MAYTIME IN MARLOW

IN MAY, when the maple leaves are growing large, the Midland county seat

and market town called Marlow so disappears into the foliage that

travellers, gazing from Pullman windows, wonder why a railroad train

should stop to look at four or five preoccupied chickens in a back yard.

On the other hand, this neighbourly place is said to have a population

numbering more than three thousand. At least, that is what a man from

Marlow will begin to claim as soon as he has journeyed fifteen or twenty

miles from home; but to display the daring of Midland patriotism in a

word, there have been Saturdays (with the farmers in town) when

strangers of open-minded appearance have been told, right down on the

Square itself, that Marlow consisted of upwards of four thousand mighty

enterprising inhabitants.

After statistics so dashing, it seems fairly conservative to declare

that upon the third Saturday of last May one idea possessed the minds

and governed the actions of all the better bachelors of Marlow who were

at that time between the ages of seventeen and ninety, and that the same

idea likewise possessed and governed all the widowers, better and worse,

age unlimited.

She was first seen on the Main Street side of the Square at about nine

o’clock in the morning. To people familiar with Marlow this will mean

that all the most influential business men obtained a fair view of her

at an early hour, so that the news had time to spread to the

manufacturers and professional men before noon.

Mr. Rolfo Williams, whose hardware establishment occupies a corner, was

the first of the business men to see her. He was engaged within a cool

alcove of cutlery when he caught a glimpse of her through a window; but

in spite of his weight he managed to get near the wide-spread front

doors of his store in time to see her framed by the doorway as a passing

silhouette of blue against the sunshine of the Square. His clerk, a

young married man, was only a little ahead of him in reaching the

sidewalk.

“My goodness, George!” Mr. Williams murmured. “Who _is_ that?”

“Couldn’t be from a bit more’n half a mile this side o’ New York!” said

George, marvelling. “Look at the clo’es!”

“No, George,” his employer corrected him gently. “To me it’s more the

figger.”

The lady was but thirty or forty feet away, and though she did not catch

their words, the murmur of the two voices attracted her attention. Not

pausing in her light stride forward, she looked back over her shoulder,

and her remarkable eyes twinkled with recognition. She smiled

charmingly, then nodded twice—first, unmistakably to Mr. Williams, and

then, with equal distinctness, to George.

These dumfounded men, staring in almost an agony of blankness, were

unable to return the salutation immediately. The attractive back of her

head was once more turned to them by the time they recovered

sufficiently to bow, but both of them did bow, in spite of that, being

ultimately conscientious no matter how taken aback. Even so, they were

no more flustered than was old Mr. Newton Truscom (Clothier, Hatter, and

Gents’ Furnisher), just emerging from his place of business next door;

for Mr. Truscom was likewise sunnily greeted.

“My goodness!” Mr. Williams gasped. “I never saw her from Adam!”

Mr. Truscom, walking backward, joined the hardware men. “Seems like

fine-lookin’ girls liable to take considerable of a fancy to us three

fellers,” he said; “whether they know us or not!”

“Shame on you, Newt!” George returned. “Didn’t you see her give me the

eye? Of course, after that, she wanted to be polite to you and Mr.

Williams. Thought him and you were prob’ly my pappy and gran’daddy!”

“Look!” said Mr. Truscom. “She’s goin’ in Milo Carter’s drug-store.

Sody-water, I shouldn’t wonder!”

“It just this minute occurred to me how a nectar and pineapple was what

I needed,” said George. “Mr. Williams, I’ll be back at the store in a

few min—”

“No, George,” his employer interrupted. “I don’t mind your lollin’

around on the sidewalk till she comes out again, because that’s about

what I’m liable to do myself, but if you don’t contain yourself from no

nectar and pineapple, I’m goin’ to tell your little bride about it—and

you know what Birdie will say!”

“Rolfo, did you notice them _shoes_?” Mr. Truscom asked, with sudden

intensity. “If Baker and Smith had the enterprise to introduce a pattern

like that in our community——”

“No, Newt, I didn’t take so much notice of her shoes. To me,” said Mr.

Williams dreamily, “to me it was more the whole figger, as it were.”

The three continued to stare at the pleasing glass front of Milo

Carter’s drug-store; and presently they were joined by two other men of

business who had perceived from their own doorways that something

unusual was afoot; while that portion of Main Street lying beyond Milo

Carter’s also showed signs of being up with the times. Emerging from

this section, P. Borodino Thompson and Calvin Burns, partners in

Insurance, Real Estate, Mortgages and Loans, appeared before the

drug-store, hovered a moment in a non-committal manner that was really

brazen, then walked straight into the store and bought a two-cent stamp

for the firm.

Half an hour later, Mortimer Fole was as busy as he could be. That is to

say, Mortimer woke from his first slumber in a chair in front of the

National House, heard the news, manœuvred until he obtained a view of

its origin, and then drifted about the Square exchanging comment with

other shirt-sleeved gossips. (Mortimer was usually unemployed; but there

was a Mexican War pension in the family.)

“Heard about it?” he inquired, dropping into E. J. Fuller’s (E. J.

Fuller & Co., Furniture, Carpets and Wall-Paper).

“Yes, Mortimore,” E. J. Fuller replied. “Anybody know anything?”

“Some of ’em claim they do,” said Mortimer. “Couple fellers _I_ heard

says she must belong with some new picture theatre they claim an

out-o’-town firm’s goin’ to git goin’ here, compete with the Vertabena.

Howk, he says thinks not; claims it’s a lady he heard was comin’ to

settle here from Wilkes-Barry, Pennsylvania, and give embroidery lessons

and card-playin’. Cousin of the Ferrises and Wheelers, so Howk claims. I

says, ‘She is, is she?’ ‘Well,’ he says, ‘that’s the way _I_ look at

it.’ ‘Oh, you do, do you?’ I says. ‘Then what about her speakin’ to

everybody?’ I ast him, right to his face; and you’d ought to seen him!

Him and all of ’em are wrong.”

“How do you know, Mortimore?” asked Mr. Fuller. “What makes you think

so?”

“Listen here, Ed,” said Mortimer. “What’d she do when she went into

Charlie Murdock’s and bought a paper o’ pins? You heard about that,

yet?”

“No.”

“She went in there,” said Mr. Fole, “and spoke right _to_ Charlie. ‘How

are you, Mister Murdock?’ she says. Charlie like to fell over backwards!

And then, when he got the pins wrapped up and handed ’em to her she

says, ‘How’s your wife, Mr. Murdock?’ Well, sir, _Charlie_ says his wife

was just about the last woman in the world he had in his mind right

then!”

“Where’s she supposed to be now?” Mr. Fuller inquired, not referring to

Mrs. Murdock. “Over at the hotel?”

“Nope,” Mortimer replied. “She ain’t puttin’ up there. Right now she’s

went upstairs in the Garfield Block to Lu Allen’s office. Haven’t heard

what Lu’s got to say or whether she’s come out. You git to see her yet?”

“No, sir,” Mr. Fuller returned, rather indifferently. “What’s she look

like, Mortimore?”

“Well, sir, I can give you a right good notion about that,” said

Mortimer. “I expect I’m perty much the only man in town that could, too.

You remember the time me and you went over to Athens City and took in

the Athens City lodge’s excursion to Chicago? Well, remember somebody

got us to go to a matinée show without any much cuttin’ up or singin’ in

it, but we got so we liked it anyhow—and went back there again same

night?”

“Yes, sir. Maude Adams.”

“Well, sir, it ain’t her, but that’s who she kind o’ put me in mind of.

Carryin’ a blue parasol, too.”

Mr. Fuller at once set down the roll of wall-paper he was measuring, and

came out from behind his counter.

“Where goin’, Ed?” Mortimer inquired, stretching himself elaborately,

though somewhat surprised at Mr. Fuller’s abrupt action—for Mortimer

was indeed capable of stretching himself in a moment of astonishment.

“What?”

“Where goin’?”

Mr. Fuller, making for the open, was annoyed by the question. “Out!” he

replied.

“I got nothin’ much to do right now,” said the sociable Mortimer. “I’ll

go with you. Where’d you say you was goin’, Ed?”

“Business!” Mr. Fuller replied crossly.

“That suits _me_, Ed. I kind o’ want to see Lu Allen, myself!”

Thereupon they set forth across the Square, taking a path that ran

through the courthouse yard; but when they came out from behind the old,

red brick building and obtained a fair view of the Garfield Block, they

paused. She of the blue parasol was disappearing into the warm obscurity

of Pawpaw Street; and beside her sauntered Mr. Lucius Brutus Allen,

Attorney at Law, his stoutish figure and celebrated pongee coat as

unmistakable from the rear as from anywhere. In the deep, congenial

shade of the maple trees her parasol was unnecessary, and Lucius dangled

it from his hand, or poked its ferule idly at bugs in shrubberies

trembling against the picket fences that lined the way.

At any distance it could be seen that his air was attentive and

gallant—perhaps more than that, for there was even a tenderness

expressed in the oblique position of his shoulders, which seemed to

incline toward his companion. Mr. Rolfo Williams, to describe this mood

of Lucius Allen’s, made free use of the word “sag.” Mr. Williams stood

upon the corner with his wife, that amiable matron, and P. Borodino

Thompson, all three staring unaffectedly. “That’s Lu Allen’s lady-walk,”

said Rolfo, as E. J. Fuller and Mortimer joined them. “He always kind o’

sags when he goes out walkin’ with the girls. Sags toe-_ward_ ’em. I’ll

say this much: I never see him sag deeper than what he is right now.

Looks to me like he’s just about fixin’ to lean on her!”

“Don’t you worry!” his wife said testily. “Lucy’d slap him in a minute!

She always was that kind of a girl.”

“‘Lucy!’” Mortimer echoed. “Lucy who?”

“Lucy Cope.”

“What on earth are you talkin’ about, Miz Williams? That ain’t Lucy

Cope!”

Mrs. Williams laughed. “Just why ain’t it?” she asked satirically. “I

expect some o’ the men in this town better go get the eye-doctor to take

a look at ’em! Especially”—she gave her husband a compassionate

glance—“especially the fat, old ones! Mrs. Cal Burns come past my house

’while ago; says, ‘Miz Williams, I expect you better go on up-town look

after your husband,’ she says. ‘I been huntin’ fer mine,’ she says, ‘but

I couldn’t locate him, because he knows better than to let me to,’ she

says, ‘after what P. Borodino Thompson’s just been tellin’ me about him!

Lucy Cope Ricketts is back in town,’ she says, ‘and none the men

reckanized her yet,’ she says, ‘and you better go on up to the Square

and take a look for yourself how they’re behavin’! _I_ hear,’ she says,

‘_I_ hear hasn’t anybody been able to get waited on at any store-counter

in town so far this morning, except Lucy herself.’”

“Well, sir,” Mr. Williams declared. “I couldn’t hardly of believed it,

but it certainly is her.” He shook his head solemnly at Mrs. Williams,

and, gently detaching her palm-leaf fan from her hand, used it for his

own benefit, as he continued: “Boys, what I’m always tellin’ ma here is

that there ain’t nothin’ on earth like bein’ a widow to bring out the

figger!”

“You hush up!” she said, but was constrained to laugh and add, “I guess

you’d be after _me_ all right if I was a widow!”

“No, Carrie,” he said, “I wouldn’t be after nobody if you was a widow.”

“I mean if I was anybody else’s,” Mrs. Williams explained. “Look how

George says you been actin’ all morning about this one!”

Mr. Fuller intervened in search of information. He was not a native, and

had been a citizen of Marlow a little less than four years. “Did you say

this lady was one of the Ricketts family, Mrs. Williams?” he inquired.

“No. She married a Ricketts. She’s a Cope; she’s all there is left of

the Copes.”

“Did I understand you to say she was a widow?”

“I didn’t say she was one,” Mrs. Williams replied. “She is one now,

though. Her and Tom Ricketts got married ten years ago and went to live

in California. He’s been dead quite some time—three-four years

maybe—and she’s come back to live in the Copes’ ole house, because it

belongs to her, I expect. Everybody knew she was comin’ some time this

spring—everybody’d heard all about it—but none you _men_ paid any

attention to it. I’ll have to let you off, Mr. Fuller. You’re a widower

and ain’t lived here long, and you needn’t take what I’m sayin’ to

yourself. But the rest of all you rag-tag and bob-tail aren’t goin’ to

hear the last o’ this for some time! Mr. Fuller, if you want to know why

they never took any interest up to this morning in Lucy Cope Ricketts’

goin’ to come back and live here again, it’s because all they ever

remembered her she was kind of a peakid girl; sort of thin, and never

seemed to have much complexion to speak of. You wouldn’t think it to

look at her now, but that’s the way she was up to when she got married

and went away. Now she’s back here, and a _widow_, not a one of ’em

reckanized her till Mrs. Cal Burns come up-town and told ’em—and look

how they been actin’!”

“It all goes to show what I say,” said Rolfo. “She always did have kind

of a sweet-lookin’ face, but I claim that there’s nothin’ in the world

like being a happy widow to bring out the complexion and the——”

“Listen to you!” his wife interrupted. “How you do keep out o’ jail so

long _I_ certainly don’t know!” She turned to the others. “That man’s a

born bigamist,” she declared. “And at that I don’t expect he’s so much

worse’n the rest of you!”

“You ought to leave me out along with E. J. Fuller, Mrs. Williams,” Mr.

Thompson protested. “I’ve never even been married at all.”

