PART V

IMPASSE

I

Catherine moved slowly up the covered stairway from the Randolph Street

station, sniffing at the strange smell of Chicago. What did make it so

different from New York? Smoke, blown whirling back in the sharp east

wind over the grinding of ice along the lake shore, something more

composite than that, which, if she could but decipher, would give her

the essential difference between the cities. She snatched at her hat,

as she reached the gusty platform. There was Bill, lounging against the

paper stand! As she edged through the home-bound crowd, he saw her,

with a sharp lifting of his negligent, withdrawn look, and started

toward her.

"Catherine!" He drew her out of the crowd, into a little corner

protected by the booth.

"What a horrid place I made you wait!" Pleasure shimmered over

Catherine, like sun in shallow water. "Have you had to stand here long?

Oh, it is nice to see you!" The strange city, the unknown, hurrying

people, walled them about in deepened intimacy.

"Fine." Bill smiled down at her. "You look as if you had been eating up

this west, and liked its taste."

"I have. I do." Soft, clear brilliance in her eyes, in her smile.

"Let's go somewhere, so I can tell you about it. I want to talk and

talk."

"There's a place just north of here. Would you like to walk? A little

place I found. Wonderful dinners. Or if you want to celebrate, we can

go to some huge hotel."

"I don't care. Let's try your little place."

They walked swiftly along the Avenue, the lake wind whipping against

them, Bill answering Catherine's random questions about the gaunt, dark

buildings they passed, about his work.

"I'm chattering," she thought. "I don't care!"

"Here we are." Bill's hand under her elbow guided her into the doorway

of a small white building.

"Wall papers," read Catherine from the hall sign, but Bill steered her

to an opposite door.

"Oh, I do like it." She nodded at Bill's fleet, anxious query.

A long, irregular room, with scattered tables, dull gray enamel,

shining in the soft orange light of small lamps, and a great brick

fireplace where logs burned.

"Sit here, where you can watch the fire without scorching." Bill chose

a table in a small alcove. "Now tell us all about it. Have you been

made president of one of these colleges? Or endowed? You look amazingly

triumphant."

"Do I strut?" Catherine laughed softly, slipping out of her coat,

drawing off her gloves.

"Not quite. But--you could, couldn't you?"

"I've had a wonderful time, Bill. Incredibly wonderful!"

"And you haven't been lonely, or homesick? How long since you left New

York?"

"More than two weeks. I've finished Illinois. That's why I'm here

to-night. I go on to Ohio at midnight. Homesick? Should I be ashamed

not to be? The first day or so, I felt guilty. And I woke up at night,

thinking I heard Spencer cry out in his sleep, or Letty. Now I just

sleep like a baby--or a spinster."

"Henrietta wrote me that they are all O.K. Had a note this morning."

"She wrote me, too. Nice old thing, to drop in on them. I do miss them

of course. But----" She looked up, a wistful shadow across her eyes.

"Bill, I had forgotten how much time there really was in a day. When

you could go straight ahead, just doing the things you had planned.

Doing one job. You said I'd have two jobs, didn't you? These last weeks

I've had one. And I love it! Not forever, of course. But for this

month. I feel like a _person_. Sometimes, almost like a personage!

People have been very kind, and interested."

She was silent as Bill turned to consult with the waitress; for a

moment her eyes lingered on his head, dark and gaunt against the

firelight, and then looked away at the groups of diners. Early yet,

Bill had said.

"Well?" Bill watched her. "What a charming gown--like an Indian summer."

"Margaret selected it." Catherine stretched one arm along the table,

the loose sleeve of golden brown velvet falling softly away from the

firm ivory of her wrist. "I was doubtful about the color."

"You needn't be."

"She bullied me into all sorts of lugs." Catherine laughed. "And

I've been glad of it." She hovered delightedly over the tray of

hors-d'œuvres. "Like a flower garden!"

"A woman runs this place," remarked Bill with apparent irrelevance.

"Down in a little southern Illinois town, the wife of one of the

college faculty wants to start a tea room. She told me all about it.

Her husband doesn't want her to. She says she supposes it isn't very

high brow. You know, Bill"--Catherine clasped her hands at the edge

of the table--"It's happening everywhere. Women are just busting out.

That's been what they've wanted to know about me. How I manage it. It's

pitiful, their eagerness. Even their husbands. I went out to dinner one

night, and the thing the college president wanted to know was all about

how I managed. How many people it took to fill my place, and all the

rest. I expected to be told in so many words that I ought to be home

with my children."

"And you haven't?"

"Indirectly, sometimes. But even the most righteous mothers crave

information. How do I manage! It's extraordinary. It may have gone to

my head. Like strong drink. I know I'm talking too much. But, Bill,

you've boiled me over, all this brew, and I have to talk!"

"I like it."

"You see--" Catherine glanced up doubtfully. "I can't write to Charles.

It sounds too much like crowing." She fingered her soup spoon. She

wanted to talk about Charles, too. Bill would understand. Those brief,

impersonal notes of his: he was well, he was working on his book, he

was busy with semester finals, the children were well, yours, Charles.

"You never saw Charles's mother, did you?" asked Bill.

"No." Catherine waited. Bill was never random in his associations.

"He's told you about her, of course?"

"Lots of times. She was devoted to him, wasn't she? You knew her?"

"We lived next door for years, you know. She died just as Charles went

to college. His father had died years earlier. Just enough income

for comfort, and just Charles. I think"--he grinned a little--"that

you'll have to train Charles as long as she did, before he can fully

appreciate your career."

"But that was years ago."

"Yes. But--I think I can tell you this, without violation--Charles told

me once, talking of you before I had met you, that to him you were

the perfect woman, like his mother. Which meant--tender, loving, and

devoted."

Catherine's spoon clicked against the soup plate. Her eyelids were

suddenly heavy, weighted with memories. Charles had said that to her,

years ago. A cold finger touched her heart, binding it, and she knew,

through all the brimming delight of the past days, how she had hidden

away the troubling thought of Charles.

"I don't mean that she spoiled him grossly," Bill was saying. "She was

too New England, too much what we used to call a gentlewoman for that.

Charles was simply the center of her life; his welfare, his desires,

his future--those things set the radius of her circle. She had nothing

else, you see. Except the idea"--the corners of Bill's mouth rose in

his slow smile--"that since Charles was a man, he was a superior being.

Did women really think that, Catherine? Or was that a concession they

knew they could easily afford to make?"

"But Charles doesn't think men are superior." Catherine's smile was

uncertain, begging for assurance. "Why, those early experiments of

his, the brochures he published, were directed against that very

superstition."

"Yes. Intellectually he has come a long way since those early days. But

that matters so much less than we like to think."

Catherine waited while the waitress served the next course. Bill's

words had evoked a thought clearly from the churning within her; she

held it until the waitress had gone, and then spoke,

"You mean, exactly, that he wishes my radius to be his desires, his

welfare, his future?"

"That's his old pattern. Bound to hang on, Catherine. Because it is so

flattering, so pleasant. Isn't it what we all wish, anyway? Someone

living within our limits?"

"Perhaps men wish it."

"You think women don't?"

"Do they?" Catherine shook her head. "I don't want Charles to have

nothing but me in his life. Aren't women hardier? Since they've never

had that--it is a sort of human sacrifice, isn't it? Men are like

vines! Did you know vines wouldn't grow well, some of them, unless you

sacrifice to them? Bones and flesh. 'If you have an old hen,' said the

nursery man, when I asked him about our Actinidia in Maine, 'bury her

close to the roots. Then the vine will shoot up.' And it did!"

"You would make over the old saying about sturdy oaks, wouldn't you?"

"Don't make fun of me. Perhaps I can discover something which will

change the world!" She stared intently at Bill. "You--" she hesitated.

"You live without that human sacrifice, Bill. You aren't an Actinidia."

"And so, perhaps, I know why men wish it." Bill pushed to one side his

untouched salad. "Without any question now of its fairness or justice

to women like Henrietta, or you. In the first place, it is convenient,

practically so; smooths down all the details of living. But especially,

it drops a painted screen between man and the distressing futility of

his life. A man with a family and a regular wife, old style, doesn't

often have to face his own emptiness. He feels important. He hurries

around at his work, and if doubt pricks a hole in that screen, the

picture painted there is intricate enough to hide the hole. He has

something to keep his machinery in action. If by day his little ego is

deflated, there is, to change my figure, free air at home to blow him

full again."

"You sound as if you thought all wives were adoring and humble," said

Catherine.

"Some of them used to be." Bill grinned at her, and lifted his hand

abruptly in a signal to the waitress. "This is supposed to be a party,"

he apologized, "and not a lecture by me. Tell me more about what you've

been doing."

Catherine's talk was fragmentary. Something--what Bill had said, or

perhaps simply his being Bill with all the old associations close

around him--had blown the froth away from the past two weeks; she had

thought that she had become almost a different Catherine, bright,

hard, full of enthusiasm and interest, absorbed in her rôle of

Bureau-representative. She saw now that her inner self still stood

with feet entangled in perplexity and doubt.

"Bill"--she broke into her own recital--"if a man doesn't have free air

at home, does he look for it somewhere else?"

"He may." Bill's quick upward glance was disturbed. He knew,

then, about Charles and Stella. Henrietta would have told him.

"Or"--lightly--"he runs along on a flat tire."

Catherine was silent, her mind skipping along with the absurd figure.

Stella Partridge was, after all, too busy pumping her own ego hard

to perform that task long for any man. She might flatter him, and

cajole----

"Do the children write to you?"

Catherine reached into the pocket of her coat.

"I've been moving too fast the last few days to have letters. I expect

a lot to-morrow in Ohio." She spread the sheet on the table. "Here's

the latest. Letty made the crosses."

"Dere Mother I will be glad when you come home again because I do not

like to sleep in Daddys and your room so well. Walter is coming to

see me for a day and maybe I am going home with him we are being good

I love You

From your loving Son Spencer Hammond Good-by."

"Nice kid." Bill looked up. "Let's see, he is just nine, isn't he?"

"Going on ten." Catherine refolded the letter. She loved the little

smudge from an inky thumb in the margin.

"What shall we do now? You have several hours left." Bill set down his

coffee cup. "Music? Theater? We can probably find seats for something."

"I'd rather--" Catherine paused. "Is it too stormy for a walk? I never

get out of doors any more. This morning, from a window in the building

at the University, I had a glimpse of the lake. Could we go there? I'd

like to see how much like the ocean it is."

"It's windy, of course."

"I'd like that." A picture of herself, buffeted by winds over a stretch

of water--perhaps that would blow away the melancholy cobwebs, would

whip her again into froth.

Bill summoned a taxi, and in silence they rode through the long

streets, south toward the park, their shoulders brushing as the machine

bumped over frozen slush.

Bill slumped forward, his hands linked about his knees, his shoulders

an arc of weariness. The long streets seemed drawn past the windows of

the cab, on either side a sliding strip of unfamiliar shapes. It's as

if a spring had broken in him, thought Catherine, a secret spring which

had kept him running. Perhaps Henrietta was right, and he is sick.

"It's a long way, isn't it?" She had a plaintive moment of loneliness.

Bill was the one familiar thing in the strange city, and he had

retreated almost beyond communication. "I didn't know it was so far."

"We're almost there." Bill straightened his shoulders, and peered out

at the sliding street. "In the Fifties. I thought you'd like Jackson

Park. More space there."

A moment later he thrust open the door.

"Here!" he called to the driver. "We'll get out here."

II

"There's your lake." Bill slipped his hand firmly under her arm, and

they bent slightly forward into the dark rushing wind. At their feet

a steady crunching, a restless churning as of china waves; beyond, a

stretch of black hidden action under a sky black and infinitely remote,

with sharp white stars. "This wind has broken up the shore ice."

Along the sloping beach rose vague suggestions of grotesqueries; piles

thrusting tortured heads with ice-hair above the frozen surface,

driftwood caught between great blocks of dirty ice.

"It's like Doré's Inferno." Catherine shivered. "You remember? That

frozen hell, with awful heads sticking up in the ice?"

"Let's walk along. You're cold." Buffeted, they went along the deserted

drive, passing regularly from shadow into the burst of light under the

yellow globes that hung above them. "I like that black sky," said Bill.

"In New York we never have that."

"No." Catherine glanced westward, through bare limbs of trees. "See,

there's the city glare, back there." She was warm again, her blood

tingling under the dark rush of the wind; the black hidden movement

of the water, the cold vasty black of the sky were exciting, like a

shouted challenge.

"Here is shelter from the wind." Bill drew her into an angle made by

the porch of a small summer pavilion. "You can put your head out to see

the lake, without being knocked flat."

The wind racketed in the loose boards nailed along the lake side of the

porch. Catherine leaned back, laughing, out of reach of the gusts. She

could just catch the dim outline of Bill's face, his strong, aquiline

profile.

"Bill!" She felt suddenly that in the dark, windy night there was

nothing else human except Bill and herself; she wanted to burrow into

his silence, his withdrawal. Her fingers brushed his arm in soft demand.

