It was March now, the mild March of an early spring. There came new days, zephyrous and sweet. All the world seemed to love a lover. But other matters were afoot in the world, too, necessarily: afoot even in the old coterie itself.
Charles Garrott, descending Miss Grace's steps on an afternoon that looked like April and felt like May, thought not of young Romance. What with the groom's absorption, and Mary Wing's unprecedented illness, the old principal friend had, indeed, heard little or nothing of the happy pair through these days. He had accepted the event, long since, once and for all, with fatalistic philosophy; and though the nuptials were now but six days distant, they were far from his mind in this moment, as, his hated tutor's stint done, he turned his long stride hurriedly toward Olive Street.
Charles, as we know, was not a caller. It was true that he had hardly seen Mary Wing since the day when she, the heroine of his write-ups, had so suddenly indicated herself as his larger heroine as well; true also that, in the engrossed and very fruitful solitude of the Studio succeeding, he had thought of her much, bookishly and otherwise. But these facts had not changed the essential nature of Charles. Still he was not a caller; still when he rang people's door-bells, it was morally certain that he had definite matters to urge upon their notice.
And so it was to-day. Charles, in a word, had conceived a new plan for helping Mary.
That she, the admirable, by way of reward for her smashing denial of the Ego, should find herself fixed for life as a grammar-school teacher, "demoted" and disgraced: this state of things had naturally seemed unendurable to Mary's good friend. That Mary did not need his help, that he recognized her now as competent, in the finest sense, to manage her own affairs henceforward, seemed to have little or nothing to do with the case. Hence, while she lay withdrawn from the battle of life with bronchitis, the helper had been elaborately at work on new lines: stalking School Board members for Mary, in fine, with great cunning. But this plan, unluckily, his fourth and most troublesome, had lately collapsed about his ears. It had cost the young man much valued time, and not a little money for lunches; and the net practical result of it had been to leave him angrily conscious of "influence," mysteriously pervasive, and by no means possessed by him. A friendly disposition toward Mary, personally, seemed to be everywhere joined to an unshakable conviction that she could not hope to get back to the High School before the fall, if then. Such was the fruit of five diplomatic conferences: the sixth had stopped Charles short. Young Dr. Hazen, who was almost as much Mary's representative on the School Board as Senff was Mysinger's, informed him that Mary herself had already canvassed over the Board with him, Hazen, and abandoned all hope in that quarter.
What, indeed, could he do for Mary Wing that she could not do better for herself?
The fifth plan concerned Public Opinion again, and a new use of the gift he had. It inspired less confidence in its author than any that had preceded it. And it was to submit it, in advance, for Mary's discussion and approval, that Charles now presented himself at the Wings' front door.
However, he met with a disappointment. Mary was out. She had gone to the Flowers' soon after luncheon—unexpectedly, it appeared—and, at half-past four, was not yet back. That seemed more or less surprising. Mrs. Wing, who had answered his ring, looked somewhat concerned, he thought. However, as it was agreed that Mary could not remain with Angela indefinitely, the caller decided, after brief hesitation,—for the Studio allured in these days as never before,—to wait for her.
So he came again into the sitting-room, and Mrs. Wing sat to keep him company. Naturally, there was but one subject for their conversation.
Charles liked Mrs. Wing. She always began every conversation with him by asking: "And how did you find your dear mother on your last visit?" Mary's mother had never seen his mother, and possibly never would, but (being a frightful sentimentalist) she assumed that all mothers are dear. It was next her habit to inquire whether Charles had written any stories lately, and why they never saw anything of his in the magazines. Such things tended to create a bond. And recently the tie had been strengthened by an unusually intimate talk on the subject of Mary, whose surrender of her great prize had, indeed, upset and distressed her mother even more than Charles had predicted.
To-day, again, Mrs. Wing appeared somewhat unlike her usual calm self. She omitted her inquiry about Charles's writing altogether (thus denying him his chance to mention the recent rather gratifying acceptance of Dionysius, no less), and the flattering things she kept saying of Angela had, to his ear, a faintly tentative ring, requiring his confirmation. But his first vague wonder, whether anything could have happened, was soon lost in other reactions. Thus, he had to wince a little in agreeing, once more, that Donald's future wife was a thoroughly "womanly girl." Few authorities enjoy denying the ripe sum of their own best thinking. But a later remark of Mrs. Wing's took a much deeper twist in his mind.
"Really," she said, slowly and dubiously, following a pause, "I have but one fault to find with Donald's choice, and that is—well, frankly, Angela seemed to care so little for Paulie and Neddy Warder.... And Donald was such a goose over them, dear boy."
As he did not see his way clear to replying to that, "I hope you're mistaken, ma'am," Charles merely smiled vaguely, and said nothing. But what he thought, on the delicate implication, was nothing about Angela at all—only that Donald had been rather less of a goose over Paulie and Neddy than Mary Wing had been....
Then the sitting-room clock ticked for a space, while Mrs. Wing communed with herself. And Charles, gazing out into the park, waiting for his friend, thought how it was that a young woman's work—even an extraordinary young woman like Mary—always subtly lacked just that ultimate touch of grim seriousness which justified the "fierce hackings away" of a man. For, as an abstract truth, there was positively no such thing as a Permanent Spinster: and women who were not spinsters, and normally desired Paulies and Neddies of their own, could not possibly fulfill their longings without serious complications to themselves, then and thenceforward. It was no human or escapable "tyranny" that had made Woman, to this degree, to her glory or her disaster, forever the victim of her sex: and, by the same token, fixed the final responsibility for the economic support of the family upon the shoulders of the predestined and uncompromised provider, Man....
Yes, then and thenceforward ... Could you, for example, imagine Mary Wing—who had had chances to marry before now, who might reasonably marry at any time—could you picture Mary packing off her three little darlings to a crèche every morning, that she might go and grow her soul at a desk somewhere? Maybe so; but he wondered....
He was thinking whether he could contrive to discuss the crèche and endowment arguments in his novel—for of course you could make a story carry just a certain amount of "solid stuff," and only dreary prigs of readers would lie still while you tried to feed them forcibly with a spoon—when all at once Mrs. Wing, near by, was heard to strike her hands together, with a little ejaculation.
"Oh, Mr. Garrott! I do believe Mary's at the High School all the time!"
That made the thoughtful visitor turn swiftly enough.
"At theHigh School?"
