XI

From her interview with Gertrude, Susan went straight on to Phil's

rooms, not even stopping to consider the possible proprieties involved.

But, five minutes before her arrival, Phil had been summoned to the

Graduates Club to receive a long-distance call from his Boston

publisher; and it was Jimmy Kane who answered her knock and opened the

study door. He had been in conference with Phil on his private problems

and Phil had asked him to await his return. All this he thought it

courteous to explain to the peach of a girl before him, whose presence

at the door puzzled him mightily, and whose disturbing eyes held his, he

thought, rather too intimately and quizzically for a stranger's.

She could hardly be some graduate student in philosophy; she was too

young and too flossy for that. "Flossy," in Jimmy's economical

vocabulary, was a symbol for many subtle shades of meaning: it implied,

for any maiden it fitted, an elegance not too cold to be alluring; the

possession of that something more than the peace of God which a friend

told Emerson always entered her heart when she knew herself to be well

dressed. Flossy--to generalize--Jimmy had not observed the women

graduate students to be, though he bore them no ill will. To be truly

flossy was, after all, a privilege reserved for a chosen few, born to a

certain circle which Jimmy had never sought to penetrate.

One--and a curiously entrancing specimen--of the chosen evidently stood

watching him now, and he wished that her entire self-possession did not

so utterly imperil his own. What was she doing alone, anyway, this

society girl--in a students' rooming house--at Prof. Farmer's door? Why

couldn't she tell him? And why were her eyes making fun of him--or

weren't they? His fingers went instinctively to his--perhaps too hastily

selected?--cravat.

Then Susan really did laugh, but happily, not unkindly, and walked on in

past him, shutting the door behind her as she came.

"Jimmy Kane," she said, "if I weren't so gorgeously glad to see you

again, I could beat you for not remembering!"

"Good Lord!" he babbled. "Why--good Lord! You're Susan!"

It was all too much for him; concealment was impossible--he was

flabbergasted. Sparkling with sheer delight at his _gaucherie_, Susan

put out both hands. Her impulsiveness instantly revived him; he seized

her hands for a moment as he might have gripped a long-lost boy

friend's.

"You never guessed I could look so--presentable, did you?" demanded

Susan.

"Presentable!" The word jarred on him, it was so dully inadequate.

"I have a maid," continued Susan demurely. "Everything in Ambo's

house--Ambo is my guardian, you know; Mr. Hunt--well, everything in his

house is a work of art. So he pays a maid to see that I am--always. I am

simply clay in her hands, and it does make a difference. But I didn't

have a maid on Birch Street, Jimmy."

Jimmy's blue eyes capered. This was American humor--the kind he was born

to and could understand. Happiness and ease returned with it. If Susan

could talk like that while looking like that--well, Susan was _there_!

She was all right.

Within five minutes he was giving her a brief, comradely chronicle of

the missing years, and when Phil got back it was to find them seated

together, Susan leaning a little forward from the depths of a Morris

chair to follow more attentively Jimmy's minute technical description of

the nature of the steel alloys used in the manufacture of automobiles.

They rose at Phil's entrance with a mingling, eager chatter of

explanation. Phil later--much later--admitted to me that he had never

felt till that moment how damnably he was past forty, and how fatally

Susan was not. He further admitted that it was far from the most

agreeable discovery of a studious life.

"What do you think, Prof. Farmer," exclaimed Jimmy, "of our meeting

again accidentally like this--and me not knowing Susan! You can't beat

that much for a small world!"

Phil sought Susan's eye, and was somewhat relieved by the quizzical

though delighted gleam in it.

"Well, Jimmy," he responded gravely, "truth compels me to state that I

have heard of stranger encounters--less inevitable ones, at least. I

really have."

"But you never heard of a nicer one," said Susan. "Haven't I always told

you and Ambo that Jimmy would be like this?"

"Sort of foolish?" grinned Jimmy, with reawakening constraint. "I'll bet

you have, too."

Susan shook her head, solemn and slow; but the corners of her mouth

meant mischief.

"No, Jimmy, not foolish; just--natural. Just--sort of--_you_."

At this point, Jimmy hastily remembered that he must beat it, pleading

what Phil knew to be an imaginary recitation. But he did not escape

without finding himself invited to dinner for that very evening,

informally of course--Susan suspected the absence of even a dinner coat:

Phil would bring him. It was really Phil who accepted for him, while

Jimmy was still muddling through his thanks and toiling on to needless

apologies.

"If I've been too"--he almost said "fresh," but sank to--"familiar,

calling you by your first name, I mean--I wouldn't like you to

think--but coming all of a sudden like this, what I mean is----"

"Oh, run along!" called Susan gayly. "Forget it, Jimmy! You're spoiling

everything."

"That's what I m-mean," stammered Jimmy, and was gone.

"But he does mean well, Susan," Phil pleaded for him, after closing the

door.

It puzzled him to note that Susan's face instantly clouded; there was

reproof in her tone. "That was patronizing, Phil. I won't have anybody

patronize Jimmy. He's perfect."

