HARRIGAN, THAT'S ME!
Never before had the air of that long, paneled room been so surcharged
with half-suppressed hilarity. At first her father merely scowled at
Barbara's intermittent little gurgles, which refused to stay entirely
pent-up; he frowned at her seemingly inane interruptions of the
technical discussion into which he had immediately plunged with the
East Coast Company's engineer, until he could no longer ignore the
smile which pulled at the lips of the latter, too, at every fresh
attempt of the girl to swing the conversation into an utterly
irrelevant channel. He looked around the table then and caught the
gleam in Caleb's eyes; he took note of Miss Sarah's illuminated face,
and gave way to a burst of querulousness not all simulation.
"_What_ is the joke?" he demanded in a voice that set them all to
rocking in their chairs. "Let me in on it--let me laugh, too--if there
is anything worth laughing at. Cal, you're growing old--old and
feeble-witted!"
He turned sternly to his daughter, but the darkly glowing eyes which
she lifted to his absolutely silenced him for an instant. Twin devils
of mischief fairly danced in their shimmering, liquid depths. The
girl's face, even to him who had long before grown overfamiliar with
its beauty, was a wonderfully lovely thing. Allison sat and stared at
her for a moment, blankly, and when he went on his voice had become
less testy.
"And you," he growled, "you have interrupted me a dozen times already,
always with some nonsense of which I can make neither rime nor reason.
Now, if you don't mind, I'd like to get Mr. O'Mara's reason for
establishing his headquarters at Thirty-Mile, instead of directing the
work from Morrison, which would seem to be far more convenient."
Barbara bobbed her head, meekly. Her giggle, however, was shameless.
"But Mr. O'Mara has been trying to tell you," she defended in a
suffocated small voice, "that it's because the work at this end is not
so difficult. There are several miles of swamp work, I think he said,
and a bridge or something, which promises trouble. I--I am sorry if I
interrupted. I only wanted to ask Mr. O'Mara a question myself--a--a
very unimportant question, I'm afraid!"
Allison had had experience with his daughter's seeming meekness.
Moreover, the working of Caleb's and Sarah's faces baffled him. He
waited, fuming.
"Just before you and Uncle Cal came in we--we were talking about the
weather," the girl struggled on. "Mr. O'Mara predicted it would rain
soon and I just wanted to ask him what made him think so."
"Yes?" Allison temporized.
It was very quiet for a moment. Steve sat, a little red of face
himself, gazing across into the girl's starry eyes.
"Go ahead!" she prompted him with a gasp.
Then his lips began to curl until a smile overspread his face and
half-closed his eyes. He leaned back and raised obediently a quaintly
solemn, quaintly boyish treble.
"I wa'n't guessin'," he averred soberly, "ner I wa'n't thinkin' it
will. It'll jest be rainin', come sunup, and it'll be good fer till
Wednesday, for sure!"
At the beginning of that quavering statement Dexter Allison's lips fell
apart. They remained open long after Steve had finished. Once he
started to rise, and then dropped back into his chair, dumfounded.
There was no doubt concerning the success of his daughter's query. At
last he got to his feet and padded around the table. With a hand on
either of the boy's shoulders, he turned that browned face up to his
own.
"You," he murmured, weakly. "You! And Elliott said that you could
outguess dear old Mother Nature herself! Well, I--I'm damned!"
They talked no more business at table that morning, and Allison found
scant opportunity to make himself heard at all. Even the reticence
which seemed a part of Steve's grave face and big body was swept aside
before the tumult of questions that tumbled from Barbara's lips,
promptly to be supplemented by Caleb whenever her breath gave out.
"And to think that you didn't recognize him, even when you met him face
to face," she rallied her father. "It was dense enough of me not to
have known instantly who it must be, the first day you began your
endless reiteration of 'my man, O'Mara.' I, at least, should have
known, because--because"--she faltered a little--"well, they always do,
in books!"