"Great, isn't it?" His voice was low and warm, walking under the rush

of the wind. "Blows the nonsense clear out of you." He moved slightly

so that his shoulder sheltered her. "Warm enough?"

"I shouldn't like to be here alone." She couldn't see his face

distinctly--shadowy eye sockets, dark mouth. "I'd feel too little! You

keep me life-size."

Silence, warm and comforting, like a secret place within the noise of

the wind rattling at the boards, churning up the ice cakes.

"I can't pry into him." Catherine's feeling broke into splinters of

thought. "It wouldn't be fair. He'd hate it. Digging under to see his

roots. Something passionless and fine in this--no strife--as if he

accepted me--whole. Dear Bill."

"Well?" He was smiling at her, she knew. "You have a train to catch,

haven't you?"

* * * * *

They stood together in the downtown station. Bill had collected her

luggage from the check-room, had brought a bunch of violets for her

from the little florist's counter.

"It's Valentine's Day, you know." He watched gravely as she fastened

them against the soft beaver of her collar. "I'm starting East

to-morrow," he said. "I'll see your family before you do, won't I?"

"You can give them my love first hand. Tell them I'm coming soon."

"I'll tell them you are so triumphant and successful that they will be

fortunate to have you again."

Catherine laughed softly. A local train was announced, draining off the

waiting people, leaving them almost alone in the station.

"You know," she said, quietly, "you puff me up, Bill. Not when you say

ridiculous things like that, but all the time." Under his seeking,

hungry eyes, she flushed. "And I am grateful."

A scurry to the platform, as the through express rolled in. Bill,

relinquishing her bags to the porter, seized her hand in a hard clasp,

and stood, bareheaded, below her on the platform shouting, "Good luck!"

as she was carried with increasing rush away.

III

Catherine, braced against the shivers and jounces of the old Ford taxi,

wondered inertly what it would feel like to live in such a town, in one

of those two-story frame houses, with a corrugated iron garage in the

rear, and grayish lace curtains at the windows, with smoke-blackened

sparrows scrapping in the front yard, and drifting, curling feathers

of soot in the dingy air. I could plan a town like this with a ruler,

she thought. A straight line for the business street, a few parallel

lines, a few right-angled lines: dots for churches, one of each kind;

for moving-picture theaters; for schools; small squares for yards

and houses. Factories along the railroad, pouring up the blanket of

smoke under which the town lay. Was that the soul of the town, that

close-hanging smoke, with its drifting feathers of soot? And then,

out at the edge, where the frame houses were far apart, scattered, a

handful of college buildings, in medieval isolation. When she had said

"Hope College" to the driver, he had shrieked to a baggage master, "Hi,

Chuck! Where's Hope Collidge, d'yuh know?"

"Out past the lunatic asylum. You know, down the car track."

Hope College, typical of the small denominational institutions offering

a normal certificate. So Dr. Roberts had classified it.

That must be the lunatic asylum, that group of brick buildings with

prison windows. They were well out of town, now, the cab skidding and

jerking over deep ruts. Gray, flat, interminable fields under a flat

gray sky. It's like a dream, thought Catherine, a funny, burlesque of a

dream, with me rattling along.

"This it, lady?" The taxi shivered in all its bolts as it halted, and

the driver poked his head in at the door. There was a driveway winding

between two rows of small blotched poplar trunks, and back from the

road two square brick buildings, scrawled over with black network of

old vines.

"I don't know."

"Guess it must be." He slammed the door and whirred up the driveway.

Just as Catherine climbed the steps, still moving vaguely in a dream

burlesque, a clangor of bells burst out, followed by the clamp of feet,

the sound of voices released. She opened the heavy door, and stepped

into the hall. The sense of dream vanished; this was real enough.

Opposite the door rose the central stairs of the building, twisting up

in a dimly lighted well. Up and down them climbed young people, girls,

a few boys. Shabby, gaudy, flippant, serious--Catherine watched them,

with a sharp resurgence of all her shining belief, her keen, exciting

delight in the thing she had come for.

She marched into an office at the left of the hall. A girl sitting at a

small table, her smooth, pale-yellow head bent over a book, looked up.

"Is this the Dean's office?" Catherine smiled at her; something like

Letty in the yellow hair, although the face was rather strained and

thin. "I'm Mrs. Hammond, from the Lynch Bureau."

"She'll be right in." The girl rose and opened the door into the

adjoining office, as if in uncertainty. "She hasn't come down from

class yet. If you'll sit down----"

"Yes. Do you happen to know whether there is any mail for me here?"

"I'll see." The girl had an awkward, half-suspicious way of staring.

"Mrs. Charles Hammond?" she asked.

Catherine sat down on a hard straight chair near the window; the girl's

eyes were inquisitive, over the edge of her book. Catherine shuffled

the envelopes hastily. Nothing from home. Strange--she had given them

this address, and for this date. A bulky envelope from Dr. Roberts, a

thin one from Henrietta. She tore open the flap of the latter, and let

the round, jerky writing leap at her. Every one was well. Henrietta

thought she might be interested in some hospital gossip. Stella

Partridge had been doing some work for Dr. Beck, the psychiatrist, and

had told several of the other doctors that she thought a medical man

should be in charge of the clinic rather than a mere Ph. Doctor. "She

says Beck has asked her to help him with a book, but I have a strong

doubt. Has Charles found her out, do you suppose?"

Catherine folded the latter, and tried to poke with it into its

envelope the swirl of feeling it evoked. For a brisk little woman had

darted into the office and at a word from the girl was darting now at

her.

"Mrs. Hammond? I'm Dean Snow. Come right in!" The pressure of her palm

against Catherine's was like a firmly stuffed pincushion. "Has anyone

else with a cold been in, Martha?"

Catherine, passing ahead of the Dean into her office, caught the

friendly softening in the voice of the girl as she answered,

"No'm, not this morning. The plumber came, and I sent him over to the

dormitory. He says that pipe is rusted and ought to come out. I told

him he'd have to see you first."

"That's right, Martha. And you got those letters off?"

"Yes'm."

"Good."

She followed Catherine, closing the door.

"Just have a chair, Mrs. Hammond." She whisked herself into place

beside the old roll-top desk, her rotating office chair creaking as

she settled down on its springs. A little cubby-hole of an office,

with a sort of film of long use over the gray walls and painted floor,

over the crammed pigeon holes of the desk, over the huge framed

photographs--the "Acropolis," the "Porch of the Maidens," the "Sistine

Madonna," and, above the desk, a faded group photograph of gentle faces

above enormous puffed sleeves; in the corner a small hat-tree, from

which a rusty umbrella dangled.

"You teach, Miss Snow, in addition to being Dean?"

"Oh, yes. Latin and Greek. It's a great relief from plumbers and

colds." She had a plump, white face, with gray bangs over her forehead,

sharp blue eyes, and full pink lips held firmly together. She has

humor, thought Catherine, and common sense, but she's intolerant. "So

you're making an investigation of us, are you?" The Dean rubbed at a

streak of chalk-dust on the sleeve of her tight dress. "What do you

expect us to do after you point out our shortcomings?"

She thinks I am dressy and interfering. Catherine held her hands

motionless against her desire to fidget. She's just the kind of

sensible woman I can't get on with.

"The Bureau wants to make a constructive study," she said. "Not a

criticism."

"We need just one constructive thing." Miss Snow smiled. "Money. We're

poor. Small endowment fund. The Baptists around here seem poorer each

year. Now I haven't had a secretary for five years. The students help

me out, and I deduct the hours from their tuition. If we had money

we could do much more. We get fine young people. The godless younger

generation doesn't come here. We wouldn't admit them if they wanted to

come. Our girls and boys know how to work. They are in earnest. But you

don't want to give us money, do you? No, you want to change things.

Mrs. Hammond--" She leaned forward, her plump fist coming down whack

on her knee. "I've been here almost forty years, as student, teacher,

officer. Our President, Dr. Whitmore, has been here as long as that.

Don't you think we know how to run a college?"

Catherine hunted for phrases, gracious, illuminating, with which to

justify her mission. So many of these little colleges through the

state, such diversity of aim, changes in educational ideas----

"You see," she finished appealingly, "that's our idea. That there

should be a clear, definite program in the training of young teachers,

and that enough is known about educational needs now to make such a

program feasible."

"I've watched young people go out of here for many years now, and I

know it doesn't make much difference what they've been taught. If they

have the fear of God, if they are earnest and faithful, they succeed.

If not--none of your modern folderols will save them. Give them the

mental discipline of mathematics and the classics, and they can teach

children reading and writing all right. I've seen too many fads in

education to take them seriously. First it was natural science that was

to make the world over, and we had to raise a fund for a laboratory.

Then--oh, there's no use listing them. But I ask you, Mrs. Hammond,

what's happened to Rousseau, or Froebel, or that woman a year or so

ago, that foreigner, Monty somebody, who had a new scheme? Gone. You

have to cling to the eternal verities. Fads pass."

The building quivered under the violent clangor of bells and the sound

of hurrying feet. Miss Snow pulled open a drawer and lifted out a

shabby, yellow-edged volume. "Here's one thing that stands. Ovid." She

tucked it under her arm and rose. "I have a class now. Would you care

to visit it?"

* * * * *

In the late afternoon Catherine stood in the hall, bidding Miss Snow

farewell.

"It's been interesting, and I appreciate the time you have given me,

out of your very busy day," she said.

"I've enjoyed it." Miss Snow shook hands vigorously. "I enjoy talking.

It airs my ideas even if it doesn't change them much. I wish you could

stay to hear the Glee Club practice to-night. We're real proud of their

singing."

"I have to take that very early train." Catherine descended the steps

and climbed into the waiting taxi--the same one which had brought her.

"The Commercial House," she said.

The early February twilight lay over the fields, as if the smoke had

settled more closely on the earth. She leaned back, letting the day

float past her, in unselected, haphazard bits. All that zeal and honest

industry poured into medieval patterns. The very best of the old

patterns, no doubt, with that stern righteousness, that obligation in

them. Something infinitely pitiful, touching, in those young things she

had watched, awkward, serious, patient, most of them.

"Of course, most of our girls teach only a few years, and then marry,"

Miss Snow had said. She couldn't have had more finality if she had

said, "and then die!"

Luncheon, a hurried half hour in a chilly, bare dining hall, with grace

helping the creamed codfish grow cold. The other faculty members,

serious and threadbare, like farm horses, thought Catherine, with bare

spots chafed by the harness of inadequate salary, of monotony. As

untouched by any modern thought as if centuries of time separated them.

And each year, young people turned into that hopper.

If I can put that feeling down on paper, she thought, it should

move even this mountain of age and tradition. To-morrow, my day will

be different; the large colleges are somewhat awake. But there are

hundreds of these.

At the desk of the hotel she asked hopefully for mail. Perhaps she had

given this address to Charles and Miss Kelly, and not the college. The

clerk poked through a pile of letters and shook his bald, red head.

Three days without a word, for Henrietta's letter had been written days

ago. After a moment of hesitation--amusing, how old habits of economy

hung on!--she wrote out a telegram.

"Night letter?" The clerk counted the words.

"No. I want it to go the quickest possible way. I want an answer before

that morning train."

In the bare little hotel room, she sat down under the light, her

writing pad balanced on her knee. A note to Dr. Roberts.

"There seems no limit to the things we may accomplish," she wrote,

"when I see, at first hand, what the catalogue discrepancies really

mean, in flesh and blood and buildings."

Suppose something was wrong, at home? She stared about at the dingy,

painted walls, with faint zigzags of cracks, and fear prickled through

the enthusiasm which enclosed her. This was the first time that letters

had failed to meet her. In two hours, or three, she should have an

answer to her message. "Please wire me at once, care Commercial House.

No word from you here." She picked up her pen again. No use to worry;

letters miscarried, and she would hear soon.

She opened Henrietta's letter, to reread the comment on Stella

Partridge. Something behind that, she thought. That woman doesn't

make incautious remarks. Her mind fumbled with the news, as if it

were a loose bit out of an intricate mechanism; if she could fit it

into place, she could see how the whole affair ran. That was one of

Charles's lowest boiling points, that contention about medical men

and psychologists. Perhaps Partridge had been too greedy, and laid

those smooth hands of hers on something Charles particularly wanted

for himself, for his own job. Whatever it is--Catherine rose suddenly,

piling her letters and portfolio on the corner of the dresser--whatever

it is, I mean to know about it, when I go home again. I am through

fumbling along.

Her room had grown chilly. A wind rattled at the loose sash of the

window. She looked out at the angle of street; a hardware store across

the way mirrored its enormous window light in shining pans and kettles.

The air seemed full of whirling bits of mica. She pushed the window up

and leaned out; sharp and wet on her face, the mica was snow, driven

along on the wind.

Only an hour since she had telegraphed. She would go down to dinner.

Something insidious in the way the soft fingers of worry pried between

thoughts, pushed down deeper than thought.

She stopped at the desk.

"If a message comes for Mrs. Hammond, please send it in to the dining

room."

"Guess we're going to have a blizzard, aren't we?" The clerk rubbed an

inky forefinger thoughtfully over his red baldness. "Coming along from

Chicago and the west on this wind."