"It's so stupid of me!" she explained, with some relief, it seemed. "I've just remembered. You know, she never cleared her papers and things out of her office closet there, and it got on her mind when she was sick. And to-day, when she came in from school, she told me she had arranged with Mr. Geddie over the telephone—the man who has her office now—to go and attend to it this afternoon. Yes, that's it—I'm sure!"
"Oh!" said Charles, not a little perplexed. "And then, you mean—she decided to go to the Flowers' instead?"
"Well, to go there first—I suppose. Donald came in just as she finished lunch—to talk with her about something. Then, when he had gone, Mary told me she was going down to see Angela. It was all rather unexpected—and somehow the High School went out of my mind completely."
"But I hope nothing's happened?" he said quickly.
"Well—I don't know that there has."
Perplexity passed at once into the certainty that something had happened. The instant thought in the young man's mind was: What's Angela done now? Having risen, he gazed with direct inquiry at his elderly friend. But her eyes glanced away from him; and she put him off further by repeating: "It was stupid of me to keep you."
Mrs. Wing added that Mary was certainly at the High School now. Charles, turning disturbed away, remarked that perhaps he would still be in time to help with the office cleaning, and she said that was very kind of him.
"She'll be glad to see you, I know. Indeed, she has appreciated all you've done for her—those beautiful articles, for example—more than you quite realize, perhaps."
But the young man shook his head, and said with a kind of bitterness: "I've never done anything for her in my life."
And then, as he took the lady's hand to say good-bye, he asked abruptly: "But why shouldn't I know what's happened, Mrs. Wing?"
"Oh," said Mary's mother, and hesitated.
"Yes, why shouldn't you?" said she, and hesitated again.
"Well," she began again slowly, "it's nothing so serious, as I said,—just a fresh disappointment for Mary,—that is really all it amounts to with me. Very likely Donald has intimated to you that he was not going to Wyoming?"
The caller stared at her dumbfounded.
"Not going to Wyoming! Why!—why not?"
"Well, he feels, in his new circumstances," said Mrs. Wing, uneasily, "that it would be more suitable to accept the position in New York. But—I really had little opportunity to discuss it with Mary. She seemed—to be frank—much disturbed, she had so set her heart on this work in the West—"
"Moresuitable!... How?"
"Well, for one thing—it doesn't seem fair to separate Angela so far from her mother, as would have to be the case in Wyoming."
But into Charles's mind there had suddenly popped back a stray remark let fall by Donald, in the only talk he had had with him for weeks: "I tell you, Charlie, it's pretty rough on a girl to be dragged off to live in a shack nine miles from nowhere!" A mere passing observation, that he had paid no attention to at the time—but was that it? Was that the reason why another of Mary Wing's most cherished plans must suddenly cave in?
He stood utterly dismayed.
"So Mrs. Flower," he asked, with some want of composure, "is going to live with them in New York?"
"Oh, no,—not for the present, I believe. She feels, and so do I, that young couples should be left to themselves to make their start. But they will be so near that they can visit back and forth—which would be impossible if Donald—"
"But Mrs. Flower can't live here by herself?"
"Well, no," said Mrs. Wing, and fussed with books on the table. "That has been the great problem, of course. Dr. Flower's death has complicated the situation sadly. I believe the present plan is for Wallace—the boy, you know—to come back and live with her—just for the next few months, while Donald and Angela are finding themselves."
Charles stood without a word. But perhaps his look betrayed what he felt, for Mrs. Wing threw out her hands with a helpless gesture, and cried: "Well, he is the man of the family now!"
"However," she added, turning away, "perhaps Mary will be able to hit upon some other arrangement. That is what she went there for—to talk the whole situation over with Angela."
But Charles, who had always thought of Angela as "soft" and Mary as "hard," seemed somehow quite certain that that talk had accomplished nothing. With brief speech, he moved toward the door. Doubtless struck with the fixed gravity of his look, Mary's mother, who had been an old-fashioned girl herself once, said with an effort, and yet firmly too:—
"It is life itself that is hard. Marriage means—readjustment. That is the only comment to make."
It was precisely the point on which the silent young man did not agree with her. To him, as to her, all the sharp force of this tidings was, indeed, in Mary's new overthrow. And yet for the moment there seemed to be room in him for nothing else but comments on the vast void in Mary's so different cousin.
Angela was wanting in the responsible qualities of a full-grown human being. Her fatal lack was in human worth. It was the sum of all he had thought about her since the day he had called upon her poor father. It was the cap and climax of all he meant to say about her in his New Novel.
So Charles took his leave with an abstracted face.
In the drawer of the Studio table, there was growing now, night by night, a fresh stack of manuscript, steady and firm upon a new Line. Mary Wing had straightened out this Line for Charles: Mary who had taught him once and for all that a woman could be finely independent, and still uphold the interdependence which held the world together. Yet Mary, the admirable, was after all but his "contrast" and his foil: it was for the peculiarities of her opposite that he had finally whetted his pencil. And, in the intense and retrospective thinking which went along with the best writing he had ever yet done, the young man considered that he had got to the bottom of Angela's case, and her sisters', quite thoroughly explored the souls of the Waiting Women of Romance.
But this news of her, these final touches as to the Nice Girl's brother and her future husband, seemed to fling at him, as it were, a last conclusive chapter for his "Notes on Women." That marriage meant readjustments he, the authority, doubtless understood as well as another. That this marriage might make it necessary for Wallie Flower to be readjusted out of his education: even that was allowed as conceivable. But that the very first act of Angela's new life should be to influence her husband in the direction of his weakness, and, as it seemed, of her own good comfort—what was this, indeed, but a brilliant certification of all the grounds of his own attack?...
The author's face, the author's swift feet, were set toward the High School. His errand—now—was to cheer up Mary Wing. "Make her look on the bright side": so her mother had urged at parting. That necessity remained as a soreness and dull anger through all the young man's consciousness. And yet, in nearly a mile's walk, he hardly thought of Mary once.
He was surveying, as if from a new peak, the unhappy situation of Home-Makers with their Homes yet to seek: the considerable army of the involuntary spinsters of leisure. And more than ever now, perhaps, he saw these sisters as a Type, pathetically marked: the innocent creatures, the helpless victims, of a dying ideal of themselves.
Here was poor little Angela, his Novel's case in point. She was born a human being, she was born a being with sex. And in twenty-six years' contact with the rich and human world, she had gathered nothing to her sum beyond what tended to enhance her sex's attraction. So selecting, she had permanently lost the fullness of her double birthright: all in nice, unconscious and inevitable response to an environment which continually assured her that being a woman was enough.
