Angela's Business

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Angela'S Business

By Henry Sydnor Harrison

With Illustrations By Frederic R. Gruger

BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY The Riverside Press Cambridge 1915

Copyright, 1914 And 1915, By Henry Sydnor Harrison

All Rights Reserved

_Published March 1915_

To JACK _Who does not think as I do._

[Illustration: "I DECIDED I WOULD REFUSE IT"]

Illustrations

"I Decided I Would Refuse It"

"No! Morals Are The Bulwark Of The Nation!"

Charles Had No Great Chance To Show His Fearlessness Of Public Opinion

"Oh!... Why Do You Do This?"

"Well, I Won'T Marry Her! I Won'T!"

Angela Peeped Over Into Washington Street

This Spinster Supplied A Quiet Charm

"Ho!--Had Your Spies On Me, Have You?"

Angela'S Business

I

Being an author actually at work, and not an author being photographed at work by a lady admirer, he did not gaze large-eyed at a poppy in a crystal vase, one hand lightly touching his forehead, the other tossing off page after page in high godlike frenzy. On the contrary, the young man at the table yawned, lolled, sighed, scratched his ear, read snatches of Virginia Carter's "Letters to My Girl Friends" in the morning's "Post," read snatches of any printed matter that happened to be about, and even groaned. When he gazed, it was at no flower, but more probably at his clock, a stout alarm-clock well known to the trade as "Big Bill"; and the clock gazed back, since there was a matter between them this evening, and seemed to say, "Well, are you going to the Redmantle Club, or are you _not_?" But that was precisely the point on which the young man at the table had not yet made up his mind.

Of course, if he went to the Redmantle Club, he could not possibly spend the whole evening here, writing, and, oddly enough, this was at once a cogent reason for staying away from the Redmantle Club, and a seductive argument for going to the same. No lady admirer could ever grasp this paradox, but every true writer must admit that I know his secret perfectly.

From time to time, no diversion offering, the author would read over the last sentence he had written, which very likely ran as follows:--

We have a society organized on the agreeable assumption that every woman, at twenty-five or thereabouts, finds herself in possession of a home, a husband, and three darling little curly-headed children.

Stimulated a trifle, he would thereupon sharpen up his pencil and charge forward a few sentences, as now:--

Slipshod people never test such old assumptions against actuality; they cling to what their grandfathers said, and call their slipshodness conservatism. So (like ostriches) they avoid the fact that there are three large and growing classes of women who simply have no relation to their comfortable old theory. I refer, of course, to the classes of Temporary Spinsters, of Permanent Spinsters, and of Married but Idle--childless wives living in boarding-houses, for example. Let no Old Tory conceive that he has disposed of the Woman Question until he can plainly answer: What are all these various women to DO in their fifteen waking hours a day?

Following which, he lit a cigarette in a moody manner, and sat frowning at the back of the head of his relative and secretary, who was clacking away all the while on a second-hand typewriter near by.

It will be contended that some hesitancy was fitting enough to the writer's thesis, Woman having raised perplexities in the bosoms of philosophers from the earliest times on. But perplexity did not happen to be the trouble with this philosopher, Charles King Garrott. These sentences Mr. Garrott so apathetically set down were the ancient commonplaces of his mind, the familiar bare bones of special researches long holding a unique position in his life. The dull General Public, with its economic eye, might yet rate him merely as a private tutor, formerly of Blaines College; the relative and secretary there might judge him only a young man of an unmasculine thin sedentary quality, who mysteriously gave his youth to producing piles of strange stuff that all had to be copied out on the typewriter. But, in the privacy of his own soul, Charles Garrott was, through all, not alone the coming American novelist (which rather went without saying), but, in that direct connection, probably the only man in the world who really understood Woman.

Old times used this phrase unscientifically; "understanding women" has acquired misleading connotations. The words seem to call up the picture of a purely gallant observer, one with a polished mustache and amorous gay eyes, sitting under a sidewalk awning and ogling out over a purplish drink. We may go so far as to state plainly that they call up the picture of a Frenchman. The young man at the table is scarcely imagined as this sort of authority, viewing Woman crudely as La Femme. As he could not put pencil to paper without revealing, Charles Garrott viewed Woman, never as La Femme, but exclusively as a Question. Himself the New Man obviously, he saw Woman solely as a Movement, meditated about her strictly as an Unrest. When he considered her in the concrete--and that he seldom did nowadays, if we need not count his friend, Mary Wing, who was as New as he, to say the least of it--his eye reviewed and criticized her, not as a Sex, but strictly as a human being against an environment. Charles Garrott would scientifically diagnose a Woman to her face, in a manner which she, poor creature, but little suspected.

Romance [he began again] left us with the sentimental tradition that a w----

"Charles!" said his relative and secretary, speaking for the first time in ten minutes, a long silence for him--"I'll thank you for your attention a moment."

"Certainly, Judge," said Charles Garrott, with that alacrity with which a true writer habitually welcomes an interruption.

"Here, near the end of this story--passage I can't for the life of me.... Here! Seems to go like this: 'Let a man,' cried Dionysius, cracking walnuts with a sort of splendid sadness, 'but free his eyes from the magic of sex, and mask my words'--no!--let's see--'_mark_ my words, Bishop, he shall see strange truths.'"

There was a pause.

"Mistake somewhere!" said the gentleman at the typewriter, with a chuckle. "Well, what's what?"

"No, that's right, I believe. Why, what's the matter with it?"

"Why!--there's no sense in it!"

"Oh--it's advanced talk, you know. Modern, epigrammatic stuff, you might call it."

"Conceding that, here's the bit about the nuts. That's where the mistake is, _I_ claim. Let me see--'cracking walnuts with a sort of _splendid_ sadness.' Good gad,--that can't be right, Charles! 'Sober sadness,' 'sorrowful sadness'--something of that sort you meant, eh?"

The secretary had swung about suddenly, revealing a face almost startlingly handsome, fine-cut as a cameo, pink and white as a professional beauty's, and topped with a magnificent crown of snow-white hair.

"'Pathetic sadness,' now, my dear fellow? Go just a little better, wouldn't it?"

"Well--no, Judge, not just in this particular story. Fact is, it's meant to be a little queer, you see."

"It _is_ queer, that's my point!" said the Judge, rather worried. "'Cracking walnuts with a sort of splendid sadness'--if the public understands _that_!--Well, as you like, of course."

Having thus washed his hands of all responsibility, the relative gazed a moment at a little red "Nothing But Business, Please" sign that hung above his typewriter-table, hummed a bar or two in a sweet tenor voice, and resumed his now expert clacking.

Similarly his employer resumed his composition:--

Romance left us with the sentimental tradition that a woman's sex was a complete, indeed a glorious, justification of her existence (_v._ F. Dell: "Women as World Builders"). Because she some day would be, or might possibly be, a mother of children, she was set upon a pedestal and left there, exempt from further responsibilities meanwhile. The potentiality of motherhood became a claim to life-long support in idleness, etc., etc.--

Now, we have long understood that the controlling fact in the life of every man is the way in which he gets his living. We have long understood that the essential immorality is to get something for nothing. But only lately have we come to see how these two general laws apply, have always applied, to women. Only late--

But there the pencil, which had been dragging, came again to a halt.

This writing went forward in an old exercise-book, on the label of which a fine trembling hand had written "_French Composition_." It was seen that firmer fingers had overwritten that inscription with another: "NOTES ON WOMEN." Here, in brief, the authority was reducing certain views to essay form, according to a plan he had: squeezing out the meat of his mind into the exercise-book, as the moral basis of a great new novel, nothing less. And the truth was that he had no sooner begun the stock-taking process than difficulties appeared, and the present want of ardor made itself felt. Faint doubts and questionings, indeed, knocked at Charles Garrott's mind in these days; not touching Woman, of course, but certainly seeming to touch his last year's formula for her. "I'm an ultra-modern with conservative reactions," he had thought to himself, with a sense of important discovery, but a night or two ago. And on the whole, he felt that that had explained him scientifically into the best company in the world.

The reference was to the one other existing person who, it was conceded, might possibly know as much about Woman as he, Charles, did. That one was a lady in Sweden. And, reassuringly enough, he had long since noted in the Swedish lady's bold modernism, also, this precise same tendency toward judicious reconsideration.

Suddenly the young man put away his writing, shut his table-drawer with a click, and said:--

"I'm going out for awhile, Judge--to a meeting of the Redmantle Club. Think I need a little stimulus."

He went away to the bedroom, thinking, but not of the Redmantle Club, for which, to say truth, he cared little. Nor were his thoughts in line with the swingeing sentences he had just been writing in the exercise-book. On the contrary, the young authority was openly inquiring of himself: _Was_ economic independence the complete solution of the Unrest? _Were_ there no Values in the world but Utilitarian Values?

The bedroom door shut, and Judge Blenso, who had replied with a mere busy nod to Charles's announcement, desisted from his clacking, and produced a late copy of "The Rider and Driver" from the little drawer of his typewriter-table. He began to look at pictures with a happy expression upon his striking face.

Why was Mr. Blenso called the Judge? An interesting point, on which I, for one, unluckily can shed no light. But if he has also been called a relative and secretary, that was for the sake of peace only. To say outright that this fine large gentleman was Charles Garrott's nephew (his half-nephew, to be exact) would necessitate a vast deal of explanatory genealogy. That was a fact, as the family Bibles of the Blensos and Minters clearly proved, but it is a fact that had better be quietly ceded. Judge Blenso was a relative, and it is quite true that his young half-uncle had been reared from infancy to address him as Uncle George. Garrott, who had no other nephew in the world, had always thought it a little unfair.

The Judge's disaster had come upon him in the prime of a gallant widowerhood. He had dived from an unfamiliar pier, one luckless day, in the interests of a stout young woman, who flattered herself that she was drowning. Diving too close to avoid her bulk, Charles's relative had struck his head upon a submerged beam which should not have been there; and the stout young woman, so far from drowning, had promptly proved that she could float enough for two. She had saved her rescuer's life, in short.

But the beam had had the last word in the encounter, after all. When Uncle George Blenso got well of his concussion, it was early discovered that he was just a little "different"; also that his nominal Real Estate and Loans business downtown was far, far from solvent. It was accordingly proposed in the family that Uncle George should go to the Garrott place in Prince William County; but this proposal had been rejected at once by Uncle George, who protested indignantly that he was a city man. The upshot was that Charles, being the only city relative extant, had invited the Judge to share his third floor here, turning out his young friend and room-mate, Donald Manford, for that express purpose. That had seemed to settle the issue. But no; very soon the lively kinsman was pointing out that he would need money, of course, for clothes, club-dues, and so on, and accordingly it was arranged that he should become Charles's literary assistant on a regular salaried basis.

It happened that Charles had as yet had occasion to publish but a single fiction ("The Truth About Jennie"; see "Favorite Magazine," for August, 1910). He had, indeed, as much need of a private chaplain as of a secretary. The peculiarities of the case, thus, often struck and amused him; and they did so now as, opening the door of the bedroom, hatted and coated, he saw his secretary's still youthful head bowed pleasantly over the magazine.

"Ah, my dear fellow, there you are!" said the secretary, with just a little jump.

And putting down his reading-matter in a manner suggesting that, of course, he had had to kill time somehow while waiting for Charles, he went on at once in an agreeable confidential voice:--

"By the by, I intended to ask you--you've heard about this Miss Trevenna? Gad, you know, Charles! Her father won't let her name be mentioned!"

The employer eyed him gravely, pulling on his gloves. The story alluded to was not unknown to him: how one modern girl, claiming more Freedom than existed, had too rashly crossed the great gulf, and how, her enterprise proving fatally unsuccessful, she had lately come home again. He felt very sorry for Miss Trevenna.

"Fact!--her mother visits her in secret, in lodgings," said his secretary, dropping his eager voice further. "A sad case--sad, yes--but, my dear fellow, can we allow our girls to run off with other people's husbands? No! Morals," said Judge Blenso, sternly, "are the bulwark of the nation!--that's what _I_ say! Am I right, Charles?"

[Illustration: "NO! MORALS ARE THE BULWARK OF THE NATION!"]

Charles said that he was perfectly right. He then proposed that the Judge should knock off work for the night, forthwith. But the Judge looked rather shocked at the suggestion, and began to clack vigorously at Dionysius.

"There's really no hurry about this short stuff, you know. Why not go down and cheer Mrs. Herman up a bit? She always appreciates a call from you."

The relative's hand irresistibly rose to his mustache.

"A fine woman, a charmin' fine widow-woman," said he, in his rich voice. "But!--business _before_ pleasure, Charles. That's _my_ way, my boy."

However, the ringing motto seemed a little too good to live up to. Hardly had the front door shut on Charles when Judge Blenso--he rather insisted on the official title, now that he was secretary--hooded his old typewriter for the night, turned down the light in the green-domed lamp on the table, and descended to visit his landlady. That he had small reverence for his half-uncle's New Thinking now became clear. The Judge left the Studio (as he himself had christened it), chuckling silently to himself, and on the steps began to chant aloud a sort of gay recitative of his own composition. The chant went a beat to every step, thus: "Cracking--piffle--walnuts--piffle--in a--sort of--piffle--sadness!"

II

The Redmantle Club was more advanced than Charles, and he knew it. And when he told his relative that he was going to it for stimulus, he must have been secretly well aware that it was but a treacherous stimulus he was likely to get.

The Club had been founded by Mrs. Frederick B. Seaman, who had once had a novel published, long ago, at a nominal expense of two hundred and fifty dollars. The name Redmantle had some significance which eludes memory, but there seems to be no doubt that the founder's original idea had been merely to gather together a few congenial persons to abuse the publishers to. The times, however, chanced to be ripe for a broader forum, one where the most advanced women of both sexes could meet and freely speak out the New Mind. The Redmantle had seemed to fill the long-felt want, from the start. Now its meetings began with a Programme, and you may be sure nobody bothered with such small fry as a publisher. The Redmantle speakers won salvos only by completely exterminating the Family and the Home, or proving beyond successful contradiction that Love Is Going Out.

By arriving late on purpose, Charles Garrott missed a speech by Mary Wing on the New Education, for which he was rather sorry. For a year or more he had regarded Miss Wing as one of his best friends, and he always liked to hear her demolish, in characteristically forceful sentences, the surviving tradition that the true object of education is to ornament gentility. He liked to see Mary Wing lay her hand upon her breast, her Self, and cry out: "So long as I live, whatever I do or think or am, the center of the world for me is _here_. I will not conjugate dead languages or recite the imports of Uruguay, before I learn the first fact about my Self--my body and my mind, my background and my opportunity!" On the other hand, by his late arrival, Charles missed Miss Frothingham's advanced harp-solo, and Professor Clarence Pollock's tribute to a celebrated lady anarchist. As to the elder Miss Hodger's address on the New Ego, he was not much less opportune. Miss Hodger was nearing her peroration as the writing tutor appeared at the door.

He took up a position just inside, and looked through the parlor smoke. The smoke emanated principally from the ladies, who were, however, as five to one. Miss Hodger towered by a baby-grand piano, one hand upon an album, and clamored for her Rights. She demanded these Rights of hers, whatever they were, with such iteration and passion that a kindly, simple person, had there been any such present, must needs have cried out, "Give that lady her Rights there!--and quick about it!"

