to put her on the train.
"I'll be glad when I'm not saying good-by to you all the time!" he told
her almost fiercely.
"Oh, so will I!"
She sprang lightly up the car steps, seeing too late his effort to help
her, and regret increased the warmth of her thanks while he settled her
bags in the rack, hung up her coat, adjusted the footstool for her.
These unaccustomed services embarrassed her a little. She was aware of
awkwardness in accepting them, but for a little while longer they kept
him near her.
He lingered until the last minute, leaning over the red plush seat,
jostled by incoming passengers, gazing at her with eyes that said more
than lips or hands dared express under the harsh lights and glances of
passengers.
"Well--good-by."
"Good-by. And you'll come to see the new house soon?"
She watched his sturdy back disappear through the car-door. Her fancy
saw the sure, quick motion with which he would fling himself from the
moving train, and with her face close against the jarring pane, she
caught a last glimpse of his eager face and waving hat beneath the
station lights.
Smiling, she saw the street lamps flash past, vanish. Against rushing
blackness the shining window reflected her own firm mouth, the strong
curve of her cheek, the crisp line of the small hat. The swaying motion
of a train always delighted her; she liked the sensation of departure,
and the innumerable small creakings, the quickening click-click-click
of the wheels, gave her the feeling of being flung through space toward
an unknown future. Her cheek against the cool pane, she shut out the
shimmering lights and gazed into vague darkness.
Her heart was warm with contentment; her love for Paul lay in it like a
hidden warmth. She thought of the articles she meant to write, of the
brown cottage on Russian Hill, of the little group of women she might
gather there, Marian Marcy's friends. With something of wistful envy
she thought of the affection that held them together; she hoped they
would like her, too. The friendship of women was a new thing to her,
and the bond she had glimpsed among these girls appeared to her special
and beautiful.
Wondering, she considered them one by one, so widely differing in
temperament and character, and yet so harmonious beneath their heated
arguments. One would say they quarreled at the luncheon table where
they met daily, flinging pointed epigrams and sharp retorts at each
other, growing excited over most incongruous subjects,--the war, poems,
biology, hairdressers,--arguing, laughing, teasing each other all in
a breath. But their good humor never failed, and affection for each
other burned like an unflickering candle flame in all their gusts of
controversy.
"It's a wonderful crowd," Marian Marcy had said inclusively, and Helen
knew that her invitation to lunch with them indicated genuine liking. A
stranger among them, she felt herself on trial, and a hope of gathering
them all at her fireside and perhaps becoming one of their warm circle
had been her strongest motive in taking the cottage.
Her days were full of work. With a kind of fury she threw herself into
the task of conquering the strange world before her. There was so much
to learn and so very little time. Her six months became a small hoard
of hours, every minute precious. In the earliest dawn, while the sky
over the Berkeley hills blushed faintly and long silver lines lay
on the gray waters of the bay, she was plunging into her cold tub,
lighting the gas beneath the coffee-pot, tidying the little house. The
morning papers gave her ideas for stories,--already she had learned
to call everything written "a story"--and she rode down the hill on
the early cable-car with stenographers and shopgirls, thinking of
interviews.
Her business sense, sharply turned upon magazine pages and Sunday
papers, showed her an ever-widening market. She saw scores of stories
on innumerable subjects; they came into her mind dressed in all the
colors of fancy, perfect, clear-cut, alive with interest. Then at her
typewriter she set herself to make them live in words, and through long
afternoons she toiled, struggling, despairing, seeing fruitless hours
go by, knowing at last that she had produced a maimed, limping thing.
Her bookcases now filled her with awe. All those volumes so easily
read, apparently produced so effortlessly, appeared in this new light
tremendous, almost miraculous achievements.
"I can never write real books," she said. "I am not an artist."
She was not embarking upon an artistic career; she was learning a
trade. But seeing about her so many newspapers, so many magazines,
carloads of volumes in the department stores, she reflected that it was
a useful trade. These miles of printing brought refreshment and wider
viewpoint to millions. "If I can be only a good workman, producing
sound, wholesome, true things, I will be doing something of value," she
consoled herself.
Mr. Hayden accepted the first story in the "San Francisco Nights,"
series, refused the second. She began on a third, and when her article
on immigration was returned from the East she sent it out again. She
had better fortune with a story on California farming conditions, which
sold to a national farm paper. Establishing a market for her work was
her hope for the future; if she succeeded she could still work in
Ripley, and the work would be something entirely her own.