If life had been real and bright and turbulent around her, and she sat within and polished her pink nails, it was because she was a woman. If she was given no education beyond the demands of provincial parlor-talk, no training for her hands, no occupation for her head, if no one ever thought of her as a full-statured being who must pay her way in substantial coin; this, again, was because she was a woman, and a woman (if any one bothered with argument at all) some day might—or might not—be the mother of children. Surely it had not been Angela's fault if she was early apprised, though through a sweet mist, that she had but one faculty of any value in the world's market; not her fault if, amid general approval, she innocently spent her youth and idleness in tricking out her value, and bringing it steadily to the attention of the only beings who could have a use for it. Least of all was it her fault if her peculiar business, and her odd specialized training, were bounded, not by marriage, but only by a wedding-day. For the final unnaturalness, the crowning wrong in her situation was exactly this: that, being told that she must be a wife or nothing, she was coincidently told that being a wife was a matter which a nice girl did well to know nothing about....
The author, sharpening his phrases, walked in angry abstraction. He passed old acquaintances as if he had never seen them before....
Oh, it was true (he conceded), a thousand times true, that many women of this crude bringing-up did develop, when their time came, a splendid competence over all their special field. But it was a little too much to assume that every creature in the female form could be counted on to perform such a feat of pure character. And Romance, which gallantly or indifferently made these exact assumptions, defending and cherishing the queer but comfortable orientalization with the cloak of false "womanliness," scarcely pretended to believe its own agreeable fictions.
Here was Angela again, his little case in point. Angela was reasonably good-looking, adopted a flattering attitude toward eligible young men, knew her place, and kept no opinions on matters of interest to her betters; hence she was called a "womanly" woman. Being womanly implied the possession of certain home-making virtues, present and to come; hence it was assumed, and she inevitably and naïvely assumed, that she possessed these virtues. Odd as these deductions sounded, he himself, he could not deny, had swallowed them once,—that night at the Redmantle Club,—romantically accepting the appearance for the reality, willfully investing the humdrum commonplace with the full beauties of the ideal. But for him, at least, all obstinate optimisms concerning La Femme had exploded with a bang in a party-call. You did not gather figs of thistles. And now it was no longer conceivable to him that she who in quarter of a century had developed no human interests, tastes, resources at all, who seemed to lack even an average interest in Paulie and Neddy Warder, should all at once blossom marvelously into the responsible and "justified" matron. No, for him, Angela at forty, having "let herself go" now that nothing more was expected of her, sat forever in a room that she had not swept, plaintively reminding a fatigued Donald of the priceless gift of her Self.
And Donald, though his interest in exploring the creature once so elaborately mysteried was long since utterly exhausted, would probably take that argument amiss no more than Dr. Flower had done. Romantic males, with their poor opinion of the worth of a woman, might hope for true domesticity, true maternity: but in their hearts they had thought all along, with a wink, that "possession" was enough. It was "what a woman was for."
But in that they were mistaken. Possession was not enough. Being a female was not enough. Great heavens!—thought Charles Garrott, and muttered as he strode.... What a shame, what a staggering waste of rich human potentiality, to classify and file away one half the world as only "marital rights!"
Wasn't it about time to stop all this? Wasn't it time for modern writers to pull away the rosy veils and let the Angelas meet themselves—while they could still do something about it? Didn't it lay up needless future misery to go on deceiving helpless women into putting a preposterous overvaluation upon the mere possession of their sex? Lastly, and above all, wasn't it a colossal libel on all womanhood to accept the strut and mannerism born of this deception as the true essentials of "womanliness"?
Womanly!...Why, womanliness was a prime human quality, integrally necessary to the work of the world—a great positive quality, not a little passive one, productive, not sterile, of the spirit, not of the body. Womanliness was the mother and guardian of great social virtues: of a finer and deeper emotion, of more sensitive perceptions, of a subtler intuition of the sources of life, of an all-mothering sympathy, a more embracing tenderness. Womanliness had no more to do with the light bright plumage of the mating-season than a waxed mustache had to do with being a soldier.
There was a time, he understood well, when the fact of womanhood had implied substantialities: when being a wife meant also being a domestic factory superintendent, not to mention being a continuous mother. That time was gone forever. You might argue for the passing, you might argue against it: meanwhile it had happened. Inexorable economics had dried the heart from the old tradition; and in the sudden vacuum thus created there moved and thrived anomalous little creatures who never knew that they had lost all touch with reality. Untroubled by a rumor of change, Angela held contentedly to the remnant, a low ideal of herself. But it was not so with her finer sisters. For the passing of the old womanliness of four walls and dependence had flung a window wide to a nobler prospect and a vaster horizon. And already the woman of to-morrow was rising in her lusty strength to prove her fundamental racial virtue, her womanliness, upon nothing less than the world.
Well, hadn't he told Mary long ago that the object of all this was only to make women more like themselves? In that, he would stake his life, he had been exactly right.
A concrete High School smote across the vision of the seer, and the cloud-stepper's feet trod but the hard sidewalk again.
Groping for truth upon his favorite subject, he had been briefly lost to the issues of the practical: he had a power of concentration, as he would have been the first to admit. But the flight of his rhetoric was, after all, only an incident of his indignation and distress; which sentiments, he knew all the time, yet had to be faced on their own account. And now, as he rounded his last corner, and his destination rose abruptly before him, Charles recalled for what he had been walking so fast and far.
Or, no ... What was he coming for exactly?
It was all very fine and easy, as a writer, to polish up demolishing phrases for poor little Angela. But what did he, as a man and a friend, have to do for Mary Wing?
The helper crossed the street in the lingering vernal sunshine. Here was the great building where Mary had once held an important place, where she came to-day, by special permission only, to remove the last traces of that association. Now that plan with which he had set out to-day looked back at the young man with rather a small face, and wry. He had never thought much of the plan: only to persuade Mary to let him make public the facts about her rejected honor from the Education League—legitimate news for the papers, fine peg for a new publicity campaign, etc. But all at once he knew that he wasn't even going to mention this to Mary now. With what words, then, did he rush to her in her fresh disaster? Doubtless to say, "I'm awfully sorry." A stirring exploit. Hadn't she shown him on that other day that she, the strong, had no desire for his fruitless sympathies?