Miss Hodger's was a tall figure, bony but commanding; she had a flat chest, a tangled mane of sorrel hair and a face somewhat like a horse's. Of her argument, little need be said; you may find it in detail in the very books where Miss Hodger found it. It was, in sum, an unanswerable demonstration of woman's sacred duty of Developing her Ego. The exposé of the Home proved particularly searching; it brought loud cheers. Much Miss Hodger said, too, of the Higher Law and the Richness of Personality, of Contributions to the Race and Enhancement of the Life Stream. In Charles Garrott's ears one sentence seemed to ring and stick above the rest: "Fiercely and relentlessly shall Modern Woman hack away all that impedes her in her Self-Development--all, I care not what it is!"

She ended with a kind of yell, thumped the album twice, and strode away from the baby-grand. There were bursts of clapping, a chorus of approval, and then general buzzing and commotion. The Programme was over. Everybody was standing: all talking, nobody left to listen. Servants entered bearing trays of light refreshments; light, indeed, they looked. It was the Redmantle's social hour, the hour of good, free, courageous talk.

Charles Garrott moved into the noisy room. All his sides, of course, were not known to his fellow members, and yet he had a standing here. He was recognized as one of the pioneer Rightsers; his last year's speech before the Club, on "Work for Women," had been generally adjudged a first-rate piece of Modern Thinking. And all the Redmantlers seemed to like to talk to him, too; they would get round him and back him up into corners in a way he scarcely liked. Mrs. Frederick B. Seaman looked as if she meant to kiss him. "And now," she said, beaming, "for a good long talk about my new book." He cleverly evaded her, but in so doing fell right into the net of the hearthside anarchist, Professor Pollock, who drew him in with a hand as large and soft as a beefsteak. Pollock was a thin, bald young man, with the conventional flowing necktie, and the New disappearing chin, and secretly Garrott had always thought him a most terrific jackass.

"How are we going to relieve this White Slave situation, Garrott? How? How?"

"It is one of the grave problems of the day," said Charles. "At the moment I can only answer, as President Taft answered the workman at Cooper--"

"What, you admit that you have no remedy to lay down? None whatever?"

"At the moment, none. It is one of the grave--"

The younger and even freer Miss Hodger, who had been hovering near, exploded a mouthful of cigarette smoke, and exclaimed excitedly:--

"Oh sister, only think! Mr. Garrott has no remedy for the White Slave situation!"

They thought it most reprehensible of him to have no remedy, and closed in on him, bursting with theirs. "Have you not considered the necessities of the living wage!" demanded the elder Miss Hodger's joyless voice, suddenly at his elbow. "Living wage--bah!" said Professor Pollock, hotly. "A mere sop--a mere feeble temporizing--" "You must get into their homes!" cried the youngest Miss Hodger, who admitted homes only as places to get into. "You must take them very, very young...."

So they fell to quarreling among themselves, and Charles Garrott wriggled away, wishing that he were as cocksure about anything as the Hodgers were about everything, and resolving to try to be henceforward. So he eluded Miss Frothingham, who was handicapped by her harp and nearsighted besides, but ran at once against a crimson-faced woman in a purple negligée, a stranger to him he felt sure, but she asked him at once, in an angry sort of way, "Don't you favor a public reception _immediately_ to splendid Flora Trevenna?" In spite of his resolution, Charles's eyes fell before the threatening gaze. It seemed to be the sixth time, at least, that he had caught the name of Miss Trevenna among the Turkish fumes, but the idea of the public reception immediately was new to him. "Don't you think she's struck a great Blow for Freedom?" demanded the crimson one, with rising indignation. "Don't you think she's weakened the hold of the horrible Tyranny of Marriage?"

Thus the Modern got stimuli, of just the sort he had known he would get if he came. Members jostled him, blew smoke in his eyes, laid demonstrative hands upon him. All about him in the dense air, he heard hot voices crying out incorrect statements of things they had lately misread; at best loose bits plucked from authors whom he, Charles, had turned inside out year before last, as like as not. And why, he wondered, need Redmantlers _look_ so queer? Why must new ideas, if only the least bit radical, invariably attract people who liked to wear breakfast-gowns in the evening, people with uncombed hair and burning pop-eyes, people who had little chin, indeed, but yet far more chin than humor?

And then suddenly, in the midst of the febrile Newness, the young authority found himself talking to a sweet-faced girl from the country, who looked at him with woman's eyes, and spoke simple little things in a pretty voice: "Do you play bridge? Do you tango? It must be _wonderful_ to be a writer...."

It was really an extraordinary experience.

The development came by way of his good friend, Mary Wing, whom Charles reached at last with a certain sense of making port. Miss Wing, it must be known, was the assistant principal of the great City High School, where no woman had ever been before her, where she herself had arrived only after eight years' incessant battling upward. She was also, this long time, president of the State Branch of the National League for Education Reform, with the prospect of presently mounting far higher, to nothing less, if you please, than the General Secretaryship of that rich and powerful body. Considering her history and her exploits, it seemed that she should have been six feet tall, with a gaze like a Gorgon and a jaw like Miss Hodger's. But Mary Wing was actually a slight and almost fragile-looking creature, with quite girlish blue eyes in a colorless face that wore an air of deceptive delicacy.

She was two months older than her friend, Mr. Garrott, which made her thirty in December. And she was undoubtedly the most distinguished person in that strident room, not excepting (at the present writing) Mr. Garrott himself.

The assistant principal was discovered leaning against a bookcase, eating sandwiches in large bites, two bites to a sandwich, and paying no attention to the earnest talk of the group she seemed to belong to. "It must be the effect of speaking," she said to Garrott. "I'm ravenous. But goodness, there's no nourishment in these little paper things." And almost at once she demanded, firm as a Redmantler, if he had ever been to call on Dr. Flower; some cousin or other of hers, this was, who (through her connections in the educational world) had lately taken an appointment as lecturer at the Medical School. Charles had agreed to call on this worthy, it seemed, but naturally he hadn't done so.

She chided him for his remissness. It was a mild enough reproof, in all conscience; yet it was at that moment that he, with his diagnostic tendency, caught himself eyeing Mary Wing critically, as if she were any other Redmantler. And then he seemed to become aware that, without knowing it exactly, he must have been eyeing Mary Wing critically for some time past now.

"He'll need some patients, too, to eke out. I must look into that," said she, popping the second half of a sandwich into her mouth. "I suppose you don't know anybody who intends to be sick soon, in a costly way?"

He shook his head. He himself, he intimated, had no idea of getting sick merely to oblige her rural cousins.

"What does that girl do?" he added, almost irritably. "Didn't you tell me there was a girl, twenty-five years old? Why doesn't she work, and eke out?"

"She does work. She runs the house."

"Apparently you didn't see Mrs. Waldo's statement that quarter of an hour a day was quite enough for that so-called work."

"Do you believe that?"

"I know it's false. Still there are ninety-six quarters of an hour in a day, people estimate. What sort of girl is she? Little nitwit, I suppose?"

"She's my cousin."

"Lots of people have little nitwits for cousins. Why doesn't she pitch in and earn her keep, like a free personality--as our friend Miss Hodger would say?"

Miss Wing was observing him with a strange air, resembling amusement. "You must really ask her that yourself some time, Mr. Garrott."

"I'll do it with pleasure, the first time ever I clap eyes on her."

"Well, then," said she, with a sudden laugh, "do it _now_!"

And thereupon, within ten seconds, the managing young woman had whisked him around a knot of Redmantlers, whisked him around the bookcase, and was saying in merry, efficient tones:--

"Angela, this is the famous Mr. Garrott you've heard so much about--my cousin, Miss Flower! Mr. Garrott's very anxious to--"

She paused wickedly, but after all finished without malice, "To make your acquaintance." And so Mr. Garrott did not have to ask the country cousin on the spot what she was thinking about not to earn her keep.

The girl had been standing against the other corner of the bookcase all the time, it seemed. She was talking, in a polite sort of way, to another guest--Mr. Tilletts, the wealthy and seeking widower--and fanning away tobacco smoke with a hand too small for the heavy odds. Mr. Tilletts was removed at once by the thoroughly competent Miss Wing.

Charles Garrott, recovered from the sudden little surprise, looked at the cousin with interest, and was at no loss for easy conversation. While he knew of Miss Flower very well, he pointed out, he had had no idea that she was here this evening. In fact, he hadn't gathered that Miss Flower went in for--well, for this sort of thing, exactly.

"Why--I really don't, I'm afraid," said she in her soft voice. "I don't suppose I understand it all very well. I just came--because Cousin Mary invited me!"

She hesitated, then laughed, and finally said: "And you see, it's the first party I've been invited to since I came here to live!"

"And you like parties?"

"Yes, so much. Don't you?"

The remark, at, and as to, the Redmantle, seemed delightful.

"I did, when I was young and gay. Now, I never seem to have time to enjoy myself any more. You've been meeting a good many people, I suppose?"

"Well, no,--not many yet. Really hardly any." The girl laughed, and again showed a charming naïveté: "You're the very first man I've met since we came here--except Mr. Tilletts!"

"But that's a tremendous exception, Miss Flower. You appreciate that he's one of our leading swains?"

"Oh, _is_ he!" she said, a little disconcerted. "Why--I hope he didn't think I was rude! I thought he was--somebody's father, you see, or uncle...."

Charles Garrott regarded the cousin pleasurably, with no thought of cross-examination. He, the authority, it need scarcely be said, had recognized this girl at sight. Manifestly, she was none other than the Nice Girl, the Womanly Woman, whom he and all moderns were forever holding up to scorn. Doubtless it was merely the increased conservative reaction: but Charles, for the moment, seemed conscious of no scorn in him toward Miss Angela Flower.

The cousin was pretty; not beautiful, no throne-shaker; but pretty, and attractive-looking. Wholly normal she looked, quite engagingly so, with her fine clear skin, smooth dark hair, and large limpid eyes. In her manner there was something soft, simple, and sweet, an ingenuous desire to please and be pleased; Miss Flower was feminine, in short,--it could not be denied. In a company, where the women acted like men, and the men acted like the Third Sex, this girl seemed content to remind you, like her mothers, that she was a woman.

Her conversation, intrinsically speaking, was not remarkable. But--the insidious contrast again--in a Midst where everybody else was conversing remarkably, plain conversation itself became an episode, and a charming one. She spoke of bridge, saying that she and Cousin Mary were hoping to "get up a table" one night very soon; of Mitchellton, where she had lived seven years till September; of the maxixe and the smallness of the house Mary Wing had taken for them; a dozen such un-New simplicities. And then, as she happened to be saying something about the strangeness of the city, "just at first," Charles Garrott exclaimed suddenly, rather pleased:--

"There's a friend of yours, at any rate, Miss Flower--Donald Manford! The last one in the world you'd expect to meet here."

The engineer must have just come in; over bobbing heads, through waving arms, his fine figure and bronzed face had been suddenly glimpsed at the doorway. This young man was another cousin of Mary Wing's; she, indeed, had raised him by hand; and he looked hardly less alien at the Redmantle Club than Miss Angela Flower herself.

To Garrott's astonishment, Miss Flower did not know Donald from Adam.

"Is _that_ Mr. Manford?" she exclaimed, surprised apparently by her cousin's cousin's good looks. "Of course I've known _of_ him for the longest time, but--"

"Why, that's strange--he's like a brother to Mary Wing. But then," said he, reconsidering, "Donald's out of the city half the time, and does nothing but work when he's here."

"Oh! Cousin Mary said she was going to bring him to see us some time--but--"

He enlarged upon the young engineer's industry (trained into him by Miss Wing); explained how he was busier than usual just now in view of his coming trip to Wyoming; mentioned the great Mora dam and cut-off project, on which he expected a commission under Gebhardt himself.

"And your cousin Mary, too," he concluded, in the justest way, "is an awfully busy person, you see."

"Yes, of course, I know! She does work _terribly_ hard, doesn't she?"

After the slightest pause, the girl added: "It's such a pity she has to, don't you think so?"

On which Donald Manford dropped cleanly from Charles's mind, and he inquired with authoritative interest, artfully concealed: "How do you mean, exactly?"

"Well--I don't know--"

She looked at him, laughing a little, as if not certain how far she could say what she meant; but finding his gaze so extremely encouraging, she went on seriously:--

"Don't you think when a woman gets really wrapped up in business--and all that--she's apt to miss some of the best things of life?"

He might have laughed at the quaint deliciousness of that, to him, Charles Garrott. But he didn't.

"That's the great question your sex is working out, isn't it?" he said, carefully. "I don't suppose work--just moderate, useful occupation--ever hurt anybody much, do you?"

"Oh, no!--of course not. That's just what I believe, too. I believe everybody ought to have work to do. But--all the work isn't teaching or going to an office--or being a public speaker--do you think so?"

"Oh, never. No, indeed."

She hesitated and said, laughing: "I know _I_ find it work enough just keeping a house and doing the housework--and being a daughter and sister!"

It was at that point that Charles's purely conventional look altered, his inmost self pricking up its ears, as it were. And a moment later the simple girl said, in the naïvest way imaginable, what seemed immediately to stick in his scientific Woman lore like a burr:--

"Of course I haven't studied and read like Cousin Mary, but truly it seems to me that--just making a home is sometimes all the business a woman could possibly attend to...."

He stood looking down at her in the strangest way, engrossed with novel reflections. She would have been astonished had she guessed how her chance phrase had set this man's mind to working, behind the pleasant mask. In her innocence she clearly did not understand, even after all the speeches, how at the Redmantle Club we talked of all businesses, and everybody's business, but never the business of making a home.

The reactionary talk proceeded for a space. But shortly, there were signs that the meeting was about to adjourn. And it was clear to Charles, as a true writer of a philosophical tendency, that he should be glad to be alone for a space now, and to think.

He said suddenly:--

"Miss Flower, I want very much to introduce Donald Manford to you, before I go. May I do it now? Won't you promise to hold fast to this bookcase, and not budge till I come back?"

The girl promised. She seemed pleased by his thought of her, but sorry over his own impending departure. "Oh, do _you_ have to go now?" she said, and her woman's eyes seemed to add quite plainly: "I'd lots rather talk to you than meet Mr. Manford."

The young authority smiled at her, and disappeared into the company. Directly, he was back again, the engineer in tow.

Donald, found conversing in a nook with another handsome guest, a Miss Helen Carson, had rather resisted removal and been hauled off, truth to tell, in some ill-humor. But Charles, for his part, felt warmly pleased with himself, bringing together these two nice, normal cousins of Mary Wing's. The girl too, looked pleased; her eyes were shining, a pretty color tinged her young cheek.

"I'm so glad to meet you, Mr. Manford, at last. We're really sort of connections, aren't we--once removed!"

"Yes, I believe so!--that's fine. Delighted to know you," said Mr. Manford. "I hope you enjoyed the speeches this evening?"

"Well--that's hardly a fair question!" laughed Miss Angela, looking from one man to the other. "Are you a--regular member?"

The query brought applauding laughter from Mr. Garrott and a weak groan from Mr. Manford. "You mean I look like one? Oh, that's a blow! No, honor bright," he added, "I leave all the advanced stuff to Mary."

Then Charles took his leave, in the friendliest manner. He felt, in an odd sort of way, that there had sprung a kind of bond between this girl and him, all the realer in that she, of course, was so unconscious of it. So kindly did he feel toward Mary Wing's cousin, indeed, that when she hoped, in her charming natural way, that he would come to see them some time soon, he, though anything but a caller, actually came very near promising to do so.

Miss Flower's eyes regretted his going; they were feminine eyes. Charles smiled into them again, pressed her hand, and turned away toward the Studio, to think.