More pushing of those soft fingers: delay of trains, wires down, who

knows when I may hear!

"It may not be a bad storm," said Catherine, and went resolutely in to

dinner. But she heard the clerk's, "You can't tell when you're going to

get trouble."

In the dining room, a few traveling men scattered about at tables

sending glances of incurious speculation after her as she chose a seat;

a middle-aged waitress whose streaked purplish hair shrieked aloud her

effort to keep youth enough to win tips, and whose heavy, laborious

tread spoke more loudly of aching, fallen arches. Catherine started

at the twin bottles of vinegar and yellowish oil in the center of the

table. Letty's just gone to bed, she thought. Mrs. O'Lay is serving

dinner. I shouldn't care to be a traveling saleswoman. The hotel drives

my job into some remote limbo. I'll go to bed early. To-morrow, at the

University, it will be different. Such a cordial note from that history

professor's wife, asking me to stay with them. It was nice of Dr.

Roberts to write personally to them.

Good steak, at least. Fair coffee. Finally, as the waitress set a

triangle of pie before her, she saw the clerk in the doorway, his

eyes focusing on her. He came slowly toward her. It's come, thought

Catherine. He ought not to button that alpaca coat; absurd, the way it

creases over his fat stomach.

"They just telephoned this from the station," he said, laying a sheet

of paper beside her plate. The elaborate scrolled heading, COMMERCIAL

HOUSE, wriggled under her eyes, settled flatly away as she read the

penciled words.

Spencer hurt coasting wired you this morning can you come

CHARLES

"Hope it's nothing serious, ma'am."

Those soft fingers of worry had unsheathed their claws; they tore at

her, deep in the unheeded, rhythmic working of her body. She could not

breathe, nor see, nor speak. Spencer!

"Nothing serious," he repeated, and suddenly her heart was clattering

against her ribs. She could lift her eyes from that paper. Why, he had

a kindly face, that bald clerk; his flat nostrils had widened a little,

in avid human sniffing at disaster, but his eyes were sympathetic.

"It's my little boy." She could breathe now. "It says he is hurt.

Why--" she thrust back her chair in a violent motion, and wavered as

she stood up. "There was a telegram this morning. I should have known

this morning!"

"That's too bad, Ma'am. It never came here."

"I'll have to get a train." Catherine was hurrying out of the dining

room, the clerk at her heels. "When can I?"

"It don't say how bad he's hurt." She felt his hand close about her

arm. "You sit down here, and I'll 'phone to the station for you." He

drew her into the enclosure behind his counter, and pushed her gently

into an old leather chair. "Little fellows stand an awful lot of

knocking around. I've got three, so I ought to know. Now, take it easy.

Where you want to go? New York City?"

Grateful tears in Catherine's eyes made prismatic edges around his

solid figure. As she watched him thumbing a railroad folder, her panic

lifted slightly. Perhaps--oh, perhaps Spencer wasn't badly hurt.

Charles would be frightened, would want her.

"Um. That's too bad. You just missed a good train." He turned to the

telephone. "Gimme the station. Yea-uh. That's right."

Henrietta would be there.

"When's the next through train east, Chuck? Huh? No, the next one." He

spit his words out of the corner of his mouth toward the receiver. "Any

word of that out of Chicago yet? Well, say, I got a lady here got to

get to New York on it. Got to, I said. You got any berths here? Well,

you could wire for one, couldn't you? What you hired for?"

He hung up the earpiece.

"He says there's trouble west of here. Snow. That seven o'clock just

went through, late. He's gonna let me know about the midnight."

"I'd better go to the station."

"What for? You stay here where it's comfortable. You go up to your room

and I'll let you know. I'm on till midnight."

"Just go up and wait?" Catherine was piteous.

"Yes, ma'am. I'll take care of you. Now don't you go worrying. I always

tell my wife she'd have the grass growing over all of us if worry could

do it. That's the woman of it, I suppose."

"You're very kind." Catherine was reluctant to leave him. He was a sort

of bulwark between her and the rush of dark fear. "I ought to wire

them----"

"Sure. Here, write it out. It stands in reason he needn't be hurt much,

and still he'd want his mother."

Catherine's pencil wobbled in her stiff fingers. Spencer would want

her. All day he had wanted her. Hours between them----

"Will take first train." She looked up, her lip quivering. "I wouldn't

have time for an answer, would I?"

"You ought not to, if that train's anywhere near on time, and if

there's a berth left on it." The clerk turned away, to fish cigars out

of his counter for a man who stood waiting, one hand plying a busy

toothpick.

"D'yuh hear anything about the blizzard down Chicago way?" the man

asked. "Say it's put kinks in the train service."

"You always hear worse than happens." The clerk's glance at Catherine

was anxious. But she signed her name to the message and wrote out the

address.

V

The midnight express for New York, coming through three hours late, did

not stop. The clerk came up to Catherine's door to tell her.

"They ain't an empty berth on her," he said. "Took off several coaches

to lighten her for the drifts."

"What am I going to do?" Catherine asked.

"There's a local in the morning. You could get something out of

Pittsburgh, if you got that far."

The rest of the night, the next day, the next night, all were to

Catherine grotesquely unreal, as if life had been transposed to a

different key, where all familiar things were flatted into dissonance

and harsh strangeness. All night the scrape of snow-plows and shovels,

futile against the snow; the snow which seemed the wind itself turned

to dry, drifting, impenetrable barriers. The local, dragged by two

locomotives, hours late, like a moving snowdrift itself. The hours

in that train, with nothing but snow darkening the windows, hiding

the world, driving through the aisles with the opening of the doors.

Pittsburgh, late in the afternoon, and no word from Charles. She beat

helplessly against the gruff taciturnity of the ticket agent; he had

stood up all day confronting cross, belated travelers. There was a

train in an hour, making connections at Philadelphia. Night on that

train, in a crowded day coach, malodorous and noisy. She felt as if she

dragged the train herself, down through strange valleys, where blast

furnaces sent up red shrieks of flame, through dim, sleeping towns.

Philadelphia at two, the next morning. A narrow strip of platform

across which the wind whirled. Another crowded day coach. Where were

these people going, that colored boy, asleep, his feet stuck out into

the aisle in their ragged socks, his shoes clasped under one arm--that

man and woman, slumping peacefully against each other, mouths drooping

wide?

* * * * *

As Catherine stepped down to the platform in the New York station, the

huge dim roofs of the train shed spun dangerously about her. A porter

loped beside her, pawing at her bag, but she walked away from him, her

eyes wide like a somnambulist. She made her way to a telephone booth,

and then, when she had lifted her hand to drop in the nickel, stopped

abruptly. If she telephoned, and something dreadful came over the wire,

buzzing into her head, it would transfix her there, unable to move,

held forever behind that close, dirty glass door. She pushed violently

against the door, freed herself, and fled out to the street. She passed

on the steps a woman crawling on her knees, one arm moving in sluggish

circles, scrubbing. After she had found a taxi and was whirring away

through the dark street, the motion of that weary arm continued before

her eyes. How dark the city was, and still, as if she had come into it

just at the turn of the tide, before the morning life moved in. "Dark

o' the moon"--she heard Spencer's voice chanting--"pulls the ole water

away from the earth."

When she stepped out of the cab she did not even glance at the house.

She paid the driver, picked up her bag, and went into the dim, tiled

hall. She was empty, capable of precise, brisk movement. All her fear,

her pressure of anxiety, her physical weariness, were held in solution,

waiting the moment which would crystallize them. She stood at the

elevator shaft, her finger on the button. The car was beneath her, the

dust-nap of its top at her feet. The bell shrilled, but nothing else

stirred. The man is asleep, she thought, dispassionately, and without

haste she began to climb the stairs to the fifth floor.

At the door she stopped again, staring a moment at the small card,

HAMMOND. She had no key. If she rang, she would waken everyone. But she

must, in some way, enter. She knocked, softly. Her face, turned up to

the dark painted grain of the metal door, grew imploring.

There was her door, and she couldn't open it, couldn't know what was

behind it! Like a dreadful nightmare. She pounded with her knuckles.

Then, softly, the door opened, and Charles, his bathrobe trailing, his

eyes sleep-swollen, was blinking at her. She seemed a dream to him, too!

"Why, Catherine--you? How'd you get here, this time of day?" He

whispered, and then he closed the door with a caution alarming in its

quietness.

"Spencer! Tell me--" Catherine's nostrils quivered at a strange smell

in the dark hall, an odor of antiseptics, of drugs.

"Thought you'd never come." Charles muttered. "Ghastly, your not being

here."

"Is he here?" Catherine started to pass Charles, but he caught her,

held her a moment. Catherine felt in the pressure of his arms, in his

harsh kiss, the thwarted rage, helplessness, distress--she knew she had

those to meet, later. Now-- "Tell me, please!" she begged. "Spencer."

"He's better." Charles released her. "Sleeping now. Mustn't disturb

him." He led the way to the living room, past closed, dark doors. "We'd

better go into the kitchen."

Catherine stumbled into a chair.

"He was hurt, coasting. He and Walter Thomas. Right in front of the

house. Miss Kelly was just coming out with the other children, to

take them all to the park. He and Walter--coasted around the corner,

into a truck. Hurt his head. Miss Kelly carried him in here herself."

Charles was leaning against the table, his face away from Catherine,

his mouth twisting wryly. Catherine touched his hand. "When I got

home, Henrietta was here, and another surgeon. His head--" Catherine

swung up to a sharp peak of agony--Spencer? She saw, unbearably, that

fine, sensitive, growing life of his, smeared over. "They didn't dare

move him. Unconscious. Stitches in his temple. They think now he's all

right." He grew suddenly voluble, shrill. "You can't tell about such

things at once. Have to wait. Might injure his brain. But he's been

conscious, perfectly clear-headed, normal. Got a good nurse. Just keep

him quiet, flat on his back. Children are tough-- Oh, Catherine----"

A door was opening somewhere, an inch at a time. Catherine strained

forward, too heavy with pain to rise. She felt Charles's uneasy start,

felt the hours of anxiety behind the sharp gripping of his hand under

hers. Feet shuffled toward them. Her mother appeared at the door, her

blue eyes blinking under the frill of her lace cap, a perceptible

quaver in the old hand which held together the folds of her gray

bathrobe.

"Thank Heaven you've come, Catherine!" She scuffed across the linoleum

and pecked softly at Catherine's cheek. "Poor little Spencer--he asked

for you."

"Oh!" Catherine was on her feet, but Charles held her fingers

restrainingly.

"Last night, mother means. The nurse said she'd call me the instant he

woke. He's really sleeping now. Not unconscious."

Catherine stood between them for a moment of silence. "It stands to

reason he might not be hurt bad, and yet want his mother." Who said

that? Some one had said it to her.

"We looked for you yesterday," said Mrs. Spencer.

"Blizzards. I couldn't get a train." Catherine felt a bond between

them, excluding her, accusing her. Charles stared at her, his eyes

sunken, the lines about his mouth deepened; her mother--a thin,

wrinkled film seemed drawn over her face, dimming her color. "I came

the instant I could. I sat up on a local." She clasped her hands

against her breast, against the heavy, pounding ache.

"You must be tired to pieces, poor child." Her mother patted her arm.

"Don't feel so bad, Cathy. It might have happened if you'd been right

here. And it's turning out so much better than----"

"But I wasn't here," said Catherine, quietly. And then, "What about

Walter?" She could see that sled sweeping around the corner. "Was he

hurt?"

"Shaken up and bruised. Spencer was steering."

A rustle at the door, a strange face staring at her, crisp and cold

above white linen.

"Yes?" Charles stepped forward intently.

"The little boy is awake."

"This is Mrs. Hammond, Miss Pert. She may go in?"

She was a culprit, a stranger, trembling, unable to move.

"You'd better take off your hat and coat, Mrs. Hammond. And don't

excite him. He's drowsy."

The dim, shaded light; a little still mound under the counterpane;

under the smooth white turban of bandages, Spencer's gray eyes, moving

softly with her flight from the door to his bed. On her knees beside

him, her fingers closing about his hand. Quiet, not to excite him. How

limp and small his hand felt!

"Hello, Moth-er!" He sighed, and his eyelids shut down again.

VI

The next two weeks life was a shadow show outside that room where

Spencer lay. "He must be kept flat and motionless," the surgeon said,

with Dr. Henrietta nodding assent. "Even as he feels stronger."

Catherine was concentrated entirely upon that. Everything reduced

itself to terms of Spencer. Books that she might read to him, games

she might devise, stories she could tell--anything to keep him content

until it was safe for him to lift that bandaged, wounded head. Always

there was the terror lest some sign of injury might show itself, some

quirk in his mind, some change in personality, some flush to indicate

fever and infection. "We think he has, miraculously, escaped any bad

effects," said Henrietta, "but we can't be absolutely sure for a few

days." At night, when he slept, Catherine would leave Charles in the

house, and slip out for a quick walk in the cold March darkness. But

terrifying images pursued her--sudden blackness shutting down over that

shining, golden reality that was Spencer to her--and she would hasten

back, unassuaged of her terror until she stood again at the door of his

room.