She did not analyze this need to keep a fragment of life apart for
herself, but quite plainly she saw the value of having her own small
income. Her relation to Paul had nothing to do with money; in their
love they were equal, and when Paul added the fruit of his work to the
scale the balance would be uneven. She knew too well the difference
between earning money and caring for a house to believe that her tasks
would earn what he must give her.
Working against time, she poured her energies into building an
acquaintance with editors, into learning their requirements. Meantime
her department in the "Post" gave her the tiny income that met her
expenses. Late at night she sat opening letters and typing prudent
replies for its columns.
"And the unions are striking for an eight-hour day!" she said to
Marian, encountering her amid clattering typewriters in the "Post's"
local room. "Me, I'd strike for forty-eight hours between sun and sun!"
"'The best of all ways to lengthen your days is to steal a few
hours from the night, my dear'!" Marian quoted gaily. Her piquant,
kitten-like face, with its pointed chin and wide gray eyes beneath a
tangle of black hair, was white with fatigue. She straightened her hat,
and dabbed at her nose with a powder puff. "The crowd's going over to
the beach at Tiburon for a picnic supper. Come along?"
"I'd love to!"
"Then run out and get some pickles and things while I finish this
story. Mother-of-Pearl! If those club women knew what I really think of
most of 'em!" The typewriter keys clacked viciously under her flying
fingers.
Smiling, Helen obeyed, and while she explored a delicatessen and loaded
her arms with packages, she felt a flutter of pleased anticipation. It
would be good to lie on the beach under the stars and listen to more of
the curious talk of these girls. "But I must contribute something," she
thought. "I must make them like me if I can."
When they assembled at the ferry, however, she found that they were
not inclined to talk. Almost silently they waited for the big gates to
open, surged with the crowd across the gang-plank and found outside
seats where the salt winds swept upon them.
"Tired, Marian?" said Anne Lester.
"Dead!" Marian answered. She rearranged the packages, took off her
coat, put it on again, and began to walk restlessly up and down the
deck.
"She lives on sheer nerve," Anne remarked. "Never relaxes." Her own
long, thoroughbred body was a picture of reposeful lines. She said
nothing more.
"How beautifully they let each other alone!" Helen thought, and in
the restful silence she too relaxed, idly studying the others. They
all worked. Beyond that she could see nothing in common; even their
occupations differed widely. She checked them off, startled a little at
the incongruity.
Anne, high-bred, imperious, with something of untamed freedom in every
gesture--Anne was a teacher of economics! Beside her Willetta, demure,
brown-eyed, brown-haired, knitting busily, had come from unknown labors
in social service work. Across the aisle Sara and Mrs. Austin--they
called her Dodo--were discussing samples of silk. And Sara was a
miniature painter, Dodo executive secretary of an important California
commission.
"I give it up!" Helen said to herself, marvelling again at the obvious
affection that held them together. Turning her face to the keen cool
wind blowing in through the Golden Gate she watched the thousand
white-capped waves upon the bay and the flight of silvery-gray seagulls
against a glowing sunset sky, drinking in the beauty of it all without
thinking, letting the day's burden of effort slip from her.
Around the camp-fire on the white half-moon of beach beyond the
fisherman's village of Tiburon the talk awoke again, idle talk,
flippant, serious, bantering, dropping now and then into silence.
Sara sat on a bit of driftwood, her long, sensitive hands clasped
around her knees, her eyes full of dreams. "How beautiful it is!" she
said at intervals, lifting her face to the dark sky full of stars, or
indicating with a nod the lights flung over the Berkeley hills like
handfuls of jewels. Anne, stretched on the sand, spoke with passion
of labor unions and I. W. W.'s, of strikes and lockouts, and the red
glimmer of her cigarette sketched her gestures upon the darkness.
Argument raged between her and Dodo, cross-legged like a boy, her fine,
soft hair let down upon her shoulders. Hot words were exchanged. "Oh,
you don't know what you're--" "If you'd read the reports of your own
commission!" "Let me tell you, Anne Lester,--where are the matches?"
The twinkling flame lighted Dodo's calm, unruffled brow as a thin
curl of smoke came from her serious lips. "Just let me tell you, Anne
Lester--" In the circle of fire-light Marian was busily gathering up
paper napkins, bits of string, wrapping paper. "Marian's got to tidy
the whole sea-shore!" they laughed, reaching lazily to help her. After
a long silence they spoke of the war.