By the door, he ran again into Mary Wing. The educator had changed her position, but was still eating sandwiches. She beckoned Charles nearer, in her confident way, and said:--

"Do you remember my telling you how much I wanted to see Donald settled before he went off, and sketching a few of the qualifications the girl must have? And your saying that what I wanted was a syndicate?"

He remembered, he said.

"See how I treasure up your _bon mots_. Well, there she is."

And she nodded down the room, not even in the direction of her cousin from the country, but to none other than Miss Carson, now found conversing with the heated Pollock.

"Oh," said Garrott.

"Why," exclaimed Mary, the moment her eyes had followed her nod, "I wonder where Donald is!"

He decided to pretend not to hear. Gazing at Miss Carson in the light of this information, he was ready to concede that she seemed a sound enough modern choice. Well-connected, well-to-do, and completely educated, the young lady in question, while now taking "two years out" to please her mother, was next year going to work, to please herself--of course, in Social Service. Young and alluring Miss Carson looked, indeed. But something in the mould of her smooth chin, confronting the young man who had none, seemed to serve notice that, though she was beautiful, she knew that Women's Egos must be free.

"Don't you think she may be a little firm? I mean, for Donald?"

"Firm? Not a bit!--she's human and competent. Heavens!--you don't want Donald to marry a helpless little silly, do you? But what on earth became of him, did you notice? I made him come here after me specially to meet her, and I had them talking so nicely--"

Then Charles said firmly: "I just introduced him to Miss Flower. It seemed you'd neglected to do so. By the way, your cousin's charming."

"Oh," said Mary, rather drawn-out.

And, after a rebuking pause, she added in pedagogic tones: "Well, I'm sorry you took him away from Helen. I'm serious about this match, you see. It would almost reconcile me to giving Donald up."

The young man's look at his old friend was certainly critical now. And he refused to feel in the least sorry for his interference with her cool eu-marital scheme. For, taking even the most liberal view, Modernity was for Moderns; probably always would be. What under the sun did a fellow like Donald want with a wife who would prove him wrong about a cosine, and keep him up jawing about Mrs. Gilman till two o'clock in the morning?

* * * * *

From the Turkish air of the Redmantle, Charles Garrott passed out into the bracing November night. Two blocks farther along, he passed the door of another club, a completely male one. And down the wide steps, between the columnar lights, there came shambling a large, loose-jointed, round-faced man in a brown felt hat, and joined him.

"Well, Charlie."

"Good evening, Mr. Wing."

Having caught stride, the two men walked on in silence. This Mr. Wing was Mary's Uncle Oliver, an interesting individual in his way, member of the City School Board, and in the business world known sometimes as a "capitalist," sometimes again as a loan-shark. When in the vein, Mr. Wing could be conversational enough, and his morose air at present indicated that he had lost not less than three dollars at the Bellevue Club card-tables this evening.

When they had proceeded some three blocks in total silence, Charles, emerging from his brown study, said idly:--

"Mr. Wing, do you believe in the Woman's Movement?"

Hearing no reply to his query, he glanced around, and found Mr. Wing slowly shaking his head. It seemed to be a time-gaining sort of shake; it undertook to hold the floor temporarily, promising good sound argument to follow. Charles waited. But Uncle Oliver did not speak; he only continued to shake his head, slowly and profoundly. And when the two had traversed half a block in this provisional sort of way, the money-lender suddenly turned up the steps of the house where he lived, still shaking his head.

Halfway up the steps, he looked back over his shoulder, and said:--

"Well, good-night, Charlie."

"Good-night, Mr. Wing."

III

The first thing the author did, on opening the door of the Studio, was to look at the clock. Big Bill pointed to but five minutes of eleven. Good! There remained a clean hour and a half before he would have to cease work and go to bed, to wake up a private tutor.

All the lethargy of the earlier evening seemed to have vanished now, under the strong reverse stimulus of the Redmantle Club. Having turned up the light in his gas-lamp, the young man stood a moment, thinking intently, and then sat down at his writing-table. The table was twelve years old, and had been to college and law-school. It was worn and stained, but still strong, and bore up, besides the lamp and clock, not only a large array of writer's paraphernalia, but a considerable floating miscellany, too, including a clipping or so, several unanswered letters, a stray tobacco-pouch, a thick exercise-book, and the particular volume on Women he happened to be reading at the moment. Ignoring these, the proprietor drew from the back of his table drawer a capacious brown-paper folder, and from the folder plucked three typewritten sheets, held together with a clip.

It was seen that the topmost of these sheets bore a heading: MARY WING. And for some moments the author of them sat in stillness, conning over the lines that followed: the magnanimous lines he had prepared with such pains long ago, and then tamely put to sleep in a drawer.

He had composed this eulogy last winter, to help Miss Wing in her campaign for the assistant principalship of the High School. His plan, of which she knew nothing to this day, had been cunning and complete. First he would get this "write-up" into the "Persons in the Foreground" department of "Willcox's," the famous and enormously circulated weekly; then he would have the "Post" reprint it; finally he would induce all the local papers to print glowing editorials demanding, "Is this prophetess to be without honor in her own country?" Unquestionably a most helpful plan; but characteristically, Mary had not waited for it. By some "pull" she had, she had put her little matter through months ahead of schedule, and Judge Blenso had just finished typing the "write-up," late one winter's afternoon, when Charles was summoned to the telephone to be greeted by the first woman assistant principal in history. He, of course, had been delighted with her success. And yet--had he not felt even then that the episode was typical of a positively manly independence?

Now he read over his forgotten words with cool judiciality:--

Her name was in newspaper headlines before she was out of her teens; and many and many a time since. She wished to be a doctor, and the Medical School would not take her in. And shortly this slim girl, with her sweetly-cut chin and ethereal eyes, had raised the whole State on the issue of principle thus thrown down: Did a woman have the right to study, or not? She stormed the courts for an injunction, she set the legislature by the ears for a special act. The story of her personal interview with the Governor, at the height of the disturbance, is often told to this day; but never by any friend of the Governor's. And then, when she was within a step of winning the long fight, her father died suddenly and she faced the immediate necessity of earning a living.

Farther along, the author's eye found the particular passage that had been in his mind from the start, the part about the National League for Education Reform. Having recounted how the bequest of Rufus B. Zecker's millions had "assured the permanence and ultimate triumph of the League's programme," the generous "puff" went on:--

What the National League contemplates is nothing less than the remaking of our entire educational system, on the basis of a new perception of truth, namely: that education is, not learning at all, but purely the process of fitting the individual for effectual relations with his (or her) environment. With the League's propaganda to that end, under the brilliant leadership of Horace Gurney Ames, Miss Wing has been closely associated for the past seven years. Her work here has been, indeed, the dominant part of her career....

The dominant part of her life, he would better have written. And that was precisely the trouble.

The sheets dropped from the young man's hands, and he gazed unwinking at the green translucence of his lamp. His mind skipped back to a day in early September, when Mary and her mother had come home from their two weeks in the metropolis--Mrs. Wing still looking rather crushed from the overwhelming rush of New York, Mary radiant with the hope that before long she might go back to New York, to stay there the rest of her life. For on that journey she had abruptly learned that the League directors had their eyes upon her with reference to their General Secretaryship, which was to become vacant next March. Undoubtedly, the brilliant Dr. Ames had sounded her pretty directly on this point. Undoubtedly, too, it would be another long step up for Mary, making her, in the educational world at least, a figure of national consequence. Once again, of course, Charles Garrott had been delighted. And yet it was clear to him now that his Modernity had first felt conservative reactions on that very day.

Through the shut door of the bedroom there came a gentle snoring. After the day's secretarial labor, Judge Blenso slept well. Charles rose and walked his carpet, much worn with a writer's meditative pacing.

The wisest of us generalize from the instances that lie nearest us. How far this young man's views on Woman had been moulded by contrasting the maturing uselessness of his pupil Grace Chorister, say, with the fine efficience of Miss Wing, he himself could not have said. But at least he knew that Mary Wing had long embodied the best of the whole Movement for him. He had held her up, in season and out, as a perfect example of the New Woman at her best. And Mary Wing was that, he declared it now; the real thing, as different as possible from the hollow shams of the Redmantle Club. Of course--of _course_--she had a right, just the same right that a man had, to put away her mother, her family and friends, and follow away the star of her work. But ... if only she showed a little more appreciation of values apart from My Career; if only you could imagine Mary sometimes speaking of Being a Daughter and Being a Sister.

Yes; those were the words that rose naturally in his mind. Beyond doubt, Mary Wing's cousin from the backwoods had given a push to Charles Garrott's thought; he would have been the first to admit that. Not merely had Miss Angela happened to body forth, in the most pleasing, unconscious way, that very type which all Redmantlers so derided; but further, she had artlessly used a phrase which, to his authoritative mind, had helped to scientize her case at a bound. For of course the most scientific modern demand as to Miss Angela's class came simply down to this, that all Temporary Spinsters should have some regular business to occupy their hands and heads. Very well, then, laughed this little girl: What about the _Business_ of Making Homes?

The phrase, connoting so much more than mere "keeping house," was worthy of a writer. And when had this other doctrine grown so strong and sure, that the Business of Making a Career, of Developing My Ego, was necessarily the biggest business in the world?

In the silence of the large dim Studio, the young man stood stroking the bridge of his nose, somewhat worriedly. It was a well-cut bridge, and held three brown freckles.

It occurred to him, not for the first time, that he himself was helping to spread the egoistic doctrine referred to. He remembered his novel, in short: his Old Novel, as he already called it, albeit it was his only one, and he and Judge Blenso had completed it but two weeks ago, to a day. This novel, in manuscript, was now in the hands of the great house of Willcox Brothers Company, whom Charles, after due thought, had selected as his publishers. Willcox's offer, and the contract, might come by any mail now.

To the writing, and infinite rewriting, of this first work had gone the scant leisure of more than four years. Its title-page read: "BONDWOMEN: A Novel of Modern Marriage." (The Judge had first typed the title BANDWOMEN, as if it were a Novel of Female Bandsmen, which had annoyed Charles very much.) Considering the cunning with which he had labored to "keep the story moving," it could scarcely be doubted, that "Bondwomen" was destined to have a large sale. And that, in fact, was just the danger; that was precisely the reason that he, the author, felt this sense of moral responsibility. Young married women, young impressionable Temporary Spinsters everywhere, would soon be reading this book, and moulding their characters upon it. He, of course, had never preached any of the wilder, Trevenna Modernity. But all the same.... That passage there, for instance, where _Lily Slender_, in the lonely vigil on the terrace, reviews the status of Parasitic Woman and decides to leave her husband, and grow her Soul: certainly the probability was that intelligent women all over the world (he would have to grant British and Colonial rights at once, no doubt) would shortly be devouring that keen, advanced Thinking; and, it was to be feared, a general exodus from Homes would follow. In his mind's eye, Charles saw armies of women rising and packing Gladstone bags in the stilly night, and stealing forth, just as the dawn whitened the east, to join _Lily Slender_ in lifting marriage to the Higher Plane, by means of Commerce.

He had put much of Mary Wing into _Lily_; he knew that. But then he hadn't taken it in, in those days, how serious Mary was as to--what was the word of that mad ass Hodger?--fiercely hacking away whatever impeded her in her Self-Development.

Had not the moment rather come when some one, some all-seeing and completely modern authority, should resolutely sound the Note of Warning? Was it so sure that careering Egoism had anything more valuable to give the world than the old virtues which it flouted? Beauty, charm, and cheer, tenderness, selfless sympathy, all that mothering meant: was it not ridiculous to ignore these enormous contributions to the work of the world, because, forsooth, they could not show an immediate cash return?

Now all the clocks of the city--all, that is, that were right, and had bells--began to sound midnight. But the absorbed author and authority paced on, aware of no sound. He was thinking, with something like excitement, of his next novel, "Bondwomen's" greater successor, for which he was now just struggling to fix his point of view, straighten out his "moral plot," by means of notes in the old French exercise-book. Long as he had sensed a certain spiritual starkness in his first novel, long as he had looked forward to his second, the vital questions concerning his new "line" had never yet been settled in his mind.... Well, suppose that, with a frank, courageous change of front, he employed the New Novel to sound the wholesome Note of Warning; suppose that he boldly took a Home-Maker for his heroine, for example, and justified her--justified her _scientifically_--as no modern thinker had ever justified her before....

The striking idea was not a new one altogether; but its possibilities, suddenly opening out, rapidly grew more and more interesting. Unfortunately, before it could be developed in even the smallest degree, it was abruptly interfered with by a most unwelcome intrusion of the practical.

Charles Garrott was a tutor. He had turned eagerly to his table, to capture certain phrases at least, while they were yet hot in his mind. But now, chillingly, his eye fell upon that other exercise-book, lying there publicly atop the volume on Women. At a glance that book looked exactly like its sister, kept hidden in a drawer; but in fact there was a boundless distinction. No hand had overwritten the label of that book there raising it to the peerage, as it were. That book was just a common book: "French Composition." And it was known to contain uncorrected exercises, forty sentences at least, which must be tutorially attended to, before Charles Garrott slept this night.

There followed a brief struggle; but it could end in only one way. Charles, with no good grace, sat at his table and clutched up a fat blue pencil.

It was a galling occurrence. Yet a man, of course, must live, whether cynical Frenchmen can see the necessity or not. And the tutoring, say what you would against it, was the best net result of a gradual sifting process, designed to find what would yield the largest amount of money for the least amount of work. So had Charles Garrott bent his life, to be a writer. Bred casually to the law, he had thrown over the encouraging beginnings of a practice directly he found that clients expected to take all a man's time, including nights even. Teaching he did not love, and yet, as he had enjoyed an excellent education, it "came easier" than anything else. His boast to friends, indeed, was that he could teach anything, whether he had ever heard of it before or not; and it was a fact that at a private school once--years ago, in the interval between college and law-school--he had taught Spanish on three days' notice, keeping, as he said, precisely one page and a half ahead of his class the whole year through. But teaching Ancient Languages at Blaines College was found, upon fair experiment, to involve too many papers in the Studio, conferences with boys, annoying teachers' meetings, and similar invasions of a writer's privacy. Besides, it was not nearly lucrative enough, after the coming of the Judge, who drew twenty-five dollars a month as Secretary, besides his keep.

Thus had evolved the private tutor, with a waiting-list. Thus it was that probably the only living compeer of the lady in Sweden must put aside his Thinking to-night, to peruse and criticize such stuff as this:--

16. _Bon jour, Monsieur le Curé! Avez vous vu le grand cheval de mon oncle, le médecin?_

Oh, detestable!

The two French exercise-books--twins with what a difference!--had started life equally as the property of a certain dear old lady, who had been spurred into studious endeavor by reading in a magazine that Roman Cato learned Greek at eighty. She had pointed out to her daughter, quite excitedly, that she herself was but seventy-one, and French was easier, besides; and that evening she had telephoned to Charles. The old lady wrote a very neat but virtually illegible hand, employing the finest Spencerian pen ever seen:--

23. _Non, petit Henri, non; votre soeur Marie n'est pas jamais aussi méchante que vous fûmes hier soir._

The author's golden moments fled.

Nevertheless, before he went to bed, Charles Garrott did produce from his drawer that other private book of his (the front part of which, also, was stuffed with observations about the Curé and naughty little Henry). Here, for what time he had, the young modern set down, on a fresh page, preliminary Notes, such as, indeed, contrasted oddly with those inscribed in the earlier evening. And when he shut up his book to go to bed, he did it with an air, and spoke aloud:--

"Let 'em bite on that!"