When her trunk came, she had rummaged through it, selecting all the

material of her work, and sending it to Dr. Roberts with a brief note.

"My son has been injured and I can do nothing more with this. If you

can send someone else to finish the work, please do so. I can not even

think of it for the present."

There would come a day, she knew, when she could think again, a day

when she would face the lurking shadows of her guilt, would determine

what it meant. Not now. Not until Spencer was well.

Charles was waiting, too, she knew. He was subdued, considerate,

concerned lest she overtax herself. But he seemed one of the shadows in

the outer world.

Then Spencer lost his angelic patience, and began to fret humanly about

lying flat in bed.

"A few more days, Spencer." Henrietta smiled at him. "Then this crack

in your head will be healed enough."

"But I feel all right now."

Fear, retreating, dragged away the distortion it had given, and

gradually the shadows about Catherine grew three-dimensional again.

Henrietta warned her: "You'll have a frightful slump, Catherine, unless

you let yourself down easily, after this strain."

"I don't feel tired, not at all."

"That's the trouble. And you are. Rest more. Spencer doesn't need you

every second now. Let Charles sleep here to-night."

Catherine shook her head.

"I sleep fairly well here, because I know I shall wake if Spencer

stirs. Anywhere else I should lie awake, listening."

"But he's safe now. I'm sure of that. The only danger, after the first,

was infection. And that's past. Two more days and I'll let him up. I

don't want you down." Henrietta paused, her fingers running along the

black ribbon of her glasses. "When are you going back to work?" she

flung out.

A subtle change in Catherine's face, like the quick drawing of shades

at all the windows of a house.

"I don't know." She moved away from Henrietta, to glance in at Spencer.

"Um." Henrietta shrugged. "Well, I'll be in early to-morrow."

That was the first shadow to take real form. When _was_ she going back

to work? And behind the shades drawn against Henrietta moved a sharp

curiosity. What had Dr. Roberts done about the investigation? There

had been a note from him, tossed into a drawer. A note of sympathy.

Had he said anything about the work? But as she made a faint motion to

go in search of the note, Spencer called her.

Another shadow to grow more real was Miss Kelly. She had managed Letty

with amazing competence, keeping her quiet and amused. She had come

earlier in the morning than usual, to dress Marian and walk with her to

school. But she was worried, shying away when she met Catherine in the

hall, and her pale blue eyes stared with some entreaty in them. The day

that Spencer first sat up, Charles carried him into the living room to

the armchair, and Catherine tucked a rug about his feet and left him

there, to look out of the window. As she went back to the bedroom, she

heard a choking, muffled sound, and there in the hall stood Miss Kelly,

her hands over her face.

"What is it?" she asked gently, touching the woman's shoulder. Then, as

she looked at the swollen, reddened eyes, she knew. "He's quite well

again," she said. "Don't cry."

"I--I hadn't left him a second," Miss Kelly whispered. "Just to help

Letty down the steps."

"I know. I haven't thought you were careless."

"I thought I'd go crazy. He's never coasted in the street. The other

boy thought of it."

"It was an accident, Miss Kelly. You mustn't blame yourself."

The entreaty faded under the flush of gratitude. Miss Kelly turned and

hurried back to Letty's room, her square shoes clumping solidly.

VII

Saturday afternoon. Spencer was dressed, even to his shoes. Catherine

had suggested moccasins, but Spencer held out for shoes. "Then I'll be

sure, Mother, that I'm really up!" The terrifying pallor had left his

face. The bandages were gone, too; just the pink, wrinkled mouth-like

scar spoke audibly of the past weeks.

"You'll have to part your hair in the middle, Spencer," Dr. Henrietta

had told him, "until this bald spot grows out." And Spencer had

retorted, promptly, "I wouldn't be that sissy!"

Catherine moved one of her red checkers, smiled a little, wondering

where he had picked up that idea, and glanced away from Spencer and

checker board, out of the window. The bare trees of Morningside pricked

up through gray mist; the distant roofs were vague. What a horrid day!

It seemed too raw and cold for Spencer's first trip outdoors. But he

really was well again. Monday he could go out. It was true, Henrietta's

prophecy. She was being let down with a thud. There seemed no place

where she could take hold of ordinary life again.

Spencer giggled.

"I jumped three of your men, Mother, and you never saw I could."

"Why, so you did." Catherine looked at her dismantled forces. She

couldn't even keep her mind on those disks of wood. "There." She moved.

"Oh, Moth-er!" Spencer was gathering in the last of the red checkers.

"You're a punk player. You're a dumb-bell!"

"What a name! Where did you find that word?" Catherine watched him; he

was teasing her--that funny little quirk in his eyebrows.

"Oh, the fellers say it." Suddenly he swept the checkers into a heap.

"I'm sick of checkers."

"Want to read a while?"

"I'm sick of reading. Staying in the house just wears me out, Mother."

The doorbell broke the quiet of the house, and Catherine, with a

relieved, "Now we'll see what's coming!" went out to the door. Her

mother, perhaps, or Margaret.

"Hello, Catherine." It was Bill, shifting a large package that he might

extend his hand. She hadn't seen him since that night in Chicago. She

had an impression of herself that night, confident, radiant, but vague

and blurred, as if Bill showed her a faded photograph he had kept for

years. "Henry said she thought I might call on Spencer," he was saying.

Catherine was grateful for the lack of inquiry. He would know that she

had dropped everything in a heap, and that all the ends were tangled

and confused. But knowing, he would ask her nothing, would not even

indicate his knowledge.

"I've brought something for him." He jerked the arm which held the

package.

"Spencer's in here." Catherine led the way to the living room. "Here's

a caller for you," she announced.

"Hello, Mr. Bill!" Spencer lunged forward in his chair, but Bill set

the box promptly before him.

"This table is just what we need. I thought you might help me with this

radio." Bill shook himself out of his overcoat. And Catherine, with a

smile at the sudden lifting of Spencer's clouds of ennui, left them.

There were things to be done. She might as well shake off her lethargy

and attack them. She heard Spencer's eager voice, Bill's deliberate

tones, pronouncing strange phrases--amperes, tuning up, wave lengths.

The laundry. Prosaic, distasteful enough. If she began with that, she

might find a shred of old habit which would start her wheels running.

She carried the bundles to her room, where she sorted the linen into

piles on her bed. She had no list; she remembered Mrs. O'Lay at the

door, last Monday, "The laundry boy's here, Mis' Hammond. Should I

now just scramble together what I can put my hands on?" and her own

indifferent answer. Five sheets. That seemed reasonable. And bath

towels--that one was going. Catherine held it up to the light, poked

her fingers through the shredded fabric, and tossed it to the floor.

We need more of everything, she thought. Sheets--she stared at the

neat white squares. If she unfolded them, probably she would find

more shreds. Well, she wouldn't look! They cost so much, sheets and

towels, and you had so little fun for your money. She stowed away the

piles in the linen drawers. Then she opened the bundle of clothing,

unironed, tight, wrinkled lumps. Mrs. O'Lay would iron them. Little

undergarments, small strings of stockings. At least she didn't have to

mend them; Miss Kelly was keeping them in order. She shook out a pajama

coat; a jagged hole in the front whence a button had departed forcibly.

She would have to mend Charles up. She chuckled; before she had gone

away she had bought new socks for Charles, hiding those she had not

found time to darn. He would never notice.

She was rolling a pair of socks into a neat ball, turning the ribbed

cuff down to hold the ball, when she stopped. One finger flicked

absently at a bit of gray lint. What was she going to do? She was

sorting those clothes quite as if Mrs. O'Lay and Miss Kelly were

fixtures. And she wasn't sure she had money enough to pay Miss Kelly

for even one more week.

She piled away the clothing, dodging her thoughts. But when she had

finished her task, she stood at the window, looking out at the court

windows, and one by one her thoughts overtook her and assaulted her.

Of course I'm going back to the Bureau, the very day Spencer goes to

school again. There's no new reason why I shouldn't. Isn't there? What

about this feeling--that Spencer was a warning to me--a sign? That's

what mother meant. Her hand lifted to her forehead, smoothed back her

hair. That's not decent thinking, she went on. Absurd. Superstitious.

Spencer might have been hurt even if I had been at his heels. Walter

was hurt. Accidents--like a bony, threatening finger shaken at her!

"Moth-er!" Spencer's voice summoned her. Mr. Bill was going now, but he

left the radio for Spencer to examine, and a book about it.

"An' he's going to see the superintendent about wires to catch things

on, and we can't rig it truly until he gets a wire." Spencer clasped

the book under one arm, and drew the black box nearer him along the

table. "It's the most inturusting thing I ever saw, Mother." His eyes

were bright with pleasure.

"I'm sorry," said Bill, "that we can't install it to-night. But perhaps

to-morrow----"

Catherine went to the door with Bill.

"It was good of you to come in," she said. "He's had a dull time."

Bill had his hand on the knob.

"I've been out of town again for a week," he said. "Henry kept me

posted."

Then he was going, but Catherine caught at his arm.

"Bill"--in a sharp whisper--"do you think it was my fault? Do you?"

"Catherine!" He was laughing at her, comfortingly. "What rot!"

"Is it?" She sighed.

"You're tired." His hand enclosed hers warmly for a moment. "Henry says

you've been wonderful, but not wise----"

There was a clatter outside the door, a firm, "Now wait one second,

Letty!" Bill pulled the door open; Letty, her pointed face framed in

a red hood, Marian, pulling her tarn off her tousled dark hair, Miss

Kelly behind them.

"Oh, Mr. Bill!" Marian hugged his arm, and Letty clambered onto her

go-duck that she might reach his hand, with a lusty, "'Lo, Bill!"

"Come back and play with us, Mr. Bill," Marian cajoled him, her head on

one side.

But Bill, grinning at her, eluding Letty's grasp, stepped into the

elevator and was gone.

"'S'at Marian?" Spencer was shouting. "Oh, Marian, you come see what

I got." Marian darted ahead. As Catherine, with Letty's damp mittened

hand in hers, came to the door of the children's room, she heard

Spencer determinedly, "No, you can't touch it! It's too delicut. Mr.

Bill told me it was too delicut. You keep your hands off it! It's just

lent to me."

"Who said I wanted to touch your ole radium?"

"It isn't radium, Marian. Radio. And you were touching it."

"Marian, dear, come take your wraps off." Miss Kelly had stowed Letty's

go-duck in the hall closet, and followed Catherine. "You musn't bother

Spencer."

"He's well now, isn't he?" She lagged into the bedroom.

Catherine sat on one of the cots, watching. She had scarcely seen

her two daughters since she had come back. She had known they were

well, she had heard Miss Kelly often sidetracking them with, "No,

your mamma is busy and you mustn't disturb her. Poor little Spencer

needs her and you don't." Miss Kelly had lifted Letty into a chair and

was unbuttoning the red coat when Letty set up a strident wail, and

stiffened into a ramrod which slid out from under Miss Kelly's fingers.

"Want my Muvver!" she shrieked. "Not you!" She flung herself on the

edge of the bed beside Catherine, with gyrations of her red-gaitered

plump legs. Catherine, laughing, dragged her up beside her. Letty

snuggled against her, peering up with her blandishing smile.

"All right, old lady." Catherine tugged off the tiny rubbers, stripped

down the knit leggings, noticing absently the promptness with which

Marian carried her own cloak and tarn to the closet and hung them away.

Why, Miss Kelly had taught her to be orderly, she marveled. Then she

saw Letty's expression of sidewise expectancy under long lashes. Miss

Kelly was looking at her gravely.

"Letty tired." She drooped into Catherine's enclosing arm like a sleepy

kitten.

"That's too bad." Miss Kelly was unruffled. "Then you can't show your

mamma your own hook that you can reach."

Letty was quiet. Catherine felt the child's body stiffen a little

from its kittenlike relaxation, as if her inner conflict was purely

muscular, not thought at all. That's the way children must think, she

speculated. With a giggle Letty slid down from the bed, hugged her arms

about the pile of scarlet garments, and marched to the closet.

"I screwed a hook into the door, low down," Miss Kelly explained.

"Usually Letty doesn't have to be told."

"And you don't allow her to beguile you, do you?" Catherine laughed at

the self-righteousness in Letty's strut back to the bed.

"You can't," said Miss Kelly, "or they run all over you."

"What runs over you?" demanded Marian.

"Mice!" Letty's shriek was almost in Catherine's ear, as she plumped

down in her mother's lap. "Mice!" and she wiggled in laughter. "Free

blind mice."

"Isn't she silly!" But Marian giggled, too. "Who's that?" The hall door

sounded on its hinges. "Daddy!" Her rush halted at the door. "Oh, I

thought you were my Daddy!"

"Did you, now?" Mrs. O'Lay's red face hung a moment at the door, a

genial full moon. "Well, I ain't. But you'd best be glad I ain't, for

it's little dinner he'd be getting for you."

Marian stuck a pink triangle of tongue after her as she disappeared,

clumping down the hall.

"She's awful fat, isn't she, Muvver?" She scuffled her feet slowly to

the edge of the bed. "An' she has a funny smell. I don't know what she

smells of, but she does."