But this only served to provoke Rolfo’s fat chuckle, and the barbed

comment: “It _is_ a heap cheaper at mealtimes, Bore!”

“How’s it happen Lu Allen’s so thick with Mrs. Ricketts?” E. J. Fuller

inquired. “How’s it come that he——”

“He’s her lawyer,” Mrs. Williams informed him, “and he was executor of

the Cope will, and all. Besides that, he used to be awful attentive to

her, and nobody was hardly certain which she was goin’ to take, Lu Allen

or Tom Ricketts, right up to a year or two before she got married. Looks

like Lu was goin’ to get a second chance, and money throwed in!”

“Well, Lu’s a talker, but he’ll have to talk some now!” P. Borodino

Thompson announced thoughtfully. “I used to know her, too, but I never

expected she was going to turn out like this!”

“You and I been gettin’ to be pretty fair friends, Bore,” said Mr.

Fuller, genially, as the group broke up. “Think you could kind of slide

me in along with you when you go up there to call?”

“No, sir!” Mr. Thompson replied emphatically. “Red-headed Lu Allen isn’t

much of a rival, but he’s enough for me. If _you_ think of starting in,

first thing I do I’m going to tell her you’re an embezzler. I’m going

home now to get out my cutaway suit and white vest, and you can tell ’em

all to keep out of my road! I’m going calling this evening, right after

supper!”

“Never mind!” Fuller warned him. “I’ll get up there _some_ way!”

Meanwhile, in the sun-checkered shadow of a honeysuckle vine that

climbed a green trellis beside an old doorway, Mr. Lucius Brutus Allen

was taking leave of his lovely friend.

“Will you come this evening, Lucius, and help me decide on some

remodeling for the house?” she asked; and probably no more

matter-of-fact question ever inspired a rhapsody in the bosom of a man

of thirty-five.

“No, thanks,” said Mr. Allen. “I never could decide which I thought your

voice was like, Lucy: a harp or a violin. It’s somewhere between, I

suspect; but there are pictures in it, too. Doesn’t make any difference

what you _say_, whenever you speak a person can’t help thinking of wild

roses shaking the dew off of ’em in the breezes that blow along about

sunrise. You might be repeating the multiplication table or talking

about hiring a cook, but the sound of your voice would make pictures

like that, just the same. I had to hear it again to find out how I’ve

been missing it. I must have been missing it every single day of these

ten years whether I knew it or not. It almost makes me sorry you’ve come

back, because if you hadn’t I’d never have found out how I must have

been suffering.”

Mrs. Ricketts looked at him steadily from within the half-shadow of the

rim of her pretty hat. “When will you come and help me with the plans?”

she asked.

“I don’t know,” Mr. Allen returned absently; and he added with immediate

enthusiasm: “I never in my life saw any girl whose hair made such a

lovely shape to her head as yours, Lucy! It’s just where you want a

girl’s hair to be, and it’s not any place you don’t want it to be. It’s

the one thing in the world without any fault _at all_—the only thing

the Lord made just perfect—except your nose and maybe the Parthenon

when it was new.”

That brought a laugh from her, and Lucius, who was pink naturally and

pinker with the warm day, grew rosy as he listened to Lucy’s laughter.

“By George!” he said. “To hear you laugh again!”

“You always did make me laugh, Lucius.”

“Especially if I had anything the matter with me,” he said. “If I had a

headache or toothache I’d always come around to get you to laugh.

Sometimes if the pain was pretty bad, it wouldn’t go away till you

laughed two or three times!”

She laughed the more; then she sighed. “Over ten years, almost

eleven—and you saying things like this to every girl and woman you met,

all the time!”

“Well,” Mr. Allen said thoughtfully, “nobody takes much notice what a

chunky kind of man with a reddish head and getting a little bald says.

It’s quite a privilege.”

She laughed again, and sighed again. “Do you remember how we used to sit

out here in the evenings under the trees, Lucius? One of the things I’ve

often thought about since then was how when _you_ were here, papa and

mamma would bring their chairs and join us, and you’d talk about the

moon, and astronomy, and the Hundred Years War, and——”

“Yes!” Lucius interrupted ruefully. “And then some other young fellow

would turn up—some slim, dark-haired Orlando—and you’d go off walking

with him while I stayed with the old folks. I’d be talking astronomy

with them, but you and Orlando were strolling under the stars—and

didn’t care what they were made of!”

“No,” she said. “I mean what I’ve thought about was that papa and mamma

never joined us unless _you_ were here. It took me a long while to

understand that, Lucius; but finally I did.” She paused, musing a

moment; then she asked: “Do the girls and boys still sit out on front

steps and porches, or under the trees in the yard in the evenings the

way we used to? Do you remember how we’d always see old Doctor Worley

jogging by in his surrey exactly as the courthouse bell rang nine, every

night; his wife on the back seat and the old doctor on the front one,

coming home from their evening drive? There are so many things I

remember like that, and they all seem lovely now—and I believe they

must be why I’ve come back here to live—though I didn’t think much

about them at the time. Do the girls and boys still sit out in the yards

in the evening, Lucius?”

Lucius dangled the ferule of the long-handled blue parasol over the

glowing head of a dandelion in the grass. “Not so much,” he answered.

“And old Doc Worley and his wife don’t drive in their surrey in the

summer evenings any more. They’re both out in the cemetery now, and the

surrey’s somewhere in the air we breathe, because it was burnt on a

trash-heap the other day, though I’ve seemed to see it driving home in

the dusk a hundred times since it fell to pieces. Nowadays hardly any,

even of the old folks, ride in surreys. These ten years have changed the

world, Lucy. Money and gasoline. Even Marlow’s got into the world; and

in the evenings they go out snorting and sirening and blowing-out and

smoking blue oil all over creation. Bore Thompson’s about the only man

in town that’s still got any use for a hitching-post. He drives an old

white horse to a phaeton, and by to-morrow afternoon at the latest

you’ll find that old horse and phaeton tied to the ring in the hand of

that little old cast-iron stripe-shirted nigger-boy in front of your

gate yonder.”

Mrs. Ricketts glanced frowningly at the obsolete decoration he

mentioned; then she smiled. “That’s one of the things I want you to

advise me about,” she said. “I don’t know how much of the place to alter

and how much to leave as it is. And _why_ will I find Mr. Thompson’s

horse tied to our poor old cast-iron darky boy?”

“He’s seen you, hasn’t he?”

“Yes, but he looked startled when I spoke to him. Besides, he used to

see me when I was a girl, and he was one of the beaux of the town, and

he never came then.”

“He will now,” said Lucius.

“Oh, surely not!” she protested, a little dismayed.

“He couldn’t help it if he tried, poor thing!”

At that she affected to drop him a curtsey, but nevertheless appeared

not over-pleased. “You seem to be able to help it, Lucius,” she said;

and the colour in his cheeks deepened a little as she went on: “Of

course you don’t know that the way you declined to come this evening is

one of the things that make life seem such a curious and mixed-up thing

to me. After I—when I’d gone away from here to live, you were what I

always remembered when I thought of Marlow, Lucius. And I remembered

things you’d said to me that I hadn’t thought of at all when you were

saying them. It was so strange! I’ve got to knowing you better and

better all the long, long time I’ve been away from you—and I could

always remember you more clearly than anybody else. It seems queer and

almost a little wicked to say it, but I could remember you even more

clearly than I could papa and mamma—and, oh! how I’ve looked forward to

seeing you again and to having you talk to me about _everything_! Why

won’t you come this evening? Aren’t you really glad I’m home again?”

“That’s the trouble!” he said; and seemed to feel that he had offered a

satisfactory explanation.

“What in the world do you mean?” she cried.

“I gather,” he said slowly, “from what you’ve said, that you think more

about me when I’m not around where you have to look at me! Besides——”

“Besides what?” she insisted, as he moved toward the gate.

“I’m afraid!” said Lucius; and his voice was husky and honest. “I’m

afraid,” he repeated seriously, as he closed the gate behind him. “I’m

afraid to meet Maud and Bill.”

She uttered half of a word of protest, not more than that; and it went

unheard. Frowning, she compressed her lips, and in troubled silence

stood watching his departure. Then, all at once, the frown vanished from

her forehead, the perplexity from her eyes; and she pressed an

insignificant handkerchief to a charming mouth overtaken by sudden

laughter. But she made no sound or gesture that would check Lucius

Brutus Allen or rouse him to the realization of what he was doing.

The sturdy gentleman was marching up Pawpaw Street toward the Square,

unconscious that he had forgotten to return the long-handled blue

parasol to its owner—and that he was now jauntily carrying it over his

right shoulder after the manner of a musket. Above the fence, the blue

parasol and the head of Lucius bobbed rhythmically with his gait, and

Mrs. Ricketts, still with her handkerchief to her lips, watched that

steady bobbing until intervening shrubberies closed the exhibition.

Then, as she opened the door of the old frame house, she spoke

half-aloud:

“Nobody—not one—never _any_where!” she said; and she meant that Lucius

was unparalleled.

* * * * *

When Mr. Allen debouched upon Main Street from Pawpaw, he encountered

Mortimer Fole, who addressed him with grave interest:

“Takin’ it to git mended, I suppose, Lu?”

“Get what mended?” asked Lucius, pausing.

“Her parasol,” Mr. Fole responded. “If you’ll show me where it’s out of

order, I expect I could get it fixed up about as well as anybody. Frank

Smith that works over at E. J. Fuller’s store, he’s considerable of a

tinker, and I reckon he’d do it fer nothin’ if it was me ast him to. I’d

be willin’ to carry it up to her house for you, too. I go by there

anyhow, on my way home.”

“No, Mortimore, thank you.” Lucius brought the parasol down from his

shoulder and stood regarding it seriously. “No; it isn’t out of order.

I—I just brought it with me. What’s the news?”

“Well, I don’t know of much,” said Mortimer, likewise staring

attentively at the parasol. “Some wall-paperin’ goin’ on here and there

over town, E. J. Fuller says. Ed says P. Borodino Thompson told him he

was goin’ to drop round and _call_ this evening, he says; but afterwards

I was up at the hardware store, and Bore come in there and Rolfo

Williams’s wife talked him out o’ goin’. ‘My heavens!’ she says, ‘can’t

you even give her a couple days to git unpacked and straighten up the

house?’ So Bore says he guessed he’d wait till to-morrow afternoon and

ast her to go buggy-ridin’ in that ole mud-coloured phaeton of his. Milo

Carter’s fixin’ to go up there before long, and I hear Henry Ledyard

says _he’s_ liable to start in mighty soon, too. You and Bore better

look out, Lu. Henry’s some years younger than what you and Bore are. He

ain’t as stocky as what you are, nor as skinny as what Bore is, and he

certainly out-dresses the both of you every day in the week an’ twicet

on Sunday!”

“Thank you, Mortimore,” Lucius responded, nodding. “I’d been calculating

a little on a new necktie—but probably it wouldn’t be much use if Henry

Ledyard’s going to——”

“No, sir,” Mortimer interrupted to agree. “Henry buys ’em a couple or

more at a time. Newt Truscom’s goin’ to be a rich man if Henry don’t

quit. So long, Lu!”

Mr. Allen, turning in at the entrance to the stairway that led to his

office, waved his left hand in farewell, his right being employed in an

oddly solicitous protection of the parasol—though nothing threatened

it. But Mortimer, having sauntered on a few steps, halted, and returned

to the stairway entrance, whence he called loudly upward:

“Lu! Oh, Lu Allen!”

“What is it?”

“I forgot to mention it. You want to be lookin’ out your window along

around three o’clock or half-past, to-morrow afternoon.”

“What for?”

“Why, P. Borodino was talkin’ and all so much, about that buggy-ride,

you know, so Rolfo Williams bet him a safety-razor against three

dollars’ worth of accident insurance that he wouldn’t git her to go with

him, and Bore’s got to drive around the Square, first thing after they

start, to prove it. There’s quite a heap of interest around town in all

this and that; and you better keep your eye out your window from three

o’clock on!”

Thus, at three o’clock, the next afternoon, Mr. Allen was in fact

looking—though somewhat crossly—out of his office window. Below, P.

Borodino Thompson was in view, seated in his slowly moving phaeton,

exuberantly clad for a man of his special reputation for “closeness,”

and with his legs concealed by a new dust-robe, brilliantly bordered;

but he was as yet unaccompanied.

A loud and husky voice ascended to the window: “On his way!” And Lucius

marked the form and suspender of Mortimer upon the sidewalk below;

whereupon Mortimer, seeing that Lucius observed him, clapped hand to

mouth, and simulated a jocular writhing in mockery of P. Borodino. “Hay,

Bore!” he bellowed. “Floyd Kilbert’s wife’s got a sewin’-machine she

wants you to move fer her in that empty seat you’ll have in your phaeton

when you git back here to the Square in a few minutes!”

Mr. Thompson waved his whip condescendingly, attempting no other retort;

and turned into the maple shade of Pawpaw Street. Five minutes later,

“General,” the elderly white horse, was nosing the unyielding hand of

the cast-iron darky boy, and the prophecy made by Mr. Allen on the

preceding morning was fulfilled.

A neat young woman, descendant of vikings, but tamed in all except

accent, showed Mr. Thompson into an Eighteen-Eighty parlour; went away,

returned, and addressed him as “yentleman.” Mrs. Ricketts would be glad

to see him, she reported, adding: “Yust wait some minute.”