Phil was oddly nettled by this reproof and grew stubborn and detached.

"He's a nice boy, certainly; and has the makings of a real man. I

believe in him. Still--heaven knows!--he's not precisely a subtle soul."

Susan's brow had cleared again. "That's what I m-mean!" she laughed,

mimicking Jimmy without satire, as if for the pure pleasure of

recollection. "The truth is, Phil, I'm rather fed up on

subtlety--especially my own. Sometimes I think it's just a polite term

for futility, with a dash of intellectual snobbishness thrown in. It

must be saner, cleaner, healthier, to take life straight."

"And now, Phil dear," she said, dismissing the matter, as if settling

back solidly to earth after a pleasantly breathless aerial spin, "I need

your advice. Can I earn my living as a writer? I'll write anything that

pays, so I think I can. Fashion notes--anything! Sister and I"--"Sister"

being Susan's pet name for Miss Goucher--"are running away to New York

on Monday--to make our fortunes. You mustn't tell Ambo--yet; I'll tell

him in my own way. And I must _make_ my own way now, Phil. I've been a

lazy parasite long enough--too long! So please sit down and write me

subtle letters of introduction to any publishers you know. Maltby is

bound to help me, of course. You see, I'm feeling ruthless--or

shameless; I shall pull every wire in sight. So I'm counting on _The

Garden Exquisite_ for immediate bread and butter. I did my first article

for it in an hour when I first woke up this morning--just the

smarty-party piffle its readers and advertisers seem to demand.

"This sort of thing, Phil: 'The poets are wrong, as usual. Wild flowers

are not shy and humble, they are exclusive. How to know them is still a

social problem in American life, and very few of us have attained this

aristocratic distinction.' And so on! Two thousand silly salable

words--and I can turn on that soda-water tap at will. Are you listening?

Please tell me you don't think poor Sister--she refuses to leave me, and

I wouldn't let her anyway--will have to undergo martyrdom in a cheap

hall bedroom for the rest of her days?"

Needless to say, Phil did not approve of Susan's plan. He agreed with

her that under the given conditions she could not remain with me in New

Haven; and he commended her courage, her desire for independence. But

Susan would never, he felt, find her true pathway to independence,

either material or spiritual, as a journalistic free-lance in New York.

He admitted the insatiable public thirst for soda-water, but saw no

reason why Susan should waste herself in catering to it. He was by no

means certain that she could cater to it if she would.

"You'll too often discover," he warned her, "that your tap is running an

unmarketable beverage. The mortal taste for nectar is still undeveloped;

it remains the drink of the gods."

"But," Susan objected, "I can't let Ambo pay my bills from now on--I

can't! And Sister and I must live decently somehow! I'd like nothing

better than to be a perpetual fountain of nectar--supposing, you nice

old Phil, that I've ever really had the secret of distilling a single

drop of it. But you say yourself there's no market for it this side of

heaven, which is where we all happen to be. What do you want me to do?"

"Marry me."

"It wouldn't be fair to you, dear."

There was a momentary pause.

"Then," said Phil earnestly, "I want you to let Hunt--or if you can't

bring yourself to do that--to let _me_ loan you money enough from time

to time to live on simply and comfortably for a few years, while you

study and think and write in your own free way--till you've found

yourself. My nectar simile was nonsense, just as your soda-water tap

was. You have brains and a soul, and the combination means a shining

career of some kind--even on earth. Don't fritter your genius away in

makeshift activities. Mankind needs the best we have in us; the best's

none too good. It's a duty--no, it's more than that--it's a true

_religion_ to get that expressed somehow--whether in terms of action or

thought or beauty. I know, of course, you feel this as I do, and mean to

win through to it in the end. But why handicap yourself so cruelly at

the start?"

Phil tells me that Susan, while he urged this upon her, quietly

withdrew and did not return for some little time after he had ceased to

speak. He was not even certain she had fully heard him out until she

suddenly leaned to him from her chair and gave his hand an affectionate,

grateful squeeze.

"Yes, Phil," she said, "it is a religion--it's perhaps the only religion

I shall ever have. But for that very reason I must accept it in my own

way. And I'm sure--it's part of my faith--that any coddling now will do

me more harm than good. I must meet the struggle, Phil--the hand-to-hand

fight. If the ordinary bread-and-butter conditions are too much for me,

then I'm no good and must go under. I shan't be frittering anything away

if I fail. I shan't fail--in our sense--unless we're both mistaken, and

there isn't anything real in me. That's what I must find out first--not

sheltered and in silence, but down in the scrimmage and noise of it all.

If I'm too delicate for that, then I've nothing to give this world, and

the sooner I'm crushed out of it the better! Believe me, Phil dear, I

know I'm right; I _know_."

She was pressing clenched hands almost fiercely between her girl's

breasts as she ended, as if to deny or repress any natural longing for a

special protection, a special graciousness and security, from our common

taskmaster, life.

Phil admits that he wanted to whimper like a homesick boy.