_In Which Aunt Frances Speaks of Matrimony as a Fixed Institution and
is Met by Flaming Arguments; and in Which a Strange Voice Sings Upon
the Stairs._
Aunt Frances stayed until after the New Year. But before she went she
sounded Aunt Isabelle.
"Has Mary said anything to you about Porter Bigelow?"
"About Porter?"
"Yes," impatiently, "about marrying him. Anybody can see that he's
dead in love with her, Isabelle."
"I don't think Mary wants to marry anybody. She's an independent
little creature. She should have been the boy, Frances."
"I wish to heaven she had," Aunt Frances' tone was fervent. "I can't
see any future for Barry, unless he marries Leila. If he were not so
irresponsible, I might do something for him. But Barry is such a
will-o'-the-wisp."
Aunt Isabelle went on with her mending, and Aunt Frances again pounced
upon her.
"And it isn't just that he is irresponsible. He's---- Did you notice
on Christmas Day, Isabelle--that after dinner he wasn't himself?"
Aunt Isabelle had noticed. And it was not the first time. Her quick
eyes had seen things which Mary had thought were hidden. She had not
needed ears to tell the secret which was being kept from her in that
house.
Yet her sense of loyalty sealed her lips. She would not tell Frances
anything. They were dear children.
"He's just a boy, Frances," she said, deprecatingly, "and I am sorry
that General Dick put temptation in his way."
"Don't blame the General. If Barry's weak, no one can make him strong
but himself. I wish he had some of Porter Bigelow's steadiness. Mary
won't look at Porter, and he's dead in love with her."
"Perhaps in time she may."
"Mary's like her father," Aunt Frances said shortly. "John Ballard
might have been rich when he died, if he hadn't been such a dreamer.
Mary calls herself practical--but her head is full of moonshine."
Aunt Frances made this arraignment with an uncomfortable memory of a
conversation with Mary the day before. They had been shopping, and had
lunched together at a popular tea room. It was while they sat in their
secluded corner that Aunt Frances had introduced in a roundabout way
the topic which obsessed her.
"I am glad that Constance is so happy, Mary."
"She ought to be," Mary responded; "it's her honeymoon."
"If you would follow her example and marry Porter Bigelow, my mind
would be at rest."
"But I don't want to marry Porter, Aunt Frances. I don't want to marry
anybody."
Aunt Frances raised her gold lorgnette, "If you don't marry," she
demanded, "how do you expect to live?"
"I don't understand."
"I mean who is going to pay your bills for the rest of your life?
Barry isn't making enough to support you, and I can't imagine that
you'd care to be dependent on Gordon Richardson. And the house is
rapidly losing its value. The neighborhood isn't what it was when your
father bought it, and you can't rent rooms when nobody wants to come
out here to live. And then what? It's a woman's place to marry when
she meets a man who can take care of her--and you'll find that you
can't pick Porter Bigelows off every bush--not in Washington."
Thus spoke Worldly-Wisdom, not mincing words, and back came Youth and
Romance, passionately. "Aunt Frances, a woman hasn't any right to
marry just because she thinks it is her best chance. She hasn't any
right to make a man feel that he's won her when she's just little and
mean and mercenary."
"That sounds all right," said the indignant dame opposite her, "but as
I said before, if you don't marry,--what are you going to do?"
Faced by that cold question, Mary met it defiantly. "If the worst
comes, I can work. Other women work."
"You haven't the training or the experience." Aunt Frances told her
coldly; "don't be silly, Mary. You couldn't earn your shoe-strings."
And thus having said all there was to be said, the two ate their salad
with diminished appetite, and rode home in a taxi in stiff silence.
Aunt Frances' mind roamed back to Aunt Isabelle, and fixed on her as a
scapegoat. "She's like you, Isabelle," she said, "with just the
difference between the ideals of twenty years ago and to-day. You
haven't either of you an idea of the world as a real place--you make
romance the rule of your lives--and I'd like to know what you've gotten
out of it, or what she will."
"I'm not afraid for Mary." There was a defiant ring in Aunt Isabelle's
voice which amazed Aunt Frances. "She'll make things come right. She
has what I never had, Frances. She has strength and courage."