The visitor waited some minutes, then examined his reflection in the

glass over the Eastlake mantel; and a slight rustling in the hall, near

the doorway, failed to attract his attention, for he was engaged in a

fundamental rearrangement of his tie.

“Wookin’ at himseff in the wookin’-gwass!”

This unfavourable comment caused him to tuck his tie back into the neck

of his white waistcoat in haste, and to face the doorway somewhat

confusedly. Two pretty little children stood there, starchy and fresh,

and lustrously clean, dressed in white: a boy about seven and a girl

about five—and both had their mother’s blue eyes and amber hair.

“He’s dressin’ himself,” said the boy.

“Wookin’ at himseff in the wookin’-gwass!” the little girl repeated,

and, pointing a curling forefinger, she asked: “Who? Who that man?”

“Well, tots,” the visitor said, rather uncomfortably, but with proper

graciousness, “who are _you_? What’s your name, little girl?”

“Maud,” the little girl replied, without any shyness.

“What’s yours, little man?”

“Bill,” said the boy. “Bill Ricketts. You got somep’m stickin’ out of

your vest at the top.”

Mr. Thompson incautiously followed an impulse to turn again to the

mirror, whereupon the child, Maud, instantly shouted:

“Wookin’ at himseff in the wookin’-gwass!”

Her voice was so loud, and the information it imparted so discomfiting,

that the visitor felt himself breaking out suddenly into a light

perspiration. Foolishly, he attempted to defend himself against the

accusation. “Why, no, I wasn’t, little Maudie,” he said, with an uneasy

laugh.

To his horror, she responded by shouting at an even higher pitch than

before:

“_Wookin’ at himseff in the wookin’-gwass!_”

She did not stop at that, for children in such moods are terrible, and

they have no pity. P. Borodino Thompson, substantial citizen, of

considerable importance financially, not only in Marlow but throughout

the county, and not without dignity to maintain, found himself at the

mercy of this child who appeared to be possessed (for no reason

whatever) by the old original Fiend of malice. She began to leap into

the air repeatedly; leaping higher and higher, clapping her hands

together, at arms’-length above her head, while she shrieked, squealed,

and in all ways put pressure upon her lungs and vocal organs to

distribute over the world the scandal that so horridly fascinated her:

“Caught him! Wookin’ at himseff in the wookin’-gwass! Caught him wookin’

at himseff in the _wookin’-gwass_! Wookin’ at himseff in the

wookin’-GWASS!”

Meanwhile, her brother did not escape infection. He, likewise, began to

leap and to vociferate, so that it was not possible to imagine any part

of the house, or of the immediate neighbourhood, to which the indictment

was not borne.

“Stickin’ out of his vest!” shouted Bill. “Got somep’n stickin’ out of

his vest! Out of his vest, vest, vest! Out of his vest, vest, VEST!”

Then, without warning, he suddenly slapped his sister heartily upon the

shoulder. “Got your tag!” he cried; darted away, and out through the

open front door to the green sunshiny yard, whither Maud instantly

pursued him.

Round and round the front yard they went, the two little flitting white

figures, and round the house, and round and round the old back yard with

its long grape-arbour and empty stable. By and by, when each had fallen

separately four or five times, they collided and fell together,

remaining prone, as by an unspoken agreement. Panting, they thus

remained for several minutes; then Bill rose and walked into the stable,

until now unexplored; and Maud followed him.

When they came out, two minutes later, Bill was carrying, to the extreme

damage of his white blouse, a large can of red paint, while Maud was

swinging a paint-brush that had been reposing in the can; and the look

upon their two flushed faces was studious but inscrutable.

Maud applied the brush to the side of the house, leaving a broad red

streak upon the gray weather-boarding; but Bill indignantly snatched the

brush from her hand.

“Shame!” he said. “You know what you got once!”

“When?” Maud demanded. “When did I got it?”

“_You_ know!” her brother responded darkly. “For markin’ on the nurs’ry

wall with my little box o’ paints.”

“She did not!”

“She did, too!”

“Not!”

“Did!” said Bill. “And you’ll get one now if she finds out you stuck

paint on the house. You will!”

“I won’t!”

“Will, too! You _know_ it’s wrong to stick paint on a house.”

“’Tisn’t!” Maud insisted. “She spanks you more’n she spanks me.”

“You wait an’ see!”

He shook his head ominously, and for a moment Maud was depressed, but

the signs of foreboding vanished from her angelic brow, and she made the

natural inquiry:

“What we _goin’_ to paint?”

To Bill also, it was evident that something had to be painted; but as he

looked about him, the available material seemed sparse. As a being

possessed of reason, he understood that a spanking applied to his sister

in order to emphasize the immunity of houses, might well be thought to

indicate that stables and fences were also morally unpaintable. Little

appeared to remain at the disposal of a person who had just

providentially acquired a can of red paint and a brush. Shrubberies were

obviously impracticable, and Bill had his doubts about the trunks of

trees: they were made of wood, he knew, like many houses and fences and

stables.

As he stood, thinking profoundly, there came loudly through the still

afternoon the sound of General, shaking his harness and stamping the

ground, as a May fly persisted in annoying him.

Maud pointed with her curling forefinger. “Wet’s paint that,” she said.

“That” was the horse; Maud was pointing at General. And immediately

Bill’s eyes showed his relief from a great strain, and became eager and

confident: nobody had ever told him not to paint a horse.

Hand-in-hand, the brother and sister approached General. The kind old

horse, worried by the fly and the heat, was pleased to have the fly

chased away; and after the first stroke of the cool wet brush on his

right foreleg, he closed one eye in hushed ecstasy and stood motionless,

lest he break the spell.

General’s owner, meanwhile, in the quiet parlour, had not quite

recovered his usual pallor; but the departure of the children mightily

relieved him, and he found time to complete the bestowal of his tie.

Thereafter, Mrs. Ricketts still not making her appearance, he had

leisure to acquaint himself with the design of romantic musical

instruments inlaid in pearl upon the top of the centre-table; and with

the two tall alabaster pitchers upon the mantelpiece, each bearing the

carved word “Souvenir;” and with the Toreador burnt upon a panel of wood

and painted, but obscure with years of standing in an empty

house—though nothing was dusty, for plainly the daughter of vikings had

been “over” everything thoroughly. Altogether, Mr. Thompson considered

the room (which spoke of Lucy Cope’s mother rather than of Lucy) a

pleasant and comfortable one—that is, if those children——

A step descending the stair, a whispering of silk—and Mr. Thompson,

after a last settling of his neck into his collar, coughed reassuringly,

and faced the door with a slight agitation. More would have been

warranted by the vision that appeared there.

She came quickly toward him and gave him her hand. “How kind of you to

remember me and come to see me!” she said. “And how inhospitable you’re

thinking me to have kept you waiting so long in such a stuffy room!” She

turned to the nearest window as she spoke, and began to struggle

delicately with the catch of the old-fashioned “inside shutters.” “We’ll

let some air in and some light, too; so that we can both see how little

we’ve changed. The children were the reason I was so long: they were

washed and dressed like little clean angels, but they’re in rather high

spirits—you know how children are for the first few days after coming

to a new place—and they slipped down into the cellar, which we haven’t

had time to get put in order yet, and they found an old air-passage to

the furnace, and crawled through it, and so they had to be all washed

and dressed over again; and when I got through doing it, _I_ had to be

all washed and dressed over again! I hope they didn’t annoy you, Mr.

Thompson: I thought I heard them romping down here, somewhere. They’re

really not so wild as they must seem; it’s only that coming to a place

altogether strange to them has upset them a little, and—— There!” The

catch yielded, and she spread the shutters wide. “Now we can have a

little more li——”

She paused in the middle of the word, gazing fixedly out of the window.

But the caller did not follow the direction of Mrs. Ricketts’s gaze; he

was looking at her with concentrated approval, and mentally preparing

the invitation it was his purpose to extend. After coughing rather

formally, “I have called,” he said, “or, rather, I have stopped by on my

way to take a drive, because I thought, perhaps, as the weather was

warm, it might be cooler than sitting indoors to take a turn around the

Square first and then drive out toward the Athens City Pike, and return

by way of——”

“_Mercy!_” exclaimed Mrs. Ricketts in a tone so remarkable that he

stopped short; and then his eyes followed the direction of hers.

He uttered a stricken cry.

All four of General’s legs had been conscientiously painted, and Maud,

standing directly under his stomach, so to speak, was holding the can of

paint clasped in her arms, while the older artist began work on the

under side of General’s ribs. General’s expression was one of dreamy

happiness, though his appearance, and that of the children’s clothes,

hands, cheeks, and noses suggested a busy day at the abattoir.

“Don’t move!” Mrs. Ricketts called suddenly, but not alarmingly, as she

raised the window. “Stand still, Maud! Now walk straight this way—walk

toward _me_. Instantly!”

And as Maud obeyed, her mother jumped out of the window, a proceeding

that both children recognized as extraordinary and ill-omened. Bill

instinctively began to defend himself.

“You never _told_ us we couldn’t paint horses!” he said hotly. “We

haven’t painted him much, we’ve only——”

“March!” said his mother in the tone that meant the worst. “Round to the

kitchen—not through the _house_! Both of you! Quick!”

Bill opened his mouth to protest further, but, almost to his own

surprise, a wail came forth instead of an argument, and at that sound,

Maud dropped the sanguinary can and joined him in loud dole. Shouting

with woe, holding their unspeakable hands far from them, with fingers

spread wide, they marched. Round the corner of the house went the dread

pageant, and the green grass looked like murder where it passed. But

when Mrs. Ricketts returned, after delivering Maud and Bill into the

hands of a despairing servitress, General and the phaeton were gone.

“Oh, oh, _oh_!” she murmured, and, overcome by the dreadful picture that

rose before her imagination, she went droopingly into the house. In her

mind’s eye she saw Mr. Thompson in all his special dressiness and

lemon-yellow tie, driving through the streets and explaining to people:

“Yes, Lucy Ricketts has come back and her children did this!” She saw

him telling Lucius—and she remembered what Lucius had said: “I’m afraid

to meet Maud and Bill!”

She began to feel strickenly sure that Lucius would return her parasol

by a messenger. If he did that (she thought) what was the use of coming

all the way from California to live in a town like Marlow!

But the parasol was not sent, nor did Lucius bring it. It remained, as

did Mr. Allen himself, obscured from her sight and from her knowledge.

Nor was there brought to her any account of P. Borodino’s making a

dreadful progress through the town as she had imagined. Mr. Thompson

had, in fact, led General as hastily as possible into the nearest

alley—so Mortimer Fole explained to Lucius one week later, almost to

the hour.

Mortimer had dropped into Mr. Allen’s office and had expressed surprise

at finding its tenant in town. “I been up here two three times a day fer

a week, Lu,” he said, seating himself. “Where on earth you been?”

“Argument before the Federal court in Springfield,” Lucius answered.

“What did you want to see me about, Mortimer?”

“Well, they’s been some talk about our pension goin’ out the family,”

said Mortimer, “in case it happened my wife’s stepmother _was_ to die.

It comes through that branch, you know, Lu.”

“Is she ailing?”

“No,” said Mortimer. “She gits the best of care. We were only talkin’ it

over, and some of ’em says, ‘Suppose she _was_ to go, what then?’”

“I wouldn’t worry about it until she did,” his legal adviser suggested.

“Anything else?”

Mortimer removed his hat, and from the storage of its inner band took

half of a cigar, which, with a reflective air, he placed in the corner

of his mouth. Then he put his hat on again, tilted back against the

wall, and hooked his heels over a rung of his chair. “Heard about Henry

Ledyard yet?” he inquired.

“No.”

“Well, sir, he went up there,” said Mortimer. “He only went oncet!”

“What was the trouble?”

Mr. Fole cast his eyes high aloft, an ocular gesture expressing

deplorable things.

“Maud and Bill,” he said.

“What did they do?”

“Henry was settin’ in the parlour talkin’ to their mother, and, the way

I heard it, all of a sudden they heard somep’n go ‘Pop!’ outside, in the

hall, and when they come to look, it was that new, stiff, high-crowned

straw hat he went and ordered from New York and had shipped out here by

express. They got a woman up there cookin’ and a Norwegian lady to do

extra work, and I hear this here Norwegian tells some that the way it

happened was Maud was settin’ on it, kind of jouncin’ around to see if

it wouldn’t bounce her up and down. Seems this Norwegian she says

spankin’ and shuttin’ up in the closet don’t do neither of ’em one

little bit o’ good. Says there ain’t nothin’ in the world’ll take it out

of ’em. Them two chuldern have just about got this town buffaloed, Lu!”

“Oh, only breaking a straw hat,” said Lucius. “I don’t see how

that’s——”

“The two of ’em come up-town,” Mortimer interrupted firmly. “They come

up-town to the Square, the next afternoon after they busted Henry’s

twelve-dollar hat, and they went into E. J. Fuller’s store and Ed says

they come mighty near drivin’ him crazy, walkin’ up and down behind him

singin’ ‘Gran’-mammy Tipsytoe.’ Then they went on over to Milo Carter’s,

and they had a dollar and forty cents with ’em that they’d went and got

out of their little bank. They et seven big ice-cream sodies apiece and

got sick right in the store. Milo had to telephone fer their mother, and

her and the Norwegian come and had to about carry ’em home. And _that_

ain’t half of it!”

“What’s the other half?” Lucius asked gravely.

“Well, you heard about _Bore_, of course.”

“No, I haven’t.”

Mortimer again removed his hat, this time to rub his head. “I reckon

that might be so,” he admitted. “I guess you must of left town by the

time it leaked out.”