"Ashes and floor oil," said Catherine. She hadn't noticed it,

consciously. She caught Miss Kelly's surprised, disapproving glance.

"We'll have to lengthen that dress, Marian," she concealed her

amusement, and her free hand pulled at the edge of the chambray dress.

"Can't pull it over your knees, can we?"

"I have let out the tucks in four dresses," said Miss Kelly. This was

ground she knew. "But Marian is growing very fast."

Catherine's arm went around Marian's waist, and pulled her down at her

side.

"Short dresses are the style, aren't they?" She hugged them both, Letty

against her breast, Marian against her shoulder. Firm, warm, slim

things, her daughters, growing very fast.

"What are you folks doing?" Spencer stood in the doorway, his eyes

mournful. "I'm all alone."

"You've got your ole radium," declared Marian promptly, "and you're not

sick any longer, even if I can see that cut, and our Muvver can stay

with us now."

"Us now!" chanted Letty.

"Oh, you've sorted the laundry, Mrs. Hammond?" Miss Kelly turned from

the opened drawer.

"Yes. I left a pile of clothes on a chair in Spencer's room--they need

buttons."

"I thought I'd just lay out clean underwear for morning. Perhaps that

shirt is with the pile." She went past Spencer, who drew aside with a

touch of petulance.

"Suppose we all go into the living room." Catherine brushed Letty and

Marian to their feet. "Daddy will be here soon, and we'll all have

dinner together for the first time. Yes, Letty, too. It's a special

occasion. Spencer's first full-dress day."

"Should I wash for dinner now, Muvver?" Marian still clung to her

mother's arm. Catherine, looking down at the brown eyes, was disturbed.

Marian was jealous of Spencer. She resented--oh, well, probably that

was natural enough. Her legs outgrew her dresses, and her personality

was growing as rapidly, shooting up, not wholly caught in civilized

patterns.

"Can you keep your hands clean until dinner? Perhaps you might wait

until Daddy has come. Run along, children. I want to speak to Miss

Kelly a moment."

"What about, Muvver?"

"Business." Catherine was firm, and Marian's mood shifted quickly.

"Show Letty your ole radium," she said, dragging Letty after her, and

Spencer pursued them in haste.

"You needn't stay for Letty's supper," said Catherine, as Miss Kelly

returned. "You've been very kind to give me so many additional hours.

And you certainly deserve to-morrow. It is several weeks, isn't it,

since you've had Sunday?"

"That's all right, Mrs. Hammond." Miss Kelly laid the retrieved shirt

on the dresser. "Of course, if you don't need me to-morrow." She looked

at Catherine warily, her sandy lashes blinking, her nose still reddened

from the afternoon. "You will want me next week?"

"Of course." Catherine frowned, a kind of panic whirring in her.

"I wondered. I didn't know. Something your mother said. I knew you

needed some one for the children only if you were working."

"You must have misunderstood mother." The whirring deepened into fear,

like wings, beating to escape the nets spread to catch her. They all

expected her to abandon everything, to step back into the old harness.

"Of course, I have made no plans, until Spencer was well. But next

week"--she spoke out boldly, denying her own doubts--"next week I

shall--" she did not finish that sentence. "At any rate, Miss Kelly,

I should tell you in advance. I've just been admiring the way you are

training the children. You are quite remarkable with them."

VIII

When Charles came in, Marian flew to meet him, flinging her arms about

him as far as they would go, with little squeals of delight.

"Daddy, hello; we're going to have a party. Letty, too. Spencer can sit

up at the table."

"I should say I could," broke in Spencer, indignantly.

He looks tired--Catherine smiled at him over Letty's yellow head.

Sallow, discouraged. His glance withdrew quickly from hers, stopped at

Spencer.

"How's the boy? Fine?"

"Daddy!" Marian pulled at his sleeve. "I thought of something. Let me

whisper it."

And Catherine, while Letty slipped from her lap in an endeavor to

learn what Marian was whispering, thought: it's a breaking off place,

to-night. The interim is over.

"You'd better ask mother." Charles ruffled Marian's cropped head.

"No! A secret, Daddy!"

"Well. Ask Mrs. O'Lay, then."

"Tell Letty!" She pounded on his knee.

"Here, you!" He glanced again at Catherine, and his grin was suddenly

like Spencer's. "That's no way to learn a secret. You wait."

Catherine's heart began to beat quickly. He is wretched about

something, she thought. Bothered. But he wants to pretend. Marian

whisked back, jumping about it. "It's all right! She says sure!"

"Then you wait at the door. Don't let them guess," and he stalked off,

leaving Marian solemn in her delight, stationed at the door.

"Chwismas!" shouted Letty. But Marian shooed her out of the hall when

Daddy returned.

Dinner had caught the slight tingling mood of a special occasion.

Charles was deliberately jolly, and the children responded in expansive

delight. Excitement moved pleasantly into Catherine, too, in spite of

her sober, concealed thoughts. That other dinner, ages ago, with the

children responsive then to the contention between her and Charles. The

friendly enclosure of the room, with Letty at her left, Charles across

from her, the other two--and Mrs. O'Lay waddling in and out. Above all,

Spencer, safely clear of that dark threat.

"Well, it's the first time we've had a jolly dinner party for a long

time, eh, Cathy?"

Ah, that was the thing she feared, ironically, under the bright

surface, that Charles was building again; not a trap, exactly, nor a

prison, but a net, a snare. This was to be proof, this scene, that

they must have her, wholly. That her life dwelt only within such walls

as these. That her desires, even, were held here. Her eyes were bright

and troubled.

The secret came. Ice cream and chocolate sauce.

"Now it's a real party," sighed Marian, contentedly. "And I thought it

up."

The telephone rang. Charles sprang to his feet, dropping his napkin as

he hurried out.

"Why," asked Spencer, "does Daddy always have to hustle when the 'phone

rings?"

"Because he has important business, because he's a man," said Marian,

promptly.

"It might be for me." Spencer was hopeful.

"No!" Marian derided him. "Folks don't telephone little boys."

Astonishing. Catherine looked at Marian's calm profile. Where did she

pick up her perfect feminine attitude? Instinct, or a parroting of some

one, Miss Kelly, or her grandmother?

"Catherine!" Charles was calling. "Some one wants you."

"Now! It wasn't Daddy at all." Spencer was triumphant.

"Move along into the living room," said Catherine, rising. "Mrs. O'Lay

is waiting to clear the table."

Then, as she sat down at the desk, she had a hasty, random thought.

Stella Partridge hadn't called for Charles once these past weeks.

Perhaps that hint of Henrietta's--Margaret's voice cut in.

"Hello! You back?" Catherine settled herself comfortably.

"Just in. Everything all right? I've been talking with Henrietta."

"Yes. Really all right. Spencer had a party to-night, his first dinner

with the family."

"Could I see him to-morrow?"

"Of course. Where have you been, anyway? Mother was vague."

"Trip for the firm. To their factories in Boston and Pittsburgh. Cathy,

what a shame your tour was interrupted! When do you go back?"

"You mean west again?" A little shock tingled through Catherine, quite

as if, while she looked at a group of familiar thoughts, an outside

hand shifted the spotlight, and at once a different color lay upon

them, changing them.

"You hadn't finished the work, had you?"

"No." That was all Catherine could say.

"Well, Spencer's all right, isn't he?"

"Yes," heavily from Catherine. Silence for a moment. Then Margaret,

forcefully:

"I'd like to come right out to-night. Don't be a fool, Cathy! I know

just what's happened to you, old dear! Don't you let it! But Amy's

waiting for me, and I'm starved."

Catherine stared at the round black mouthpiece. If she could hold that

light Margaret threw over things--in which nothing looked the same. But

she couldn't talk.

"I'll expect you to-morrow, then?" she asked.

"Yes. Early."

* * * * *

Charles was telling the children the story of the bantam hen he had

owned when he was a little boy. Letty was curled up on his knees,

Marian sat on the arm of his chair, his arm about her, Spencer had

drawn his chair close.

"And I used to carry her around in the pocket of my coat, with just her

head sticking out, and her bright shiny eyes and her yellow bill."

"Yellow bill?" murmured Letty.

"Just how big was she, Daddy?" Marian asked.

"I'd like a hen like that," said Spencer.

"Some day maybe we can live in a decent place, where we can have hens."

"And a dog, Father?"

"No, a kitty. A little gray soft kitty." Marian looked anxiously at her

father. "I'd much rather have a kitty, Daddy."

"We might have both"--and as Letty opened her mouth wide and pink for

a protest--"yes, and Letty could have a kitty or a dog or a pet hen.

Well, my bantam's name was Mitty. One day----"

Catherine stepped softly away from the door. She could get Letty's bath

ready. And she must transfer bedclothes. Spencer was to move into his

own room again, and she had forgotten to ask Mrs. O'Lay to arrange the

beds.

When she went in for Letty, the story had gone on to a dog. Mr. Bill's

dog. He lived next door, Charles was explaining, and he was bigger than

I was. His dog was shaggy.

Letty, protesting, came, full of incoherencies about dogs and kittens

and chickens.

"Muvver, to-day Letty wants li'l dog an' li'l kitty an' li'l shickey."

"Not to-day. To-day's over. Now you are a fish." And Letty swam

vigorously. Catherine stood beside her cot, looking down at her,

fragrant, pink, beatific. A decent place to live in--with live things

around them instead of city streets. A tiny, distant alarm clanged in

her mind. That was what Charles had said, when he spoke of the offer at

Buxton. Was he thinking about that, still? What _was_ he thinking about!

Spencer had his bath, refusing her assistance with firm dignity. He was

silent, standing at the door of his own room, a thin, pajamaed figure,

looking at his own cot.

"You don't need me now at night, do you?" Catherine turned down the

covers. "Here, hop in before you are chilly."

"I liked that other bed," said Spencer. "It's much softer."

"Nonsense!" Catherine laughed at him, tucked him in, kissed his cheek

softly, not looking at the pink, wrinkled scar. "Same kind of springs.

And you're well now."

"Will you be gone in the morning, Mother?"

His question halted her at the door.

"No, Spencer. What made you ask that?"

"I wanted to know."

She snapped off the light and closed his door.

Then Marian was bathed; scrubbing and spluttering, she repeated with

funny little imitations of Charles's phrases, the stories about Mitty

Bantam and Mr. Bill's dog.

Catherine opened the window to let the steam out of the bathroom, while

she hung up limp towels and scrubbed out the tub and restored things

to shining order. Her sleeve slipped down on her wet wrist, and she

shoved it back impatiently. She'd like a drowsy, warm bath herself, and

sleep, dreamless, heavy. But Charles was waiting for her. The interim

was over. Pushing her hair away from her forehead with her habitual

gesture, she went into the living room.

Charles looked up from his paper, smoke wreathing his face.

"This has been fine," he said, warmly. "Comfortable home evening."

Catherine sat down, brushing drops of water from her skirt.

"Hasn't it?" he urged.

"Well--" She was staring at her hands, blanched, wrinkled at the finger

tips, by their long soaking. "If home is the bathroom!" Under her

lowered eyelids she saw Charles watching her, guardedly. He set down

his pipe with a click.

"If you feel that way!"

"Horrid of me to say it, wasn't it?" Catherine relaxed, her hands

limp-wristed along the chair.

"I suppose you are tired. Awful strain, these last weeks."

"Perhaps I am." Catherine twisted sidewise in her chair and smiled at

him. "But you look tired, too, poor boy. What have you been doing?

I--why, I haven't seen you since I came back."

"You certainly haven't. But I didn't mind. Spencer--well, thank God,

that's over!"

"Yes." Catherine discovered that she was so recently out from the

distorting shadow of fear for Spencer that as yet she could not talk

about it, as if words might have black magic to recall the fear.

"Damned lucky escape." Charles rammed tobacco into the pipe bowl with

his thumb. He was thrusting out words in bravado, without looking at

Catherine. He, too, had lived in that fear! He sucked vigorously,

drawing the match flame down into the pipe. "What are you going to do

now?"

The muscles of wrists and fingers leaped into tight contraction, and

her hands doubled into fists against the chair.

"I haven't thought, until to-day." Then, suddenly,--better pour out

everything. "Nothing has changed, has it, now that Spencer is well?"

"You plan to go back to the Bureau?"

"You mean that you think I should give it up?" Catherine stared at the

hard, jutting line of his jaw, at his eyes, feverish, sunken. "Charles,

you can't mean you blame me for Spencer's accident?"

"No." He spoke sharply, denying himself. "It might have happened

anyway. I know that."

"Oh!" A long, escaping sigh. "If you had blamed me--I couldn't have

endured it." And then, "It's hard, not to blame myself."

"That's just it." Charles moved forward, eagerly. "It's frightening. I

thought you might feel, well, that you couldn't risk it. Leaving them.

I want to be fair, Catherine."

"If you had been away, on a business trip"--Catherine was motionless

except for the slow movement of her lips--"and this had happened, I

should have sent for you. Would you have blamed yourself? Or given up

your work? Oh, yes, I know you'll say that's different. It isn't so

different. It wouldn't be, if you didn't make it so."