It was this conversation with Aunt Frances which caused Mary, in the
weeks that followed, to bend for hours over a yellow pad on which she
made queer hieroglyphics. And it was through these hieroglyphics that
she entered upon a new phase of her friendship with Roger Poole.
He had gone to work one morning, haggard after a sleepless night.
As he approached the Treasury, the big building seemed to loom up
before him like a prison. What, after all, were those thousands who
wended their way every morning to the great beehives of Uncle Sam but
slaves chained to an occupation which was deadening?
He flung the question later at the little stenographer who sat next to
him. "Miss Terry," he asked, "how long have you been here?"
She looked up at him, brightly. She was short and thin, with a
sprinkle of gray in her hair. But she was well-groomed and nicely
dressed in her mannish silk shirt and gray tailored skirt.
"Twenty years," she said, snapping a rubber band about her note-book.
"And always at this desk?"
"Oh, dear, no. I came in at nine hundred, and now I am getting twelve
hundred."
"But always in this room?"
She nodded. "Yes. And it is very nice. Most of the people have been
here as long as I, and some of them much longer. There's Major Orr,
for example, he has been here since just after the War."
"Do you ever feel as if you were serving sentence?"
She laughed. She was not troubled by a vivid imagination. "It really
isn't bad for a woman. There aren't many places with as short hours
and as good pay."
For a woman? But for a man? He turned back to his desk. What would
he be after twenty years of this? He waked every morning with the
day's routine facing him--knowing that not once in the eight hours
would there be a demand upon his mentality, not once would there be the
thrill of real accomplishment.
At noon when he saw Miss Terry strew bird seed on the broad window sill
for the sparrows, he likened it to the diversions of a prisoner in his
cell. And, when he ate lunch with a group of fellow clerks in a cheap
restaurant across the way, he wondered, as they went back, why they
were spared the lockstep.
In this mood he left the office at half-past four, and passing the
place where he usually ate, inexpensively, he entered a luxurious
up-town hotel. There he read the papers until half-past six; then
dined in a grill room which permitted informal dress.
Coming out later, he met Barry coming in, linked arm in arm with two
radiant youths of his own kind and class. Musketeers of modernity,
they found their adventures on the city streets, in cafes and cabarets,
instead of in field and forest and on the battle-field.
Barry, with a flower in his buttonhole, welcomed Roger uproariously.
"Here's Whittington," he said. "You ought to hear his poem, fellows,
about a little cat. He had us all hypnotized the other night."
Roger glanced at him sharply. His exaggerated manner, the looseness of
his phrasing, the flush on his cheeks were in strange contrast to his
usual frank, clean boyishness.
"Come on, Poole," Barry urged, "we'll motor out in Jerry's car to the
Country Club, and you can give it to us out there--about Whittington
and the little cat."
Roger declined, and Barry took quick offense. "Oh, well, if you don't
want to, you needn't," he said; "four's a crowd, anyhow--come on,
fellows."
Roger, vaguely troubled, watched him until he was lost in the crowd,
then sighed and turned his steps homeward.
As Roger ascended to his Tower, the house seemed strangely silent.
Pittiwitz was asleep beside the pot of pink hyacinths. She sat up,
yawned, and welcomed him with a little coaxing note. When he had
settled himself in his big chair, she came and curled in the corner of
his arm, and again went to sleep.
Deep in his reading, he was roused an hour later by a knock at his door.
He opened it, to find Mary on the threshold.
"May I come in?" she asked, and she seemed breathless. "It is Susan's
night out, and Aunt Isabelle is at the opera with some old friends.
Barry expected to be here with me, but he hasn't come. And I sat in
the dining-room--and waited," she shivered, "until I couldn't stand it
any more."
She tried to laugh, but he saw that she was very pale.
"Please don't think I'm a coward," she begged. "I've never been that.
But I seemed suddenly to have a sort of nervous panic, and I thought
perhaps you wouldn't mind if I sat with you--until Barry--came----"
"I'm glad he didn't come, if it is going to give me an evening with
you." He drew a chair to the fire.