It raised another storm of laughter--that faltering, ingenuous reason
of hers--and Barbara hastened to explain that the phrase was a relic of
her own childhood, which she had once coined in extenuation of conduct
to which her mother had objected. She still employed it, she
explained, in particularly irresponsible moments.
It was minutes before Allison could wedge in a single remark, longer
than that before he stopped frowning to himself in a fashion which made
Caleb remember that moment of inexplicable vehemence, outside on the
veranda. They had retrogressed as far as the "injine"--the "steam
injine"--when Allison finally made himself heard.
"What I can't remember is just why you left us so suddenly. I know it
was some sort of a rumpus, with Barbara in it--there's always a woman,
of course--but I can't recall----"
He paused to ponder--paused and became aware immediately of Barbara's
swift silence and Steve's hint of self-consciousness. Then it all
returned to him with a rush. He had his turn.
"Oh, but I do remember," he drawled. "Why, of course--_of course_! It
was a matter of knight-errantry and ladies fair! But who was it whose
choice conflicted with your own?"
He cocked his head on one side, mock thoughtful; then he fell to
pounding his knee and roared with laughter.
"Archie Wickersham!" he shouted. "Archie Wickersham--oh, Lord! I
never really appreciated that _mêlée_ until this minute. And you
promised that you'd be back, didn't you, and--well, b'gad, here you
are! And now don't suffer any longer, Barbara, though I must state
that this is the first time I ever knew you to search so diligently
beneath the table for renewed composure. I am not going to expound Mr.
O'Mara's reasons for going, any more than I could dilate upon those
which have brought him back. But please shake hands again--Steve.
And, if I may be pardoned the idiom, allow me to assure you that it was
some battle!"
If it did nothing else, Allison's ponderous raillery served one end.
It removed any sentimental awkwardness which might have attached to the
episode, and yet the girl rather resented its being so completely
reduced to terms of farce-comedy. When the men rose, after breakfast,
to go down into the town, she, too, declared her intention of
accompanying them, as though it were the expected thing. She crossed
the lawn at Steve's side, ahead of her father and Caleb, with Miss
Sarah watching from the door. Both men walked for a time in silence,
their eyes upon the slender figure in short skirt and woolly sweater
beside the taller one in blue flannel before them. And, as usual,
Allison was the first to speak.
"Now I know what you meant when you referred to that trip up the west
branch, Cal," he said. "And you were right. It does take stuff to
make that sort of a gentleman. Isn't there anything more to tell me?
I am truly interested, Cal."
So Caleb told him then of "Old Tom's" tin box. And while he was
explaining the man and girl ahead, all in one breath, skipped back to
that day-before-yesterday now many years gone. There was a quality of
camaraderie in the girl's half-parted lips and eager impulsiveness of
tongue that morning that was entirely boyish. Her very unconsciousness
of self intensified and emphasized it for the man whose steady gaze
rarely left her warm face. And more than once she caught herself
watching for his slow smile to spread and crinkle the corners of his
eyelids; once or twice, in a little lull, she found time to wonder at
that new and quite frivolous mood of hers. But when Steve finally
asked for Devereau--Garry Devereau, who had followed him to the
hedge-gap that day and laid one hand upon his bowed, shamed
shoulder--the light went from Barbara's eyes. And Stephen O'Mara, who
did not understand at first the quick hurt which entered them, stopped
smiling, too.
"I liked him," Steve said simply. "I've always remembered and liked
him. Thinking of him and--and--has often kept me from being too lonely
nights when I was lonely enough."
That statement concerning his friend contained the first personal note
which had come from his lips. Barbara did not answer immediately, and
Steve thought that she was phrasing her own reply. He could not know
that she wanted a moment in which to contemplate the little hint of
diffidence in his voice and to wonder at herself for not having
wondered before if he had not, many, many times, been very lonely
indeed.
"Do you remember a little girl who was at our place the summer you were
here?" she asked finally. "A pale, red-lipped, very shy little thing
named Mary Graves?"
Stephen nodded.