The truth was, and he had known it from the beginning, he rather shrank from seeing Mary at all now, in the stress of this final defeat. Final, yes: for while Angela was attaining success to the full limit of her small conceptions, every aspiration that Mary had cherished, literally, had one by one gone down. And if this last was not the worst, perhaps, neither was it the easiest to bear. No, if anything on earth was calculated to harden and embitter a woman who could not easily yield, surely it must be her own so easy overthrow by pink cheeks and soft, empty eyes.
And these white-stone steps Charles now ascended had for him a reminiscent power, by no means comforting. The last time he had trod these steps, he had sworn, in anger, that he, single-handed, would force the School Board to bring Mary Wing back here, without delay. Mary would have a right to smile, if she ever heard of that. She had been thrown out of this building only because she was a woman: under all the argument, that was positively the reason. And now three months had passed, and he, her helper, came to say, "Well, I'm very sorry...."
Charles pushed through the tall bronze doors of the High School, where he had seen Miss Trevenna one day, strode long-faced into the dim spaces of the entrance hall. It was five o'clock: the whole building seemed silent and empty. A rare sense of impotence within him, troubled also by a secret shrinking, the young man went stalking across the corridor toward the stairways. But just here he encountered a brief diversion.
A glazed door at his left, at which he happened to be looking, came suddenly open. The door was marked, in neat gold letters,PRINCIPAL'S OFFICE. And reasonably enough, the jaunty figure that came stepping out proved to be none other than the principal himself.
Always a hard but uncomplaining worker, Mr. Mysinger was evidently just leaving for the day. Light overcoat on his arm, stick and gloves in his hand, he whistled blithely to himself, to the tune of labor done. But at the sight of Charles Garrott here on his domain, he checked his gay air, stood still in his official door.
Over half the corridor, the two men gazed at each other. And Mr. Mysinger's specious face, after the first surprised stare, assumed the smile of amity and pleasure.
"Ah, Garrott! Well met!"
Charles had halted, too, without premeditation. The chance meeting here was natural enough. All that gave it the force of coincidence was that he had in that instant been thinking, not for the first time, of Mary Wing's old saying of this man: "If he let either Board know that he wanted me back, it would be done to-morrow...."
"I've wanted to see you for some time," said Mr. Mysinger, smiling and easy—"about a certain matter of common interest—"
On the great stairway the sound of descending feet was heard, those of a belated teacher, doubtless. But neither man looked to see. And within the sedentary Charles there was slowly spreading a vast iciness, akin to a bodily nausea.
"Can't you step into the office half a minute?"
"Certainly."
Mary's former principal stood aside from his door, bowing, with elaborate welcome. Charles, advancing, passed through it, passed through the anteroom, stepped silent into an office large as a magnate's. Here he stood, just inside the door. Mysinger, following with his faint swagger, went by him toward his handsome flat desk.
"Have a cigar?"
"Thanks, no."
The good-looking principal leaned against his desk, facing his visitor with the same air of too good-humored assurance.
"Garrott, let's be frank," said he. "You feel that I am hostile to one of your friends, and stand in the way of her advancement in the schools. You are really mistaken in that. So far as my personal opinions might carry weight, I am anxious for her—for all the teachers—to go forward just as fast as their abilities would justify. But as you know, Garrott, the Board and the Superintendent settle all these matters, and I myself am only one of the teachers under their direction."
He paused encouragingly. But the young man at the door only continued to look at him with the same lidless fixedness.
"At the same time," said the principal, a rather more resolute note tingeing his voice, "you appreciate as well as I that teachers can't be picked up and moved about like chessmen. We must have some—permanence—some constancy—to insure efficiency. And frankly, my personal judgment—after fifteen years' experience, and considering the brilliant work of Johnson Geddie—is that you could hardly hope to see your friend promoted—well, immediately."
"So you would advise—?"
Mysinger's eyelid seemed to flutter a little: he really did have a purpose, it seemed.
"I am told—ahem!—that your friend has recently received a most flattering offer—from elsewhere?"
How had he known this? "Well?"
"Well, the party in question," said he, with his set smile, "seems to have a certain prejudice against me. She refuses to speak to me, in fact,—why, I cannot imagine. All the same, I am, and always have been, her sincere well-wisher. And after earnest thought, I honestly feel sure that her friends would make no mistake if they urged her not to let slip this—ahem—well-deserved promotion. I thought," he added, his gaze a threat now, "I'd better bring the point to your attention."
Charles's fixed eyes did not waver. But before them there unrolled a thin gray mist, briefly shutting the principal from his sight. The mist queerly turned red, and became shot with fiery sparks. Then all cleared; and, behind him, the young man's hand felt for, and touched, the open door. Gently, moving only his arm, he shut it. And it seemed to him that he must be turning white inside.
"You," said he, "are more used to insulting women than I am."
Mysinger flung up a deprecating hand. "Tut, tut, my dear sir! Talk of that sort does no good whatever, I assure you. You would do well to look at the matter in a sensible way, and believe that I speak—Here! What're you doing there?"
The principal had suddenly heard a strange sound: the click of his own key in his own lock, in fine. At the same time, his visitor was observed to be regarding him with a new and peculiar intentness, arresting and significant. And his only reply to his host's indignant inquiry was to drop the key in question in his coat-pocket.
Now Mary's old conqueror, and his own, had straightened from that lounging swagger. His voice rang more angrily: "You—! What do you think you're up to, anyway—?"
"I think I'm going to beat you to a pulp," said the author,—"you puppy!"
And he started forward with a kind of bound, like one who goes to fill, at last, a long-felt need.
Mary Wing was considered a reliable person. When she announced that she would clean out an office closet on a certain day, you could make your plans on the thing's being done. And to-day—if her usual principles might have weakened a little—Mary was further bound by the definite engagement she had made. As Charles had reflected, a demoted grammar-school teacher could not walk in and out of a principal's office like one who had some rights there.
Mary had not remained at the Flowers' interminably, after all. She had entered the High School before Charles Garrott had arrived at Olive Street, and had been upstairs for half an hour, when Charles, following on to help her, strode through the great bronze doors. Nevertheless, she was a full hour behind the time mentioned to Mr. Johnson Geddie over the telephone, and this increased her hope that her only too obliging successor would not be found waiting for her. However, Mr. Geddie was found waiting for her; very much so, in fact. Nothing could have exceeded the exuberance of his courtesy, and nothing could have been less welcome.