"It didn't get me so much at first--it was like an earthquake shock.
But lately--" "One feels like doing something. I know. What is a little
Red Cross work here at home, when you think--"
"Oh, it's all too horrible!" Sara cried.
"Yes. But lots of things are horrible. War isn't the worst one. One has
to--" "Yes, get up and face them. And do something. As much as you can."
The words echoed Helen's own feeling. In the folds of her coat, curled
against a drift log, she listened, quiet, adding a word occasionally.
She felt now the charm of this companionship, demanding nothing,
unconstrained, full of understanding. It was freedom, relaxation,
without loneliness. Like a plant kept too long in constricting soil
and now transplanted to friendlier earth, she felt stirring within her
innumerable impulses reaching out for nourishment.
"You know," said Dodo suddenly, putting a warm hand over Helen's. "I
like you."
Helen flushed with delight.
"I like you too."
She remembered the words for long months, remembered the glow of
fire-light, the white, curving line of foam on the sand, the far lights
scattered on a dozen hills, and the cool darkness over the bay. That
evening had made her one of the group, given her the freedom of the
luncheon table reserved for them in the quiet little restaurant, opened
for her the door of a new and satisfying relationship.
She could always find one or two of the girls at the table, rarely all
of them. They dropped in when they pleased, sure of finding a friend
and sympathetic talk. When she had an idle half hour after luncheon
she might go shopping with Willetta, always hunting bargains in dainty
things for the little daughter in a convent. She learned the tragedy
that had shattered Willetta's home, and the reason for the cynicism
that sometimes sharpened Dodo's tongue. If they wondered about her own
life they asked no questions, and they accepted Paul's Sunday visits
without comment.
Any other evening in the week might see Willetta running up the steps,
knitting in hand, to spend an hour curled among the cushions on the
hearth or to depart blithely if Helen were busy. Dodo's voice might
come over the telephone. "Tickets for the concert! Want to come down?"
The crackling fire might blaze upon them all, gathered by chance,
chattering like school-girls while Marian speared marshmallows with a
hat-pin, toasting them and her tired, sparkling face at the same time.
But Sunday found Helen tacitly left to Paul.
His unexpected coming upon the whole group broke ever so slightly the
charm of their companionship. She had felt the same thing in entering
her office when all the salesmen were there. Some intangible current
of sympathy was cut, an alien element introduced. One thought before
speaking, as if to a stranger who did not perfectly comprehend the
language.
"There is a subtle division between men and women," she thought,
talking brightly to Paul while they climbed Tamalpais together or
wandered in Golden Gate park. "Each of us has his own world." After a
silence, passing some odd figure on the trail or struck breathless by
a vista of heart-stopping beauty, she sought his eyes for the flash
of intimate understanding she expected, and found only adoration or
surprise.
She felt that the shortening summer was rushing her toward a fate
against which some blind impulse in her struggled. Paul's eager
happiness, his plans, his confident hand upon her life, were
compulsions she tried to accept gladly. She should be happy, she told
herself; she was happy. Searching her heart she knew that she loved
Paul. His coming was like sunshine to her; she loved his sincerity, his
sweet, clean soul, the light in his eyes, the touch of his hand. When
he went away her heart flew after him like a bird, and at the same time
some almost imperceptible strain upon her was gone. Alone in her silent
house she felt herself become whole again and free.
"You're feeling like a girl again!" she told herself. The watch on her
wrist ticked off the night hours while she sat motionless, staring at
the red embers of the fire crumbling to ashes. She saw the twilight
of a long-dead summer's day and a girl swept by tides of emotion,
struggling blindly against them.
But it was not Paul's kisses that she shrank from now. She wanted them.
She was no longer a girl caught unawares by love's terrible power and
beauty. She was a woman, clear-eyed, deliberately choosing. Why, then,
did she feel that she was compelling herself to do this thing that she
wanted to do? "It's late, and I'm tired. I'm getting all sorts of wild
fancies," she said, rising wearily, chilled.