"Oh, my work." He settled back into his chair. "I've got to tell you

things about that. I don't know how interested you are. You've been

engrossed." He paused, but Catherine did not speak. "It does concern

you! And it's a frightful mess." His eyes were haggard, angry, and his

shoulders sagged in the chair with a curious, weary dejection, unlike

their usual squared confidence. "I haven't told you. They didn't put me

in as head of the clinic. The committee recognized the value of my work

in organizing the clinic"--he was quoting, sneeringly--"but preferred

to install a medical psychiatrist. You know it was decided last year,

unofficially, that I was to be appointed the instant the funds were

clear."

"What happened? Who is the head?" Pity extricated Catherine from

her own floundering. She knew, swiftly, what had happened, as she

remembered a sentence in that letter from Henrietta.

"A Dr. Beck. What happened? The usual thing. The doctors in the town

stirred up the usual brawl. This was a medical clinic. No layman

could manage it. Any fool with a year of anatomy could do better

than a specialist. If you can cut off a leg or an appendix, you know

instinctively everything about mental disorders or feeble-mindedness or

anything else that touches psychology."

"But you had discussed that with the committee, and they----"

"They agreed with me last year. But they say they didn't realize

popular opinion. There was underhanded play going on before I heard

about it, and the thing was settled. I don't know just how. It's that

feeling--doctors are all wise, established powers, mystic, and we

scientists are new. If a man can cure the measles, he knows more about

paranoia than I know!"

Catherine clasped her hands, pulses tingling in her finger tips.

"What has happened to Miss Partridge?" she asked.

A dull, brick-glow mounted in Charles's face--anger, or humiliation.

"Has she been ousted, too?" insisted Catherine.

"Dr. Beck has made her his assistant."

"But she's not a physician." Catherine lifted one hand to her throat,

pressing it against the sharp ache there. Poor Charles, he had been

pounded. If he would only tell her!

"No. But she's shrewd enough to see where her bread will be nicely

buttered. She makes an excellent office girl. She--" He was defiant,

aggressive. "You didn't ever like her. You'll probably be delighted to

hear that she saw which way the wind blew, and even added some puffs

of her own. Queering me. Flopping over the instant she saw her own

advantage."

That little squirrel smile! And the faint, distinct, metallic ring

in her clear voice! Catherine saw her in the dusk of that passageway

behind the gymnasium, holding the brown leather bag. I'm soft, she

thought, to have no pleasure out of this.

"Well?" demanded Charles. "You see where it leaves me. All this time

wasted."

"At least you have the material for your book." Catherine was

dispassionately consoling. "And you have that almost done."

"But I haven't. It's clinic material. I can't publish it now. It

belongs to them."

"Charles!"

"Exactly. She did part of the work, Miss Partridge. She wants that for

Dr. Beck. The committee wants the rest, for its clinic as at present

established."

"That's outrageous."

"I could put out a book from my own notes. But it wouldn't mean

anything. No authority behind it. No, I'm done with them. Done."

"At least"--Catherine felt slowly for words--"you have your university

work. That's the main thing. That hasn't been touched."

"Hasn't it, though?" Charles was grim. "When I've spent all this time,

on the score of a great contribution I was about to make!"

"Does it hang up your promotion?" Catherine cried out.

"It does. I heard that this morning, indirectly."

Catherine pulled herself to her feet and stood beside him, hesitantly

brushing his hair, moving her finger down to the deep crease between

his eyes.

"See here," she said, lightly. "You aren't so done for as all that. You

know it."

He thrust his arm violently around her, drew her down to the arm of the

chair, his head pressing into her shoulder.

"And you weren't here!" he cried. "There was no one----"

"Poor boy." Her hand touched his head, softly, sensitive to the

crispness of his heavy hair.

"You haven't cared what happened to me." His words came muffled.

"Oh, haven't I?" Her fingers crept down to his cheek. "Perhaps I have."

"Haven't shown it much." He lifted his face from her shoulder.

In the instant before she bent to kiss him, there was a scurry of

thoughts through her mind--leaves lifted in a puff of wind: He is

contrite about Stella Partridge. He can't say that he is. He thinks

I don't know about her. No use in airing that. He is through, and

unhappy, and I love him.

"Let's not talk any more to-night," she said. "Lots of days coming to

talk in. Spencer is well, and we are here, together."

IX

A square, rimmed in solid black, of something full of distant,

colorless clarity. Not quite colorless, since an intense turquoise-blue

seemed to move far behind it, like a wave. Catherine stared. She had

come awake so suddenly that she could only see that square at first,

without knowledge of it. Then, as suddenly, she knew. It was the sky,

over the black rim of the opposite wall of the court, with window edges

for its frame. Almost morning. What a strange dream, digging, trying

to push the spade down through roots of dead grass, while someone kept

saying, "Make it larger. That won't hold her." Had Spencer called out?

Fully awake, she lifted herself on an elbow. The house was quiet. She

could see dimly between her and the window the dark mound of Charles's

head on his pillow.

That queer dream. As she lay down again, she had it, in a swift flash

of association. The Actinidia vine! Bury an old hen at its roots, she

had told Bill. She was digging, for herself. Oh, grotesque!

And yet, before she had slept, she had not thought of herself. She had

worked patiently, tenderly, to restore Charles. She could hear him,

humble, "You mean that, Cathy? You think this isn't a horrible failure?

I couldn't prevent it, could I? After all--" and gradually she had

drawn him clear of his forlorn dejection.

The patch of sky grew opaque, white. Morning.

There is no wall between us now, she thought. That is down.

Love--tenderness--strength--sweet, fiery, ecstasy--all that he wished.

Surely he would, in turn--lift her--into her whole self.

X

Charles had taken the children out for a Sunday afternoon walk. They

wanted Catherine, too.

"The air will do you good, if you _are_ tired," urged Charles.

"But Margaret is coming in." Catherine stretched lazily in her chair.

"And I don't want to budge."

Charles had gone, resignation in his voice as he corralled the children

out of the door. Catherine closed her eyes. She was eager to see

Margaret, and yet a little afraid. She was too like an old scrap bag

crammed with thoughts and feelings, tangled, unsorted; and Margaret

would want to shake out the bag, sweeping away the jumble of contents.

Charles had said, that morning, "Queer, how down I felt yesterday. That

pork roast Friday night was too heavy. Tell Mrs. O'Lay, will you, to

go easy on the pork." And then, hastily, "Talking things out with you

cleared the air, too. I can see I'd had an exaggerated line on them. I

have a plan I want to talk over, some time soon."

Charles, restored, could call his malady pork! At the same

time--Catherine rose hastily as the bell clattered. At the same time,

she thought, walking down the hall, there had been gratitude, hidden,

unspoken, and release in the feeling between them. That feeling was the

air itself, intangible, invisible, but holding all these other things

of shape or solidity. Charles was himself again, confident, assured,

almost boisterous.

Margaret pounced at her, shook her gently, hugged her, marched her back

to the living room.

"Fine! Everyone else is out. Now I can bully you." She dragged off

her gloves. "You look as if you needed it, too," she said. She leaned

forward abruptly and touched Catherine's hand. "Spencer! Oh, it has

been awful, I know," and surprisingly her eyes grew brilliant with

tears. "But he's honestly not hurt, is he? Henrietta swore he wasn't."

"Honestly all right," said Catherine.

"I wanted to come back, but Henry wired me I couldn't do a thing. So I

stuck to the job." She moved restlessly. "And Henry swears there's no

danger of any future complication. I worried about that. Spencer's not

the sort I want changed by any knock on his head."

"No." Catherine shivered. "They all say there is absolutely no danger."

"Well." Margaret was silent a moment.

She had to say that, to be rid of it, thought Catherine.

"But I know what you've been up to." Margaret's tears were gone.

"Wallowing in sentimental regrets. Listening to mother suggests that

you must surely see your duty now. And the King, too! Just when I was

so proud of you, and using you for an example of what a woman really

could do, could amount to, and everything." She laughed. "Don't be a

renegade, Cathy."

"Pity to spoil your example, huh?"

"Exactly. Have you seen your boss since you came back? I thought not.

Cathy, go and see him. Dress up and go down to your office. Drag

yourself out of your home, sweet home, long enough to remember how you

felt. If you'll promise that, I won't say another word. Psychological

and moral effect, that's all."

"I don't want to see him until I make up my mind."

"It isn't your mind you are making up. It's"--Margaret waved her

hand--"it's your sentiment tank. Oh, I know. I have a soft heart,

myself, Catherine."

"There's another thing." Margaret had turned her upside down, as she

had feared, and she was hunting feverishly in the scattered contents

of her scrap-bag self. "Charles." Reticence obscured her. "He's been

disappointed about that clinic. He does need----"

"Anybody," declared Margaret with quick violence, "anybody needs

somebody else loving 'em, smoothing 'em down, setting 'em up, brushing

off the dust. I know! But you can do that anyway. That just goes

on----"

"I wonder. You're a hard-boiled spinster, Margaret. What do you know

about it?"

"I know a little thing or two about love. You do it all the time,

through and around whatever else you are doing. Not from nine to five

exclusively." She settled back, a grimace on her lips, as the door

rattled open and Letty's piping was heard. "Didn't stay long, did he?

You promise me you'll go down to the Bureau. Quick! Or I'll fight with

the King like a----"

"Yes, I'll go down." Catherine laughed. "I'd have to anyway."

And Margaret, smiling at her, ran out to meet Spencer.

XI

Catherine sat at the dining room table, staring down at the straggling

columns of figures on the sheet of yellow paper. Her mouth was sullen,

mutinous. Mrs. O'Lay came through the hall, her broom swishing behind

her. She had been redding up the study, and Catherine had moved her

bookkeeping into the dining room. Well, there it was. Appalling totals.

Bills and bills and bills. She ran her fingers across the ragged edges

of her checkbook stub. No hope there. Then her hand crept past the

bills to a long white envelope, bearing the Bureau inscription in one

corner. Her check in full for the month, as if she had stayed in Ohio

and finished the job. Charles's eyebrows, lifted inquiringly when Miss

Kelly had appeared that morning, seemed to arch across her name on

that envelope. She had only to take out that slip of paper, scrawl her

name and "on deposit" across the back, and she was committed. Last

night--Charles clinging to her hand--"It's wonderful, Cathy, having

things right again. Don't spoil them." And she cravenly had kept

silence.

She looked again at the final figures in her check book. Tiny, impotent

sum. Her mind busily added to them the figures of the check. But she

couldn't take it, unless she meant to go on. Dr. Roberts intended it as

an indication of her permanence, a check for the full month, when she

had worked only half of it. Her fingers rested on the slip. The bills,

the paltry little balance, worked on her in a sort of desperate fever.

I'd have to give up Mrs. O'Lay, too, she thought, to even things.

There'll be doctors' bills. That surgeon. Everything's overdrawn. Have

to tell Miss Kelly.

She saw herself vividly walking that treadmill. Poor Charles; he had

expected some release, financially, from the clinic and his book.

Wonderful, having things right--don't spoil them.

She rose quickly, bunching together the devastating bits of paper. She

had to see Dr. Roberts, at least. No use trying to think. Her mind was

a jellyfish. Perhaps if she saw him, and talked with him, something

with a backbone would rise up to rout the jellyfish.

"I may not be in for luncheon," she told Mrs. O'Lay. "But you can

manage."

"Sure, you look elegant." Mrs. O'Lay replaced the cover on her kettle

of soup. "An' a breath of air will do your heart good."

It did, Catherine discovered. She had been housed too long. Clear,

bright, gusty, with bits of paper swirling along the stone wall of

the Drive, and sharp white wave edges rushing across the river. Too

cold for the top of the bus. She watched the river through the window,

and then the shops on the side streets. She was empty, except for bits

of external things touching her eyes. Straw hats in the windows, and

bright feathers; why, spring would come, soon.

The elevator boy grinned at her widely, ducking his bullet head.

"How'do. Ain't seen you round here for quite some time."

That old thrill of belonging to the building--that woman in furs

stepping off at the dentist's floor was eying her curiously--the thrill

of expanding into part of this complicated, intricate, impersonal life.

Her office again, long, narrow, caging the sunlight between its shelved

walls, and the stenographer rising in a little flurry. "I'll call Dr.

Roberts. He was expecting you, I think."

Catherine looked out of her window. No one in the fitting room

opposite; she could see the sweep of draped fabrics.

"Mrs. Hammond! I am delighted to see you."

Dr. Roberts bustled toward her, his bearded face cordial, his gestures

animated, fidgety. "I wondered how soon you would be in. I should have

called you soon. Your little boy has recovered?"

"Yes." Catherine sat down.

"Such a pity. Poor little chap. And calling you back. I must tell

you how admirable your investigation is. We've had several letters

from people whom you met. You handled them admirably, interested them

without antagonizing them. Well, you are ready now to finish the tour?"

"You have sent no one else?" Catherine was cold. That jellyfish in her

head was a flabby lump left by the tide.

"No. I want you to go back." His eyes, small, keen, searched hers.

She sighed faintly.

