As we entered the kitchen, a tiny room with one window in it, I glanced around it as I had done at the front room, the two seeming to complete the suite occupied by Mrs. Gibbons. My survey was quick and cautious, but not too much so for mental noting of the conservation of time and space and labor represented by an arrangement of household effects I had never seen before. Health and comfort were the principal omissions.
In one corner of the room was a bed covered with a calico quilt of many colors, and under it a pallet, tucked away for convenience in the daytime, but obviously out at night. Close to the bed was a large stove in which a good fire was burning, and from the blue-and-white saucepan on the top came forth odor of a soup with which I was not familiar. The door of the oven was partly open, and in the latter could be seen a pan of heavy-looking biscuits which apparently awaited their devouring at any time that suited the desire of the devourer. Bettina looked at them and then at me, but she said nothing—that is, nothing out loud.
"Set down." Mrs. Gibbons, the baby still in her arms, made effort to dust one of the two chairs in the room with the gingham apron she was wearing, and, after failing, motioned me to take it. The other one she pushed toward Bettina with her foot. On the bed was a little girl of six or seven, and as we took our seats a boy, who barely looked ten, came from behind a couple of wash-tubs in an opposite corner of the room and wiped his hands on a towel hanging from a hook in the wall. To ask something concerning this boy was the purpose of our visit.
"Speak to the lady, Jimmy. Anybody would think you didn't have no manners! No, you can't have your supper yet."
Mrs. Gibbons waved her hand weakly at her son, who, smiling at us, had gone to a corner cupboard with perforated tins of diamond pattern in its doors, and taken therefrom a soup-plate and cup and saucer. Paying no attention to his mother's reference to a delayed meal, he ladled out of the big saucepan, with a cracked cup, a plate of the steaming soup, and carried it carefully to an oilcloth-covered table, on which was a lamp and glass pitcher, some unwashed dishes left from the last meal, a broken doll, and a child's shoe. Putting down the plate of soup, he came back to the stove and poured out a cup of feeble-looking coffee.
"Goin' to be extras out to-night and I mightn't get back till after ten." Again his gay little smile lighted his thin face. "Ifen I don't eat now I mightn't eat at all. Have one?"
He poked a plate of the health-destroying biscuits at Bettina with a merry little movement, and bravely she took one, bravely made effort to eat it. "What's your name?" I heard him ask her, and then I turned to Mrs. Gibbons.
"It is about your little boy I've come to see you." I moved my chair as far as possible from the red-hot stove and opened my coat. "He is too young to be at work. He isn't twelve, is he?"
The indignation I had felt on hearing of Jimmy's bondage to a bench from seven in the morning to six in the evening, with an interval of an hour for lunch, was unaccountably disappearing. With helplessness and incapacity I was not ordinarily patient, and Mrs. Gibbons was an excellent example of both. Still—"He isn't twelve yet, is he?" I repeated.
Mrs. Gibbons pushed the little girl, who was trying to get out of the bed, back in it, and shifted the whimpering baby from one arm to the other. For a moment she hesitated, looked at me uncertainly.
"No 'm, he ain't but eleven, but I had to tell the mayor that signed the papers permitting of him to work, that he was twelve. The law don't let children work lessen they're twelve, and only then if their mother is a widow and 'ain't got nothing and nobody to do for her. I don't like to tell a story if I can help it, and them what don't know nothing 'bout how things is can't understand, and say we oughtn't to do it. They'd do it, too, ifen they had to. After his father died I had to take Jimmy out of school and put him to work. There wasn't nothing else to do."
"Has his father been dead long?" I moved still further from the stove. My question was unthinking. He couldn't have been dead long.
"In days and months it 'ain't been so long, but it's been awful long to me. 'Taint been more'n a year since they brought him home to me dead, and I been plum' no 'count ever since. This baby," she put the child in her arms on her lap and shook her knees in mechanical effort to still its cries, "this baby was born while its father was being buried, and when I took in my man was gone and wouldn't never come home no more, never give me his wages on Saturday nights, and wouldn't be here to do nothing for me and the children, seems like something inside me just give out. I reckon you 'ain't never had nothing to happen to you like that, have you?"
"No, I've never had anything like that to happen to me." The last remnant of indignation was vanishing. That is, against the helpless, incapable, worn-out woman who was Jimmy's mother. Against something else, something I could not place or define or call by name, it was rising stormily. "I know you need Jimmy's help," I said, after a moment, "but he is too young to work, too small."
"Came near not getting a job 'count of not being no bigger."
His mouth filled with half a biscuit, the boy nodded at me gleefully, then putting down his spoon, he dusted his hands and wiped them on the side of his trousers. "The first place mother and me went to, they wouldn't take me 'cause the table where I'd had to work struck me right here." His hands swiped his throat just under his chin. "But the next place was all right. They had a boys' table and the bench was made high on purpose."