"And do you remember how, even then, Garry seemed to care for her? He
was always supercilious with the rest of us; he tormented us or ignored
us entirely, but never her."
Again the inclination of the head.
"Well, he grew up just that way," Barbara went on, thoughtfully. "One
never could tell what was behind his indifference or--or flippancies.
He mocked at things . . . customs and courses of action, which we have
come to accept and . . . and recognize. But he was always gentle with
her, and kind, and--oh, I think reverend is the right word! Now,
knowing Garry as I do--as you will, when you see him again--the phrase
may seem a strange one to apply to him. And yet it describes best his
bearing toward Mary Graves, two years ago."
She was walking more slowly now, without knowing it.
"I doubt if Garry ever revered anything on earth, or above it, except
just little, white, shy Mary Graves, who never grew much bigger than
she was when you knew her. I don't know whether you know it--of course
you don't!--but his father cared that way for a woman, cared just as
utterly. And everybody thought this match was an assured thing; they
even wondered at it a little, she was so . . . so mouselike, and Garry
so brilliant and hard and--I don't like the word sophisticated. It
seemed to me that Garry's wisdom was not a thing which he had acquired
himself. It seemed more the accumulated wisdom of ages and ages which
was his just by--by instinct.
"He cared for her that way, Mr. O'Mara, and she married another man,
almost without a word of explanation to him. Nobody ever cited Garry
as a shining example, but he--that man whom Mary Graves married--had an
unspeakable record! Her family made the match--the newspapers call it
a union of America's fairest youth and powerful millions, don't they?
Well, he had them--and she married him. And Garret Devereau dropped
out of the world for a long time.
"It was a year before he came back. People had already begun to talk
about the way his father had gone before him--he shot himself, Mr.
O'Mara, when he became tired of waiting for Garry's mother to
return--and when Garry reappeared they talked more. I never knew
before that a change so terrible could take place in anyone so much a
man as I know Garry to be. It's not just his face and his rather
dreadful silence. It's not the fact alone that he drinks too much, and
shows it, pitifully. It's--oh, it's the pity that a brain so keen
could so deliberately commit suicide.
"They've begun to drop him, Mr. O'Mara, and you know what that means.
But I'll always care for him deeply. That's why I have asked him up
this fall. Don't you think you could come down again, Friday, if you
have to go back into the woods before then? I'm going to have a party
for some week-end guests--a masque dance. Garry needs his friends now,
more than he ever did, and--and when you meet him will you--will you,
please, not let him see that you notice how much he has changed?"
Barbara put one hand upon his elbow, and again in that moment of
contact the directness of her appeal made Steve think of a slim and
clear-eyed boy. He realized that she cared for Garrett Devereau only
as he cared himself with fine and lasting appreciation for the
finenesses of him whom they had known together. Steve nodded his
comprehension, and made no answer to her invitation to him, then. But
they found conversation somehow less easy after that. It was not until
they had traversed the streets of the lower village--long lanes of red
and blue and saffron-fronted saloon-hotels and rivermen's
lodging-houses--and reached the newer, huger mills down-river that the
girl regained in part her former vivacity.
Morrison had grown, inconceivably, in those elapsed years. A railroad
station and freight-yard occupied the ground which had been occupied by
the former mills; a single track road stretched arrow-straight into the
south to a junction with the trunk line, which swung westward twenty
odd miles below. And even the very atmosphere of that lower portion of
the town was different. The men still swarmed in on the drives,
brilliant dots of color against the neutral background of the dusty
wide streets. Their capacity for abandonment to pleasure, their
prodigality, was as great as ever, but the old-time picturesque
simplicity of it all seemed lacking--the simplicity which had once
mitigated much that would have been otherwise only brutish. The
dingily gaudy saloon fronts, like drabs in blowsy finery, struck a too
sophisticated, sinister note--which, after all, only sums up completely
the change which had taken place. Even the vices of the older
Morrison, in being systematized, had become infinitely more
complicated, too. It was no longer a river village. Morrison was a
city now.