From his tone, you might have supposed that all the Redmantlers of the world would come to-morrow and look at these novel words of his. That, of course, was far from being the case: these were his inviolable secrets. Yet so real were his imaginings to the young man, so reactionary seemed even the thought of a Novel of Warning, that an unmistakable defiance had tinged his voice as he spoke. And particularly did this defiant air seem to extend to his excellent friend, Mary Wing.

Charles Garrott went to bed that night thinking defiantly of Mary (and almost tenderly of Mary's so different cousin); and on succeeding afternoons, when he took his walks abroad, he did not turn his steps, as was frequently his habit, toward streets where the advanced assistant principal was likely to be met.

None the less, he did meet Mary on the street, before the week was out; and then the case was such that the secret sense of disloyalty faded, and Charles saw that he had been right all along. Mary, in short, was found parading Washington Street, where the largest possible number of people would be certain to see her, in the company of the too celebrated Miss Trevenna. And then the authority thought of the Home-Making cousin more sympathetically than ever; though he did not guess that the cousin, chancing to see him and his ladies from an upstairs window, was also thinking, not unsympathetically, of him.

IV

It was not Charles's fault that he did not see Miss Angela, to-day, as she saw him; the sight of her would have been agreeable to him, at that moment particularly. But the window from which the pretty cousin looked out happened to be a considerable distance away; and she gathered nothing of his sentiments.

Dr. Flower's house, indeed, was not on Washington Street at all, but on Center, a very different street. Center, however, had this merit, that it stood back to back with Washington, and as the Washington Street residences were mostly "detached" at this point, the rear of the Flower house commanded a certain view of that handsome thoroughfare; not much of it, of course,--an oblique slice cut in between houses. The distance, as has been said, was rather great for eyes less keen than the lynx's. But a pair of opera-glasses at the parted curtain discreetly bridged the space, and brought a few feet of the Street of the Rich under the legitimate observation of the less materially successful.

Now, when she had leveled her glasses upon the three figures--for Charles, at this trying moment, was escorting _two_ ladies down the promenade--Miss Angela felt, to say truth, a little lonely and out of things. Not only was Mr. Garrott the first man she had met in the new city, but she had met him only, as it must now have seemed to her, like ships passing in the night. Not dreaming how she had been figuring in his thought, the girl felt, humanly and femininely, a little depressed. And when she presently reflected, "I suppose this is the time he goes down to lunch every day!"--the small thought was actually a cheering one to her, presenting, as it were, some point of contact with Washington Street and the pleasant happenings that seemed to go on over there.

Such, in fine, was the sheer enchantment of distance. To Mr. Garrott himself, this public promenade was as far from a pleasant happening as could well have been conceived.

When he had looked over the street just now, and seen who his old friend's companion was, Charles had, indeed, experienced a decided shock. On the heels of that, he had had a moment of distinct uncertainty. Ought he to cross and join this remarkable pair, or should he avert his eyes? The etiquette here was unknown to him, the business without precedent in his experience.

There was more than etiquette involved, of course. While this particular city was alive to contemporary currents, and even had its little Redmantle Club, it still considered the Church of England marriage service a sound start for a union, and associated contrary theories exclusively with inferior morals. To walk Washington Street with Miss Trevenna was, as it were, to wound and rebuke the city's old-fashioned prejudices. But that, without doubt, was the very reason Mary Wing was doing it.

Charles had crossed the street. Mary Wing saw him, half-way over. Not suspecting how his unfavorable scrutiny had been upon her for some time past, she smiled a bright welcome.

He was presented to Miss Trevenna. She acknowledged his greeting in an absent, fluty voice, and turned on him briefly a face of almost nun-like serenity, palely lit by a pair of starry eyes. He found her altogether a mystic-looking creature, not easily associated with things wild and gay.

"I was just telling Flora about the Education Reform League," continued Mary, in her calm tones.

But Charles, after all, had no great chance that day to show his fearlessness of mere public opinion. Hardly had he passed out of Miss Angela Flower's range of vision, when the walk of three ended, if the episode did not. It was Miss Trevenna's corner, it seemed; she could not be persuaded to go farther.

[Illustration: CHARLES HAD NO GREAT CHANCE TO SHOW HIS FEARLESSNESS OF PUBLIC OPINION]

"I'd turn with you, but I have a class," said Mary, disappointed, and a little surprised, it seemed. "I wish you'd stroll on with me!"

"I've something to do at my room--some business to attend to, really."

"Then let's walk this afternoon, do! Shall I come for you?"

"How nice of you! I'd like to so much."

On which the girl was gone, stepping on light feet down the side street. In the momentary lapse of talk, Charles's eye went after her. He saw something mysteriously withdrawn in that gray figure, something set forever apart.

And then, while he and his friend walked on six steps in silence, the young man wondered, with a sudden fierce annoyance, what Mary thought she was doing exactly.

Of Miss Trevenna he knew only what the world knew, which was little enough. One of several daughters of a prosperous family, she had been known as a reserved, and somewhat dreamy girl, indifferent to social life, and much addicted to curling up at home with books of poetry; Shelley's poetry or some such bewildering stuff; altogether a queer person. She even wrote poetry herself, it was damagingly alleged after the crash, and it was recalled that in women's meetings she had sometimes risen and expressed, in the quietest sort of way, ideas which disconcerted even the Hodgers of her day. Duly there had come to town the entirely typical dashing stranger: Robert McKittrick, this one was, an architect in government employ, who came with excellent letters. Mr. McKittrick was seen in public, a time or two, with Mr. Trevenna's quietly peculiar daughter; it was known that a sane and sound Mrs. McKittrick existed in Philadelphia, or some such place; there may have been a little mild talk, but it was very little and very mild. And then one fine day, the town was startled with the news that these two had taken the great jump together, by the last night mail train north.

It was the sort of thing you read about in every novel nowadays, especially if written by an Englishman. But this time, unluckily, it had really happened, and in a community not too large for a homogeneous public opinion. Moreover, life does differ just a little from the novels, in that it possesses no invisible author to shut the book splendidly, the moment the case is proved. Life did not leave Mr. McKittrick and Miss Trevenna forever singing in the honeymoon heyday. It merely kept them in the back of the town's mind for two years, a tidbit or a terrible warning, according as you looked at it, and then it brought Miss Trevenna back to us again, alone.

It might have seemed the oldest and the vulgarest story in the world. The weak, trusting maiden, the handsome, promissory villain, the flight, the rude awakening and Conviction of Sin, and then the piteous Return (Act III, Curtain) to Forgiveness, a black shawl, Quick Decline, and Death: these things have wrung the gallery's scalding tears from farther back than we can remember. But well Charles Garrott understood that Miss Trevenna's "case" had nothing to do with this cheap business. He thought it right enough, of course (theoretically speaking), that Mary Wing should sympathize with a sister in distress. And yet.... Well, no one, certainly, had "deceived" or "betrayed" Miss Trevenna. Quite probably she had proposed the excursion herself, like one of the glorious heroines at the moment educating British maidenhood. Miss Trevenna had gone with her lover because she had a Right to Her Happiness; she had gone to fulfil the Unwritten Law of Her Being; she had gone to Strike a Blow for Freedom. It was absurd to look for remorse in a black shawl here.

And still, glancing after that oddly cloistral figure, the young man felt that the net effect was not so different from the sorry old melodrama, after all.

He spoke suddenly, with a manner proving that he did not pride himself on wearing a mask for nothing:--

"Did you know that a woman's occipital condyles are less voluminous than a man's,--yes, considerably so,--while her zygomatic arches are more regular? Well, then, take my word for it, for they are."

Miss Wing rewarded him by coming out of her abstraction with a laugh. She asked him in what great tome he had learned that fascinating fact.

"Ah, that's my secret. By the way," said Charles, "how's that charming little cousin of yours, Miss Angela?"

He spoke in his most natural voice, as if no thought of conflict had ever risen between him and the best of New Women. All the same, the cousin's name fell rather oddly on the advanced air.

Mary Wing said that she hadn't seen Angela since the Redmantle Club; she said she must try to go there this afternoon. He remarked that being pulled up by the roots, and transplanted, was hard on the young, but that Miss Angela would make friends fast enough. Having a passion for biography, especially the biographies of women, he wanted particularly to learn something about this girl, who had given him, Charles Garrott, a phrase. But the talk now took another turn; it wasn't a day for discussing Home-Making clearly. Miss Hodger and Professor Clarence Pollock went walking by, across the sunny street, and Mary, having greeted them much too pleasantly to suit his taste, said:--

"Do you know this is the third time I've seen those two together lately? It begins to look like an affair."

"What!" he cried, disgusted. "Why!--why, she'd bite his head off in a week!"

And then, while she protested argumentatively, he was silent for a space, struck with the thought that here was an opening not unsuited to his need.

While the plan for his new work was by no means settled yet, beyond doubt this matter of Miss Trevenna had given strong impetus to the conservative wave. And meanwhile, there was the personal side. To lecture Mary Wing openly was a thing scarcely to be thought of. Yet, having felt the unmistakable reactions himself, the young man found himself itching, literally itching, to get his hands on Mary and make her react a little, too.

He said in his pleasantest way:--"Did it ever strike you, by the way, that she's got the propaganda in the purely archaic form?"

"Archaic?--Hodger!"

"She still imagines that the object of this Movement is to make women more like men. Of course, the object of the Movement is to make women more like themselves."

Her silence seemed to applaud his epigram. Charles felt that it was generous of him to add: "I bagged that somewhere. Sounds like Havelock Ellis to me. But," he added, frankly, "I've improved the wording. Why do you say I'm unjust to her? On the contrary, I'd be delighted to fork over all those rights of hers she was demanding the other night. By the by, what are Hodger's rights exactly?"

"I suppose she's entitled to human rights, even if you, as a man, don't find her especially attractive."

Charles winced, and then smiled faintly.

"Human rights--security and protection, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? She's got them, hasn't she? I thought what Hodger was yelling for was special privileges, rather exceptional privileges in the way of freeing her Ego from--"

"As a woman, she hasn't even all the human rights, you know very well. As a human being, she would feel that she's entitled to exceptional rights, because she's an exceptional being. She would take the ground that her public work--"

"She would take that ground, of course. But," said Charles, amiably, "possibly others would not agree with her. That is just the trouble, isn't it? The doctrine that the world belongs to Exceptional People has that fatal weakness."

"In your opinion," she qualified him--"what?"

"We'd need a great board, a sort of Super-Supreme Court of really godlike understanding, to tell us which are the Exceptional People."

Seeing that he had her temporarily at a loss, Charles continued his agreeable prattle:--

"And hand them out their little certificates, you know. I remember, this chap Chesterton said a fairly bright thing once--a little piece I read somewhere. He said he'd always wanted to hear somebody--anybody--preach 'personal liberty' with one small qualification. Said he'd waited and waited to hear one person state the creed something like this: 'Men and women of genius must not be bound by ordinary laws. But I am NOT a man of genius, and therefore I will keep the law.' Chesterton said he'd been waiting for years."

He was aware that Miss Wing was regarding him in a curious sort of way, and now she said, directly:--

"Do you know, this doesn't sound like you at all?"

"Doesn't it?--why not? I've always believed in taking a good look around, every now and then. Constant discussion," said Charles, "constant canvassing of rival theories--"

"Well, those theories are only good for people who think that the way to advance is by standing still."

As she spoke these positive words, the two were overtaken and passed by Henry Mysinger, of all people. Mr. Mysinger was at once Mary's principal at the High School and her special adversary in the Schools, against whom in years past she and her friend Garrott had how often schemed and plotted. His salute now was pleasant, with reference to Charles, but the eye he cast upon his assistant was distinctly not approbatory.

As for Mary, it did not appear that she bowed at all.

"But the way to advance is by advancing," she continued, declining to lower her voice at all, "and it's only the exceptional people who are capable of superintending these advances. That, by the way," said the school teacher, "is probably the very definition you are looking for."

He flatly rejected her definition; disputation followed. With increasing pointedness, Mary Wing pressed the case for "exceptional people," Self-Developing People who recked not of Homes and being Sisters and Daughters. And presently she said, with only a small air of hesitation:--

"And please remember that enlightened people cannot possibly point the way without courage, and--a certain amount of pioneering experiment."

Mr. Mysinger had mercifully withdrawn himself around the corner of Third Street. There his assistant would turn, too, parting from her friend; and really, that appeared to be just as well. Forgetting his mask, the young man was beginning to betray signs of exasperation. No more than Mysinger, of course, had he ever been deceived by the delicate girlishness of Mary's face; but the positions she seemed to be taking now passed anything he had ever thought of her addiction to the New. Was this mere argument for argument's sake?--or did she seriously imagine that the regeneration of society was to be accomplished by the antics of a few wild female Egoists--lawless Egoettes?

"That's true, to a point, of course," he said, with control. "Yet don't you suspect people who talk about their Duty to the Race, while overlooking entirely their duty to that part of the race which should be nearest and dearest to them?"

"I'd suspect even more people who daren't call their souls their own, for fear they might be criticized by somebody who knows nothing about the facts."

And then she exclaimed suddenly. "Oh, why don't you say at once that you've been talking at poor Flora Trevenna for three blocks!"

He was considerably taken aback, but spoke calmly: "Not at all--or at least only in a general way. One of the problems of the day, as we say at the Redmantle Club."

It was on the tip of his tongue to say then, man to man, as it were: "Miss Mary, you have a great work ahead of you, in a special field. Isn't it a pity to confuse your good cause with one that perhaps is not so good?" But, of course, you hardly gave advice of that sort to Mary Wing.

"But since you seem to invite my opinion," he continued, "I will say that I do think there is a logical connection between Hodger's kind of talk and Miss Trevenna's--ah--pioneering experiment."

"Of course there is! Who denied it?" said she, with a forthrightness that increased his wonder at her.

And then, as they came to a standstill at the corner, she added, after a grave speculative stare:--

"If it'll do you the slightest good, Mr. Garrott, I'll tell you exactly what finally decided Flora to forget her duty to her sisters, aunts, uncles, and so on, as you consider. Prepare yourself. It was a sentence in a book."

"_A sentence in a book!_"

Miss Wing nodded, several times. "As she's a reserved girl, and I appear to be her only friend now, of course this is a confidence."

"I can name the book!" cried Charles; and he did.

"However," he resumed, with bitter urbanity, "if she'd happened to read a few pages further, she might have noticed that the Lady in Sweden took every bit of it back."

To his surprise, Mary Wing laughed.

"Do you know, that's just what I told her, in almost those very words? And what do you suppose she said? 'Well, I'm glad I didn't read as far as that.'"

Continuing to look at him and continuing to laugh, the annoying young woman added: "I'm afraid you don't begin to understand women as yet, Mr. Garrott! No, you don't begin to. _Au revoir!_"

It was noted that Charles's bow was characterized by a certain stiffness.

He went on his way alone, to Berringer's, and the good solid man-talk. The strongest thought in his mind now was that the end of these things was not yet. And here, at least, he was by no means deceived.

The next day was Saturday. At two o'clock on that day, each week, Charles took train and went down to his mother's place in the country, there to remain till early Monday morning. This was an invasion of his writer's time, with which he let nothing interfere. Returning to town, and finding "Bondwomen" not yet heard from, he became absorbed in a short story--for the "line" of his new novel could not be laid in a day or a week, of course--and went suddenly upon his emergency schedule, as Judge Blenso had named it. This schedule called for the omission of all exercise, other than as tutoring necessitated, and a general withdrawal from the world of living women. But he couldn't get away from their Unrest, even so.