“By the time what leaked out?”

“Well, you remember how he started off, that day,” Mortimer began, “to

git her to go out buggy-ridin’ in his phaeton with ole General?”

“Yes.”

“Well, sir, you know he was goin’ to drive back here and around the

Square to win that bet off o’ Rolfo, and he never come. ’Stead o’ that

he turned up at the hardware store about two hours later and settled the

bet. Says he lost it because she wasn’t feelin’ too well when he got

there, and so they just set around and talked, instead of ridin’. But

Bore never went back there, and ain’t goin’ to, you bet, any more than

what Henry Ledyard is! There ain’t hardly a man in town but what Maud

and Bill’s got buffaloed, Lu.”

Mr. Allen occupied himself with the sharpening of a pencil. “What did

they do to Thompson?” he asked casually.

“Well, sir, fer the first few days I expect I was the only man in town

knowed what it was.” Mr. Fole spoke with a little natural pride. “You

see, after he went up there and wasn’t no sign of him on the Square fer

awhile, why I didn’t have nothin’ much to do just then, and thinks I,

‘Why not go see what’s come of him?’ thinks I. So I walked around there

the back way, by Copes’s alley, and just as I was turnin’ in one end the

alley, by Glory! here come P. Borodino Thompson leadin’ ole General and

the phaeton in at the other end, and walkin’ as fur away from him as he

could and yet still lead him.

“Well, sir, I almost let out a holler: first thing I thought was they

must of been in the worst accident this town had ever saw. Why, pore ole

General—honest, he looked more like a slaughter-house than he did like

a horse, Lu! ‘What in the name of God is the matter, Bore!’ I says, and

you never hear a man take on the way he done.

“Seems Maud and Bill had painted ole General red, and they painted him

thick, too, while Bore was in the house fixin’ to take their mother out

on this here buggy-ride. And, well, sir, to hear him take on, you’d of

thought _I_ was responsible for the whole business! Says it might as

well be all over town, now he’d ran into _me_! Truth is, he talked like

he was out of his mind, but I kind o’ soothed him down, and last I fixed

it up with him to give me credit fer a little insurance my wife’s been

wantin’ to take out on her stepmother, if I’d put General and the

phaeton in George Coles’s empty barn, there in the alley, until after

dark, and not say nothin’ to George or anybody about it, and then drive

him over to Bore’s and unhitch him and wash him off with turpentine that

night.

“Well, sir, we got it all fixed up, and I done everything I said I

would, but of course you can’t expect a thing like that not to leak out

_some_ way or other; so I’m not breakin’ any obligation by tellin’ you

about it, because it got all over town several days ago. If I’ve told

Bore Thompson once I’ve told him a hunderd times, what’s the use his

actin’ the fool about it! ‘What earthly good’s it goin’ to do,’ I says,

‘to go around _mad_,’ I says, ‘and abusin’ the very ones,’ I says, ‘that

done the most to help you out? The boys are bound to have their joke,’ I

says to him, ‘and if it hadn’t been you, why, like as not they might of

been riggin’ somep’n on Lu Allen or Cal Burns, or even me,’ I says,

‘because _they_ don’t spare _no_body! Why, look,’ I says. ‘Ain’t they

goin’ after Milo Carter almost as much as they are you and Henry,’ I

says, ‘on account of what happened to Milo’s store?’ I says, ‘And look

at E. J. Fuller,’ I says. ‘Ain’t the name o’ Gran’-mammy Tipsytoe perty

near fastened on him fer good? _He_ don’t go all up and down pickin’ at

his best friend,’ I says. ‘E. J. Fuller’s got a little common _sense_!’

I says. Yes, sir, that’s the way _I_ look at it, Lu.”

Mortimer unhooked his heels, and, stretching himself, elevated his legs

until the alternation thus effected in the position of his centre of

gravity brought his tilted chair to a level—whereupon he rose,

stretched again, sighed, and prepared to conclude the interview.

“Speakin’ o’ the devil, Lu,” he said, as he moved to the door—“yes,

sir, them two chuldern, Maud and Bill, have perty much got our whole

little city buffaloed! They’s quite some talk goin’ on about the brain

work _you_ been showin’ Lu. I expect your reputation never did stand no

higher in that line than what it does right to-day. I shouldn’t wonder

it’d bring you a good deal extry law-practice, Lu: Mrs. Rolfo Williams

says she always _did_ know you were the smartest man in this town!”

“_Now_ what are you talking about?” Lucius demanded sharply, but he was

growing red to the ears, and over them.

“Goin’ out o’ town,” said Mortimer admiringly. “Keepin’ out the way o’

them chuldern and lettin’ other fellers take the brunt of ’em. Yes, sir;

there isn’t a soul raises the question but what their mother is the

finest-lookin’ lady that ever lived here, or but what she does every

last thing any mortal could do in the line o’ disci_plinn_; but much as

everybody’d enjoy to git better acquainted with her and begin to see

somep’n of her, they all think she’s liable to lead kind of a lonesome

life in our community unless—” Mortimer paused with his hand upon the

door-knob—“unless somep’n happens to Maud and Bill!”

He departed languidly, his farewell coming back from the stairway: “So

long, Lu!”

But the blush that had extended to include Mr. Allen’s ears, at the

sound of so much praise of himself, did not vanish with the caller; it

lingered and for a time grew even deeper. When it was gone, and its

victim restored to his accustomed moderate pink, he pushed aside his

work and went to a locked recess beneath his book-shelves. Therefrom he

took the blue parasol, and a small volume in everything dissimilar to

the heavy, calf-bound legal works that concealed all the walls of the

room; and, returning to his swivel-chair, placed the parasol gently upon

the desk. Then, allowing his left hand to remain lightly upon the

parasol, he held the little book in his right and read musingly.

He read, thus, for a long time—in fact, until the setting in of

twilight; and, whatever the slight shiftings of his position, he always

kept one hand in light contact with the parasol. Some portions of the

book he read over and over, though all of it was long since familiar to

him; and there was one part of it in which his interest seemed quite

unappeasable. Again and again he turned back to the same page; but at

last, as the room had grown darker, and his eye-glasses tired him, he

let the book rest in his lap, took off the glasses and used them to beat

time to the rhythm of the cadences, as he murmured, half-aloud:

“The lamplight seems to glimmer with a flicker of surprise,

As I turn it low to rest me of the dazzle in my eyes.

And light my pipe in silence, save a sigh that seems to yoke

Its fate with my tobacco and to vanish with the smoke.

’Tis a fragrant retrospection—for the loving thoughts that start

Into being are like perfume from the blossoms of the heart:

And to dream the old dreams over is a luxury divine——

When my truant fancy wanders with that old sweet-heart of mine.”

He fell silent; then his lips moved again:

“And I thrill beneath the glances of a pair of azure eyes

As glowing as the summer and as tender as the skies.

I can see——”

Suddenly he broke off, and groaned aloud: “My Lord!” he said all in a

breath. “And thirty-five years old—blame near thirty-six!”

He needs interpretation, this unfortunate Lucius. He meant that it was

inexplicable and disgraceful for a man of his age to be afraid of a boy

of seven and a girl of five. He had never been afraid of anybody else’s

children. No; it had to be _hers_! And that was why he was afraid of

them; he knew the truth well enough: he was afraid of them because they

_were_ hers. He was a man who had always “got on” with children

beautifully; but he was afraid of Maud and Bill. He was afraid of what

they would do to him and of what they would think of him.

There, in brief, is the overwhelming part that children can play in true

romance!

“Lordy, Lordy!” sighed Lucius Brutus Allen. “_Oh_, Lordy!”

But at last he bestirred himself. He knew that Saruly, his elderly darky

cook, must be waiting for him with impatience; she would complain

bitterly of dishes overcooked because of his tardiness. Having glanced

down into the Square and found it virtually devoid of life, for this was

the universal hour of supper, he set his brown straw hat upon his head,

and took the parasol under his arm—not because he meant to return it.

He took it with him merely for the pleasure of its society.

Upon the bottom step of the flight of stairs that led down to the

street, he found seated a small figure in a white “sailor suit.” This

figure rose and spoke politely.

“How do you do?” it said. “Are you Uncle Lucius?”

“Who—— What’s your name?”

“Bill. Bill Ricketts,” said Bill.

Lucius made a hasty motion to reascend the stairs, but Bill confidingly

proffered a small, clean hand that Mr. Allen was constrained to accept.

Once having accepted it, he found himself expected to retain it.

“Mamma lef’ me sittin’ here to wait till you came downstairs,” Bill

explained. “That man that came out said he couldn’t say but he was

pretty sure you were up there. She told me to wait till either you came

downstairs or she came back for me. She wants her parasol. Come on!”

“Come on where?”

“Up to your house,” said Bill. “She lef’ Maud waitin’ up _there_ for

you.”

It was the truth. And after a rather hurried walk, during which the boy

spoke not once unless spoken to, but trotted contentedly at Lucius’s

side, confidingly hand-in-hand with him, when they came in sight of the

small brick house in the big yard, where Lucius lived, a tiny white

figure was discernible through the dusk, rocking patiently in a wicker

rocking-chair on the veranda.

At sight of them she jumped up and came running to the gate to meet

them. But there she paused, gravely.

She made a curtsey, formal but charming.

“How do do, Uncka Wucius?” she said. “Mamma would wike her paraso’.”

Saruly, looming dark and large behind her, supplemented this

information: “Miz Ricketts done lef’ the little girl here to wait fer

you, Mist’ Allen. She tell me ask you please be so kine as to bring the

chillun along home with you, an’ her parasol with ’em. She tell _me_ the

chillun been a little upset, jest at first, ’count o’ movin’ to a new

place, but they all quieted down now, an’ she think it’ll be safe fer

you to stay to dinnuh. An’ as ev’ything in my kitchen’s plum done to a

crisp ’count o’ you bein’ so late, Mist’ Allen, if you leave it to me I

think you bettuh.”

“I’ll leave it to you, Saruly,” said Lucius, gently. “I think I’d

better.”

And then, with the parasol under his arm, and the hand of a child

resting quietly in each of his, he turned with Bill and Maud, and, under

the small, bright stars of the May evening, set forth from his own gate

on his way to Lucy’s.

“YOU”

MURIEL ELIOT’S friends and contemporaries were in the habit of

describing her as “the most brilliant girl in town.” She was “up on

simply everything,” they said, and it was customary to add the

exclamation: “How on earth she finds the _time_!” And since Muriel also

found time to be always charmingly dressed, in harmony with her notable

comeliness, the marvel of so much upness in her infant twenties may

indeed need a little explaining.

Her own conception was that she was a “serious” person and cared for

“serious reading”—that is to say, after she left college, she read, not

what is acceptably called literature, but young journalists’ musings

about what aspires to be called that; she was not at all interested in

buildings or pictures or statues themselves, but thought she was, read a

little of what is printed about such things in reviews, and spoke of

“art” and “literature” with authoritative conviction. She was a

kind-hearted girl, and she believed that “capitalism” was the cunning

device of greedy men to keep worthy persons under heel; hence it

followed that all “capital” should be taken away from the “capitalist

class” by the “people;” and, not picturing herself as in any way

uncomfortably affected by the process of seizure, she called herself a

“socialist.”

In addition to all this, Muriel’s upness included “the new psychology”

and the appropriate humorous contempt for the Victorian Period, that

elastic conception of something-or-other which, according to the writing

young ladies and gentlemen who were her authorities, seemed to extend

from about the time of Custer’s Last Fight to the close of President

Wilson’s first administration. Muriel, like her original sources of

information, was just becoming conscious of herself as an authority at

about the latter date—she was sixteen then; and at twenty she began to

speak of having spent her youth in the Late Victorian Period. That

obscure decade before her birth, that time so formless and dark between

the years of our Lord 1890 and 1900, was Mid-Victorian; people still

mistook Tennyson and Longfellow for poets.

Sometimes older women thought Muriel a little hard; she was both

brilliant and scholarly, they admitted; but the papers she wrote for the

women’s clubs were so “purely intellectual,” so icily scientific, so

little reticent in the discussion of love, marriage and children, that

these ladies shook their heads. The new generation, as expressed by

Muriel, lacked something important, they complained; for nothing less

than maidenliness itself had been lost, and with it the rosebud

reveries, the twilight half-dreams of a coming cavalier, the embowered

guitar at moonrise. In a word, the charm of maidenhood was lost because

romance was lost. Muriel lacked the romantic imagination, they said, a

quality but ill replaced by so much “new thought.”

They made this mistake the more naturally because Muriel herself made

it, though of course she did not think of her supposed lack of romance

as a fault. She believed herself to be a severely practical person, and

an originally thinking person, as a quotation from one of her essays may

partly explain. “I face the actual world as it is; I face it without

superstition, and without tradition. Despising both the nonsense and the

misery into which former generations have been led by romance, I permit

no illusions to guide my thinking. I respect nothing merely because it

is established; I examine mathematically; I think mathematically; I

believe nothing that I do not prove. I am a realist.”

When she wrote this, she was serious and really thought it true; but as

a matter of fact, what she believed to be her thinking was the

occasional mulling over of scattered absorptions from her reading. Her

conception of her outward appearance, being somewhat aided by mirrors,

came appreciably near the truth, but her conception of her mind had no

such guide. Her mind spent the greater part of its time adrift in

half-definite dreaming, and although she did not even suspect such a

thing, her romantic imagination was the abode in which she really dwelt.