Once, when a squatly huge, red-headed, red-shirted riverman with a
week's red stubble upon his cheeks, lurched out of a doorway ahead of
them and stood snarling malevolently at O'Mara, the girl shrank against
her companion and clutched his arm. The red-shirted one fell to
singing after they had passed. A maudlin rendition of "Harrigan,
That's Me," followed them long after they had rounded a corner. Steve
looked down and smiled casually into Barbara's wide and startled eyes.
"That's a river-boss," he explained, "enjoying what he considers a
roaring good time. His name is Harrigan. He works on the Reserve
Company's cut, which we are to move in the spring, and whenever he has
had a trifle more than enough he always sings that song. He's willing
to fight, too, to prove that it was written especially for him!"
The girl continued to gaze up at him. His short laugh failed entirely
to clear her face of apprehension.
"He's not exactly a friend of yours, is he?" she said.
"Well, not exactly," Steve admitted. "Not when he is in that frame of
mind!"
"Nor in any other," the girl persisted, and she glanced down at her
hand, still lying upon the blue-flannel sleeve. "Did you know that
your arm grew as hard as iron for an instant? I never knew that
anyone's arm could grow as hard as that. And is that the way you
always prepare to receive your--friends?"
Steve colored a little.
"Perhaps I'm overcautious," he replied. "But it has to be hard. It
constitutes what one of my men, Joe Morgan, calls 'accident insurance.'"
Then her face lighted up again. The delighted bob of her head with
which she greeted that name astonished the man.
"Do you--why, you must have heard of Joe," he exclaimed.
Mischief danced again in the dark eyes.
"Joe Morgan," she laughed. "'Fat Joe,' isn't it? And of course I have
heard of him. You don't realize it, but I know more about this East
Coast work and--and the men who are doing it, than I had any idea
myself. Why, I'll wager that you never knew, yourself, that he once
wrote in to the officials insisting that the entry of his name on the
files be changed from 'Joe Morgan, cook,' to 'Joseph Morgan, assistant
to Chief O'Mara'!"
Steve's chuckle of appreciation was answer enough.
"I didn't know," he admitted, "but it's like him. And it was no more
than reasonable, either--that request--even if it is funny. He has
been cook for me; but he's been doctor and nurse and countless other
things in as many crises. He's the most trustworthy and capable
adviser, too, that any man ever had."
She scanned his face closely at the timbre of those words. Then, with
face averted, "Didn't he embroider you a--a sofa-cushion, too, once?"
she inquired, quite demurely.
Steve grew very red.
"Who told you that?" he blurted, and Barbara giggled again.
"Mr. Ainnesley, I think. Then it is true? I--I never believed it
before."
Watching the blood creep up beneath his tanned skin, she told herself
that she did like more than a little the way his eyelids crinkled when
he grinned.
"We were in San Domingo that year," he explained none too composedly.
"It was near Christmas, and Joe wouldn't consider any of the native
wares as a gift. So he--he worked it himself in--in yellow worsted on
a red background. I have it still, displayed in a conspicuous place in
the shack up-river. But now I'll wager that you can't guess what the
motto is across its front. He told me that he didn't care for it
particularly himself, but it was the only one he could find. You can't
guess, but you are permitted to try."
And he gasped when she threw back her head and burst into her gurgling,
throaty laugh.
"'What is home without a father?'" she sing-songed. And when they were
both sober-faced again she added:
"I want to know him, please! Can't I meet him, Mr. O'Mara?"
Side by side they turned in at the millyard, between towering piles of
aromatic raw planks. Behind them Caleb and Allison had lost still more
ground while the latter paused to speak a peremptory word in the ear of
a mildly intoxicated, red-headed riverman who was pouring forth his
whole soul in the refrain of "Harrigan, That's Me!" And almost
immediately, in answer to Barbara's question, Steve pointed across to a
short, plump figure in conversation with McLean, the mill
superintendent. Even at that distance his broad face gleamed from the
closeness of a recent shave; even at that distance it was quickly
apparent to the girl that his garb was as near a replica of O'Mara's
own clothes as his lack of height and extra weight would permit.