Late Thursday afternoon, as he was working out the last pages of the time-killing fiction, the door of the Studio opened without a knock, and Donald Manford walked in. Donald certainly continued to make himself very much at home here.

"Get out," said Charles, tired and cross. "What do you think this is, a Wheelman's Rest?"

The tall engineer said that he was passing and thought he'd drop in. But with the aid of an eyebrow he made known, over Judge Blenso's snowy head, that he desired private converse in the bedroom.

The public talk between the two young men, continuing, was that Donald wanted to borrow a white waistcoat from Charles, which Charles was rather reluctant to lend him. Thus, gradually, they faded from the Studio, much to the annoyance of the Judge, who had ceased typing on purpose to listen, while ostensibly merely engaged in picking lint from his types with a brass pin.

When the door of the bedroom was shut, Donald Manford said, in low hurried tones:--

"Have you heard all this talk about Mary? I tell you the town's buzzing with it!"

Charles had heard no talk; he was disturbed, if scarcely surprised. But when it became clear that the purpose of Donald's visit was to get him, Charles, to "drop a hint to Mary," he refused at once, point-blank.

The engineer was pained and astonished.

"You don't understand the situation," said he, stewing. "I tell you Mary's gone to work to make a heroine of that woman! Recommending her for good jobs, with her morning, noon, and night, having people in to meet her at _tea_! Now, of course, she just doesn't understand what she's doing. She's too innocent; she's ignorant of the practical meaning of this business. And it's my duty to protect her from her ignorance...."

Charles sat down on one of the parallel white beds--the Judge's. And little as he sympathized with Miss Trevenna's Blow for Freedom, he seemed to sympathize even less with his young friend's proprietary absurdities.

Whatever this stalwart youth was, Mary Wing had made him. An orphan and poor, he had been taken to the bosom of the kindly Wings; and Mary, a girl of twenty then, had been from the start his second mother. She had fed and clothed Donald, helped pay his bills at college; she had trained him, taught him, filled him with her own ambition. She had got him his first opening, pulled wires for him, hewed out his ascending steps. Fine and confident as Donald stood there, Mary Wing had made him. And now to see him, as to her, clutching on the toga of the primitive male, to hear him, the ignorant, ridiculously claiming overlordship in a field which should have been supremely woman's.

"Go ahead," said Charles dryly. "Protect her all you want."

But Donald angrily told him not to be an ass. It was a delicate matter--for him--he declared; besides, Mary wouldn't listen to him. He wasn't _advanced_.

"But you're another matter. You've got some influence with Mary, and--"

"Stop right there! I've got more influence with the Weather Department than I have with Mary Wing."

Glowering at him over the foot of the bed, the engineer demanded reasons for his strange unpractical behavior. Charles offered a few simple selections from his complex feelings.

"First, your cousin's personal behavior is none of my business. Second, I'd have no respect for her if she gave up her principles because you asked me to ask her to. Third, I despise a person who's scared out of his wits by fear of what the neighbors'll think."

Donald appeared momentarily speechless. Perceiving this, the author fitted a cigarette into a holder Mary Wing had given him on his birthday, and resumed his few remarks:--

"Of course your mistake is in supposing that Miss Mary is acting through ignorance. She's acting from principle, as I say, and doing a plucky thing, too. For she doesn't think that because a poor silly girl has once made a mistake, the thing to do--"

But Manford recovered his voice with a bound.

"_Mistake!_ I'm surprised at you, Garrott! I did you the justice to think that all this advanced rot of yours was just talk. Come!--say right out you think it's a mighty plucky thing for a girl to go off and live with a married man!"

Charles smiled, and then hesitated. It was odd how instantly Donald Manford modernized him, killing all reactions: But what was the use of arguing with a fellow who honestly believed that a woman had but one "virtue," who spoke of her frankly as "the sex," allowed her no honor but "woman's honor," had but one question to ask about her "character"? This youth had not budged since the fifth century.

"The only way to punish this is by the disgrace of it, I tell you!" he was arguing. "There's no punishment at all when you make a heroine of the woman."

"There'll be enough to punish, don't fret, without Mary Wing's taking a hand."

"Now look here, Charlie," said Donald, encouraged. "Just look at the matter in a sensible way. You can feel sorry for her and all that. But it isn't right, by George, it isn't decent and moral, to stand up and practically say you admire a notorious bad woman! Just think of the effect on other women! They'll argue, 'Well, if that's the way people feel about it, there's no use being good any more.' And think, Charlie!--what'll become of Society if all the girls get to skipping off and living with married men!"

Charles laughed and rose. "Of course I'd not dream of speaking to Miss Mary about this."

The young engineer exploded. But presently he gave it up.

"Then I'll have to speak to her myself," he declared, and looked as if he expected the hazardous audacity of such an enterprise to touch his friend's heart, even then. "And you remember this," he added, angrily, "when Mary's friends are all dropping her!"

"Nobody who drops her for this was ever her friend."

"More New Thought! And what about Mysinger? Suppose your idea is that this plucky business will boost Mary's standing in the schools like the devil?"

"My dear fellow, you're seeing things! You never heard of politics, I suppose? Nothing can shake us in the schools. 'Cause why? We own the Board by two votes."

Donald regarded him with the strongest disapproval. "Do you know you make me sick?"

"By the way," said Charles, pleasantly, "didn't I see you go by here with Miss Flower the other day? Where did you--"

"Absolutely sick, and I've--"

"Meet up with her, old fellow? Isn't she a--"

"Sick!" roared Donald, and banged the door.

He was a hopeless ignoramus, and Charles was the peer of the greatest authorities, living or dead. But the subject, beyond doubt, was the most complex and baffling in the whole field of Womanology. And Charles, standing and staring at that shut door, was possessed with the odd feeling that Donald had got the best of the argument, after all.

Why must Mary _always_ be as independent as the Declaration, and more militant than a Prussian?

V

The emergency schedule withdrew Charles from the streets; he lunched in twenty minutes at Mrs. Herman's and spent the hour gained at his writing-table. With the completion of the short fiction, he resumed his walks to Berringer's. And now on Washington Street, the principal scene of his social life since he became a regular author, he saw again Miss Angela Flower. In five days, suddenly, he saw Miss Angela three times.

Twice, as it happened, the two passed on opposite sides of the street, moving in contrary directions. But the third time he fairly overtook her, not a dozen steps from the door of the rich little Deming boys, to whom he taught the Elements all morning.

He was pleased with the agreeable coincidence. He greeted Mary's so different cousin with a genuine warmth, springing spontaneously from his personal sense of a bond between them. And Miss Angela, it seemed, was not less glad to see him.

"You don't know how nice it is," she laughed, a tinge of color in her smooth cheeks, "to see a familiar face, after blocks and blocks of strangers. And you're almost the only person I know, too!"

Suiting his long stride to hers, he assured her that this state of affairs would pass quickly.

"I got only a glimpse of you yesterday," he pursued. "Do you take your constitutionals at this time, too?"

But she said, elusively, that she took them at all sorts of times.

"It's my chief form of recreation at present, you see! But--I thought I might meet father up here--it's his time for coming home to lunch from the college. Only I seem just to miss him every day."

He and the Womanly Woman walked a good half-mile together that day, and the authority enjoyed himself thoroughly. It was in the course of this walk that he evolved another phrase of scientific justification, viz.: "The Business of Supplying Beauty and Supplying Charm."

The talk turned naturally upon the girl herself. Having failed to get any biography from the embattled Miss Wing, Charles proceeded to the source. Under his agreeable, yet artful promptings, Miss Angela sketched with a charming simplicity the story of a commonplace family life: how she and her brothers had grown up at Hunter's Run, a crossroads post-office four miles from Mitchellton; how they had moved into Mitchellton, which had seemed like heaven at first, but had palled after seven years; how all the boys of Mitchellton grew up and went away, one by one, to make their marks in the world (though there was one exception, it seemed, a Mr. Dan Jenney, who was still in Mitchellton--Aha! thought Charles); how lonely she was after Tommy, her older brother, had thus gone away; how her father had had quite a large practice in Mitchellton, but didn't seem much interested in getting patients here; and so on. Tommy, it was learned, had married money in Pittsburg, but appeared to be happy all the same. As for the younger brother, Wallie, his ambition was to go to college and be an electro-chemist, and he was now at work downtown, gathering funds for that purpose. Mary Wing had got him a position, it seemed.

Miss Angela's conversation, as has been noted, was not remarkable as conversation. But what mattered that? Into an atmosphere too heated by the Trevennas of this Unrestful world, her girlish unsophistications blew like a primrose zephyr. Moreover, she had her moments, you may be sure; her vivacities as honest as wit. She said that Mitchellton was like a town in war-time.

"That's the way a man described it to me once, a surveyor from the North, when he'd only been there three hours! He declared he hadn't seen a male between the ages of fifteen and sixty-five. They'd all gone off, you see--"

"And then the surveyor went off, too?"

"He did!--exactly! Hopped on a funny little calico pony he had, the minute he said that, and trotted off down Main Street. We never saw him again."

Charles, laughing, looked down at her. She wore a plain blue suit and a simple hat with a yellow quill, obviously inexpensive both, and not new. She was characterized, sartorially, only by that unobtrusive yet exquisite neatness whose practice some women bring to a fine art. Pretty and sweet she looked, none the less; feminine, too, without a doubt.

And, quite unconsciously, she was giving by piecemeal an answer to that fundamental question of her Modern critics, How do you spend your time? A considerable part of Miss Angela's time went, it seemed, to the actual care of the house. With her leisure she really had little to do as yet, because of her lack of acquaintance. Even the table of bridge with Cousin Mary had not developed so far. She walked a great deal, usually alone, but mentioned having met Mr. Manford the other day; the impression was left that she and Donald hadn't specially taken to each other. She kept her mother company; she often went into the shops, "just looking"; once or twice she and Wallie had been to the moving-picture shows. She read also, it seemed, for she had just finished "Marna"--a gift to her, this was--a certain late New Woman novel which Charles himself meant to give an hour to some day. Her account of her domestic business the old-fashioned girl concluded thus:--

"I don't know very much about housekeeping yet, but I do the best I can. I think mother enjoys the rest."

And whatever criticism narrow utilitarians might have brought against her management of her fifteen hours a day seemed to be morally destroyed by that unconscious stroke. _Mother enjoys the rest._ Imagine Miss Hodger, for instance,--to come no nearer home,--casually mentioning: "I don't want to do this, but I will. I want to go there, but I won't." "Why, Miss Hodger?" you would ask her. "Why must you mutilate your Ego thus?" "Well,"--you are to fancy Miss Hodger saying,--"you see, I think mother'd enjoy the rest!"

But the girl herself remained delightfully unconscious of the reactions she set in motion.

"Mr. Garrott," she said suddenly,--"I hope you don't mind my asking, but--when are you going to have some stories coming out? I'm crazy to read one of them!"

"Oh!" laughed Mr. Garrott. "Well!--I can't say definitely, at the moment. I'm trying," he said, modestly, "to write books, you know, and it's a slow business, with the little free time I have. My first one, that I've just finished, took me four years."

"Four years! How wonderful! But isn't it going to come out soon?"

"I'm--ah--negotiating with a publisher now."

"It must be fascinating! I--I never knew an author before."

He warmed, expanding.

At the parting of their ways, these two paused, talking like old friends; and no parting took place here, after all. Angela said, with a charming hesitancy: "Mr. Garrott, if you really want to read that book,--'Marna', I mean,--I wish you'd let me lend it to you. We've finished with it--for good!--and if you have time to stop a minute--" And he, who never called, who had a special rule against borrowing things from ladies, restored his hat to his head at once, accepting with pleasure.

So they turned out of Washington Street toward Center, and she continued, with a laughing, sidelong glance:--

"Do you know who _Marna_ reminded me of? Quite a friend of yours!--somebody you admire a great deal!"

Knowing the nature of the book well from the reviews he was incessantly reading, the young man smiled: "I wonder if you can possibly be alluding to one of your most distinguished cousins."

"It did, just a little! At first, I mean--where Marna goes away to lead her own life, and everything.... Mr. Garrott, do you think she's really going to take the position in New York, Cousin Mary, I mean?"

"Take it! Why, of course she will, provided she can get it! It would be a remarkable thing for such a young woman, and a great opportunity besides."

This the girl seemed to understand. She remarked, however, that Cousin Mary and Mrs. Wing seemed so wrapped up in each other. Her extreme domesticity was peculiarly refreshing to Charles just now; nevertheless, he now took up the cudgels for Modernity, though in the gentlest way: Why should not daughters have the same right to leave home for work that the sons of Mitchellton had, for example? Daughters had always left homes for another reason. Suppose _Marna_ had married the first whippersnapper that came along, and he had carried her off to Australia, etc.

But Miss Angela seemed to feel that, for her part, she would look long at any lover who wished to separate her from her mother.

Center Street, at this point, was a place of car-tracks, cobblestones, and threatening small establishments of those personal sorts which are always first to appear in a waning "residence district." At the corner stood a Human Hair Goods Works. The Flower house was not intrinsically pretty. It was one of a block of six, all just alike and evidently built some time ago; rather dingy little brick houses, with weather-beaten small verandahs set only a step or two above the sidewalk, and scantily separated from it by grassless "lawns." However, Charles was not repelled by poverty, to which he had been well used.

Within, he had the pleasure of meeting Miss Angela's father, who was encountered in the hall, in the act of removing his overcoat. Angela left the two men together, while she tripped upstairs to get "Marna."

Charles found the medical father a decidedly queer individual. A very tall, thin, seedy man he was, with a neglected sandy mustache, and a long neck punctuated with a very large Adam's apple, which he jerked with a sort of nervous twitch as he talked. With his lusterless eye and spare, remote manner, he looked like a man who had let himself dry up from within. Yet, if Charles remembered aright, the Medical School had counted this gentleman a distinct acquisition.

He assured Dr. Flower that he had long desired this pleasure, and explained:--

"Your cousin, Miss Wing, is an old friend of mine."

"My wife's cousin," said the Doctor, seeming to make a distinction. "Quite so! Certainly!"

"I believe it was she who first brought the Medical School to your attention?"

"Ah, yes! I fancy it was. Quite so. Have a cigar, will you? However," continued the father, jerking his long neck, "you don't offer that as something to be urged against her, I assume?"

The young man, though surprised, smiled politely.

"Possibly you're no more enthusiastic about teaching than I am, say?"

"Ah, well!... It wants excitement, you maintain?--lacks the spice of brilliant variety? You find no romance in it, you suggest? Well--"

Dr. Flower fell silent, brushing his hat with the sleeve of his worn coat, while he stared cheerlessly at nothing. Charles wondered at him, with a certain sense of mild mystery. If he felt that way about teaching, why had he thrown over his practice and left Mitchellton?

"I believe," said he, with discretion, "your--that is, Mrs. Flower's cousin, Mary Wing, is the only teacher I ever knew who could really be called a 'fan.'"

"Quite so. You won't have a cigar, you said? But even in that case, it doesn't amount to a complete exhaustion of the energies, you would feel? You'd contend there's an unused store for other enterprises, even there?"

"Quite so," said Charles, considerably puzzled.

But then Miss Angela came skipping and smiling down the narrow stairs, book in hand, and slipped her arm through her father's. She said that Mr. Garrott could keep "Marna" as long as he liked, but that she would be _so_ interested to hear what he thought of it. The trio stood chatting a moment together.