"I can't do it." She was startled at the finality in her own words. "I

can't go away, Dr. Roberts. Not--again."

He showed no surprise.

"Your letters," he suggested. "They sounded enthusiastic."

"It was fascinating." There was pain in the folding down of her long

eyelids. "But I can't go away. I--" she smiled briefly. "I've lost my

nerve. I can't risk what might happen."

"The children, you mean?"

"Yes."

"Um. A pity. Accidents happen, anyway. But of course you have thought

of that." He drummed busily with his fingers along the desk.

Catherine straightened her shoulders. She could think clearly now;

evidently the jellyfish had existed just for that one decision.

"I had hoped there wouldn't be a chance for me to go away again. I

thought you might have sent someone else, and that you'd want me here

in the office. You see--the glimpse I had of the real colleges gives

enormous vitality to all these catalogues. I'd like to go on, if I

could do it right here."

When had she thought that? Astonishing, the way ideas burst out from

some deep level, and you recognized them as authentic.

"A pity." Dr. Roberts clasped his hands, twisting his fingers in and

out. Here's the church, and here's the steeple, thought Catherine, as

if she played the finger game for Letty. "I was afraid of it. But if

you will come back, handle the work here--I like the way you write up

the material." He clapped one palm on the desk. "Let me think it over.

I suppose I might finish the trip myself. I am free now--those meetings

have come off."

"There's this check." Catherine took it out of her handbag. "For a

month, at the new rate."

"I think that will be satisfactory. It's gone into the budget, your

salary, I mean. I don't think the President will suggest cutting it.

Not if I make the trip myself. Let me think it over. No, the check is

yours."

* * * * *

Just after twelve, by the jeweler's sidewalk clock. She could reach

home for luncheon. But she didn't want to! She turned out of the

entrance and moved along, graceful, deliberate, toward the cross street

and Amy's club.

The housekeeper nodded to her. There were women in a group near the

fire, one or two heads turning toward her; no one there who knew her.

She sat alone at a small yellow table in a corner of the dining room.

She was earlier than her usual hour. That was why she saw none of the

women she had talked with. She did recognize several of the faces.

Bits of gossip collected about them, highly colored pieces of personal

comment, which Amy had thrown off in her intense, throaty voice. That

woman who was just seating herself, dropping her heavy, squirrel-lined

great coat over her chair, was a successful physician; makes thirty

thousand at least. Has to have a young thing adoring her--yes, there's

the present young thing, with a sleek bobbed head like a child's,

and round, serious eyes. Secretary, housekeeper, chauffeur, slave!

Catherine could hear Amy's satiric list. And the two women at the table

beyond. Catherine bent over her salad, while the women in the room

retreated to some great distance, carrying the bits of gossip like

cockleburrs stuck to their garments. It's funny, thought Catherine. I

never saw it before. But it is always how they love--how they live--not

what they think. Even when Amy talks about them. Even these women.

Her thoughts ran on, clearly. She had wished to lunch there, because

she needed something to orient herself, to deliver her out of the

smother of her life and all its subtle, intimate pressures of love.

She wanted to see women in terms of some cold, dignified, outer

achievement. And instead, her mind clattered about them with tales of

their lovers, their husbands, their emotional bondage.

Well, was that her fault, her own prepossession? Or Amy's? From Amy had

come these irritating recollections. Or was it that women were like

that, summed up in personal emotions? She drew on her gloves and left

the club rooms.

She would walk up the Avenue and across Central Park. They were having

lunch at home, now, Charles, the children. Sometimes in walking her

feet seemed to tread thoughts into smoothness; or the swinging rhythm

of her body shook some inner clarity up through confused images where

she could see it, could lay hold of it.

What was she trying to think about, anyway? Women? Herself? Herself and

Charles. And the children.

Men had personal lives, too. But didn't they make them, or try to make

them, comfortable, assured, sustaining, so that they could leave them?

Find them when they came back? And women having had nothing else, still

centered there? She stopped in a block of traffic, looking about with

eyes strained and vague.

Petulant, smug faces above elegant furs. Hard streaks of carmine for

lips. Faces with broad peasant foreheads, with beak noses. Faces----

The rush carried her across the street. Letty and Marian, her

daughters, growing up.

If I knuckle under now, she thought, what of them? She could feel them

pressing against her, Letty's silky head under her throat, Marian's

firm, slim body against her arm. What I do can't matter very much,

directly, to them. They have to live, themselves. She was humble,

feeling their individualness, their growth as a curious progression

of miracles in which she was merely an incidental tool. Women devote

themselves to their families, so that their daughters may grow up and

devote themselves to their families, so that---- Catherine laughed.

Some one has to break through that circle, she thought.

She entered the Park, walking more slowly along the winding path. If

she had only sons--the thought of Spencer stood up like a straight

candle flame in her murky drifting--that would be different. There was

her own mother. Catherine could see her, being wheeled along the beach

at Atlantic City, with her friend, Alethea, on a little holiday to

recover from the shock of Spencer's accident. How does she manage it,

that poise of hers, that sufficiency?

The walk had come to a cluster of animal houses. Catherine looked about

her, and on a sudden whim went past the attendant into the monkey

house. The warm, acid, heavy odor affronted her. She didn't want to

be here. Years ago she had come in, before she married. She turned

to go, and met the melancholy flat stare of a small gray monkey. The

animal clung to the bars of the cage with one hand, the long, naked

fingers moving restlessly, and looked at Catherine, while the fingers

of the other hand dug pensively into the fur of her breast. Catherine

felt her heart pause; she had a sensation of white excitement, as if

she hung poised over an abyss of infinite knowledge, comprehension. A

second monkey swung chattering across the cage and dropped from the

bar, grabbing at the tail of the monkey that stared, and the moment

was gone. Catherine went hastily out into the clear, sweet air. I hate

them, she muttered, and hurried away across the brown, dead stretches

of park. But she could not escape the vivid recollection of that

earlier visit, years ago. She had seen then a female monkey nursing

her young, and the pathos of the close-set unwinking eyes over the

tiny furry thing had made the curve of long monkey arm a symbol of

protective mother instinct.

They're too like us. That's why I hate them. And then, fiercely, men

have climbed out of that. Some ways. But they want to keep us monkey

women. Loving our mate and children. Nothing else.

She came presently to a stretch of water at the other side of the

park, and stopped a moment on the shore. Blue, quiet, with long black

reflections of trees from the opposite bank.

My mind has made itself up, she thought. Her pallor and sullenness had

given place to an intense vitality in her wide, dark eyes, in the curve

of her mouth. It isn't selfishness, nor egoism, this hankering of mine.

It's more than that. I'll tell Charles--she laughed softly, out of the

wholeness of her release from doubt--I'll tell him that I can't be a

monkey woman. He'll help me. He must help me.

XII

She waited until the children were asleep and the house was quiet.

Then she knocked at the study door, behind which Charles sat, working

on a lecture. She scarcely waited for his "Come" but went in swiftly,

closing the door.

"Most through work?" She drew a small chair near his desk. "Why, you

aren't working." His desk was orderly, bare.

"Not just now." Charles leaned back. "I--" he hesitated. "You look

stunning in that get-up," he finished.

"Yes?" Catherine's smile lingered. "It's not the get-up. It's me,

inside."

"Handsome wife." Charles touched her fingers, spreading them wide

between his own fingers, crumpling them together in a sudden violent

squeeze. Then he leaned back again. "Just been thinking about you," he

said.

"Yes? So've I." Vivacity in Catherine's voice, her gesture, a vivacity

which had true life from deep inner light, not an external manner. "I

wanted to talk to you."

"I've been wanting to talk things over with you." Charles looked away

from her somberly. "For some time."

"It's about next year," continued Charles slowly, and Catherine

thought, I'll leave the monkeys out, at first. "Our plans, you know."

Something arrested Catherine at the edge of speech, something like the

damp finger of air from a cellar.

"I should have brought it up before you went downtown," he was saying.

"You were down this morning, weren't you?"

She nodded.

"I didn't realize you were going. And anyway, to-day sort of brought

matters to a head."

"Yes?"

"Well, it's my job. I went in to see the Head, to-day." Charles faced

her, his eyes deprecating. "You gave me nerve to do that, Cathy. I'd

been knocked so confoundedly hard--but I felt better to-day. That's

you." Catherine's hands clung together in her lap. "I wanted to have

exact data on where I stood. The trouble is, this place is too big.

I mean the institution, not my own job. There are too many men eager

for a foothold. The Chief was rather fine about it--about my work,

especially. Praised it. You know. But he said I'd stepped somewhat out

of rank, going abroad. Two men are ahead of me, in line for promotion.

Can't have too many professors. Isn't room. All that guff, you know

what it is." Charles brought his fist down on the desk. "I should like

to get to a place where I can march ahead as fast as I can go. I talked

over the whole situation with him, including the Buxton offer." His

eyes were suddenly wary, inquisitive. "You remember that, of course?

And he agreed with me."

"He advised you to leave the University?" Catherine heard her own

voice, like a thin wire.

"He agreed that the chance for advancement, for future accomplishment,

lay there rather than here."

"And you wish to go?"

"I had another letter to-day from the president there. It's a

remarkable place, Cathy. Small, but endowed to the neck. A few of

those small colleges are, you know. I'd have the entire department

in my hands, with freedom to work out anything I liked. They want a

strong department. Want a good man to build it up." His wariness, his

searching of her face had dropped away in a rush of genuine enthusiasm.

His words ran on, building the picture, his work, his opportunity.

Then he switched, suddenly. "And the place is fine, too. Pretty little

town, college community. Wonderful place for the children. The other

night, as I told them about my childhood, I felt we had no right to

imprison them here. It isn't decent. Shut up in a city, when they are

just growing up. Do you think so? All this awful struggle to stretch

our income, too. That would be over. More salary, almost twice as much.

Living conditions infinitely better. Pleasant people to live near."

"When you got your appointment at the University here, you thought it

was perfect. The institution, the city. Do you remember how you felt?"

"It did seem so, didn't it? But you have to watch a thing work out."

"You are sure you are judging Buxton fairly, and not in the light of

what's happened in the clinic?"

"I've been thinking about it for months. I spoke about it in the

fall----" He stopped suddenly, and Catherine saw the phantom that he

had evoked: his own voice, harsh, "I think I'll take that Buxton offer,

just to get you out of town," and her own answer, thrown back as she

fled, "You'd have to be sure I would go!"

"I can't decide it alone," he went on hastily. "I'm just trying to show

you how it looks to me."

"But you have decided." Her effort to keep her voice steady flattened

all its intonations. "Decided that it is much the best thing for your

career, much the best for the children."

"I can't drag you off unless you wish to go. I hoped you would like it,

too. It--well, it is something of an honor, you know. The way they keep

after me. There's a large appropriation for a laboratory. I'd have very

little teaching. They seem to have some idea of a creative department."

Catherine was silent. There was something shaking and ludicrous, in the

way that courageous light of afternoon had been snuffed out. Why, she

had thought she stood at last in a clear road, where she could be sure

of direction, and here she was only at the core of the labyrinth again,

knocked blindly into an angle of blind wall.

"Catherine!" he cried out against her silence. "If it wasn't for this

damned idea of yours, you'd care what happened to me!"

Whirling about in the lane of her labyrinth, shutting her eyes to its

maze. "I do care, Charles. That's the trouble."

"After all, it's not just me. It's the children and you, isn't it?" He

fiddled with the blotter, shoved it along the desk. "I think it will

be infinitely better for you, too." His chin was obdurate. "New York

is no place. Overstimulates you. At a place like Buxton, life is more

normal. There's a woman's Faculty Club," he added, triumphantly.

Catherine laughed.

"Teas?" she said, "or literary afternoons?"

"They're fine women. Cathy, don't laugh. I hoped you would like it."

"Like it?" She flung out her hands, sensitive, empty palms upwards.

"I've just been there! I know what it is like. But I know"--she was

sober again--"why, there's nothing for me to do but say yes, is there?

I can't say that Buxton offers me no opportunity, except to be a monkey

woman, can I?"

"What?"

"Nothing." She doubled a fist against her mouth, and stared at him.

"You've been so sweet these last days." Charles reached for her hand,

held it between both of his. "Things were ghastly mixed up, and then

we seemed straight again, you and I. You know everything's been wrong

since you first took that damned office job. I can't stand it! Our

yapping at each other. I hoped you would want to throw it over. I do

care about your being happy. Cathy, if you believe, honestly, that it's

more important that you should stay here, I'll try to see it that way."

Her hand was reluctant, cold, in the warm, steady pressure of his.

"I can't believe it, alone." The labyrinth shut her in, black,

enclosing. "You'd have to believe it, yourself. And you don't."

"It's different, considering the children, too, as well as you and me.

What you do, in an office, takes you away from me. What I do, Cathy,

that is yours, too, isn't it?"

His fingers crept up about her wrist; beneath them her life beat in

heavy, slow rhythm.

"It knocks the stuffing fairly out of everything, if I think you don't

care."