"Will you bring him?" she asked eagerly. "Will he come?"
But the question was unnecessary. Joe Morgan--Fat Joe to the
river-front and the construction squad--was already hustling in their
direction, even before Steve, with that slow smile tugging at his lips,
had finished assuring her that it was never necessary to summon Joe
into the presence of an attractive member of the opposite sex. He came
without being called. Barbara had a closer and closer view of him,
until he stopped at last directly in front of them and bowed. She
wanted to laugh at that wide face--at the grandiloquent flourish with
which he removed his hat--and would have had she not recalled the grave
respect with which the man beside her had referred to him a moment
before. His eyes were palest blue, his nose a smooth pink mound in an
expanse of pink, pink cheeks. She noted that his teeth were as white
and even as those of O'Mara himself. Fat Joe bowed again.
"Morning, Chief," he saluted, in that thin and reedy tenor which none
but fat men have.
Then Barbara laughed.
Steve managed the presentation with extreme punctility and left them.
When he returned, almost an hour later, he heard them both laughing
long before he came into view, and on the way back up the hill the girl
detailed for him much of her conversation with Fat Joe.
"Hereafter I shall be more dignified when in your presence," she
informed him in as deep a bass as she could summon. "I had no idea how
great and important a man was escorting me when I came down this hill!
But Mr. Morgan has enlightened me."
With that she discovered that she could still tease him, almost as
easily as she had teased the sturdy small boy of the uncouth shoes and
napping trousers.
"Joe is necessarily prejudiced in his opinion," he argued, "and
therefore shouldn't be taken too seriously."
"He told me that you had one regrettable characteristic, however," the
girl went on. "He lamented your strength at the ancient and honorable
pastime of stud-poker! And he also bewails your taste in literature.
Why, he tells me that you are indicted to Dickens and Dumas--he didn't
pronounce it that way, either--and even fall back upon Shakespeare, in
dark and dour hours. No, I am positive that Mr. Morgan docs not
approve of such fiction. He confided to me that he finds more
entertainment, of a winter's night, in perusing a Sears-Roebuck or a
Montgomery-Ward catalogue. And--and do you know what I admitted to
him? No? Well, I told him that some of the happiest moments of my
life had been spent in just such fashion. I've always thought they
were fascinating!"
She badgered him on the way back up the hill that morning, but when
they paused for a moment at the edge of the close-cropped lawn which
rolled back to the stucco and timber house facing the river, she
abandoned her facetiousness.
"Why should there be any--any element of personal danger in this work
you are doing, Mr. O'Mara?" she asked. "And did I do wrong in
mentioning to Mr. Morgan how that man came out of that--place, and
glared so at you?"
His rejoinder should have been very reassuring.
"So Joe has been hinting at that mystery stuff again, has he? After
listening to him one is almost compelled to believe that I run daily a
veritable gauntlet of nameless perils."
Barbara stood, small fists buried in her sweater pockets, studying his
smile of amusement.
"I shouldn't like to believe so," her voice was faintly diffident.
"And you--you haven't accepted my invitation for Friday. May I expect
you? I didn't tell you, but Archie--Archibald Wickersham--will be
there, as well as Garry. So--so you won't be entirely unacquainted."
And then, at those words, his face changed. All in one fleet second,
in spite of the whole morning's quick intimacy of mood and the spirit
of companionship which to her had seemed a delightfully new yet
time-tried thing, Barbara found that she could not read an inch behind
those grave gray eyes. She found his quiet countenance as unreadable
as that of the utmost stranger might have been. And while she waited,
not entirely certain how displeased she was at his deliberation, a
blackest of black horses soared splendidly over a fence to the north
and came cantering down the road. The rider, a tall, bare-headed girl,
lifted her crop in salute as she caught sight of them.
"My friend, Miriam Burrell," the girl murmured in explanation to Steve,
and something had gone from her voice and left it conventionally
impersonal. "She's riding Ragtime, and isn't he a beauty--almost as
much a beauty as she is herself?"