With passionate intensity she wrung all the joy from every moment of
these happy days. She loved the changing colors of the bay, the keen,
cool dawns when she breakfasted alone on her balcony with the morning
papers spread beside her plate and an unknown day stretching before
her. She loved her encounters with many sides of life; the talk of the
Italian waiter in a quaint Latin Quarter café; her curious friendship
with a tiny Chinese mother who lived in the Wong "family house," the
shadowy corridors of which were filled with a constant whispering
shuffle of sandaled feet; the hordes of ragged, adorable Spanish
children who ran to her for cakes when she climbed the crazy stairs
that were the streets of Telegraph Hill.
And there were evenings at the Radical Club, where she heard strange,
stimulating theories contending with stranger ones, and met Russian
revolutionists, single-taxers, stand-pat Marxian socialists, and
sensation seekers of many curious varieties, while next day at a
decorous luncheon table she might listen to a staid and prosperous
business man seriously declaring, "All these folks that talk
violence--all those anarchists and labor men and highwaymen--ought to
be strung up by a good old-fashioned vigilance committee! I'm not a
believer in violence and never was, and hanging's too good for those
that do." The romance of life enthralled her, and she felt that she
could never see enough of it.
Best of all she loved the girls, that "wonderful crowd" that never
failed her when she wanted companionship, and never intruded when she
wished to be alone. In the evenings when they gathered around her
fireplace, relaxing from the strain of the day, among her cushions
in the soft light of the purring flames, talking a little, silent
sometimes, she was so happy that her heart ached.
Sitting on a cushion, she sewed quietly by the light of a candle at
her shoulder. Willetta's knitting needles clicked rhythmically while
she told a story of the department-store girls' picnic; Anne, flung
gracefully on the hearth-rug, kept her finger between the pages of a
"History of the Warfare of Science and Religion in Christendom," while
she listened, and on the other side of the candle Dodo, chin propped
on hands, and feet in the air, obliviously read Dowson, reaching out a
hand at intervals for a piece of orange Sara was peeling with slender,
fastidious fingers.
"Orange, Helen?" She shook her head.
"Girls, just look what Helen's doing! Isn't it gorgeous?"
"Too stunning for anything but a trousseau," Marian commented. "One
of us'll have to get married. I tell you, Helen, put it up as a
consolation prize! The first one of us--"
"No fair. You've decided on your Russian," remarked Dodo, turning a
page.
"Mother-of-pearl! I should say not! I don't know why I never seem to
find a man I want to marry--" she went on, plaintively. "One comes
along, and I think,--well, maybe this one,--and then--"
They laughed.
"No, really, I mean it." She sat up, the fire-light on her pretty,
serious face and fluffy hair. "I'd like to get married. I want a lovely
home and children, as much as anybody. And there've been--well, you
girls know. But always there's something I can't stand about them.
Nicolai, now--he has just the kind of mind I like. He's brilliant and
witty, and he's radical. But I couldn't live with his table manners!
Oh, I know I ought to be above that. But when I think,--three times a
day, hearing him eat his soup--Oh, why don't radical men ever have good
table manners? _I_'m radical, and _I_ have."
"Oh, Marian, you're too funny!"
"The real reason you don't marry is the reason none of us'll marry,
except perhaps Sara," said Anne.
Sara's defensive cry was covered by Helen's, "What's that, Anne?"
"Well, what's the use? We don't need husbands. We need wives. Some one
to stay at home and do the dishes and fluff up the pillows and hold our
hands when we come home tired. And you wouldn't marry a man who'd do
it, so there you are."
"Oh, rats, Anne!"
"All right, Dodo-dear. But I don't see you marrying Jim."
Dodo sat up, sweeping her long, fine hair backward over her shoulders.
"Of course not. Jim's all right to play around with--"
"But when it comes to marrying him--exactly. There are only two kinds
of men, strong and weak. You despise the weak ones, and you won't marry
the strong ones."
"Now wait a minute!" she demanded, in a chorus of expostulation. "The
one thing a real man wants to do is to shelter his wife; they're rabid
about it. And what use have we for a shelter? Any qualities in us that
needed to be shielded we've got rid of long ago. You can't fight life
when you give hostages to it. We've been fighting in the open so long
we're used to it--we like it. We--"
"Like it!" cried Willetta. "Oh, just lead me to a nice, protective
millionaire and give me a chance to be a parasite. Just give me a
chance!"