There is an astronomer who knows as much about the moon as can yet be

known; but when that moon is new in the sky, each month, he will be a

little troubled if he fails to catch his first glimpse of it over the

right shoulder. When he does fail, his disappointment is so slight that

he forgets all about it the next moment, and should you ask him if he

has any superstition he will laugh disdainfully, with no idea that he

deceives both his questioner and himself. This is the least of the

mistakes he makes about his own thoughts; he is mistaken about most of

them; and yet he is a great man, less given to mistakes than the rest of

us. Muriel Eliot’s grandmother, who used to sing “Robin Adair,” who

danced the Spanish Fandango at the Orphan Asylum Benefit in 1877, and

wrote an anonymous love-letter to Lawrence Barrett, was not actually so

romantic as Muriel.

The point is that Muriel’s dreaminess, of which she was so little aware,

had a great deal more to do with governing her actions than had her

mathematical examinings and what she believed to be her thinking.

Moreover, this was the cause of her unkindness to young Renfrew Mears,

who lived across the street. Even to herself she gave other reasons for

rejecting him; but the motive lay deep in her romanticism; for Muriel,

without knowing it, believed in fairies.

Had she been truly practical, she would have seen that young Mr. Mears

was what is called an “ideal match” for her. His grandfather, a cautious

banker, had thought so highly of the young man’s good sense as to leave

him the means for a comfortable independence; yet Renfrew continued to

live at home with his family and was almost always in bed by eleven

o’clock. He was of a pleasant appearance; he was kind, modest,

thoughtfully polite, and in everything the perfect material from which

the equerry or background husband of a brilliant woman is constructed.

No wonder her mother asked her what on earth she _did_ want! Muriel

replied that she despised the capitalistic institution of marriage, and

she believed that she meant what she said; but of course what she really

wanted was a fairy-story.

In those wandering and somewhat shapeless reveries that controlled her

so much more than she guessed, there were various repetitions that had

become rather definite, though never quite so. One of these was the

figure of her Mate. Her revery-self never showed her this mystery

clearly in contours and colours, but rather in shadowy outlines, though

she was sure that her Mate had dark and glowing eyes. He was somewhere,

and sometime she would see him. When she did see him, she would

recognize him instantly; the first look exchanged would bring the full

revelation to both of them—they would ever have little need of spoken

words. But her most frequent picture of this mystic encounter was a

painful one: she saw herself a bride upon the bridegroom’s arm and

coming down the steps of the church;—a passing stranger, halting

abruptly upon the pavement, gave her one look from dark and glowing

eyes, a look fateful with reproach and a tragic derision, seeming to

say: “You did not wait till _I_ came, but took that fool!”

Then he passed on, forever; and it was unfortunate for young Mr. Mears

that the figure of the bridegroom in these foreshadowings invariably

bore a general resemblance to his own. Renfrew had more to overcome than

appeared upon the surface; he had shadows to fight; and so have other

lovers—more of them than is guessed—when ladies are reluctant. For

that matter, the thing is almost universal; and rare is the girl,

however willing, who says “Yes,” without giving up at least some faint

little tremulous shadow of a dream—though she may forget it and deny it

as honestly as that astronomer forgets and denies the moon and his right

shoulder.

Renfrew’s case with his pretty neighbour was also weakened by the liking

and approval of her father and mother, who made the mistake of

frequently praising him to her; for when parents do this, with the

daughter adverse, the poor lover is usually ruined—the reasons being

obvious to everybody except the praising parents. Mrs. Eliot talked

Renfrew Mears and his virtues at her daughter till the latter naturally

declared that she hated him. “I do!” she said one morning. “I really do

hate him, mamma!”

“What nonsense!” her mother exclaimed. “When I heard the two of you

chatting together on the front porch for at least an hour, only last

evening!”

“Chatting!” Muriel repeated scornfully. “Chatting together! That shows

how much you observe, mamma! I don’t think he said more than a dozen

words the whole evening.”

“Well, don’t you like a good listener?”

“Yes,” Muriel replied emphatically. “Indeed, I do! A good listener is

one who understands what you’re saying. Renfrew Mears has just lately

learned enough to keep quiet, for fear if he speaks at all, it’ll show

he doesn’t understand _any_thing!”

“Well, if he doesn’t, why did you talk to him?”

“Good gracious!” Muriel cried. “We can’t always express ourselves as we

wish to in this life, mamma; I should think you’d know that by this

time! I can’t throw rocks at him and say, ‘Go back home!’ every time he

comes poking over here, can I? I have to be polite, even to Renfrew

Mears, don’t you suppose?”

The mother, sighing, gave her daughter one of those little

half-surreptitious glances in which mothers seem to review troubled

scenes with their own mothers; then she said gently: “Your father and I

do wish you could feel a little more kindly toward the poor boy,

Muriel.”

“Well, I can’t, and I don’t want to. What’s more, I wouldn’t marry him

if I did.”

“Not if you were in love?”

“Poor mamma!” Muriel said compassionately. “What has love to do with

marrying? I expect to retain my freedom; I don’t propose to enter upon a

period of child-rearing——”

“Oh, good gracious!” Mrs. Eliot cried. “What a way to talk!”

“But if I did,” Muriel continued, with some sharpness, “I should never

select Renfrew Mears to be my assistant in the task. And as for what you

call ‘love,’ it seems to me a rather unhealthy form of excitement that

I’m not subject to, fortunately.”

“You _are_ so queer,” her mother murmured; whereupon Muriel laughed.

No doubt her laughter was a little condescending. “Queer?” she said.

“No—only modern. Only frank and wholesome! Thinking people look at life

as it really is, nowadays, mamma. I am a child of the new age; but more

than that, I am not the slave of my emotions; I am the product of my

thinking. Unwholesome excitement and queer fancies have no part in my

life, mamma.”

“I hope not,” her mother responded with a little spirit. “I’m not

exactly urging anything unwholesome upon you, Muriel. You’re very

inconsistent, it seems to me.”

“I!” Muriel said haughtily. “Inconsistent!”

“Why, when I just mention that your father and I’d be glad if you could

feel a little kinder toward a good-looking, fine young man that we know

all about, you begin talking, and pretty soon it sounds as though we

were trying to get you to do something criminal! And then you go on to

say you haven’t got any ‘queer fancies!’ Isn’t it a queer fancy to think

we’d want you to do anything unhealthy or excited? That’s why I say

you’re inconsistent.”

Muriel coloured; her breathing quickened; and her eyes became

threateningly bright. “The one thing I _won’t_ be called,” she said, “is

‘inconsistent!’”

“Well, but——”

“I won’t!” she cried, and choked. “You _know_ it makes me furious;

that’s why you do it!”

“Did I understand you to say you never permitted your emotions to

control you?” her mother asked dryly.

In retort, Muriel turned to the closet where she kept her hats; for her

favourite way of meeting these persecutions was to go out of the house

abruptly, leaving her mother to occupy it in full remorse; but this time

Mrs. Eliot forestalled her. A servant appeared in the doorway and

summoned her: “There’s someone downstairs wants to see you; I took him

in the library.”

“I’ll come,” said Mrs. Eliot, and with a single dignified glance at her

daughter, she withdrew, leaving Muriel to digest a discomfiture. For the

art of domestic altercation lies almost wholly in the withdrawal, since

here the field is won by abandoning it. In family embroilments she

proves herself right, and the others wrong, who adroitly seizes the

proper moment to make an unexpected departure either with dignity or in

tears. People under stress of genuine emotion have been known to

practice this art, seeming thereby to indicate the incompatible presence

of a cool dramatist somewhere in the back of their heads; yet where is

there anything that is not incompatible? Muriel, injured by the word

“inconsistent,” had meant to withdraw in silent pain, thus putting her

mother in the wrong; but, in the sometimes invaluable argot of the

race-course, Mrs. Eliot got away first. Muriel felt severely baffled.

There remained to her, however, a retreat somewhat enfeebled by her

mother’s successful withdrawal: Mrs. Eliot had gone out of the room;

Muriel could still go out of the house. Therefore she put on a hat,

descended the stairs and went toward the front door in a manner intended

to symbolize insulted pride taking a much more important departure than

the mere walking out of a room.

Her mother, of course, was intended to see her pass the open double

doors of the library, but Mrs. Eliot’s back happened to be toward these

doors, and she was denied the moving-picture of the daughter sweeping

through the hall. The caller, however, suffered no such deprivation; he

sat facing the doorway, and although Muriel did not look directly at

him, she became aware of a distinguished presence. The library was

shadowy, the hall much lighter; she passed the doors quickly; but she

was almost startled by the impression made upon her by this young man

whom she had never before seen. Then, as she went on toward the front

door, she had suddenly a sensation queerly like dizziness; it seemed to

her that this stranger had looked at her profoundly as she passed, and

that the gaze he bent upon her had come from a pair of dark and glowing

eyes.

She went out into the yard, but not, as she had intended, to the street;

and turning the corner of the house, she crossed the sunny lawn to some

hydrangea bushes in blossom, where she paused and stood, apparently in

contemplation of the flowers. She was trembling a little, so strong was

her queer consciousness of the stranger in the library and of his dark

and glowing eyes. Such sensations as hers have often been described as

“unreal;” that is to say, “she seemed to be in a dream.” Her own eyes

had not fully encountered the dark and glowing ones, but never had any

person made so odd and instantaneous an impression upon her. What else

was she to conclude but that there must have been “something psychic”

about it? And how, except by telepathy, could she have so suddenly found

in her mind the conviction that the distinguished-looking young man was

a painter? For to her own amazement, she was sure of this.

After a time she went back into the house, and again passed through the

hall and by the open doors, but now her bearing was different. In a

sweet, low voice she hummed a careless air from Naples, while in her

arms she bore a sheaf of splendid hydrangea blossoms, thus offering, in

the momentary framing of the broad doorway, a composition rich in colour

and also of no mean decorative charm in contour, it may be said. “The

Girl from the Garden” might have been the title she wished to suggest to

a painter’s mind, but when she came into the view of her mother’s

caller, consciousness of him increased all at once so overwhelmingly

that she forgot herself. She had meant to pass the doorway with a cool

leisureliness and entirely in profile—a Girl from the Garden with no

other thought than to enliven her room with an armful of hydrangea

blossoms—but she came almost to a halt midway, and, for the greater

part of a second packed with drama, looked full upon the visitor.

He was one of those black-and-white young men: clothes black, linen

white, a black bow at the collar, thick black hair, the face of a fine

pallor, and black eyes lustrously comprehending. What they must have

comprehended now was at least a little of the significance of the

arrested attitude beyond the doorway, and more than a little of what was

meant by the dark and lustrous eyes that with such poignant inquiry met

his own. For Muriel’s fairly shouted at him the startled question: “Who

are _you_?”

Time, life and love are made of seconds and bits of seconds: Muriel had

gone on, carrying her question clamouring down the hall with her, before

this full second elapsed. She ran up the stairs and into her own room,

dropped the hydrangeas upon a table, and in two strides confronted a

mirror. A moment later she took up the hydrangeas again, with a care to

hold them as she had held them in the hall below, then walked by the

mirror, paused, gave the glass a deep, questioning look and went on.

After that she seated herself beside an open window that commanded a

view of the front gate, and waited, the great question occupying her

tumultuously.

By this time the great question had grown definite, and of course it

was, “Is this He?” Other questions came tumbling after it: How did she

know he was a painter, this young man of whom she had never heard? It is

only in the moving pictures that a doctor must look like a doctor, a

judge like a judge, an anarchist like an anarchist, a painter like a

painter; the age of machines, hygiene and single-type clothing has so

blurred men into indistinguishability that only a few musicians still

look like musicians, a feat accomplished simply by the slight

impoverishment of barbers. The young man in the library was actually a

painter, but Muriel may well have been amazed that she knew it; for

nowadays it is a commonplace that a Major General in mufti may

reasonably be taken for a plumber, while an unimportant person

soliciting alms at the door is shown into the house under the impression

that a Senator is calling.

Why (Muriel asked herself) had her mother not mentioned such an

appointment? But perhaps there had been no appointment; perhaps he had

called without one. What for? To ask permission to paint the daughter’s

portrait? Had he seen her somewhere before to-day? Where did he live? In

Paris?

The front door could be heard closing below, and she looked down upon a

white straw hat with a black band. This hat moved quickly down the path

to the gate, and the young stranger was disclosed beneath the hat: a

manly figure with an elastic step. Outside the gate he paused, looking

back thoughtfully with his remarkable eyes; and Muriel, who had

instantly withdrawn into the concealment of a window-curtain, marked

that this look of his had the quality of covering the whole front of the

house at a glance. It was a look, moreover, that seemed to comprehend

the type of the house and even to measure its dimensions—a look of the

kind that “takes in everything,” as people say. Muriel trembled again.

Did he say to himself: “This is Her house?” Did he think: “I should like

to set my easel here by the gate and paint this house, because it is the

house where She dwells”?

His pause at the gate was only a momentary one; he turned toward the

region of commerce and hotels and walked quickly away, the intervening

foliage of the trees almost immediately cutting him off from the

observation of the girl at the window. Then she heard her mother coming

up the stairs and through the upper hall; whereupon Muriel, still

tremulous, began hastily to alter the position of the little silver

implements upon her dressing-table, thus sketching a preoccupation with

small housewifery, if Mrs. Eliot should come into the room. But to the

daughter’s acute disappointment, the mother passed the open door without

even looking in, and retired to her own apartment.