The new assistant principal was a plump, white person, in whose face a reddish mustache and gold-rimmed spectacles—his own personal addenda, as it were—were the only salient features. Not brilliant, he was rising by character, evinced in an unconquerable optimism. "Keep a-smiling, brother—it costs you nothing!"—so Mr. Geddie's roguish eyes seemed continually to say. But perhaps they seemed to say it more than normally to-day, by way of striking a happy average with the quite unsmiling late incumbent.
Mary, during her brief tenancy, had stored here a long accumulation of printed matter, chiefly duplicate files of "The New School," with sundry assorted leaflets of the Education Reform League. Her task to-day was to go through these files, destroy what was no longer useful to her, and pack the rest for removal. Her successor had thoroughly prepared for her. There on the floor was the packing-case, there on the floor was a table to sit at, there against the wall stood a stepladder. But Mr. Geddie would not weary in well-doing. The moment he understood what the proposition was, as he termed it, he said that, of course, he would help Miss Wing. Refusals drowned in a sea of smiles. Allow Miss Wing to climb that rickety ladder, and lift down those heavy stacks of magazines? Positively, she must not ask him that. Trouble? A pleasure, Miss Wing; a genu-wine pleasure.
He had his way, as people of strong sunny character always do. Mary, having overcome the impulse to make an excuse and abandon the enterprise, sat at the little table. Kind Mr. Geddie went up and down the ladder, fetching her dusty armfuls to sort over. In the intervals, for he had the shorter end of the job, he was down on his knees beside her, brightly stacking discarded "New Schools" into piles against the wall.
The work went forward steadily, on the woman's part almost in silence. That, however, made no difference. It was the man's power to be able to talk more than enough for two, and he did. As the old assistant principal grew steadily more quiet, the new one seemed increasingly buoyant. And it seemed to Mary that she had been listening to his conversation for a long, long time, at the moment when she heard him suddenly exclaim, from the ladder:—
"Well, well! Look who's here! Come for the spring-cleaning, Mr. Garrott? Ha, ha!"
She, in her inner absorption, had failed to hear the approaching feet. But at that she raised her head, with a kind of jerk.
"Don't mind the dust, Mr. Garrott—it eats all right! Ha, ha! Walk in!"
Mr. Garrott stood silent in the office door, looking at Miss Wing. The eyes of the old friends briefly met. Something in the young man's appearance vaguely arrested Mary Wing. She had noted, as her glance lifted, the torn glove on his right hand. Now she was remotely aware that the face looking back at her so intently appeared somehow subtly changed: there was something faintly wrong with it, it seemed. But such details Mary's consciousness hardly registered at all. All in one flash, she wondered how he happened to be here, thought how good it was of him to come, and knew that she had never been less glad to see anybody in her life.
"Good-afternoon," said she.
"How'do, Miss Mary?" said Charles; and then started forward. "How are you, Mr. Geddie? I seem to be rather late to help with the good work."
"Yes, sirree!—Can't come in at the eleventh hour and take our credit away! Can he, Miss Wing?—ha, ha! All over but the applause!"
However, Mr. Geddie did not know himself for a tactful man for nothing. Observing that Miss Wing continued to drop magazines on the floor in silence, and that her young man there didn't seem to know what to do with himself, he gracefully adopted a new position. From the third round of the ladder, he made a roguish address, the meat of which was that there was a whole corner left of the bottom shelf, and if Mr. Garrott insisted, etc.
"I'll relieve you with pleasure," said Charles, coldly.
So Mr. Geddie lumbered down from the ladder, wiped his hands on his pocket-handkerchief and re-attached his cuffs. He implored Miss Wing to make herself absolutely at home in his office, assured her, not once but three times, that John the porter, on the floor below, would be positively gratified to do any service for her, however small. In the moment of parting, he volunteered a new civility.
"Why, here, Mr. Garrott!" he hastily exclaimed, "your coat's all dusty in the back! That won't do! Just a minute while I get my whisk—"
But Miss Wing's young man interrupted him rudely.
"No, I'm not dusty at all! Thanks—don't trouble."
Another person who didn't know the value of a smile, clearly. And the manwasdusty, of course. Well, no affair of his, of course. Mr. Geddie kept a-smiling.
"Well, good people!" said he. "Olive oil!"
When he had got a polite distance down the hall, Miss Wing's young man shut the office door upon him. So at last came privacy. For the first time, since the unforgotten afternoon last month, Charles Garrott stood alone with his admirable heroine.
He moved toward her, deliberating.
Downstairs there, he had been having five of the most engrossing, the most completely satisfying, minutes of his life. Being able to come upstairs at all, he had come in the spiritual state of his stimulating experience. Over all that was unsettled and unhappy, there persisted in him a fierce young elation. By the oddest luck, he was not here empty-handed, after all: he came with something rather better than a hope to give. And doubtless—since he was incurably a sentence-maker—there had already come into his head discreet phrases with which to communicate the hope, at least: phrases which, though gallantly suppressing his own exploits, might yet be somewhat tinged with a protector's strength.
But all this dropped from Charles's mind in the instant when Mary raised her head over the table, and looked at him.
He had seen his friend for a few minutes on Friday, her first day up and about. But that passing glimpse, it seemed, could hardly have counted. For now her gaze had an unexpected power for him: the sight of her came on him with a sort of impact, as if this were some one he had heard about often, but never before seen. Undoubtedly, that small phenomenon was due to the amount he had been thinking about her of late, behind her back, as it were. But beyond all this, the particular look of Mary's face had made him instantly certain that, whatever she had gone to struggle with Angela about to-day, she had, indeed, been routed. And that he had not miscalculated the effect of this upon her, he was also certain from the first sound of her voice....
Mary did not look up as her helper advanced, or cease the work of her hands. But it was she who spoke first:—
"How did you happen to come here?"
"I've been to your house. Your mother told me you were here."
She said, with a curious stilted politeness: "It was very good of you to come. But really you must not wait for me, please. I have a good deal more to do—a great deal more—and it is work of a sort that I have to do alone."
"Miss Mary," said Charles, "your mother told me, at my request, what has happened this afternoon."
Mary flinched, just perceptibly. But her voice, when she spoke, seemed harder than before.
"Well, it's the fact. That's all there is to say. There isn't anything more to discuss."
"I don't mean to discuss it, of course. There was just one thing I thought of—a—sort of suggestion."
Finding himself neither questioned nor forbidden, he continued: "Do you think it would be such a bad way out of the—the difficulty, if Donald were just to go on here for a while?"