The horse came on, to be reined up at last directly in front of the two
at the roadside. Stephen O'Mara met for a moment the level, measuring
glance of its rider, before Miriam Burrell turned to Barbara.
"I've enjoyed exceedingly our morning canter, Bobs," her alto voice
drawled.
Then, before Barbara could reply, she threw one booted leg from the
stirrup and dismounted. With the reins looped over her elbow she faced
the man in blue flannel and corduroy, a tall, lithe figure with coppery
red hair and whitest skin and doubly vivid lips.
"You're Stephen O'Mara," she said, and the calmly direct statement
might have been overbrusk had it not been for the modulation of her low
voice. "You're Stephen O'Mara, for a thousand!"
And she held out a gauntleted hand, the clasp of which corroborated the
suggestion of wirelike strength in that lithely straight body.
Barbara Allison had never been able to analyze her preference for
Miriam Burrell. Even the girl's undeniable beauty of face had often
puzzled her, for, taken each feature by itself, it was far more
striking than beautiful. There was no color in her pale skin; her red
mouth, if anything, was a trifle too wide, and her wide-set eyes were
tip-tilted in an almost Oriental slant. Her utter lack of hypocrisy,
her unsparing arraignment of fundamental motives--her own and those of
all with whom she came in contact--often resulted in calmly direct
comments which were stunningly disastrous to casual conversation. For
Miriam Burrell told the truth to others, which was unusual enough to
puzzle more than a few; she did not lie to herself, and that was an
enigma to almost all. It resulted, of course, in a reputation for
"unconventionalism."
There was scarcely a day passed but that her coldly dispassionate
dissection of this or that foible of their own set, did not startle or
sometimes distress Barbara Allison; hardly a day but that her cool
voice, which could be as tempered as edged steel, did not cut through
the veneer of some custom or other and expose the crooked grain
beneath. Barbara did not know just why she cared so deeply for Miriam
Burrell--we scarcely ever realize that such a regard can be based only
upon the deepest of deep-founded faith--but at that moment, while she
and Steve were shaking hands so soberly, she felt very little, very
much ignored; felt as though she did not share at all the understanding
in their eyes.
"I've just asked Mr. O'Mara to come to my dance, Miriam," she said,
"and how did you know him, pray? I've asked him, but he is
unflatteringly long in accepting."
"Know him?" she echoed. "Know him! Oh, Mr. O'Mara and I have met
before. I think just before the fall of the Roman Empire, wasn't it,
Mr. O'Mara? Weren't they dragging me in at the wheel of a chariot one
afternoon, when you were dealing out a gold piece to each of your
legionaries?"
She laughed, dryly, and Barbara felt smaller and more forlorn and
lonelier still.
"No doubt Mr. O'Mara hasn't time to be flattering, Bobs," she
commented. "But you will have time to come Friday, for a little while,
won't you?" she asked.
Steve glanced down at the hand which still felt the pressure of her
buckskin clad fingers.
"I have to work--day and night--some weeks when things break badly," he
told her simply. "If I can"--and he turned to Barbara--"if I can, I
want to come."
Miriam nodded her head with brisk finality.
"If you can," she agreed. "Barbara, no doubt, has been telling you
about Garret Devereau, hasn't she? Yes--come if you can. I have
heard, Mr. O'Mara, that you have once or twice fought your way out of
the dark, when everybody else had lost hope. I want an opportunity to
talk with--a specialist in such campaigns!"
Stephen O'Mara had read a meaning in the words of that contained, often
abrupt, straightly tall girl of which Barbara Allison had not even
dreamed. He stood watching them when they turned up the driveway, the
horse Ragtime muzzling the woolly white sweater and following like a
dog. But he wasn't thinking of Miriam Burrell or of Garry Devereau,
while he waited for Caleb and Dexter Allison to come up with him. He
was wondering about Archie Wickersham--the Honorable Archie--thinking
about that funny brawl of years before, which had not been so funny
after all--wondering if----
It was past twelve that night when Miriam Burrell's door was pushed
softly open by a slim white figure which hesitated on the threshold;
but the night-light was still burning upon the table. Barbara stood
for a moment, staring at her friend, who was sitting bolt upright in
bed.