Muriel most urgently wished to follow her and shower her with questions:

“Who _is_ he? Isn’t he a painter? Why did he come to see you? What were

you talking about? When is he coming again? What did he say when he saw

me?” But remembering the terms upon which she and her mother had so

recently parted, and that odious word “inconsistent,” Muriel could not

bend to the intimacy of such a questioning. In fact, her own thought

took the form, “I’d rather die!”

She turned to the window again, looked out at that gate so lately made

significant by the passage of the stranger—and there was young Mr.

Renfrew Mears, just coming in. He was a neat picture of a summer young

gentleman for any girl’s eye; but to Muriel he was a too-familiar

object, and just now about as interesting as a cup of tepid

barley-water. She tried to move away before he saw her, but Renfrew had

always a fatal quickness for seeing her. He called to her.

“Oh, Muriel!”

“Well—what?” she said reluctantly.

“There’s something I want to ask you about. Will you come down a few

minutes?”

“Oh, well—I suppose so,” was her not too heartening response; but on

the way downstairs a thought brightened her. Perhaps Renfrew might know

something about a dark young man—a painter—lately come to town.

He was blank upon this subject, however, as she discovered when they had

seated themselves upon a wicker settee on the veranda. “No,” he said. “I

haven’t heard of any artist that’s come here lately. Where’d you hear

about one?”

“Oh, around,” she said casually. “I’m not absolutely certain he’s an

artist, but I got that idea somewhere. The reason I wanted to know is

because I thought he might be one of the new group that have broken

away, like Matisse and Gaugin.”

“Who?”

“Never mind. Haven’t you heard of anybody at _all_ that’s a stranger

here—visiting somebody, perhaps?”

“Not exactly,” Renfrew replied, thinking it over conscientiously. “I

don’t believe I have, exactly.”

“What do you mean, you don’t think you have ‘exactly’?” she asked

irritably. “Have you, or haven’t you?”

“Well,” he said, “my Aunt Milly from Burnetsville is visiting my

cousins, the Thomases, but she’s an invalid and you probably

wouldn’t——”

“No, I wouldn’t!” Muriel said. “Don’t strain your mind any more,

Renfrew.”

“I could inquire around,” he suggested. “I thought it wouldn’t likely be

my aunt, but you said ‘anybody at all.’”

“Never mind! What was it you wanted to ask me?”

“Well, it’s something that’s rather important, but of course maybe you

won’t think so, Muriel. Anyway, though, I hope you’ll think it’s _sort_

of important.”

“But what _is_ it? Don’t hang fire so, Renfrew!”

“I just wanted to lead up to it a little,” he explained mildly. “I’ve

been thinking about getting a new car, and I wondered what sort you

think I’d better look at. I didn’t want to get one you wouldn’t like.”

Her lips parted to project that little series of sibilances commonly

employed by adults to make children conscious of error. “Why on earth

should you ask me?” she said sharply. “Is that your idea of an important

question?”

Renfrew’s susceptible complexion showed an increase of colour, but he

was growing more and more accustomed to be used as a doormat, and he

responded, without rancour: “I meant I hoped you’d sort of think it

important, my not wanting to get one you wouldn’t like.”

“Now, what do you mean by that?”

“Well,” he said, “I mean I hoped you’d think it was important, my

thinking it was important to ask you.”

“I don’t,” she returned as a complete answer.

“You say——”

“I say I don’t,” she repeated. “I don’t. I don’t think it’s important.

Isn’t that clear enough, Renfrew?”

“Yes,” he said, and looked plaintively away from her. “I guess I don’t

need any new car.”

“Is there anything more this morning?” she was cruel enough to inquire.

“No,” he answered, rising. “I guess that’s all.” Then, having received

another of his almost daily rejections, he went away, leaving her to

watch his departing figure with some exasperation, though she might well

have admired him for his ingenuity: every day or two he invented a new

way of proposing to her. In comparison, her refusals were commonplace,

but of course she neither realized that nor cared to be brilliant for

Renfrew; and also, this was a poor hour for him, when the electric

presence of the black-and-white stranger was still vibrant in the very

air. Muriel returned to her room and put the hydrangeas in a big silver

vase; she moved them gently, with a touch both reverent and caressing,

for they had borne a part in a fateful scene, and already she felt it

possible that in the after years she would never see hydrangeas in

blossom without remembering to-day and the First Meeting.

Impulsively she went to her desk and wrote:

“Is it true that You have come? My hand trembles, and I know that if I

spoke to my mother about You, my voice would tremble. Oh, I could never

ask her a question about You! A moment ago I sat upon the veranda with a

dull man who wants to marry me. It seemed a desecration to listen to

him—an offense to You! He has always bored me. How much more terribly

he bored me when perhaps I had just seen You for the first time in my

life! Perhaps it is not for the first time in eternity, though! Was I

ever a Queen in Egypt and were You a Persian sculptor? Did we meet in

Ephesus once?

“It is a miracle that we should meet at all. I might have lived in

another century—or on another planet! Should we then have gone seeking,

seeking one another always vainly? All my life I have been waiting for

You. Always I have known that I was waiting, but until to-day I did not

know it was for just You. My whole being trembled when I saw You—if it

_was_ You? I am trembling now as I think of You, as I write of

You—write _to_ You! A new life has possibly begun for me in this hour!

“And some day will I show You this writing? That thought is like fire

and like ice. I burn with it and freeze with it, in terror of You! See!

Here is my heart opened like a book for your reading!

“Oh, is it, _is_ it You? I think that You are a painter; that is all I

know of You—and why do I think it? It _came_ to me as I stood in a

garden, thrilling with my first quick glimpse of You. Was that the proof

of our destiny, yours and mine? Yes, the miracle of my knowing that You

are a painter when I do not even know your name—that is the answer! It

must be You! I tremble with excitement as I write that word ‘You’ which

has suddenly leaped into such fiery life and meaning: I tremble and I

could weep! Oh, You—You—You! _Is_ it?”

Twice, during the latter phases of this somewhat hasty record of ardour,

she had been summoned to lunch, and after hurrying the final words upon

the page, she put the paper into a notebook and locked it inside her

desk. Then she descended the stairs and went toward the dining-room, but

halted suddenly, unseen, outside the door. She had caught the word

“painter,” spoken by her father.

“Well, I’m glad you liked that painter.”

“Yes,” Mrs. Eliot said. “I talked it over with him, and I’m afraid he

agreed with you instead of with me. Naturally, he would, though! I was

quite interested in him.”

“You were?”

“Yes—such an unexpected type.”

“Well, no,” Mr. Eliot said. “Nobody’s an unexpected type nowadays. Isn’t

Muriel coming down at all?”

“Jennie’s been up for her twice,” his wife informed him. “I suppose

she’ll come eventually. She’s cross this morning.”

“What about?”

“Oh, I just asked her if she couldn’t be a little fairer to a certain

somebody. I suppose I’d better not have mentioned it, because it made

her very peevish.”

Upon this, Muriel made her entrance swiftly enough to let her mother

know that the last words had been overheard, an advantage the daughter

could not forego. She took her place at the table opposite to her

gourmandizing little brother Robert, and in silence permitted her facial

expression alone to mention what she thought of a mother who called her

“peevish” when she was not present to defend herself.

Only a moment before, she had been thrilled inexpressibly: the

black-and-white stranger, so mysteriously spoken of by her parents, was

indeed a painter. That proved his You-ness, proved everything! Her whole

being (as she would have said) shook with the revelation, and her

anxiety to hear more of him was consuming; but the word “peevish”

brought about an instantaneous reversion. She entered the dining-room in

an entirely different mood, for her whole being was now that of a

daughter embattled with a parent who attacks unfairly—so intricately

elastic are the ways of our whole beings!

Mrs. Eliot offered only the defense of a patient smile; Mr. Eliot looked

puzzled and oppressed; and for a time there was no conversation during

the further progress of this uncomfortable meal. Nothing was to be heard

in the room except the movements of a servant and the audible eating of

fat little Robert, who was incurably natural with his food.

It was Muriel who finally decided to speak. “I’m sorry to have

interrupted your conversation,” she said frostily. “Perhaps, though,

you’d prefer not to say any more about me to papa and Robert while I’m

here to explain what really happened, mamma.”

“Oh, nonsense!” Mr. Eliot said. “I suppose even the Pope gets ‘peevish’

now and then; it’s no deadly insult to say a person got a little

peevish. We weren’t having a ‘conversation’ about you at all. We were

talking about other matters, and just barely mentioned you.”

Muriel looked at him quickly. “What other things were you talking

about?”

He laughed. “My! How suspicious you are!”

“Not at all; I simply asked you what other things you were talking

about.”

Instead of replying, “About a distinguished young painter who saw you on

the street and wants to paint your portrait,” Mr. Eliot laughed again

and rose, having finished his coffee. He came round the table to her and

pinched her ear on his way to the door. “Good gracious!” he said. “Don’t

you suppose your mother and I ever talk about anything except what a

naughty daughter we have?” And with that he departed. Mrs. Eliot said,

“Excuse me,” rather coldly to Muriel, followed him to the front door,

and failed to return.

Muriel did not see her mother again during the afternoon, and in the

evening Mr. and Mrs. Eliot went out to a dinner of their bridge-club,

leaving their daughter to dine in the too audible company of Robert. She

dressed exquisitely, though not for Robert, whose naturalness at the

table brought several annoyed glances from her. “_Can’t_ you manage it

more quietly, Robert?” she asked at last, with the dessert. “Try!”

“Whaffor?” he inquired.

“Only because it’s so hideous!”

“Oh, hush!” he said rudely, and, being offended, became more natural

than ever, on purpose.

She sighed. With the falling of the dusk, her whole being, not

antagonized by her mother’s presence, had become an uplifted and

mysterious expectation; and the sounds made by the gross child Robert

were not to be borne. She left the table, went out into the starlight,

and stood by the hydrangeas, an ethereal figure in draperies of mist.

“Oh, You!” she whispered, and let a bare arm be caressed by the clumps

of great blossoms. “When are you coming again, You? To-night?”

She quivered with the sense of impending drama; it seemed to her certain

that the next moment she would see him—that he would come to her out of

the darkness. The young painter should have done so; he should have

stepped out of the vague night-shadows, a poetic and wistful figure,

melancholy with mystery yet ineffably radiant. “Mademoiselle, step

lightly!” he should have said. “Do you not see the heart beneath your

slipper? It was mine until I threw it there!”

“Ah, You!” she murmured to the languorous hydrangeas.

At such a moment the sound of peanuts being eaten, shells and all, could

not fail to prove inharmonious. She shivered with the sudden anguish of

a dislocated mood; but she was Robert’s next of available kin and

recognized a duty. She crossed the lawn to the veranda, where he sat,

busy with a small paper sack upon his knee.

“Robert! Stop that!”

“I ain’t doin’ anything,” he said crossly.

“You _are_. What do you mean, eating peanuts when you’ve just finished

an enormous dinner?”

“Well, what hurt is that?”

“And with the shells on!” she cried.

“Makes more _to_ ’em,” he explained.

“Stop it!”

“I won’t,” Robert said doggedly. “I’m goin’ to do what I please

to-night, no matter how much trouble I get into to-morrow!”

“What ‘trouble’ do you expect to-morrow?”

“Didn’t you hear about it?” he asked. “Papa and mamma were talkin’ about

it at lunch.”

“I didn’t hear them.”

“I guess it was before you came down,” Robert said; and then he gave her

a surprise. “The painter was here this morning, and they got it all

fixed up.”

Muriel moved back from him a step, and inexplicably a dismal foreboding

took her. “What?” she said.

“Well, the thing that bothers _me_ is simply this,” Robert informed her:

“He told mamma he’d have to bring his little boy along and let him play

around here as long as the work went on. He said he has to take this boy

along with him, because his wife’s a dentist’s ’sistant and can’t keep

him around a dentist office, and they haven’t got any place to leave

him. He’s about nine years old, and I’ll bet anything I have trouble

with him before the day’s over.”

“Do you mean the—the painter is married, Robert?”

“Yes, and got this boy,” Robert said, shaking his head. “I bet I _do_

have trouble with him, if he’s got to be around here until they get

three coats o’ paint on our house. Mamma thought they only needed two,

but papa said three, and the painter talked mamma into it this morning.”

“The house?” Muriel said. “We’re going to have the—the house painted?”

Robert was rather surprised. “Why, don’t you remember how much papa and

mamma were talkin’ about it, two or three weeks ago? And then they

thought not and didn’t say so much about it, but for a while papa was

goin’ to have every painter in town come up here and make a bid. Don’t

you remember?”

“I do now,” Muriel said feebly; and a moment later she glanced toward

the bright windows of the house across the street. “Robert,” she said,

“if you’ve finished those horrible peanuts, you might run and ask Mr.

Renfrew Mears if he’d mind coming over a little while.”

She had been deeply stirred by the subject that had occupied her all

day, and it was a spiritual necessity for her (so to say) to continue

upon the topic with somebody—even with Renfrew Mears! However, she

rejected him again, though with a much greater consideration for his

feelings than was customary; and when he departed, she called after him:

“Look out for your clothes when you come over to-morrow. We’re going to

have the house painted.”

Then, smiling contentedly, she went indoors and up to her room. The

great vase of hydrangeas stood upon a table; she looked at it absently,

and was reminded of something. She took some sheets of written paper

from a notebook in her desk, tossed them into a waste-basket, yawned,

and went to bed.