Angela's last word, in her soft and pretty voice, was, "Don't forget, we're going to have that bridge game some night soon!"

So he took leave of her, not only with the book, but with the promise of a party shortly to come. And, curiously, that was the first thing this simple Nice Girl had ever said that the authority felt inclined to criticize somewhat: the use of the word "that," now. Skilled and wary he had grown since he became a regular writer, and he could not recall having agreed to give a valuable evening to playing bridge soon. The engagement had just developed along, it seemed.

But that was a trivial matter, early lost sight of. Continuing his walk to Berringer's and the good man-talk, Charles pondered upon the nature of a Home.

La Femme, as we know, was all over for this young man; through too much knowledge he had analyzed the charm away. He did not (of course) exaggerate Miss Angela's values, magnify anything about her whatever. Of course she was but a Type, and a familiar one. Only, for him she had happened to personify, with unexpected freshness, that aspect of the Question which, he was more and more convinced, scientific thinkers fallaciously slurred over: the business aspect of Home-Making, to wit. Though few of the sounder authorities openly advocated the suppression of Homes, was it not true that they--and he once among them--practically did so by denying any value in their schemes to those emotional and spiritual contributions which alone turned a house into a Home? There lay the heart of the whole great problem. "Four walls," mused Charles, as he swung rapidly down Center Street, "and three meals a day, and even the banisters dusted, to boot--these mere utilities can never make a Home."

And he made a mental note of the sentence for his conservative Notes in the exercise-book of the old lady.

But this day, as it fell out, was memorable in the Studio for more than meditation.

When he left Miss Chorister's at four-thirty, which was when the tutorial day ended, the author did not make straight for the Studio, according to habit, but turned downtown again, instead. He had personal affairs to attend to to-day, an accumulation of small shopping and sundry errands that could not be longer procrastinated. They took much valued time. It was after six, in the winter night, when he got home.

At the foot of his own steps he encountered his and his relative's new fellow-lodger, and their only one. Possibly he was still thinking scientifically of Miss Angela, for it instantly occurred to him that here was Miss Angela's full opposite.

"Oh, good-evening, Miss McGee!"

He spoke as pleasantly as possible, but the lodger only answered "Evening," and turned her back at once.

"How do you do to-night?"

"Tired as a dog."

"And no wonder, working such long hours!"

No answer from the lodger.

"You _are_ later than usual this evening, aren't you?"

"Keep me on purpose," muttered Miss McGee angrily (or something like that), climbing the tall stairs.

She was a dark young woman, darkly dressed and darkly scowling, it had seemed, at the mere sight of Charles. As he knew from a rare letter on the hall table, her official name was Mary Maude McGee, but to him she was always and simply Two-Book McGee, on account of her apparent habit of reading two novels a night, every night in the year. She had them under her arm now, with the labels of the circulating library showing.

Charles also had a book under his arm, "Marna": here was a topic!

"Do you," he inquired, continuing the social chat, "find many good novels these days?"

"No, I don't!" said she, so sharply that you would have supposed he was to blame for it. Imagine!

"You must really look over my stock some day, Miss McGee. I'm sure I have _something_ you could read."

But the invitation brought only a mutter from Miss McGee, and the door of the Second Hall Back banged shut behind her.

"Help! help!" mused Charles, and straightway was struck with an interesting thought: How about taking over Two-Book McGee as a minor character in the new novel?

He considered the idea, mounting to his Studio. The lodger was known as a self-supporting female, allied with a tintype and "art photography" establishment. Certainly she seemed an odd sort of person to say "Look pleasant" to anybody. Friends, engagements, pleasures, she had none, on the word of Mrs. Herman. All day she helped to photograph the General Public; all night, till sleep overcame her, she sat alone in her very small room, reading novel after novel which she did not like. A dull life, it might have seemed; but then, you see, she had, to bless her, the priceless knowledge that she was a self-respecting and independent being, a person and not a parasite. The authorities could not doubt that Two-Book McGee was happy in her way.

Charles, however, seemed to be doing just that, at the moment. He conceived Miss McGee as one not joyful in her economic freedom; hence as an "illustrative character" for conservatism, sowing doubts in the minds of readers as to whether Leading My Own Life was, in fact, necessarily the other name for happiness. Climbing the stairs now, he invented words for Two-Book's mouth: imagining her as saying, "Oh, I'd marry anybody to get out of this!"--and again, with sobs, crying out to some modern arguer, "Oh, just to be a parasite again!--just to be a snug, comfortable little parasite!..."

So making fiction, Charles Garrott opened the door of his Studio. And full upon the threshold, he encountered the great surprise of his life.

The large room looked familiar and inviting. The lamp burned on the writing-table; the drop-light shone over the Judge's typewriter; the author's office-coat hung on his chair-back. By the typewriter stood the Judge, pink and shining from his evening bath. Wrapped in a beautiful lavender robe, he turned, smiling.

But on the writing-table, beyond the lamp, there lay a strange package. The author's eye had fallen on it even as he opened the door. Some instinct in him seemed to divine the incredible truth instantly, but something else within spoke loud and sharp:--

"_What's that?_"

Judge Blenso laughed agreeably, and lowered the bath-towel with which he was rubbing his fine white head. To the secretary, the literary business was still a sealed book indeed; so far as he was advised, a package of manuscript back by express was doubtless a very pleasant little occurrence.

"Why, it's Entry 2, Charles!" he chuckled. "Your novel--just come in! Must be! And gad, my dear fellow! Willcox wrote you a letter, too!"

The young man bounded for the table.

Long as he had deemed himself a writer, Charles King Garrott had as yet sent out little manuscript, "Bondwomen" having absorbed all his creative energies for years. Accordingly, the prevalent stupidity of editors and publishers, amounting ofttimes to mere madhouse imbecility, as every young writer can testify, was yet as a sealed book to him. With the ultra-modern message of the Old Novel, he, personally, might have become authoritatively dissatisfied; but that any publisher in his senses could fail to jump at it had, of course, scarcely entered his mind.

Hence, in the two seconds required to pounce upon and open Willcoxes' letter, his mind was tossing out other explanations of that package with the utmost lucidity and vigor. Willcoxes had been so pleased with the Old Novel that they had put it in type at once: this package was the proof. The package was the manuscript; but it had been sent back by an office-boy by mistake, and the letter rushed after it to implore pardon. Willcoxes, while delighted with the novel, had thought that possibly some of the ultra-modernism had better be toned down a little, in the interest of Homes; therefore....

In short, Charles Garrott's mind executed exactly the processes that all young writers' minds execute at these moments, in instinctive recoil from the stupefying fact of Rejection. But when he got the letter open, all this activity was quickly stilled.

DEAR SIR [it ran]:

We have given careful consideration to the manuscript of the novel, BANDWOMEN, which you were good enough to submit, but regret to report that the decision has been adverse. We fear that the publication of the story would not prove a financial success.

The manuscript is returned to you to-day by express. Thanking you for giving us the opportunity of examining it, we are

Yours very truly,

Willcox Brothers Company.

In this stunning letter the stenographer's error seemed the crowning insult. _Bandwomen!_ Charles, for once in his life, blew up.

The proceedings ensuing came as a complete surprise to the secretary, exciting in their way: he had really never thought that Charles had it in him. That commonly sedentary and controlled young man had abruptly become dynamic and vocal. Some of his remarks eluded the listener, as, for instance, the menacing cry: "I'll rent the Academy of Music some day to tell about this!" But on the whole Judge Blenso, who himself, in his prime, had been counted an accomplished commentator on the world's devilish ways, gladly gave tribute to Charles for verbal ingenuity and somewhat arresting vividness of metaphor.

But it was clear now to the secretary that this was no pleasant happening after all. When the storm began to abate, he spoke in mollifying tones:--

"Now, my dear fellow,--this unfortunate occurrence. Unfortunate! But as to that plan of mine--we might consider it now, Charles? What do you think?"

"What plan?" Charles said, in a let-down voice.

"I regret this, about Entry 2," said the Judge, with his brilliant black gaze. "'Bandwomen' is a fine novel, my dear fellow,--fine! But as to that little plan of mine--giving our undivided time and abilities henceforth to some more remunerative kind of work? Gad, Charles!--wouldn't it be wise?"

And then Charles, after staring blankly at his relative's odd handsome figure, suddenly burst out laughing....

But later he stood at his window, staring silently down into the lamplit street. A rare depression had suddenly closed over him. Oddly enough, it seemed to have little to do with his great repulse as a writer. After all, "Bondwomen," good though he felt it to be, did not represent his best thought now; moreover, that the next publisher would jump at it still seemed to him as certain as Judgment Day. The young man's deep dissatisfactions were with all the terms and conditions of his writer's life.

Long ago he had said to a friend once, "I can't afford to give my time to making money," and the remark, being repeated, had gained him the reputation of a fool's wit, none recognizing that he had practically bagged it outright from a fellow of the name of Agassiz. And there (he was thinking) was the measure of the degree to which he had withdrawn from the accepted ways of men, from all the currents of stimulating life. Making money, after all, was the "battle of life," and he--he had thought it often before now--had placed himself with the noncombatants. All day, downtown there, vigorous beings met and fought, crossed wills, locked minds, pitted strength against strength; while he, Charles, spent his days with women and children and his nights alone in this room, palely pondering over ethical subtleties. He remembered something Mary Wing had said to him one day last winter: "You're a great deal more like a woman than a man; don't you know it?" On the whole, Mary had meant that as a compliment, but the word had stuck in him like a knife.

He had bent his life to be a writer--and for what? Merely that those who knew him best might view him, tolerantly, as a member of the Third Sex.

"A writer ought to go out once a month and do something cruel," he thought moodily. "Assault and battery.... Blood in rivers...."

He was disgusted with tutoring and writing, with Woman and all womanish ways.

Nevertheless, the instant supper was over, he was found seated at his writing-table, "Notes on Women" open before him. In fact, the bee had stung this young man deep, whether he liked it or not. In sum, the unimagined rebuff to his principal _opus_ did not diminish, but intensified the literary passion. Now he embarked upon his first attempt to plot out a definite scenario for his new novel, "Bondwomen's" subtle and superior successor. And it must have been that the novel thoughts generated at the Redmantle Club had rapidly crystallized through the days succeeding. For now it seemed to be quite clear in the author's mind that he would take, as the central figure in his greater work, an extreme specimen of lawless Egoette, against whom he would set, in subtle but most telling contrast, the best type of Home-Maker.

VI

It was one of those slack hours in the domestic day when even the most tireless hands can find no task to do. Miss Angela Flower sat by the single window of her bedroom, the window that gave, over two sets of back-yards, a sectional view of Washington Street. On the ledge beside her stood the opera-glasses, employed sometimes for long-distance vision. They were old glasses, somewhat shabby now, and the case to them was long since lost.

To be transplanted is hard on the young, as Charles Garrott had once said, and to be a normal girl is to desire that pleasant happenings shall occur. This was Angela's favorite seat in the house, because it brought her nearest to the happenings of the Street of the Blessed: nearest to them, while she was yet farthest away. Often in the early weeks she had, indeed, felt quite forlorn as she sat here; she was a stranger and friendless, of a poor family and with small opportunity. Since the Redmantle Club meeting, however, the view from the window had become more personally interesting, more touched with the sense of participation. Here Angela had seen Mr. Garrott on his way to lunch; here she had twice glimpsed Mr. Manford, striding along from his office just at dark; here she had even made out Mr. Tilletts, whom once she had mistaken for somebody's uncle, whirling by in a great automobile.

And this afternoon, in her leisure hour, Angela did not feel forlorn or out of things at all, nor did she so much as glance out of the window, with a naked eye. She had sheets of note-paper upon a magazine in her lap, and on one of the sheets she was writing blithely:--

Miss Angela Flower entertained at bridge Thursday evening.

As the Redmantle Club had been her first party in the city, so the young girl, with real pleasure, now planned for a second, this one to be her very own. It had occurred to her, more for fun than anything else, to write out a little notice of her party for the social columns of the "Post." Not being as experienced at writing as Mr. Garrott, she took some time to get the wording of the notice just to her liking; but it was a very happy sort of time.

That finished, Angela turned again to the more practical aspects of the party. Who were to be the guests at it, in fine? As yet she had only herself and Mr. Garrott.

Now, calling out suddenly to her mother in the front room, she learned to her surprise that it was almost half-past four o'clock; whereon she sprang up at once, and began to dress quickly for the street. About quarter of five, after talking a little with her mother in the front room, Angela set out to call on her cousin, Mary Wing.

Now Angela knew that something rather unpleasant was going on in connection with her Cousin Mary at this time. Being a well-brought-up young girl, she was, of course, not allowed to hear bold, improper talk, but still she knew that there was _something_. Mrs. Flower, though very fond of Mrs. Wing, who was her double first-cousin, had, indeed, felt obliged to forbid Angela to cultivate any undue intimacy with Mary; which Angela, considering the differences between the two girls, was hardly likely to do in any case. Nevertheless, relations were still pleasant, and Mrs. Flower had agreed that, under the circumstances, Cousin Mary and Mr. Manford should be invited to the bridge-party. It was the cousinly thing to do, and besides, as Mrs. Flower had pointed out, she could not very well invite Mr. Manford without inviting Cousin Mary, too.

The Wings lived in a pleasant house on Olive Street, four doors from Washington and overlooking the Green Park. The house was bigger than it looked, because of a two-story extension that ran out behind, converting an ordinary dwelling into two quite nice flats. Building that extension was the very first thing that Mary had done when she took charge of the family. In the upper flat dwelt Mr. and Mrs. Crowther, who could sometimes be heard recriminating each other in embittered tones. In the lower flat Mrs. and Miss Wing were very comfortable, with four rooms, bath, kitchenette, tiny back yard and patent clothes-dryer. The fourth room, which had been Donald Manford's till he outgrew apron-strings, was a convertible affair, now a dining-room, now a bedroom, according as the Wings dined at home, on the one hand, or were receiving a visit from Fanny Warder--Mary's younger but married sister--on the other. At present the latter condition prevailed, and Fanny's two babies possessed the room, the flat, and the world besides.

Angela entered upon three generations, scattered widely over the sitting-room floor. Fanny was out, but her place in the line was ably taken by Aunt Mary, whose modernity did not stick out so much in these purely domestic moments. Angela, watching her cousin explain to Paulie Warder why the best little boys never, _never_ ate green paint, thought with a kind of surprise: "She really looks very nice." She was duly presented to Paulie and Neddy-Weddy, who were coaxed to show off their store of tricks for the Pretty Lady, and she did her best to shower those eulogies which the relatives in the case invariably expect. But Neddy-Weddy, for his part, appeared altogether too sleepy to care what strangers might think of him, and it may be that to a coolly impartial eye Paulie appeared more soiled than cute at this particular moment. Angela really wasn't sorry when the babies' grandmother gathered them and their belongings to her bosom and withdrew to an inner chamber.

But when she broached the matter of the bridge-party on Thursday, Cousin Mary said at once:--

"My dear, it's very sweet of you, but I couldn't--possibly. I can't dream of taking an evening off--oh, this side of Christmas!"

Cousin Mary had a great stack of examination papers to mark, it seemed; she pointed to them on her open desk in the corner. She also had ten thousand leaflets to distribute for that Education League of hers; they lay in bales in another corner, behind the sofa. Further, she had three articles to write at once for the League's magazine: for it had a special magazine all its own, it seemed. As for Donald Manford, she said she could not speak. But Cousin Mary did mention, in a discouraging way, that Donald also was doing a good deal of rush-work just now, clearing his desk for his trip to Wyoming.