"Then you aren't asleep," she faltered. "Are you--reading?"
The older girl turned and gazed, half blankly, at the dark-eyed face in
that mist of loosened hair.
"Yes," she drawled, for all that her hands and hunched-up knees were
bookless. "Yes, I'm reading. I'm having a little squint at this
puzzle-scroll they call Life."
She made a peremptory gesture and Barbara crept in beside her.
"I--may I turn off the light?" she asked.
Miriam snapped the button.
"I couldn't sleep," Barbara began presently, in a quaintly small voice.
"And I--I wanted--Miriam, I've acted so like an unschooled, half-grown
girl to-day that it has perplexed and worried me! From the moment when
I first recognized him and became so--tangled up--I've just chattered
and chattered. You don't think I'm utterly frivolous and unstable, do
you?"
"Haven't you always been famed for your poise?" came back the
uncompromising voice she knew so well.
"Are you--you aren't laughing at me, are you?" she hesitated. "Because
I don't think I am in the mood to be laughed at. And I have poise. I
am not a child. But looking back now, I can't quite account for all
my--shall I call it cordiality? Don't you believe, Miriam, that it was
because I wanted to make up, a little, for the way I treated him when
he was a boy?"
"Maybe!" agreed Miriam, unenthusiastically.
"Because I did treat him abominably," went on the drowsy voice. "And,
do you know, all day, even when we seemed so--such good friends, I
still felt as though he was on guard against any repetition of such a
slight. I wouldn't want him to feel that way, but it was there just
the same, even in the way he received the invitation to my party. It
was on the tip of my tongue to tell him that there are men who--who'd
almost charter a liner to come--if I'd invite them. It would have
sounded conceited, but I wanted to _jolt_ him! And he just said he'd
come if he could!"
"He has his work," Miriam answered, and into her voice crept that
wearied, indescribably hard note which the younger girl couldn't
understand. "He has to work, and a lot of those others would be a lot
more worth asking, if they had to work, too. I wish every man had
to--work--hard; had to work until body and brain were numb with it!"
Her voice slurred and she recovered it. "I don't know whether he
remembers or not. Probably not! You've just had a unique experience
for one of our kind, that's all. You've met a man!"
Barbara raised herself upon one elbow.
"You don't mean to infer, do you, Miriam," she reproved, "that Archie
Wickersham or my other friends, or--or Garry, aren't men?"
"Males!" snapped the other girl. "Just males! But"--and she seemed to
be arguing with herself--"but Garry might have been, though--he might
have been!"
Barbara lay awake a long time, pondering.
"It's odd," she murmured once, "but we did seem so--so congenial. I
can't remember when my brain has been so quick to catch a thought or
supplement one. Have you ever wondered, Miriam, why we--we can't seem
to marry one who brings out the best in us, like that?"
"Can't? You mean, dear child, that we don't! Some of us because the
'best that is in us' is far, far too decently unexciting for daily
diet. And some of us--oh, just because we haven't the sand and
backbone, I guess!"
But Barbara was too nearly asleep to catch the bitterness of that
reply. Just once again, before she slept, she asked a question.
"Should I have told Mr. O'Mara that my engagement to Archibald
Wickersham was to be announced at the party?" she murmured.
"Why should you have?" Miriam crisply wanted to know.
"Oh, I don't know," she mused. "Only I thought he might be interested.
You don't seem to realize that we are--very old friends!"
And long after Barbara was sound asleep, her face buried in the palm of
one hand, Miriam Burrell lay stiffly awake. Once she smiled a little,
for such perplexities which, of themselves, must work out inevitably.
When dawn came it found her still struggling stubbornly with her own,
for which it seemed there could be no solution now.