“US”

“HIGHLAND PLACE” was one of those new little cross-streets in a new

little bosky neighbourhood, that had “grown up over night,” as we say,

meaning grown up in four or five years; so that when citizens of the

older and more solid and soiled central parts of the city come driving

through the new part, of a Sunday afternoon in spring, they are pleased

to be surprised. “My goodness!” they exclaim. “When did all _this_

happen? Why, it doesn’t seem more’n a year or so since we used to have

Fourth o’ July picnics out here! And now just look at it—all built up

with bride-and-groom houses!”

“Highland Place” was the name given to this cross-street by the

speculative land company that “developed” it, and they did not call it

“Waverley Place” because they had already produced a “Waverley Place” a

block below. Both “Places” were lined with green-trimmed small white

houses, “frame” or stucco; and although the honeymoon suggestion was

architecturally so strong, as a matter of fact most of the inhabitants

held themselves to be “settled old married people,” some of the couples

having almost attained to a Tin Wedding Anniversary.

The largest of the houses in “Highland Place” was the “hollow-tile and

stucco residence of Mr. and Mrs. George M. Sullender.” Thus it had been

defined, under a photographic reproduction, with the caption “New

Highland Place Sullender Home,” in one of the newspapers, not long after

the little street had been staked out and paved; and since the

“Sullender Home” was not only the largest house but the first to be

built in the “Place,” and had its picture in the paper, it naturally

took itself for granted as being the most important.

Young Mrs. William Sperry, whose equally young husband had just bought

the smallest but most conspicuously bride-and-groom cottage in the whole

“Place,” was not so deeply impressed with the Sullender importance as

she should have been, since the Sperrys were the newcomers of the

neighbourhood, had not yet been admitted to its intimacies, and might

well have displayed a more amiable deference to what is established.

“No,” Mrs. Sperry said to her husband, when they got home after their

first experience of the “Place’s” hospitality, a bridge-party at the

Sullenders’—“I just can’t stand those people, Will. They’re really

_awful_!”

“Why, what’s the matter with ’em?” he inquired. “I thought they were

first rate. They seemed perfectly friendly and hospitable and——”

“Oh, yes! Lord and Lady of the Manor entertaining the tenantry! I don’t

mind being tenantry,” young Mrs. Sperry explained;—“but I can’t stand

the Lord-and-Lady-of-the-Manor style in people with a nine-room house

and a one-car garage.”

“It may be one-car,” her husband laughed; “but it has two stories. They

have a chauffeur, you know, and he lives in the upstairs of the garage.”

“So that entitles the Sullenders to the Manor style?”

“But I didn’t notice any of that style,” he protested. “I thought they

seemed right nice and cordial. Of course Sullender feels that he’s been

making quite a success in business and it naturally gives him a rather

condescending air, but he’s really all right.”

“He certainly was condescending,” she grumbled, and went on with some

satire: “Did you hear him allude to himself as a ‘Realtor?’”

“Well, why shouldn’t he? He _is_ one. That’s his business.”

“My Lord the Realtor!” Mrs. Sperry cried mockingly. “There ought to be

an opera written called ‘Il Realtor’ like the one there used to be with

the title ‘Il Janitor.’ Those are such romantic words! ‘Toreador,’

‘Realtor,’ ‘Humidor’——”

“Here, here!” her husband said. “Calm down! You seem to have got

yourself worked up into a mighty sarcastic mood for some reason. Those

people only want to be nice to us and they’re all right.”

Mrs. Sperry looked at him coldly. “Did you hear Mr. Sullender saying

that his company had sold seven ‘_homes_’ this month?” she inquired.

“Oh, you can’t expect everybody to know all the purist niceties of the

English language,” he said. “Sullender’s all right and his wife struck

me as one of the nicest, kindest women I ever——”

“Kind!” Mrs. Sperry echoed loudly. “She doesn’t stop at being ‘kind’!

She’s so caressingly tender, so angelically loving, that she can’t

possibly pronounce a one-syllabled word without making two syllables of

it! Did you notice that she said ‘yay-yus’ for ‘yes’, and ‘no-oh’ for

‘no’? I do hate the turtle-dove style of talking, and I never met a

worse case of it. Mrs. Sullender’s the sweetest sweet-woman I ever saw

in my life and I’m positive she leads her husband a dog’s life!”

“What nonsense!”

“It serves him right for his Realtoring, though,” Mrs. Sperry added

thoughtfully. “He _ought_ to have that kind of a wife!”

“But you just said she was the sweetest——”

“Yes, the sweetest sweet-woman I ever saw. I do hate the whole clan of

sweet-women!”

The young husband looked perplexed. “I don’t know what you’re talking

about,” he admitted. “I always thought——”

“I’m talking about the sweet-woman type that Mrs. Sullender belongs to.

They use _intended_ sweetness. They speak to total strangers with

sweetness. They wear expressions of saintly sweetness. Everybody speaks

of a sweet-woman with loving reverence, and it’s generally felt that it

would be practically immoral to contradict one of ’em. To be actually

sassy to a sweet-woman would be a cardinal sin! They let their voices

linger beautifully on the air; and they listen, themselves, to the

lovely sounds they make. They always have the most exquisitely

self-sacrificing reasons for every action of their lives; but they _do_

just exactly what they _want_ to do, and everybody else has to do what a

sweet-woman wants him to. That’s why I’m sure Mr. Sullender, in spite of

all his pomposity, leads a dog’s life at home.”

“Of all the foolish talk!” young Sperry exclaimed. “Why, everybody says

they’re the most ideally married couple and that they lead the happiest

life together that——”

“‘Everybody says!’” she mocked him, interrupting. “How often have you

known what ‘everybody says’ turn out to be the truth about anything? And

besides, we don’t know a thing about any of these people, and we don’t

know anybody else that does! Who is this ‘everybody’ that’s told you how

happy the Sullenders are?”

“Well, it’s just a general impression I got,” he admitted. “I think I

heard someone down-town alluding to Sullender’s domestic relations being

very fortunate and pleasant.”

“Oh, you _think_ so? Is _that_ all? You don’t really know a thing about

it, then.”

“No matter. You’re wrong this time, Bella. The Sullenders——”

But Bella shook her pretty young head, interrupting him again. “You’ll

see! I do hope there won’t have to be too much intimacy but you can’t

live across the street from people very long, in a neighbourhood like

this, without getting to know the real truth about ’em. You wait and see

what we get to know about the Sullenders!”

“Yes, I’ll wait,” he laughed. “But how long?”

“Oh, I don’t know; maybe a year, maybe a month——”

“Let’s make it a month, Bella,” he said, and put his arm about her. “If

we don’t find out in a month that the Sullenders are miserable together,

will you admit you’re wrong?”

“No, I won’t! But you’ll probably have to admit that I’m right before

that long. I have a _sense_ for these things, Will, and I never go wrong

when I trust it. Women know intuitively things that men never suspect. I

_know_ I’m right about Mrs. Sullender.”

Her husband permitted the discussion to end with this, wisely fearing

that if he sought further to defend his position Bella might plausibly

accuse him of “always insisting upon the last word.” And so, for that

night, at least, the matter was dropped from their conversation, though

not from the thoughts of Mrs. Sperry. Truth to tell, she was what is

sometimes called an “obstinate little body,” and, also, she appreciated

the advisability of a young wife’s building for future and lifelong use

the foundations of infallibility. That is to say, she was young and

therefore inexperienced, but she had foresight.

Moreover, she had attentively observed the matrimonial condition of her

parents and aunts and uncles. Many and many a time had she heard a

middle-aged husband speak to his wife of like years somewhat in this

manner: “No, Fannie, you’re wrong again. You’re mistaken about this now,

just as you were about James Thompson’s adding machine in 1897. And you

were wrong about painting the house, the year after that, too. Don’t you

remember how you insisted dark green was the right colour, and finally

had to admit, yourself, that dark green was awful, and light yellow

would have been just right, as I all along said it would?”

Thus, young Mrs. Sperry, looking to times far ahead, had determined to

be wrong about nothing whatever during these early years of her

matrimony. Moreover, since argument had arisen concerning the

Sullenders, she had made up her mind to be right about them, and to

“prove” herself right, “whether she really _was_ or not!” And that is

why, on the morning after her arraignment of sweet-women generally, and

of her too gracious neighbour particularly, the pretty newcomer in

“Highland Place” found herself most pleasurably excited by the naïve but

sinister revelations of a stranger eight years of age.

At a little before nine o’clock, Mr. William Sperry had departed (in a

young husband’s car) for his place of business, some five miles distant

in the smoky heart of the city; and not long afterward the thoughtful

Bella, charmingly accoutred as a gardener, came forth with a trowel to

uproot weeds that threatened a row of iris she had set out along the

gravel path leading from the tiny white veranda to the white picket

gate. Thus engaged, she became aware of a small presence fumbling at the

latch of this gate, and she changed her position from that of one on all

fours, who gropes intently in the earth, to that of one upright from the

knees, but momentarily relaxed.

“Do you want to come in?” she inquired, looking out from the shade of

her broad hat to where the little figure in blue overalls was marked off

into stripes of sunshine and shadow by the intervening pickets of the

gate. “Is there something you want here, little boy?”

He succeeded in operating the latch, came in, and looked attentively

over her excavations. “Have you found any nice worms?” he asked.

“No, I haven’t found any at all,” she said, somewhat surprised by his

adjective. “But I don’t think there are any ‘nice’ worms anywhere. Worms

are all pretty horrid.”

“No, they ain’t,” he returned promptly and seriously. “There’s lots o’

nice worms.”

“Oh, I don’t think so.”

“Yes, there is.”

“Oh, no.”

“There is, too,” he said stubbornly and with some asperity. “Everybody

knows there’s plenty of nice worms.”

“Where did you get such nonsense in your head?” Bella asked, a little

sharply. “Whoever told you there are nice worms?”

“Well, there is!”

“But what makes you think so?” she insisted.

“Well——” He hesitated, then said with a conclusive air, settling the

question: “My mother. I guess _she_ knows!”

Bella stared at him incredulously for a moment.

“What’s your name?”

“My name’s George. My name’s George, the same as my papa,” he replied

somewhat challengingly.

“Don’t you live just across the street?” she asked.

“Yes, I do.” He turned, pointing to the “George M. Sullender residence”;

and Bella thought she detected a note of inherited pride in his tone as

he added, “That’s where _I_ live!”

“But, George, you don’t mean,” she insisted curiously;—“you don’t mean

that your _mother_ told you there are nice worms? Surely not!”

“My mother did,” he asserted, and then with a little caution, modified

the assertion. “My mother just the _same_ as did.”

“How was that?”

And his reply, so unexpected by his questioner, sent a thrill of coming

triumph through her. “My mother called my father a worm.”

“What!”

“She did,” said George. “She called him a worm over and over——”

“What!”

“And if he’s a worm,” George went on, stoutly, “well, I guess _he’s_

nice, isn’t he? So there got to be plenty nice worms if he’s one.”

“George!”

“She calls him a worm most every little while, _these_ days,” said

George, expanding, and he added, in cold blood, “I like him a great deal

better than what I do her.”

“You do?”

“She hit him this morning,” George thought fit to mention.

“_What?_”

“With a cloe’s-brush,” he said, dropping into detail. “She hit him on

the back of the head with the wooden part of it and he said, ‘_Ooh_’!”

“But she was just in fun, of course!”

“No, she wasn’t; she was mad and said she was goin’ to take me with her

and go back to my grampaw’s. I won’t go with her. She’s mad all the

time, _these_ days.”

Bella stared, her lips parted, and she wished him to continue, but

remembered her upbringing and tried to be a lady. “Georgie,” she said

severely;—“you shouldn’t tell such things. Don’t you know better than

to speak in this way of what happens between your poor papa and your

mother?”

The effect upon George was nothing, for even at eight years of age a

child is able to understand what interests an adult listener, and

children deeply enjoy being interesting. In response to her admonition,

he said simply: “Yesterday she threw a glass o’ water at him and cut

where his ear is. It made a big mark on him.”

“Georgie! I’m afraid you’re telling me a dreadful, dreadful story!”

Bella said, though it may not be denied that in company with this

suspicion there arrived a premonitory symptom of disappointment. “Why, I

saw your papa yesterday evening, myself, and there wasn’t any mark or

anything like——”

“It don’t show,” George explained. “It took him a good while, but he got

it fixed up so’s it didn’t show much. Then he brushed his hair over

where it was.”

“Oh!”

“My mother hates my papa,” said George. “She just hates and hates him!”

“What _for_?” Bella couldn’t stop this question.

“She wants him to have more money and he says what good would that do

because she’d only throw it around.”

“No!”

“Yes,” said George. “And she’s mad because once he got so mad at her he

hit _her_.”

“What!”

“He did, too,” George informed her, nodding, his large eyes as honest as

they were earnest. “She said she was goin’ to see my grampaw and she

left me at home, but my papa catched her at the Pitcher Show with Mr.

Grumbaugh.”

“Who?”

“Mr. Grumbaugh,” George repeated, with the air of explaining everything.

“So my papa made her come home and he hit her, and she hit him, too!”

“Before _you_!” Bella exclaimed, horrified.

“Sure!” George said, and looked upon her with some superiority. “They do

it all before me. Last week they had a _big_ fight——”

He would have continued willingly, but at this point he was interrupted.

Across the street a door opened, and out of it came Mrs. Sullender,

leading a five-year-old girl by the hand. She called loudly, though in a

carefully sweet and musical tone:

“George? Jaw—_aurge_? Oh, Jaw-_aur_-gie?”