"Yes. It does that for me, too." Catherine smiled at him in a flicker

of mockery. She caught a faint slackening of his fingers. Stella

Partridge! But she knew, even in the impulse to have that out,

to insist upon it as part of the winter, that it was better left

untouched. Intangible, incomplete, a kind of subtle aberration, it

would dissolve more quickly unexpressed.

"I'd be a beast to say I wouldn't go. A perverted, selfish wife.

Wouldn't I? I can't be that. I'm too soft. Charles, I do desire for you

every chance----"

"You're not soft. You're really fine. You----" He jumped to his feet.

"And when we get out there, you'll see. You'll like it! Lots of things

for you to do. You will be happy, Cathy. I'll make you happy."

Catherine, leaning back in her chair, lifted her face to look up at

him. She heard in his voice the shouting down of fear; he had been

worried, then. He had not been sure.

XIII

Catherine sat on the window sill, looking down at the shadows which

slanted across the tree tops of Morningside. In the distance roofs

still glittered in the afternoon sunlight. Beneath her the spring

leaves were delicate and small, keeping their own fine shape, not yet

making green masses. A little easterly breeze touched her warm cheek,

and she thought, leaning from the window, that she sniffed in it the

faint piquancy of Balm of Gilead buds. The last trunk was banging down

the hall, its thuds like muttered profanities.

She turned back to the dismantled rooms. How queer they looked, small,

dingy, worn. Mrs. O'Lay, in the kitchen, was assuring Charles: "Sure

and you needn't worry yourself about that, Mr. Hammond. I'll clear out

every stick. Them little things I've saved for myself. I can make use

of them."

She was cramming things into the dumbwaiter. Catherine could hear the

rustling of waste paper.

Catherine stood up, cautiously. She was stiff, almost dizzy, as if she

had bent so long over packing boxes and trunks that her head couldn't

without penalty be held upright. Well, it was done. Incredible and

astonishing, that the disorder and confusion had come to an end.

"All ready, dear?" Charles stood in the doorway, buttoning his coat,

patting his tie into place. "About time we got off."

"Be sure there is nothing left." Catherine went slowly through the

rooms, listening to the walls return her footsteps emptily.

In the kitchen Mrs. O'Lay poked among the salvage, bundles, piles, an

old black hat of Catherine's mounted rakishly on a box of breakfast

food, a dingy cotton duck of Letty's, limp from loss of stuffing.

"I'll finish up here, Mis' Hammond." The broad red face was creased

into downward wrinkles. "Sure, an' I hate to see the end of you," she

said. "It's fine for you you got a tenant to come in right away, but

we'll miss you."

"Taxi, Catherine!" shouted Charles.

"Good-by, God love you!" Mrs. O'Lay waved her out of the apartment onto

the elevator.

"Well, we certainly got things off in great style, eh?" Charles beside

her in the cab, the bags stowed at their feet, had his erect, briskly

managing air. "Everything done, and time for dinner before your train."

Catherine was sunk in a lethargy of weariness; dimly she still sorted,

packed, gave directions.

"You know, I forgot about the gas deposit." She emerged frantically

from her lethargy. "Five dollars!"

"I'll see to it. Where's the receipt?"

"Let's see--in that envelope. I'll mail it to you. It was good of

mother to take the children until train time, wasn't it?" Catherine

sighed.

"I tell you, it was a lucky thing we got the apartment off our hands

before fall." Charles patted her knee cheerfully. "Awful job, if we'd

had to pack up at the end of the summer."

"Awful job any time!"

"Oh, well, a week in Maine will make you forget it all. Especially with

the rent off our chests."

"You'll surely come in three weeks?"

"Positively. That finishes up everything. And I'll have to get away

then if I'm to have any vacation. Say, be sure to tell old Baker he's

got to take me down to the ledges for some real fishing. I haven't

fished for two years, except for flounders."

"And Buxton the first of August?"

"Be hot there in August, won't it? Well, I'll have to go then. But I

can find a house for us, and sort of learn the ropes before you blow

in."

"I wonder----" Catherine's brows met in a deep wrinkle. "I can't

remember which trunk I put the blankets in, and the linen. Hope they

aren't labeled Buxton!"

"Oh, you got them where they belong. Don't fuss, I tell you. You let

me drop you at the Gilberts' now, and I'll go on to the station. I can

check these things, and that will give you a few minutes to rest."

"I don't care where you drop me." Catherine laughed. "All my poor mind

does is to hunt for things in those trunks and boxes."

"You might as well stop worrying. They're settled."

* * * * *

Catherine stood at the entrance to the hotel, watching the taxi jerk

its way along with the traffic. Charles's hand lay on the opened

window, a resolute, capable fist. Every one was going home. Home from

work. Shop girls in gay tweeds, already faded across the shoulders;

sallow, small men in baggy trousers, with bits of lint sticking to

them, from the lofts where they sewed--perhaps on more gay tweed

suits, or beaded silk dresses for the trade. Moist, pale faces, with a

startled, worn expression, as if the warmth of the day surprised and

exhausted the city dwellers. And in Maine--a sharp visual image of

pointed firs reflected in clear water, with a luminous twilight sky

behind dark branches.

"Ought to be glad I'm going," she thought. "Instead of spending the

summer here, with these people. And the children--I couldn't keep them

here. Could I!"

Henrietta's maid admitted her to the quiet, orderly living room. Dr.

Gilbert was in her office. She would be free soon. Catherine sat down

at the window, looking idly out at the great steel framework which

shadowed the room. How long ago she had looked down into pits of water

and uncouth shapes of cranes! New Year's Day. And Henry had said,

"You'd be a fool not to go."

The methodical arrangement of the room was restful, sane, after the

hurly-burly of the last week. Distressing that confusion could so fray

the edges of yourself. She closed her eyes, relaxing into a kind of

blankness.

She opened them presently, to find Henrietta in the doorway, staring

through her eyeglasses, her mouth firm and compassionate.

"Hello!" Catherine moved hastily erect. "Don't turn that professional

stare on me. I won't have it."

"Hoped you were asleep." Henrietta came in. "Bill hasn't shown up

yet. Perhaps we'd better go down to the dining room. Your train is so

beastly early. Where's Charles?"

"Checking the trunks. He'll be in soon."

As they waited for the elevator, Catherine turned suddenly upon

Henrietta.

"You know, Henry, I appreciate your not telling me what you think. I

suppose you're disgusted, and you haven't said a word. Not since I told

you we were going."

"Not disgusted." Henrietta thrust her eyeglasses between the buttons of

her jacket. "I've been rather cut up about it. But it's your affair. I

don't see that you could do anything else. Not now, at any rate."

"Perhaps some women could. I can't."

"Women can't alone." Henrietta sounded violent. "Not without men

helping them. Being willing to help them. So long as their own affairs

come first----"

The door of the elevator swung open.

"When Mr. Gilbert comes in, tell him we are at dinner. And Mr. Hammond,

too."

"Yes, ma'am."

Henrietta nodded to the waiter, who led them into an alcove off the

main dining room.

"Quiet in here." Henrietta settled herself briskly. Catherine was

thinking: Henrietta manages her life so that things, mere things, never

get in her way--laundry, or food, or packing. "I wanted to see you

make a go of it," said Henrietta. "You're so darned intelligent. It's

the children, I know. If it weren't for them, you could stay here. If

you would. Probably Charles would pull you along by a heartstring even

then. Now, Bill---- But I'll let him speak for himself. He has some

news."

"Perhaps"--Catherine did not glance up--"perhaps, Henry, I've just been

knocked flat at the end of the first round. Who knows? I may get my

wind back--in Buxton."

"What can you do in a country town?"

Catherine did not answer; Charles was coming toward them, buoyant,

touched with excitement, and behind him, Bill. Charles tucked the

checks into her purse.

"I'll mail these others to the Dean," he said. "Great place we're going

to. The Dean himself has offered to see to our chattels. Going to store

them in some building on the campus until we come. Real human beings in

Buxton!"

Catherine looked silently at Bill, as he took her hand for a brief

moment. She hadn't seen him for weeks; he had been out of town again.

His glance was grave, a little pleased.

"Tell them your news, Bill."

"Oh"--he shook out his napkin--"I'm off to South America next week, to

build a bridge."

Henrietta explained. Huge engineering project, throwing a link across

mountains, a road for commerce. Difficult enough to interest even a

clam like Bill.

Catherine listened rather vaguely; Bill was moving his knife, his salt,

his roll, to illustrate. Saves hundreds of miles in shipping, you see,

if the thing can be done. A straight line from the interior.

"How long will it take?"

"Can't tell exactly until I see the ground. Perhaps a year. Or longer."

Catherine flung her glance at Henrietta, and found her watching Bill,

her blue eyes calmly reflective. Not a trace of dispute, not a faint

echo of bitterness, although Henrietta was looking less at Bill than

back into whatever secret, intimate hour of decision lay behind the

present announcement. This was what Henrietta had meant. That Bill

would go alone if he wished, not for an instant expecting Henrietta to

drop her life and follow.

"And you're just staying here?" Charles was naïve, surprised.

"Naturally." Henrietta grinned at him. "I can't move my practice. It's

a long time, but perhaps one of us can wriggle in a vacation."

"Well!" Charles leaned back. "If my wife----" he broke off,

suspiciously.

"Henrietta might reasonably object to being deserted," said Bill

quietly. "But she's good enough to see why I wish to go."

Charles paused an instant over that, and then with a shrug came out on

clear, safe ground with a question about the work. Catherine listened.

She was tired. Her thoughts crawled obscurely, undirected, in a fog of

weariness. Charles would pull her along by a heartstring, Henrietta

said. Probably. She lacked that cold singleness which Henrietta kept.

But Bill never tried to pull Henry by a heartstring. He hid away from

her.

"You're not eating a thing, Cathy," said Henrietta. "Too much packing,

I suppose. I hope you'll loaf for a while. Do you have the same woman

who took us for peddlars?"

"I think so." Catherine stared out of her fog.

"Amelia will have the house opened and ready. Catherine can loaf all

summer." Charles was hearty, assured. "It's been a hard winter, some

ways."

The talk went on, with coffee and cheese, and Catherine drifted again

in her fog. Perhaps one person always hides away. Bill had said

something about that, once. In every combination of people, one hides.

But if you hide away, then you shouldn't sulk. Play fair.

Dinner was over. Time to go. Henrietta, regretfully, explained that she

couldn't go to the station. A case. Bill would walk over.

"I shall miss you, Cathy." They stood at the entrance of the hotel.

"And the children. Bill gone, too. I'll have to work like fury."

"You must come out to Buxton when we're settled. Take a week off."

Charles glanced at his watch, edged toward the street.

"I may." Henrietta's lips, firm and cool, touched Catherine's.

"Good-by."

"We'd better walk fast," said Charles. "I have to get the bags out of

the parcel room."

"Want a taxi?" Bill lifted his hand, but Catherine refused.

"It's only three blocks. Let's walk."

At the corner entrance of Grand Central, Charles darted ahead, with a

hasty, "Meet you at the clock. You find Mother Spencer and the kids."

Catherine drew a long breath and looked up at Bill.

"South America," she said. "Mountains. And you are really keen about

it?"

"It sounds good, don't you think?" He pushed open the heavy door for

her. "Too bad we can't have dinner on some mountain peak." He smiled

down at her. "What would they give us? Hot tamales, or are those

Mexican?"

"South America--and Buxton," said Catherine.

"There is Spencer." Bill took her arm and swung her out of the path of

a laden porter. "And the others."

"I hope it will be wonderful, Bill. And I'm not done for, not yet."

Catherine could see the children, Letty with round eyes and her doll

hugged under one arm, Marian jiggling on her toes with delight.

"I hope that you----" What he would have said, Catherine did not know,

for Marian had seen them and hurled herself upon her mother with a

burst of staccato excitement. But Catherine had met, for a clear

instant, in a lifting of Bill's somber impersonality, a kind of dogged,

sympathetic challenge.

"Oh, Mother!" Spencer had his fingers around her arm. "I began to think

you weren't coming!"

"Margaret's here somewhere." Mrs. Spencer clung to Letty's hand.

"Buying you magazines, I think. Where is Charles?"

"Here's the King." Margaret came up with him. "Hello, Mr. Bill."

"The guard will have to let me through the gate," announced Charles

severely, "to settle these bags for you."

"Oh, Cathy!" Margaret whisked to Catherine's side. "We're coming up to

see you in Maine, Amy and I. In our own car! Want us?"

"I shall probably stop in Buxton on my way back from George's," said

Mrs. Spencer, as she pushed Letty and Marian toward the gate. "I wish

you weren't going so far"--she sighed--"but as I've said, I think it's

just the place for you all."

Charles was impressing the guard, successfully, so that he did step

through, Spencer beside him tugging at a handbag. A flurry of good-bys,

and Catherine, with Letty and Marian clinging to her hands, followed

him upon the platform. She turned for a last glimpse. Margaret, her

bright hair flying, was waving at them; Mrs. Spencer dabbed softly

at her cheeks with her handkerchief; Bill--no, Bill had turned away.

There, he was waving, too. Marian waggled her handkerchief. Charles

called behind her, "Come along, Cathy, your coach is halfway down the

track."