"Willetta's right, just the same," Dodo declared through their
laughter. "It's the money that's at the root of it. You don't want to
marry a man you'll have to support--not that you'd mind doing it, but
his self-respect would go all to pieces if you did. And yet you can't
find a man who makes as much money as you do, who cares about music and
poetry and things. I'm putting money in the bank and reading Masefield.
I don't see why a man can't. But somehow I've never run across a man
who does."
"Well, that's exactly what I'm driving at, only another angle on it."
Anne persisted. "The trouble is that we're rounded out, we've got both
sides of us more or less developed. It all comes down to the point that
we're self-reliant. We give ourselves all we want."
"You aren't flattering us a bit, are you?" said Marian. "I only wish I
did give myself all I want."
"I don't know what you're all talking about," Sara ventured softly. "I
should think--love--would be all that mattered."
"We aren't talking about love, honey. We're talking about marriage."
"But aren't they the same things--in a way?"
"You won't say that when you've been married three years, child," said
Dodo, with the bitterness that recalled her eight-years'-old divorce.
"Not exactly the same things, I suppose," Helen said quickly.
"Marriage, I'd say, is a partnership. It's almost that legally in
California. You couldn't build it on nothing but emotion--love. You'd
have to have more. But Anne, why can't you make a marriage of two
'rounded out' personalities?"
"Because you can't make any complete whole of two smaller ones. They
don't fit into--Look here. When I was a youngster down in Santa Clara
we had two little pine-trees growing in our yard. I was madly in love
then--with the music-teacher! Well, I used to look at those trees. They
grew closer together, not an inch between their little stems, and their
branches together made one perfect pinetree. I was a poetic fool kid.
These trees were my idea of a perfect marriage. I fell out of love
with the music-teacher because he was so unreasonable about scales,
I remember! But that's still my notion of marriage, the ideal of the
old, close, conventional married life. And--well, it can't be done
with two complete and separate full-grown trees, not by any kind of
transplanting."
"Well, maybe--" The fire crackled cheerfully in the silence.
"But if you break it up--free love and so on,--what are you going to do
about children?" said Marian.
"Good Lord, I'm not going to do anything about anything! I'm only
telling you--"
"Any one of us would make a splendid mother, really. We have so much to
give--"
"Going to waste. When you think of the thousands of women--"
"Simply murdering their babies!" cried Willetta. "Not to mention giving
them nothing in inspiration or proper environment."
"I'm not so sure we'd make good mothers. Just loving children and
wanting them doesn't do it. There were six of us at home, and I know. I
tell you, it's a question of sinking yourself in another individuality,
first the husband and then the child. There's something in us that
resists. We've been ourselves too long. We want to keep ourselves to
ourselves. No, not want to, exactly--it's more that we can't help it."
"If you're right, Anne, it's a poor outlook for the race. Think of all
the women like us--thousands more every year--who don't have children.
We're really the best type of women. We're the women that ought to have
them."
"We are not!" said Dodo. "We're freaks. We don't represent the mass of
women. We go around and around in our little circles and think we're
modern women because we make a lot of noise. But we aren't. We're of no
importance at all, with our charity boards and our social surveys and
our offices. It's the girls who marry in their teens--millions of 'em,
in millions of the little homes all over America--that really count."
"In America!" Anne retorted. "You won't find them in their homes any
more in France or England. The girls aren't marrying in their teens
over there, not since the war. They're going to work--just as we did.
They're going into business. Already French women are increasing the
exports of France--_increasing_ them! We may be freaks, Dodo, but we're
going to have lots of company."
"It's interesting--what the war will do to marriage." They were silent
again, gazing with abstracted eyes at the opaque wall of the future.
"Just the same," Sara insisted softly, "you leave out everything
that's important when you leave out love."
Anne's small exclamation was half fond and half weary.
"We'll always have love. Every one of us has some one around in the
background, sending us flowers. A woman without a man who loves her
feels like a promissory note without an endorsement. But marriage!"
"And there's always the question--what _is_ love?" Helen roused at the
little flutter of merriment, and after a moment she joined it with her
clear laugh.
"Why, love is just love," said Sara, bewildered.
"Of course. There's only one definition. It's something that isn't
there when you're trying to analyze it. And every one of us would,"
said Dodo. "Give me an orange, Sara darling, and tell us about the new
pictures."
It was their last evening together in the little house. Precious as
each moment of it was to Helen, with the coming change in her own life
hanging over it, she had no more premonition than the others of the
events that would so soon whirl them apart.