“Yes’m?” he shouted.

Mrs. Sullender nodded smilingly to Bella, and called across: “Georgie,

you dear little naughty thing! Didn’t I tell you half an hour ago to

come indoors and play with poor dear little Natalie? She’s been waiting

and waiting so patiently!”

George looked morose, but began to move in the desired direction. “I’m

comin’,” he muttered, and was so gross as to add, under his breath,

“Doggone you!”

However, he went across the street; and then Mrs. Sullender,

benevolently leading the two children by the hand, nodded again to Bella

with a sweetness that was evident even at a distance, and reëntered the

house, taking George and the tiny Natalie with her.

Bella remained upon her knees, staring violently at the “Sullender

Home,” and her thoughts were centred upon her husband. “Just _wait_ till

he gets here!” she thought.

But she saved her triumph until after dinner, when he had made himself

comfortable upon the lounge in their tiny “living-room” and seemed to be

in good content with his briar pipe.

“I had a caller after you left, this morning,” she informed him sunnily.

“Who was it?”

“Mr. George M. Sullender.”

“So? That’s odd,” said Sperry. “I saw him starting down-town in his car

just before I did. How did he happen to come back here?”

“He didn’t. This was Mr. George M. Sullender, Junior.”

“Who’s that?”

“Their little boy,” said Bella. “You’ve seen him playing in their yard

with the little sister.”

“Oh, yes. Did his mother send him over on an errand?”

“No. He came to see if I’d found any ‘nice worms’,” Bella said, and

added, in a carefully casual tone, but with a flashing little glance

from the corner of her eye: “He said _some_ worms must be nice because

Mrs. Sullender is in the habit of calling Mr. Sullender a worm, and

Georgie thinks his father is nice.”

Young Mr. Sperry took his pipe from his mouth and looked at his wife

incredulously. “What did you say about Mrs. Sullender’s calling Mr.

Sullender——”

“A ‘worm,’ William,” said Bella. “She calls him a ‘worm,’ William,

because he doesn’t make even more money than he does, poor man. The

child really hates his mother: he never once spoke of her as ‘mamma’ but

he always said ‘my papa’ when he mentioned Mr. Sullender. I think I must

have misjudged that poor creature a little, by the way. Of course he

_is_ pompous, but I think his pomposity is probably just assumed to

cover up his agony of mind. He has a recent scar that his wife put on

his head, too, to cover up.”

“Bella!”

“Yes,” she said reflectively. “I think he’s mainly engaged in covering

things up, poor thing. Of course he does _strike_ his sweet-woman, now

and then, when he finds her at the movies with gentlemen he doesn’t

approve of; but one can hardly blame him, considering the life she leads

him. It was last week, though, when they had their _big_ fight, I

understand—with the children looking on.”

But at this, William rose to his feet and confronted her. “What on earth

are you talking about, Bella?”

“The Sullenders,” she said. “It was curious. It was like having the

front of their house taken off, the way a curtain rolls up at the

theatre and shows you one of those sordid Russian plays, for instance.

There was the whole sickening actual life of this dreadful family laid

bare before me: the continual petty bickerings that every hour or so

grow into bitter quarrels with blows and epithets—and then, when other

people are there, as we were, last night, the assumption of suavity, the

false, too-sweet sweetness and absurd pomposities—oh, what an ugly

revelation it is, Will! It’s so ugly it makes me almost sorry you were

wrong about them—as you’re rather likely to be in your flash judgments,

you poor dear!”

Bella (who was “literary” sometimes) delivered herself of this speech

with admirable dramatic quality, especially when she made her terse

little realistic picture of the daily life of the Sullenders, but there

was just a shade of happy hypocrisy and covert triumph in the final

sentence, and she even thought fit to add a little more on the point.

“How strange it is to think that only last night we were arguing about

it!” she exclaimed. “And that I said we’d not need to wait a month to

prove that I was right! Here it is only the next day, and it’s proved I

was a thousand times righter than I said I was!”

“Well, perhaps you’ll enlighten me——” he began, and she complied so

willingly that she didn’t let him finish his request.

She gave him Georgie’s revelation in detail, emphasizing and colouring

it somewhat with her own interpretations of many things only suggested

by the child’s meagre vocabulary; and she was naturally a little

indignant when, at first, her husband declined to admit his defeat.

“Why, it’s simply not believable,” he said. “Those people _couldn’t_

seem what they seemed to be last night, and be so depraved. They were

genuinely affectionate in the tone they used with each other and

they——”

“Good gracious!” Bella cried. “Do you think I’m making this up?”

“No, of course not,” he returned hastily. “But the child may have made

it up.”

“About his own father and mother?”

“Oh, I know; yet some children are the most wonderful little

story-tellers: they tell absolutely inexplicable lies and hardly know

why themselves.”

But at this, Bella looked at him pityingly. “Listen a moment! There was

all the sordid daily life of these people laid out before me in the poor

little child’s prattle: a whole realistic novel, complete and

consistent, and I’d like to know how you account for a child of seven or

eight being able to compose such a thing—and on the spur of the moment,

too! When children make up stories they make ’em up about extraordinary

and absurd things, not about the sordid tragedies of everyday domestic

life. Do you actually think this child made up what he told me?”

“Well, it certainly does seem peculiar!”

“‘Peculiar?’ Why, it’s terrible and it’s _true_!”

“Well, if it is,” he said gloomily, “we certainly don’t want to get

mixed up in it. We don’t want to come into a new neighbourhood and get

involved in a scandal—or even in gossiping about one. We must be

careful not to say anything about this, Bella.”

She looked away from him thoughtfully. “I suppose so, though of course

these people aren’t friends of ours; they’re hardly acquaintances.”

“No, but that’s all the more reason for our not appearing to be

interested in their troubles. We’ll certainly be careful not to say

anything about this, won’t we, Bella?”

“Oh, I suppose so,” she returned absently. “Since the people are really

nothing to us, though, I don’t suppose it matters whether we say

anything or not.”

“Oh, but it does!” he insisted, and then, something in her tone having

caught his attention, he inquired: “You _haven’t_ said anything to any

one about it, have you, Bella?”

“What?”

“You haven’t repeated to any one what the child told you, have you?”

“Oh, no,” she said lightly. “Not to any one who would have any personal

interest in it.”

“Oh, my!” William exclaimed, dismayed. “Who’d you tell?”

“Nobody that has the slightest interest in the Sullenders,” Bella

replied, with cold dignity. “Nobody that cares the slightest thing about

them.”

“Well, then, what in the world did you tell ’em _for_?”

“Why, to pass the time, I suppose,” Bella said, a little offended.

“Cousin Ethel dropped in for a while this afternoon and the whole thing

was so extraordinary I just sketched it to her. What are you making such

a fuss about?”

“I’m not,” he protested feebly. “But even if the thing’s true, we don’t

want to get the name of people that gossip about their——”

“Oh, my!” she sighed impatiently. “I’ve told you Cousin Ethel hasn’t the

slightest personal interest in these people, and besides she’ll never

repeat what I told her.”

“Well, if she doesn’t, it’ll be the first time!”

“Will, please!”

“Golly, I hope it won’t get back to the Sullenders!”

“Such horrible people as that, what difference would it make?” Bella

demanded. “And how could it get back? Cousin Ethel doesn’t move in

Sullender circles. Not precisely!”

“No, but her close friend, Mrs. Howard Peebles, is the aunt of Mrs.

Frank Deem and Frank Deem is Sullender’s business partner.”

“Oh, a Realtor, is he?” Bella said icily.

William returned to the lounge, but did not recline. Instead, he sat

down and took his head in his hands. “I do wish you hadn’t talked about

it,” he said gloomily.

Bella was sensitive; therefore she began to be angry. “Do you think it’s

very intelligent,” she asked, “to imply that I don’t know enough not to

make neighbourhood trouble? You may not recall that only last night you

were sure that you were right and I was wrong about what sort of people

these Sullenders are. Already, the very next day, you’ve had to confess

that you were utterly mistaken and that your wife is wholly in the

right. I suppose you may feel a little depressed about that and want to

change the question to something else and claim I’m in the wrong about

_that_. But don’t you think it’s a little bit childish of you, Will?

Don’t you think that the way you’re taking your defeat is just a little

bit—small?”

He was hurt, and looked up at her with an expression that showed the

injury. “I’d hardly have expected you’d call me that,” he said. “At

least, not quite so soon after our wedding-trip!”

“Well, I might have expected you wouldn’t be accusing me of gossiping

harmfully,” she retorted. “Not _quite_ so soon!”

Young Mr. Sperry rose again. “Do you think that’s as bad as using the

epithet ‘small’ to your husband?”

“‘Epithet’?” she echoed. “You charge me with using ‘epithets’?”

“Well, but didn’t——”

“I think I’ll ask you to excuse me,” Bella said, with an aspect of

nobility in suffering. Thereupon, proudly, she betook herself from the

room.

It was a tiff. Next day they were as polite to each other as if they had

just been introduced, and this ceremonial formality was maintained

between them until the third evening after its installation, when a

calamity caused them to abandon it. After a stately dinner in their

hundred square feet of dining-room, Bella had gone out into the twilight

to refresh her strips of iris with fair water from the garden hose, and

William reclined upon his lounge, solitary with a gloomy pipe.

Unexpectedly, he was summoned: Bella looked in upon him from the door

and spoke hastily. “Uh—Mr. and Mrs. Sullender——” she said. “Uh——”

And as hastily she withdrew.

Perturbed, he rose and went out to the little veranda, where, with a

slightly nervous hospitality, Bella was now offering chairs to Mrs.

George M. Sullender and her husband. Mrs. Sullender smilingly, and in

her angelic voice, declined the offer.

“Oh, no,” she said. “We came in for a moment to admire your lovely

irises at closer range; we’re just passing on our way to some friends in

Waverley Place.”

“We’d be so glad——” Bella fluttered.

“No, no, no,” Mrs. Sullender murmured caressingly. “We’ve only a

moment—I’m so sorry you disturbed your husband—we’re just going over

for bridge. I suppose you know most of the people in Waverley Place?”

“No, I don’t think I know any.”

“Well, of course _we_ don’t think it compares to Highland Place,” Mrs.

Sullender said, with a little deprecatory laugh. “I’m afraid it’s

rather—well, gossipy.”

“Oh——” Bella said. “Is it?”

“I’m afraid so,” the gentle-mannered lady returned. “Of course that’s a

great pity, too, in such a new little community where people are bound

to be thrown together a great deal. Don’t you think it’s a great pity,

Mrs. Sperry?”

“Oh—naturally,” Bella acquiesced. “Yes, indeed.”

“I knew you would. Of course it’s just thoughtlessness—most of the

people who live there are so young—but we heard a really dreadful story

only yesterday. It came from a _very_ young newly-married couple, and my

husband and I were _so_ sorry to hear they’d started out by telling such

dreadful things about their neighbours. Don’t you think it’s most

unwise, Mrs. Sperry?”

Mrs. Sullender’s voice, wholly unruffled, and as indomitably tender as

ever, gave no intimation that she spoke with a peculiar significance;

but William Sperry was profoundly alarmed, and, with a sympathy that

held no triumph in it, he knew that Bella was in a similar or worse

condition.

“Ye-es,” Bella murmured. “Of—of course I do.”

“I knew you _would_ feel that way,” said Mrs. Sullender soothingly.

“It’s unwise, because gossip travels so. It nearly always goes straight

back to the people it’s about. In fact, I don’t believe I ever knew of

one single case where it didn’t. Did you, Mrs. Sperry?”

“I—I don’t—that is, well, no,” Bella stammered.

“No. It’s _so_ unwise!” Mrs. Sullender insisted, with a little murmur of

tender laughter. Then she took the arm of her solemn and silent husband,

and they turned together toward the gate, but paused. “Oh, I’d meant to

tell you, Mrs. Sperry——”

“Uh—yes?”

“That dear little boy Georgie—the little boy you were chatting with the

other morning when I called him in to play with my little girl—you

remember, Mrs. Sperry?”

“Yes!” Bella gasped.

“I thought you made such friends with him you’d be sorry to know you

won’t see him any more.”

“No?”

“No,” Mrs. Sullender cooed gently. “Poor little Georgie Goble!”

“Georgie—who?”

“Georgie Goble,” said Mrs. Sullender. “He was Goble, our chauffeur’s

little boy. They lived over our garage and had quite a distressing time

of it, poor things! The wife finally persuaded Goble to move to another

town where she thinks chauffeurs’ pay is higher. I was sure you’d be

sorry to hear the poor dear little boy had gone. They left yesterday.

Good night. Good night, Mr. Sperry.”

With that, followed by somewhat feeble good-nights from both the

Sperrys, she passed through the gate with her husband, and a moment

later disappeared in the clean dusk of “Highland Place.”

Then Bella turned to her troubled William. “She—she certainly made it

pl-plain!”

“Yes,” he said. “But after all, she really did let us down pretty easy.”

“‘Us,’” the young wife demanded sharply. “Did you say ‘_Us?_’”

“Yes,” he answered. “I think she let us down about as easy as we could

have expected.”

Bella instantly threw herself in his arms. “Oh, William!” she cried.

“William, _do_ be the kind of husband that won’t throw this up at me

when we’re forty and fifty! William, _promise_ me you’ll always say ‘Us’

when I get us in trouble!”

And William promised and William did.