"And besides, my dear," she concluded, "to the best of my knowledge, Donald can't play bridge at all."

"I could teach him, Cousin Mary--it's awfully easy! I remember, I taught a man in Mitchellton to play once, in twenty minutes! Besides--why, of course, it wouldn't make any difference!"

Mary Wing, no doubt, desired to play fair. She could not say now, as of old, that Donald never went out; for she knew that Donald was going out that very evening, escorting Miss Helen Carson to the theater, in short. Mary knew this, because she had arranged the matter herself, and personally bought the tickets for Donald's account.

So she said: "You must ask him, Angela--do! Use my telephone there, why don't you, and catch him now before he leaves the office?"

But no, that was just what Angela felt she could not do, for, while she had enjoyed two short walks with Mr. Manford, the truth was that he had never called. Mr. Garrott, on the other hand, besides everything else, had called, the day she lent him the book.

"I thought _you_ might ask him, Cousin Mary. I thought you might just bring him with you, informally. It's going to be very informal," said Angela.

"But as I can't go myself, Angela, you see ..."

Angela concealed her disappointment as best she could. She was a sweet-natured girl; moreover, Cousin Mary, after all, was the only person who had tried to do anything for her. Nevertheless, her disappointment was keen, and touched with a little irritation at Cousin Mary's attitude. Her cousin, Mr. Garrott, Mr. Manford, and herself--they made a natural table of bridge, a little coterie of friends and relatives who instinctively met together now and then for congenial diversion. It did seem rather hard that Cousin Mary should spoil it all, with this firm stand against all social enjoyment. Only she and Mr. Garrott, it seemed, cared for a little wholesome pleasure.

And undoubtedly this attitude of Cousin Mary's did reduce the bridge-party to a rather precarious position. Of course Jennie Finchman could be secured for the other girl, or even Fanny Warder; but as for the man to fill Mr. Manford's place, that was a more difficult matter.

"I'm awfully sorry _you_ can't come, Cousin Mary," she was saying in her soft voice. "Mr. Garrott'll be _so_ disappointed. He admires you so much--indeed, he does! He told me so only yesterday."

"Oh!" said Mary Wing; and added, as if it were a part of the same sentence--"yesterday! You're seeing a good deal of him now?"

"Oh, yes! We have a walk or something nearly every day."

"He's quite attractive, don't you think?"

The girl answered without self-consciousness: "Oh, I do--he's the nicest thing! And so cunning-looking, too!--isn't he?"

"I've always been intrigued, I admit," said the school-teacher, "by the three brown freckles on his nose."

She was looking with admiration at her cousin's fresh youthfulness, so unmarked by experience, so innocent of knowledge of fierce conflicting ideas. And Mary looked with a kind of compunction, too. She had honestly wished and tried to "do something" for Angela; but, alas, she herself had been so long and completely out of things that few connections remained to her now, such as would assist to launch a somewhat belated début. She had her hands full enough trying to do something of that sort with Donald, an eligible man. Still--

"Oh, Angela, here's a thought!" she said, suddenly. "If you'll only make a decently long visit, you'll be almost certain to see Donald here! He drops in nearly every afternoon to see the babies, you know--"

"Oh!--does he?"

"You never imagined such a goose as he is over them. And then you could ask him to the party, in--in a casual way."

Angela cheered up at once. Of course, if she could meet and ask Mr. Manford in a casual way, it would be different. And it must be admitted that Mr. Tilletts, who had hovered in the background of her mind, did seem a rather remote possibility.

So the talk passed easily from the bridge-party to Fanny Warder, and other lesser matters.

Mary Wing moved about as she talked. She was picking up fire-engines and pieces of cake, overlooked by the grandmother in the suddenness of departure. Angela's eyes followed her over the room, and she felt a touch of envy. It was really a pretty room, much prettier than anything in the Flowers' little house, large, light, attractively furnished, most comfortable and livable. But, of course, it was a simple matter to have pretty things if you had the money to buy them; which, in brief, was just what the Flowers didn't have. It suddenly came over Angela that her advanced cousin was, comparatively speaking, a _rich_ woman.

She said something of the sort aloud presently. Mary Wing replied that she worked pretty hard for all she had.

"Our furniture is so old and awful I can't do a thing with it," continued Angela. "I rub and scrub and polish, but it just seems to get worse. And then the parlor is that long, narrow shape, like a sleeping-car, and needs papering so dreadfully! You know, Cousin Mary," said the girl, with a rueful laugh, "we were never so poor in all our lives! You don't know how hard it is to accomplish _anything_, when you literally haven't a cent to spend."

Cousin Mary, who could be very nice when she wanted to, expressed herself very sympathetically. "And I do know something about it, my dear, you see, for I've been that way myself."

"If father'd only get some patients!" said Angela. "But he's so funny, he just seems to think a family gets along somehow, and never even put up his sign till I begged him to! And, of course, Wallie doesn't contribute anything; he just puts away everything he makes for his education--"

"It _is_ hard on you, poor dear--"

"He has to, of course. But I _have_ wished we had Tommy back, these weeks since we've been here! He was the sweetest, most generous thing, till he married...."

But soon Cousin Mary gave the conversation a characteristic twist, with the very suggestion that Mr. Garrott had once promised to make to Angela, and then permanently backed down.

"Angela," she said, suddenly thoughtful, "did you ever think at all of going to work--regularly, for yourself?"

The girl looked up, in surprise. "Going to work? You mean in an office?"

"Yes--something of that sort. You--"

"Why, no, Cousin Mary! I've never _had_ to think of that. Of course, father can still support me. I didn't mean you to think--"

"Oh, of _course_! I understand that perfectly! I meant only on your own account, my dear, so that you could have your own money, all you want of it. It makes a difference, as I can testify! And then, too, I know a good many girls with plenty of money already, who go to work--well, just for the fun of it!--Helen Carson, for instance."

Angela looked as if she hardly knew how to explain herself to one holding her cousin's known ideas of fun. However, she endeavored, sweetly.

"Yes, I know. But in the first place, you see, I couldn't very well be spared from the house. I do every bit of the work, except cooking and washing, and mother doesn't expect ever to touch the housekeeping any more. It takes so much time, and worry, and our cook is _awful_, because we can't afford to pay but twelve dollars a month, and, of course, a good servant won't work for that! And besides, father wouldn't dream of allowing such a thing, Cousin Mary. He'd think it was--was just charging him with being a failure, and not able to take care of his family!"

It was a sufficiently conclusive statement, as Cousin Mary seemed to feel; she did not argue back, but replied understandingly, and mentioned that Harold Warder felt the same way about women's working. So Angela felt the moment to be favorable for explaining her deeper points of view.

"And, Cousin Mary, even if I made mother take back the housework, and father'd let me do it," she said, with a girlish hesitancy that became her well, "I wouldn't _want_ to go into an office--or have a business career. I--just feel differently about all those things. I have no ambitions that way--at _all_!"

Cousin Mary, who chanced to be standing near, surprised her by stooping suddenly and pinching her cheek.

"Tell me what your ambitions are, Angela, dear."

"Well--you probably--I don't believe you'd understand exactly what I--"

"On the contrary, for two cents I'll tell you what they are myself."

"Well, what?" said Angela, gazing up with unfeigned interest. "Tell me what you think?"

"They really can be stated as one, my guess is," said Mary, smiling in the nicest way: "To be a good wife to the man you will love some day."

Color flowed suddenly into the girl's upturned face. By a strange coincidence, Cousin Mary had stated the ambition in the very words Angela herself would have used. But, though maidenly embarrassed, she would not lower her gaze as if she were ashamed of her ambition, or overborne by her cousin's hard masculinity.

"I know," she said, pink and sweet, "you think that's just a--weak womanly ambition! I know you aren't much interested in my kind of things, Cousin Mary."

"Indeed, you wrong me," said Mary, her smile dying. "I don't feel that way at all."

And through her shot the irrelevant thought: "Why does she call me Cousin Mary, all the time? I'm only four years older than she."

But, as the two girls thus gazed at each other, the interval in their ages seemed, indeed, indefinite and immense. Angela's eyes could afford that subtle expression of known womanly advantage. The light of afternoon, flowing freely over the park and into the long windows, fell full upon Mary Wing's delicate face. It was a face, to be just, not devoid of a feminine attractiveness at times. But now the bright day showed it colorless and tired; the marks of many "fights" lingered indefinably about the mouth; tiny crow's-feet netted the corners of the fine blue eyes. Yes, this school-teacher's first youth was gone. Full of strange isms, she had lost sight of the real things of life, and now her Woman's Opportunity had slipped away from her forever.

It may be that Mary Wing would have given something of her honors to be prettier than Angela just for that moment.

"I think it would be hard to name a finer ambition. To be a good wife to ..." And, breaking off, she added, with another smile, sudden and merry: "To Dan Jenney, didn't you tell me?"

Her young cousin lost her dreamy look rather abruptly.

"Why, _no_, Cousin Mary! Please don't say that! I only told you that--"

But Cousin Mary, having turned her eyes toward the window, interrupted the womanly talk with a smashing announcement.

"Here's Flora Trevenna coming in--good!" she said in her most matter-of-fact way. "Excuse me a minute, Angela,--I'm bell-hop, you know!"

Angela, who at least knew the ill-omened name, gave one startled gaze, and sprang up. The prospect of casually meeting Mr. Manford was forgotten in her sudden panic alarm.

"I must _go_!" she said, looking about her a little wildly. "I--should have gone some time ago--really! I just stopped in to--"

Mary's colorless face seemed to stiffen a little. So, perhaps, Mr. Mysinger was wont to see it.

"Well, wait just a minute," she ordered, rather than requested. "I'd especially like you to meet Flora."

Nice reward this for being cousinly and inviting Cousin Mary to the bridge-party: _to meet that woman_!

"I--really, I _can't_, Cousin Mary! I'll just run back and see your mother a minute--and then--"

"You can't well be so rude as that, can you?" said Mary. And then she added, as if something within her threw out the words beyond her will: "Why do you call me Cousin Mary all the time? I'm only four years older than you."

The question, of course, expected no notice. Mary was gone into the hall. Yet Angela, left unpoliced, did not immediately fly toward the bedroom region, or run and hide with the leaflets behind the sofa. It may be she feared her hard cousin a little; but besides that, in the strangest and most contradictory sort of way, it appeared that she did not altogether want to fly. She was conscious of an excitement, of a sort of unworthy curiosity.

The front door opened; there were voices. And then Mary Wing returned, her arm slipped brazenly through that of her astounding friend.

And Angela, despite all of the injunctions of propriety, looked; looked, with a sort of fearful fascination. Never in her life before, to her knowledge, had her girlish eyes rested upon a Badwoman. Though virtue went out of her, she _must_ look this once....

"Flora, this is my cousin, Angela Flower, whom you know of, I believe. My friend, Miss Trevenna, Angela."

A look of greeting came upon the Badwoman's not displeasing face, a little smile upon the pretty, sinful lips.

"Oh, how do you do, Miss Flower?"

But Angela, with her upbringing, found it impossible to reciprocate these friendly overtures. Take one shameful peep, she might. But that itself brought a reaction, perhaps; and as well as Donald Manford, as well as Judge Blenso himself, Angela knew, if only by intuition, that good people must stand up for morals. Donald certainly would have applauded her, as she inclined her graceful head about an inch and spoke two cold words:--

"Miss Trevenna."

And then, her alarm mysteriously gone, she turned to her cousin and said, formally: "Good-bye, then, Cousin Mary. Do come to see us when you find time."

Indeed, the two cousins viewed everything too differently to make much intimacy between them probable. When the door had shut on Angela, Cousin Mary put her arm about the shoulder of the Badwoman and said the strangest, the most advanced thing possible:--

"Dear Flora! You must let me say--I'm sorry."

Miss Trevenna, with her deceptively cloistral countenance, seemed to flinch a little. Her gaze looked rather bright; it fell away from Mary's. But she produced a fair effect of uncomprehension and surprise.

"Sorry? Why, what for?"

"Well--I can't feel my little cousin showed to very good advantage."

"Oh, didn't she? But it makes no difference. I--hardly ever notice what people do--really! Are you too busy, or shall we walk?"

"Let me get my hat," said Mary.

Having put on hat and coat in her own bedroom, the fighting educator looked into the room beyond, where the babies and their grandmother were considerably spread over creation.

"Angela gone?" asked Mrs. Wing presently, in the midst of cooing.

"Yes," said Mary; and let it stand at that.

"Look how he cuddles in his granny's arm. I had to change his little socks again. She was very strange with them, Mary, didn't you think so?"

"Strange?--how do you mean?"

"Why, she just didn't seem to care anything about them! Didn't you notice, she hardly looked at Paulie once! How could she help loving such little darlings? And she seems such a nice, womanly girl, too."

"Well, _all_ women aren't maternal, mother, don't you know that?"

"In my day," said Mrs. Wing imperturbably, "all good women loved babies."

But when Mary said where she was off to now, a shadow fell on her mother's calm face, and Mary saw it. However, Mrs. Wing said nothing, this time.

Though Donald had never carried out that hare-brained threat of his, as to "dropping a hint" to Mary, his voice could scarcely have been missed amid the general feminine chorus. Indeed, everybody who possessed so much as a hint to her name, in those days, seemed to be dropping it to Mary. How far she minded her public unpopularity Mary did not say, but her mother's unwavering disapprobation she unquestionably took to heart. "Good women don't make mistakes of that sort," said Mrs. Wing, and was shaken by no argument. And now, as Mary bent to kiss this wrinkled and well-loved cheek, she was thinking that never in the world before had there opened such a gulf between two generations; and she wondered why life must be so hard.

Later, Mrs. Wing sat for some time quite still, by her window, and her brooding look was not grandmotherly now, but motherly, which is different. For, of course, there was one person on earth to whom Mary could never seem truly the mature, advanced and dangerous young woman of Fights, Reforms and Careers. Through all her newnesses and strength, the mother's eyes yet held her as the tiny, helpless, clinging little scrap which she, a young girl then, had gone down to the gates of the world to bring in.

VII

The "line" of the new novel refused to come straight on the first attempt, or the second, and Charles had been compelled to leave his preliminary scenarios to ripen gradually in his head. In the intervals of intense plotting, he was tossing off short fictions; four such he had now tossed since the completion of "Bondwomen" had set him free. "Bondwomen" itself was in the hands of that discriminating house, Messrs. Blank and Finney, Judge Blenso having risen up early on the morning after the rejection to take it to the express office. Experience was now coming with a leap; but yesterday the first of Charles's new stories had been sent back by "Willcox's Monthly," with a mere printed form of refusal. This was the fiction about Dionysius, who, it may be remembered, had freed his eyes from the magic of sex and consequently cracked walnuts with a sort of splendid sadness.

Such episodes staggered belief; but, in a strange way, they seemed to fan the fires of genius unrecognized. Hence it was without joy that Charles confronted after supper this evening a memorandum he had lately left for himself in the place where he left memoranda. It was brief, containing but a single word,--_Bridge_; and, coming on it unexpectedly, the author spoke but a single word, though a different one. No more than Mary Wing, of course, did he have evenings to fling this way and that, in mere idle frivolity. Why did people have this mania for playing cards, going to places, calling, all the time? Why the mad rage for doing things?