Still Mary waited, hardly encouraging him, examining a "New School," silently laying it down in the packing-case at her feet.
"I know you feel," said Charles, inspecting the top of her hat, "that settling down to this consulting work, in a city that offers so many distractions all the time, won't be a good thing for Donald—from any point of view. Staying here won't take the place of the chance with Gebhardt he's throwing away, of course—that's pretty serious. Still, there ought to be plenty of good work for him to do here—isn't there?—for a few months, a year or two, if necessary. That would give him—and you—a little time to adjust things to—the new conditions. And then from the point of view of the Flowers, too,—of Mrs. Flower, in fact,—it occurred to me it mightn't be a bad sort of working compromise.... What do you think?"
"I think it is very sensible," she replied, with the same labored courtesy. "It is what I suggested, too."
"Oh," said Charles, and paused. "But Donald didn't want to give up Blake & Steinert, I suppose?"
"I haven't suggested it to Donald."
That brought a considerable silence.
"It's—settled, then?"
"It was settled last week."
A curious let-down feeling took possession of the young man. He pressed his hand to his forehead; and then for the first time was aware that his head ached furiously. In the same moment, his eye was unpleasantly caught by his burst-out gloves. Having stared at his hands for a second, he silently stripped off the gloves, balled them, and pitched the ball into a waste-basket near by.
"I'll just have a look into this closet for myself," said he, turning away. "I don't believe Geddie—"
"No!—please don't!—don't trouble! I really don't need any help, thank you. I don't ..."
Her wish to be alone was all but woundingly plain to him. And still it seemed to Charles physically impossible to turn now and walk out of the door. So, not looking at her, he answered in a peculiarly mild manner that, of course, this wasn't help at all, only a little indulgence of himself, which she really mustn't refuse him. And while he yet spoke, allowing no opportunity for such refusal, he hung his hat on Mr. Geddie's hook, and all the forepart of him disappeared upward into the closet.
After an interval rather longer than necessary, he re-emerged to view, a few periodicals in one hand, a faded bundle of typewritten papers in the other.
"Geddie's made a clean sweep. There's hardly another armful."
His manner was almost as cheery as Geddie's own. His "note" was to go ahead as if nothing had happened.
"Put them here?" asked Charles.
Mary Wing's arms quivered a little on the table.
"Put themanywhere! It doesn't make theleastdifference!"
So Charles laid his burden down on the table, and quietly went up the ladder again. Here, for a space, he pretended to be impossibly busy over nearly empty shelves.
And then, out of the silence behind him, he heard his friend's voice, painfully stiff, somewhat strained.
"You see—you oughtn't to have come to see me to-day. I—I'm not fit for society. I tried to warn you. I haven't had time—to get philosophical yet."
The helper spoke into the dusty closet: "Well, you don't need to get philosophical with me. I'm pretty mad myself—as far as that goes."
"I wasn't prepared for it—at all.... And then I've been beating my head against it—like a fool—all afternoon."
Well he knew Mary's horror of weakness, her warranted confidence in her own self-control. Well he understood her regret for that uniquely sharp speech of hers. Was it this, a novel impulse to justify herself in his eyes, that seemed to force her on, beyond his expectation and against her own will?
"But don't suppose I went there expecting to have my own way about everything—manage them around like children. I didn't. I went respectfully. I went to beg. But it was no use."
Silence: and then the hard voice went on rapidly:—
"She and Donald had talked it all over, and decided that it would be best for his career to go to New York. She and Donald ... Ididthink that, as I was planning Donald's work when she was still in short dresses, my opinion might have some weight with her. And I thought, just as you did, that something might be saved if they stayed here for the present—kept the house and all the rest of it. And then, of course, I lost my temper—that makes twice.... I reminded her how she had told me once that nothing could induceherto leave her mother, as a widow.... What was the use? Of course she only cried, and said it was hopeless to try to explain to me—how differently a woman felt about all these things when she was going to be married. I believe she said I was incapable of understanding the new emotions that came with a great love."
That, indeed, seemed a romantic description of the mild, chance product of the Fordette. However, the replete young authority only said:—
"Then I suppose it's great love that taught her engineering so quickly—and all Donald's little peculiarities?"
Mary Wing made no answer. Her capable small hands took up the literature lately provided by Charles. And when she spoke, it was as if his unaccustomed acrimony had met and destroyed her own.
"Oh, it's natural that we should see everything differently. She is really a sweet-natured girl. I'm sorry already for what I said to her.... And her not wanting to stay here—you mustn't think that's just a selfish whim—just wanting to live in New York. Of course, what she wants is to have Donald to herself—to have their young married life to themselves. And my going there to give advice to-day—naturally that made her more certain than ever that she could never have that here—with me just around the corner. She let me understand that, finally. She intimated that Donald had said as much—he was tired of being managed.... Oh, it's perfectly natural, perfectly right. To-morrow, I'll accept it easily enough.... As I say—I haven't had much time."
He was more touched by that speech than everything that had gone before, yet more resolved, too, not to say, "I'm sorry."
"As a matter of fact," he asked straightforwardly, "whatwasdecided—as to Mrs. Flower?"
"It's not decided yet, at all. However, I have a plan—another suggestion—which it seems to me might meet some of the difficulties."
"Aren't there friends or relatives here that she might stay with for a time?"
"That's it. I think I can persuade her to live with us—till we have a chance to see how all this—"
"Withyou?"
"It's just a hope, as I say. I didn't think of it till just now. Mother is very fond of her. And Wallie can't give up college, of course. That would be—quite the worst thing."
The school-teacher spoke with characteristic matter-of-factness. If she was adding final touches to the portraits of two women, she did it, certainly, with supreme unconsciousness. In the brief stillness of the office, she efficiently neared the end of her task. The top of her table was almost bare, the litter on the floor was deep. And now she spoke again, dryly and quite conclusively.