They had talked of many things when she asked, suddenly, "Mr. Poole, I
wonder if you can tell me--about the examinations for stenographers in
the Departments--are they very rigid?"
"Not very. Of course they require speed and accuracy."
She sighed. "I'm accurate enough, but I wonder if I can ever acquire
speed."
He stared. "You----?"
She nodded. "I haven't mentioned it to any one. One's family is so
hampering sometimes--they'd all object--except Aunt Isabelle, but I
want to be prepared to work, if I ever need to earn my living."
"May you never need it," he said, fervently, visions rising of little
Miss Terry and her machine-made personality. What had this girl with
the fair hair and the shining eyes to do with the blank life between
office walls?
"May you never need it," he repeated. "A woman's place is in the
home--it's a man's place to fight the world."
"But if there isn't a man to fight a woman's battles?"
"There will always be some one to fight yours."
"You mean that I can--marry? But what if I don't care to marry merely
to be--supported?"
"There would have to be other things, of course," gravely.
"What, for example?"
"Love."
"You mean the 'honor and obey' kind? But don't want that when I marry.
I want a man to say to me, 'Come, let us fight the battle together. If
it's defeat, we'll go down together. If its victory, we'll win.'"
This was to him a strange language, yet there was that about it which
thrilled him.
Yet he insisted, dogmatically, "There are men enough in the world to
take care of the women, and the women should let them."
"No, they should not. Suppose I should not marry. Must I let Barry
take care of me, or Constance--and go on as Aunt Isabelle has, eating
the bread of dependence?"
"But you? Why, one only needs to look at you to know that there'll be
a live-happy-ever-after ending to your romance."
"That's what they thought about Aunt Isabelle. But she lost her lover,
and she couldn't love again. And if she had had an absorbing
occupation, she would have been saved so much humiliation, so much
heart-break."
She told him the story with its touching pathos. "And think of it,"
she ended, "right here in our garden by the fountain, she saw him for
the last time."
Chilled by the ghostly breath of dead romance, they sat for a while in
silence, then Mary said: "So that's why I'm trying to learn
something--that will have an earning value. I can sing and play a
little, but not enough to make--money."
She sighed, and he set himself to help her.
"The quickest way," he said, "to acquire speed, is to have some one
read to you."
"Aunt Isabelle does sometimes, but it tires her."
"Let me do it. I should never tire."
"Oh, wouldn't you mind? Could we practice a little--now?"
And so it began--the friendship in which he served her, and loved the
serving.
He read, slowly, liking to see, when he raised his eyes, the slim white
figure in the big chair, the firelight on the absorbed face.
Thus the time slipped by, until with a start, Mary looked up.
"I don't see what is keeping Barry."
Then Roger told her what he had been reluctant to tell. "I saw him
down-town. I think he was on his way to the Country Club. He had been
dining with some friends."
"Men friends?"
"Yes. He called one of them Jerry."
He saw the color rise in her face. "I hate Jerry Tuckerman, and Barry
promised Constance he'd let those boys alone."
Her voice had a sharp note in it, but he saw that she was struggling
with a gripping fear.
This, then, was the burden she was bearing? And what a brave little
thing she was to face the world with her head up.
"Would you like to have me call the Country Club--I might be able to
get your brother on the wire."
"Oh; if you would."
But he was saved the trouble. For, even while they spoke of him, Barry
came, and Mary went down to him.
A little later, there were stumbling steps upon the stairs, and a voice
was singing--a strange song, in which each verse ended with a shout.
Roger, stepping out into the dark upper hall, looked down over the
railing. Mary, a slender shrinking figure; was coming with her brother
up the lower flight. Barry had his arm around her, but her face was
turned from him, and her head drooped.
Then, still looking down, Roger saw her guide those stumbling steps to
the threshold of the boy's room. The door opened and shut, and she was
alone, but from within there still came the shouted words of that
strange song.
Mary stood for a moment with her hands clenched at her sides, then
turned and laid her face against the closed door, her eyes hidden by
her upraised arm.