As to this engagement, it seemed just to have developed along; the first he knew of it, you might say, the thing was settled and arranged. Still, it was admitted that from the young Home-Maker's point of view, it was all quite simple and natural and human. Charles, even in the first flush of author's revolt, really felt no bitterness.

Shutting his table drawer with a bang, he withdrew to the bedroom and began to assume one of those garments which first brought renown to Tuxedo Park.

Charles's acquaintance with Miss Angela had developed smoothly, without any unusual effort on his part. That they had a walk or something every day was not mathematically accurate; but he had seen the girl several times since the day of the call, when he got the book. The very next day, as it fell out, he had met the pretty cousin again on the promenade, at about the same time and place, and as she was out only for exercise, and had done her stint, she said, she very charmingly turned around with him. In no sense was it repellent to the authority thus to see, by pleasing signs, that the old-fashioned girl liked him, in the good old-fashioned way. At the same time, of course, he was, by deliberate choice, a fiction-writer, not a dancing-man; and his position about the bridge-party, as he saw it, was that he was doing a kindly deed, to give pleasure to a rather lonely young girl. Moreover, it should not occur again.

And when he set out on the brisk walk to the Flowers', he was not thinking of Angela at all, but of Angela's cousin, Mary. He understood that Mary was to be at the bridge-party--indeed, he understood that the party was being given principally in Mary's honor--and he was genuinely concerned as to what his manner toward that young woman now should be.

His perplexity dated from an episode two days earlier. On Tuesday afternoon he had met Mary Wing over by the High School, not entirely by chance, and had turned and walked with her. She was alone, for a wonder; but she had begun at once to talk of the unhappy Miss Trevenna, fairly bursting out as to the way she was being persecuted, and so forth. Miss Trevenna had "lost" two places already, it seemed. And Charles, seeing how much to heart Mary took the luckless girl's troubles, suddenly felt sorry for her--yes, he ventured to feel sorry for Mary Wing!--and did what he had positively resolved not to do. He, also, dropped a hint to Mary.

The memory of that unwisdom was with him yet, as an exasperation and a hurt.

It had profited him nothing that he approached the task, circumspectly, in his light, humorous vein. "Did you ever hear what Susan B. Anthony said when she had tried using bloomers for a year?" he had inquired, positively jovial. "Said she was convinced that one reform at a time was all that one person could manage!" But Mary Wing had said instantly, "You apply this to me," and right there had the trouble begun. "Aren't you crippling yourself needlessly?" he had amiably suggested. "Is it wise to feed the popular delusion that any sort of reformer is all sorts of an anarchist?" To which she replied, quite indignantly, "This isn't a question of _reform_ at all with me!--if you must have it explained to you." And when he asked her what she expected to accomplish exactly, she declared that in point of fact a great deal had been accomplished already; Miss Trevenna's father had seen her, for one thing, and it seemed but a matter of time before she would be forgiven and taken back. "But if nothing was accomplished in a thousand years," said Mary, "I'd still do exactly what I am doing!"

The worst of it was that one large disunited side of Charles stuck it out that Mary was doing exactly right: he knew, indeed, whatever she might say for argument, that all this was chiefly a matter of her sympathies, and she no more believed in this sort of Freedom than he did. Hence his counter-argument had not been up to his best standard, a mere urging of timid prudences, it seemed. And very soon she had swooped on his weakness, silencing him at a stroke:--

"I'll not drop an old friend just because it's _safer_! I'll not. Mr. Garrott, you disappoint me."

Now, no man on earth enjoys being told that he has disappointed a friend, least of all a woman friend, in a matter involving courage. Mr. Garrott held that word ungracious from Mary. And now, as he strode silently toward his evening of pleasure, he seemed to feel that there was, indeed, a kind of hardness in her, and, as to him, a certain air of assured superiority such as could not be further tolerated.

How, then, should he deport himself toward Mary now, seeing her again at the bridge-party? Through long blocks, Charles pondered the question. While leaning from the first toward a manner of brilliant tolerance, slightly aloof, indeed, yet splendidly witty, he really had not settled the point finally in his mind, when Miss Angela opened her front door for him, and said, almost in the first breath:--

"Oh, Mr. Garrott, what do you think? Cousin Mary and Mr. Manford both backed out! _I hope you don't mind playing three-hand!_"

Taken completely by surprise, the young man hardly repressed a bitter mirth.

But that, after all, was for his wasted evening only. And in a moment he was himself again, doing his deed of kindness, distributing pleasure among the young and lonesome.

He was not, indeed, he considered, one to think the less of a girl for being poor but hospitable, for desiring to "entertain," when, the too obvious fact was, she had nobody to entertain. The three-hand's party rather touched than repelled Charles; he criticized not Angela, but Mary Wing, who had stayed away. Moreover, the other guest turned out to be Fanny Warder, which suited him unexpectedly well. Grieved though he was by Fanny's broken beauty, she had become a Case to him now, one more exhibit in the growing gallery of Woman's Unrest.

And certainly, when it was all over, it never once occurred to Charles to think of this evening as a waste, exactly.

Into the mysteries of three-hand, as pursued in the Flower parlor that evening, it will do well not to follow. The play really was not the thing, as Angela had implied to her Cousin Mary, when speaking of Donald. Fanny Warder played a poor game; everybody said that. Of course, she had only come to help out, but still, one could not avoid observing how treacherous were her bids, or crying out upon her when she was discovered slumbering with the three highest hearts. A great deal of jumping up and changing seats there was, a great deal of discussion each time as to which one had better jump and change, constant demands of, "Whose bid is it?" and, "Who dealt these cards?" But there was much girlish laughter, too; merry prattle flowed unceasingly; "a good time was had."

And Angela's bridge-party had, as Charles viewed it, one sterling merit: it ended early. It is a point which, as is well known, rests entirely in the hands of the hostess, according to when she elects to bring on her refreshments; and when Angela rose soon after ten o'clock and tripped away alone to get "the party," as she called it, the author's whole opinion of her went up at a bound. He had known women, thus having you at their mercy, to keep you sitting around till midnight before ever mentioning "the party," and then sometimes those horrible jolly girls made you romp back to the pantry and help.

And when, after a considerable interval, Miss Angela returned, bearing her refreshments on a large tin tray, the young authority again took the large view, sympathetically seeing the general behind the particular. The refreshments consisted of lettuce and tomato salad, together with crackers, a little cheese, ice-water, and a small box of candy. Charles could not conceal from himself that the salad was poor, the dressing had "run," the crackers were without crackle, the candy cheap, the ice-water warm; but, in a subtle sort of way, all this made him feel not less, but more, friendly toward his simple young hostess. Not knowing that she could not make mayonnaise, or suspecting that her little brother had reluctantly stood treat to the candy, his fancy pictured the girl as preparing the modest spread for her (two) friends with her own hands and thought, her heart full of pleasant anticipations the while. And this seemed normal and human to Charles, and sweet enough, and just a little pathetic besides. Angela, gayly setting out her three plates, was again a type and a symbol. She was all the poor Nice Girls in the world, ten million poor Nice Girls scattered over the earth that night who, the day's justifying labors done, were trying to create a little joy for themselves and others, sweetly pursuing their great business of Supplying Beauty and Supplying Charm....

But while Angela was still in the rearward regions, making ready her tray, Charles engaged in a scientific talk with his old friend Fanny. It both interested and depressed him.

Mary's young sister had taken Harold Warder out of a field unusually large for these lean days. Harold had been in love with her from his knickerbocker days, and was considered to be "doing very well"; the match had been a most promising one. But ill-luck had pursued the young couple from the first, assuming the worst of all forms, unceasing doctor's bills. Fanny, beyond any counting, had had long illnesses following the births of both her children; and the expenses of the first one had swamped Warder, wiping out at once the rainy-day margin he had married on. That Mary Wing secretly sent money to Fanny, Charles was morally certain. But Fanny was well again now, and poverty and debt were wont to be the butts of young love. Why, then, was her pretty face drawn to a birdlike thinness; why this beaten look in eyes that were once so gay?

Tête-à-tête over the three-hand table, Mrs. Warder surprised Charles by saying that she wanted to go back to work; her husband, however, would not hear of such a thing. Charles, though a modern, said naturally not.

"I can earn a hundred a month," said Fanny, "and get a perfect nurse for twenty-five."

He explained the error in her utilitarianism. Intently shuffling the cards on the table, he pointed out the injustice of orphaning Paulie and Neddy-Weddy of their mother-love. Fanny's own mind seemed greatly unsettled. But she could be as straightforward as Mary with those she was fond of.

"Harold supposed," she said, presently, "that he was marrying a lively young person, one that he, at least, would find indefinitely entertaining. He discovers instead that he's got an ailing woman on his hands, one with no spirits or looks at all worth mentioning. Could you blame him if he woke up some day and said, 'I've been cheated?'"

And the Young Wife slowly added: "It'll be years before he gets his head above water again. And that's my doing, Charles,--I, who'd have cut off my right arm to help him the least bit."

Charles scolded her roundly for her morbidness. "Great heavens!--you must know _he_ could never think that way! Look how you have helped him! If your health went, you gave it to him--let him hold that to his heart! There's Paulie and the baby, that you brought him, more than compensating--"

But Mary's sister broke this argument with her old laugh.

"Don't tempt me, Charles! I'm all kinds of a hypocrite but that kind! Of course, I wanted children a great deal more than Harold, and they're my compensation--for everything--not his at all. You know all that perfectly well. No, no," said Fanny, lowering her voice as Angela's returning steps were heard. "If Harold ever tires of me, I'll go, you may be sure. He won't find me clamping on his shoulders, claiming to be taken care of for life because of my two little darlings...."

Charles had expected to walk home with Fanny, continuing the sad but interesting talk, but he was frustrated in that intention by the arrival of an escort of Fanny's own. This proved to be none other than Mr. Tilletts.

It developed that the seeking widower, who was known as a sort of public Former Suitor, had called on Fanny this evening, and, finding her about to go out, had begged the privilege of squiring her to and fro. Had Angela understood this in advance, how willingly would she have raised Three-Hand to a Table! But at least she could do her best now to remove from Mr. Tilletts's mind the idea that she was rude,--derived at the Redmantle Club, where she had made her unfortunate mistake,--and apparently she was successful, for Charles heard the plump seeker say, "May I call?" quite distinctly, as they moved into the hall.

The door shut on a chorus of good-nights.

The bridge-party was over; and it was only quarter of eleven. Charles turned toward the hat-rack and the Studio. And in turning, he surprised a look in his hostess's dark eyes, which seemed to say, in the most ingenuous way: "At last, a few minutes to ourselves!"

All evening, he had been aware of a subtly more personal note in Miss Angela's manner; a coyer and engagingly proprietary note, which he, with his known dispassionateness toward this sex, considered as intended for Fanny Warder's benefit. Charles had not been annoyed by this: few men repel the adoration of a pretty girl. And now this soft simple expectancy of hers, this girlish lingering over her somewhat pathetic party, seemed beyond his kind heart (as he would have put it) to disappoint. "You're not going!--it's so early!" she exclaimed, and coquetted prettily enough: "I'd think you were displeased with me--promising to have Cousin Mary for you, and then not doing it!... But you don't mind _very_ much, do you?"

Kindly Charles capitulated at once. "Pay my party-call right now--?" he threw out, gallant and yet thrifty withal. "If you're sure I'm not keeping you up...."

So these two reëntered Miss Angela's little parlor, with its sleeping-car shape and too prominent Latrobe heater: a room poor enough in itself, but having an institutional significance when considered as the Waiting Room of the Womanly Woman. Here they sat down, side by side, upon a dented sofa. And here, before a great while, there took place a somewhat strange occurrence.

There began an animated flow of girlish chatter.

"I haven't seen you on Washington Street for three days now, Mr. Garrott. I believe you're avoiding me! I met Mr. Manford this afternoon, and what do you think he said? That he couldn't play bridge as well as he could build them, and was afraid he'd be mobbed at a party! I don't think he _could_ play any worse than Fanny, do you? But Mr. Garrott, why does he want to go to _Wyoming_? I'd _lots_ rather go to New York, if I were a man! I asked him if that river out there he was going to dam was pretty, and he said he'd send me a picture post-card of it, when he went. But I suppose he'll forget all about it...."

Mr. Garrott, pleasantly relaxed, made suitable replies as need arose. In his scientific way, he was noting how fine and clear Miss Angela's skin was, what shining soft eyes she had, how soothing and sweet was her voice. Certainly this girl did not try to create the air that she was your manly superior, or address you like a Self-Made Man reproving his wife.

"Fanny's broken so dreadfully, hasn't she? She was so lovely and attractive as a girl. Tommy was crazy about her when she visited us in Mitchellton, a long time ago. He gave her the loveliest presents! But Tommy was always the most generous boy. They were getting up a drinking-fountain as a memorial to Major Beesom--he was postmaster for years and years, you know--and Tommy headed the list with twenty-five dollars, and he was only making forty a month! I just wish you could have known Major Beesom! I know you'd want to put him in a book. Mr. Garrott, I'm _so_ anxious to read some of your stories! What are your heroines like, generally?"

Out of which, she said presently, laughing and whisking her hand behind her back:--

"You were looking at my ring!"

"Why not?" said Mr. Garrott, starting a little. "A cat may look at a ring."

That was reasonable surely. Angela, after a few teasing pretenses, held up her modest gimcrack for him to see. And Charles, naturally, accepted the hand so presented.

As to what subsequently occurred, there was always a divided house within the many-sided Charles. But all his sides insisted that, at this point, he had no interest in the matter whatever; some held that he had not even seen the ring till she called attention to it. Now, bending over the hand, he examined it, and said:--

"Well! This is news to me, you know!"

"Not at all!" laughed the owner of the ring. "Why, what do you mean?"

"I've seen an engagement ring once before, you see."

"You're very clever! But--does it have to follow that I'm engaged?"

"That was the rule, in my day."

"You don't seem at all curious!"

"I'm very curious."

"Well, I'm not, of course!"

"I'm glad to hear it."

He made, as it were, a sort of sketch of a move to release the small hand at this point. However, nothing seemed to come of it.

"Are you?... Why?"

"Oh, because--it's rather sad for an old bystander like me to see all the nice young people going off two by two, for happiness and the great adventure."

To that, the girl made no reply. She merely gave a little laugh, and withdrew her hand. The house seemed very still. And Charles was at once aware that he had been found somehow deficient at the simple game of parlor conversation. In a scarcely definable way, he felt himself rebuked for timidity, wariness.

Nevertheless, in her simple, natural way, the girl made known that the ring was properly the possession of a man in Mitchellton--Charles recalled Mr. Jenney--and was now worn only by courtesy, reminiscently, as it were, with no obligations attached.

"You see, his brothers all went off, like all the other men, and his sister married and went away, and so he said he would stay in Mitchellton with his mother. And it's truly the most hopeless place! He doesn't seem to have any ambition at all--it provoked me so! I think all men ought to have ambition, don't you?"

"I do, indeed. And he owns that pretty ring, you say?"

"Yes. You see," she said, laughing and coloring, "when I felt I must break it off,--well, he wouldn't let it stay off exactly! I--I'm telling you all my secrets! He said he'd still consider himself--oh--you know!"

"Naturally. He had enough ambition for that."

And, as if to show Miss Angela that, in point of fact, none knew better than he how to talk to a girl on a sofa, Charles carelessly took up that betrothal hand again, saying: "So he made you keep the ring all the same?"

"The day we left Mitchellton. And I said I'd wear it--oh, just till I met somebody I liked better! It was really more of