"At any rate, nothing fatal has happened. Nobody knows that better than I do—really. No doubt it's personal vanity with me, as much as anything. And now—"
"Do you know," Charles Garrott spoke up suddenly, as if he did not hear her at all—"I think you're the best I ever knew? The best—thebest—absolutely the most of a person—"
She, the strong, seemed to start and shrink; she broke in sharply, with instant signs of a shaken poise: "No—please! You don't understand me at all. I do—not need sympathy! It's just what I've been trying to say—"
"Well, you aren't getting it from me, no fear. Sympathy! If ever there was honest looking up, if ever—"
"No!—don't! I didn't tell you about it for that!—only to explain why I seemed so ... It was due you. As I say, nobody understands better than I how unreasonable it is—to be so disturbed. And if you hadn't come here to-day—"
"Won't you give me credit for some understanding? If you were ten times as disturbed, I'd think it the reasonablest—"
"Yes—for a woman. Well, I'm not that kind of woman," said Mary Wing, with curious agitation, as if she could stand any sort of talk better than this. "Please don't say any more. I don't tell my troubles to be comforted—patted on the head. I'm not feminine, I hope, after all these knocks. You make me—"
"Thank God,no!" said the young man on the ladder, considerably moved.
And then that connection which he must have been groping toward for a month flashed startlingly upon him, and he, the authority, blurted out like a boy:—
"No—you're womanly!"
He saw his old friend's face quiver a little as the strange word struck her: oddly, it seemed to silence her. But it was not possible that she could be one half so struck with that word as he, Charles Garrott, was.Mary Wing was a Womanly Woman.... And now she could no more have stopped his speech than she could have stopped a river when the one gate in the dam, long locked, has suddenly burst open.
"That's it. Of course.... Funny, I was just thinking over all that as I walked around here—how different those things are. No, not different—they don't belong in the same story at all. What's character got to do with—feathers in the springtime?... Born stupid," said Charles, in a low, stirred voice—"that seems to explain me. I'd better have been one-eyed—beat me over the head with it, and still I can't see.... Won't see. That's it!—it's worse. I'm just an old-line male—that's what. Just the sort who've taught women not to bother to try to be womanly when being feminine comes so much cheaper. Why, look at me, criticizing you in my thoughts, not liking it because you were—independent. What was that but just pique—don't you know?—just common ordinary male jealousy—because a woman didn't need my shoulder to lean on. Manly protector ... seventeenth-century stuff. Well, you've punished me, don't you worry.... Just standing where you always stood, just being your Self. Acting straight from your own law all the time, doing the best sort of things, one after the other—the biggest, the—thetenderest—"
"Don't," said the grammar-school teacher again, but in the littlest voice he had ever heard from her lips.
Rapt as he was, that voice penetrated him. More, it alarmed him: and with reason, too. Staring down with a new fixedness, touched with a faint, purely masculine horror, Charles beheld the strangest sight seen by him in many a day. Mary Wing, the unconquerable, had suddenly put her face into her hands.
He had really only been finishing that other talk of theirs, with a certain sense of right; but of course this wasn't the time for that. He had been indulging his analytic propensity, his fatal tendency to comment, at her expense. Hadn't he understood that she feared nothing so much as his sympathies?...
His friend, in her arresting attitude, sat as rigid as a carven woman. The stillness in the little office was profound. Then a voice strained out, very thin, but still not defeated:—
"Don't be alarmed. I'm ... not going to cry."
And that seemed to settle it. It was as if, in that silent struggle waged all the way from the Flowers' to now, the speaking of the word itself was the fatal admission. The school-teacher had no sooner pronounced it than her arms spread suddenly out on the table before her, and her head came down upon them.
Charles Garrott, on his ladder, was heard to take one breath, sharply. After that, no sound came from him. Quite motionless he sat, in the chance position in which the sudden disaster had overtaken him: long arms dangling from his knees, large feet hooked under a ladder-rung, some distance down. He hardly winked an eye.
Mary Wing was crying. That painful hard tension had snapped; the indomitable slim figure drooped beaten, for once. She, also, made little sound in her peculiar difficulty. But her body shook with a stormy racking. And it hurt her, he was sure; hurt her physically, as if she couldn't find tears without breaking something inside....
Strange it seemed that once, in this very room, and only the other day really, he had wanted to see Mary cry. He had thought of it then as a desirable sort of symbol, hadn't he?—something of that sort. What did her tears have to tell him now? Then he had conceived himself as watching her emotion, moved doubtless, but yet with a secretly gratified masculinity. Now every heave of those slender shoulders was like a clutch upon his heart.
And still there was something in Charles that was not distress at all. He was aware of another and quite different inner sense—peace, the end of struggle, fulfillment—he could not say what it was. It was strange. He was not unhappy....
There came, after a time, signs that his friend was overcoming that hard revolt of feelings too much put upon. Even in the beginning she had never seemed to abandon herself, quite. At length, somewhat unexpectedly, she moved, turned from her seat under his eye, and, rising, went away to the office's one window. There she stood, her back toward him. And presently she began to clear her throat, with nervous quick coughings.
Through this, Charles had not spoken, or thought of doing so. To pat Mary's shoulder, this time, had not entered his head. His instinct seemed to feel the banality of any intrusion upon her freedom: she should weep or not weep, just as seemed best to her. Now, as his grave eyes followed her, it occurred to him that his presence here had been, and was, a considerable intrusion. And about the time he had reached this conclusion, Mary spoke, naturally enough, except that a sharp catch of breath broke her sentence in the middle.
"I'm giving you ... a pleasant visit to-day."
The young man stirred on his perch. He answered, oddly, with a sort of growl:—
"That's right! I'm a fair-weather friend. Keep things pleasant formeall the time—or good-bye."
His heroine was sniffing repeatedly, in the humanest way. She kept clearing her throat. Her movements made it clear that she was searching busily for her handkerchief. However, there lay her handkerchief on the table, under his eye. And if she, perhaps, hardly wished to turn and come for it just now, no more did he see his way clear to going and taking it to her.
"No—but what's the sense of it? I'm—doing just what I told Angela not to do. Feeling sorry for myself, that's all."
"Well, I don't feel sorry for you. Don't worry about that."
Charles came down the ladder, and stood a moment kicking at the "New Schools" strewn about the floor.
"Look here, suppose I save time by arranging about this box now? You want it to go to your house, I suppose?"
"No—I'm going to send it to the grammar-school."
"Oh—all right. I'll attend to it," he said, briefly. "I'll tell the porter to keep it to-night, and get a wagon to-morrow."
On which, without more ado, he stepped from the assistant principal's office, and shut the door behind him.
Charles's conference with the negro porter in the corridor below lasted a minute, perhaps. His diplomatic retirement lasted ten minutes, at least. His surplus time the young man spent in staring out of a tall window into a white-paved courtyard. But that it was a white-paved courtyard, or that it was a courtyard, he never knew. The instant he found that he was staring at it, he jumped a little, and went upstairs....
If he had meant this interval as a punctuation and the turning of a page, Mary, it seemed, had so accepted it. Reopening Mr. Geddie's door, Charles saw that his absence had been employed for a general setting to rights. The table had been moved back against the wall; the books and globe restored to it, the chair Mary had occupied returned to its place, the window opened to blow out the dust. Mary herself stood in the middle of the room, coated, buttoning her gloves. Without looking at her exactly, he was aware that the white veil which had been caught up around her hat was now let down.
Bygones were bygones, clearly: the least said, the soonest mended. Charles remarked, exactly as if house-cleaning were the sole interest he knew of here: "Well, you've made a good job of it."
And Mary replied, with equal naturalness: "I did what I could. John will have to attend to these things on the floor."
"Yes—I told him to see to that at once."
"He ought to give the closet a good cleaning, too. I'd better tell him—this is just the time."
"I told him to be sure to scrub the closet. It'll be all right."
Looking up, she said: "You seem to have thought of everything."
"Let me get my hat," said Charles.
But Mary, standing in his way, was regarding him with a sudden directness he had no wish to reciprocate. And she answered his remark about the hat with a little exclamation.
"What's the matter with your eye?"
"My eye?" said the young man, and involuntarily put his hand there. Recollecting, he finished: "Nothing—nothing at all."
The school-teacher came a step nearer, but he went round her as he spoke, and continued his way.
"But there's a good deal the matter with it!" she exclaimed, concerned. "It's swollen—it looks discolored, too.—How did you hurt yourself?"
"Oh, that? Oh!" said Charles, carefully fitting on his hat, and then removing it again. "I remember now—it's nothing. Got a tumble this afternoon, that's all. Stupid thing."
"You must let me get some hot water down the hall. I'm afraid it's—"
But he indicated, quite brusquely, that his eye was all right, just the way he liked it, that having water put on it was, in particular, the last thing he would ever dream of.
She said behind him, slowly, after a pause: "If you won't, you won't, of course.... But it's so exactly like you—"
"Ready?" said Charles.
But when he turned he found that Mary had turned, too, after him—stood facing him anew. And this time the confrontation was too near, too immediate, to be further avoided.
He now discovered that the thin veil had not withdrawn his friend very far. Looking at her for the first time since her cataclysm, he saw that her delicate face wore that look described as "rain-washed," which commonly means peace, but peace at a price. The redness of her eyelids was quite perceptible. What struck the young man particularly, however, was the look of the blue eyes themselves. More or less irrelevant eyes he had always thought them, for all the heavy arched brows which so emphasized their faculty for steady, sometimes disconcerting, interrogation. That characteristic grave intentness was in Mary's gaze now: but it was not this that gave her look its power to hold Charles Garrott in his tracks.
The peculiar commotion within him gave forth in a short laugh, testy and embarrassed: "Honestly, if you say the word 'eye' to me again—"
"I wasn't going to speak of your eye," said Mary Wing, with quite remarkable meekness.... "I was thinking of that remark you made—about being a fair-weather friend."
And then she went on hurriedly, with a rare, impulsiveness: "I've just been thinking—I don't suppose since the world began there was ever such another rainy-day friend as you. It's got so now that I never get into trouble without thinking right away—as I was thinking this afternoon when I left the Flowers'—that you'll be right there to help me with it. Yes, I was. And it's so—perfect. Nothing to spoil it ever—not one thing for you to gain—all just your rather extravagant idea of what being a friend means. You don't know—how much it means...."
The strange speech—strange blossom of her disruptive emotion—ended a little short; but that it ended was the principal thing. Doubtless there had been a time when words such as these from Mary Wing, this fine frank expression of abiding friendship, would have been sweet and acceptable to Charles Garrott, crowning him with a full reward. But it seemed that that time must have passed, somewhat abruptly....
The two moderns stood, gazing full at each other. And now, in the same moment, a little color tinged the girl's cheek, beneath her veil, and the young man turned rather pale.
"Miss Mary, you must be dreaming," said Charles, gently. "I've never done anything for you in my life. We both know that. Let's go."
Mary, her eyes falling, had resumed the buttoning of her gloves. She moved toward the door. The descent of the High School stairs was made in comparative silence. The chief item of importance developed was that Mary intended to go home by street-car; she was tired, she mentioned. It seemed that Charles, on the contrary, had no intention of foregoing his afternoon constitutional. He said that he would see Miss Mary to her car, however; and he did.
So the old friends parted casually on a street corner, as they had done a hundred times before.
But in the Studio, there could be no such reserve, no such slurring of the characteristic services of men. Here combat must have its fair due, in the moral order of a too sedentary world. Judge Blenso, in brief, from whom no secrets were hid, had the full facts relative to the altered eye within ten minutes of Charles's homecoming, an hour later; and the Judge's cold manner, already somewhat softened by the heartening acceptance of Entry 3, straightway dissolved in exultation and proud joy. The reconciliation between uncle and nephew was instantaneous and immutable, and there followed, by consequence, the most broken, the most conversational, evening in the history of the Studio.
Charles was very glad to be reconciled with his relative. He was very glad to feel that his secretary no longer viewed him with bald disgust. Nevertheless, there were times, necessarily, when a writer wished that he had no relative and secretary at all; and this, in a word, was one of them. Charles did not wish, to-night, to go over and over one set of primitive facts indefinitely; he did not wish to listen to sporting anecdote and reminiscence, hour after hour; in chief, he did not wish to go to bed at half-past ten o'clock. However, he did each and all of these things, perforce.
"Always retire early after a fight!—that was my father's rule, long as he lived!" cried Uncle George, his black eyes dangerously bright.... "No—let's see.Beforea fight—that was father's way! Well, good gad!—too late for that now! You come along to bed, my dear fellow!..."
But, in time, a sweet snoring from the parallel white couch indicated freedom, welcome solitude, at last. And then the young man rose noiselessly in the dark, and slipped back to the familiar Studio, where all his personal life had so long had its heart and center. On the old writing-table, in front of which he had sat and pondered so many hours, so many nights, the green-domed lamp was set burning anew. However, Charles did not sit at his table now. Beside the lamp, Big Bill without surcease ticked off the flying minutes of a writer's prized leisure. But Charles heeded not Big Bill. Wrapped in a bathrobe grown too short for his long shanks, he paced his carpet on slippered feet, up and down; and there was no such thing as bedtime now. For this day the authority had made the last and the best of all his many discoveries about Woman: and he did not see how he could ever sleep again.