"What is it you do?" I asked, and again my voice sounded strange."Is it a box-factory you're in?"
"Soap and pills." Head thrown back, Jimmy drained the last drop of coffee from his cup, then scraped the latter with a tin spoon for its last bit of sugar. "We are pasters, our gang is. We paste the paper on the boxes. There's a boy sits next to me what's the fastest paster in town, but I'm going to beat him some day. I can paste almost as fast as he can now."
"He could beat him now if he didn't play so much." In his mother's voice was neither scolding nor complaint. "Jimmy always would play some from the time he was born. His boss says he's the best worker he's got 'cepting the boy who sits next to him, and if he'd just stay still all day—"
"Oh, can he play?" I made no apology for the interruption. The child was undersized and illy-nourished, and to let him work ten hours a day seemed a crime for which I, and all others who cared for children, were somehow responsible. But if he had a chance to play—
"When old Miss High-Spy goes out the room we play." Jimmy gave his trousers a jerk and made effort to force connection between a button and a buttonhole belonging respectively to his upper and his lower garments. "She's a regular old tale-teller, but soon as she's out the room we get down from our bench and rush around and tag each other. Our benches 'ain't got no backs to 'em, and if we didn't get off sometimes we couldn't sit up all day. The other fellows, the big ones, don't tell on us. They make us put the windows down from the top when she's out."
"Do you mean you don't have any air in the room?" My voice was unbelieving, and at something in my face Jimmy laughed.
"Not when we're working. The wind might blow the little pieces of paper off the table and we'd lose time getting 'em, she says. Some the boys get so sick from the heat and the glue smell they heave up their breakfast and can't eat nothing all day. I 'ain't fainted but twice since I been there, but Alex Hobbs keels over once a week, anyhow. Used to frighten me at first when I saw him getting green-y, but I don't mind it now."
With a quick turn of his head Jimmy looked at a small clock on the shelf above the wash-tubs, and got up with even quicker movement. "I forgot about the wood, and the papers will be ready 'fore I can get there if I don't hurry. Good-by to you all," and, slamming the door behind him, he ran down the kitchen steps into the yard, where in a moment we heard him whistling as he chopped the wood that must be brought up for the morning.
It was not often Mrs. Gibbons had a listener who had never before heard of her hardships, and after explaining to me why Jimmy was at home at that time of the day, his presence being due not to trifling on his part, but to the half-time the factory was running, she gave herself up to the luxury of telling me in detail of her many misfortunes and of her inability to get through the winter unless additional help were given her.
"Can't you work?" I asked. "If the children are put in a day nursery they would be well looked after, and you would probably be more comfortable in a good factory than here."
"A good factory!" The inflection in her voice was one of listless tolerance for my ignorance. "I don't reckon you ever worked in one. There ain't none of 'em good. Some's better than others, but when you get up at five o'clock on winter mornings and make the fire and melt the water, if it's frozen, to wash your face with, and—"
"Does it freeze in here?" Bettina, who had by effort restrained herself from taking part in the conversation, leaned forward and dug her hands deep in her lap. "Does it really freeze in this hot room?"
"It ain't hot in here at night. Last winter it froze 'most every night for a month. Mis' Cotter was boarding with me last winter, her and her little girl both. She's the lady what rents the room between the kitchen and the front room from me. She sews on carpets and the place she works at is right far from here. She warn't well last winter—some kind of misery is always on her—and she asked me to board her so she wouldn't have to do no cooking before she goes away in the morning and when she comes back at night."
"With a swift movement of her hand Mrs. Gibbons caught the little girl, who, behind her back, was making ready to slip off the bed and on the floor, but as she swung her again in place she kept up her talking, and by neither rise nor fall was the monotone of her voice broken.
"I had to get up at five so as to have breakfast in time, for I can't get the room warm and the things cooked in less'n an hour, and she has to leave here a little after six so as to take her little girl to the nursery before she goes to her place, and they ain't noways close together. The stars are shining when she goes out and they're shining when she comes in; that is, if the weather's good. She's been so wore out lately she's been taking her meals again with me, but I don't see much of her. She goes to bed the minute she's through supper."
Bettina twisted in her chair. "Do you eat and sleep in here, too?" she asked. Her eyes were on Mrs. Gibbons. Carefully she kept them from mine. "Do you always eat in here?"
"We eat in here all the time and sleep in here in winter, because there ain't but one fire. That goes out early, which is why the water freezes. Jimmy has to bring it up from the yard in buckets, and as the nurse-lady who comes down here says we must have fresh air in the room, being 'tis all four of us sleep in it, I keep the window open at night. I don't take no stock in all this fresh-air talk. 'Taint only the water what gets froze—"
"Why don't you cover a bucketful of it with one of those tubs?" Again Bettina's forefinger pointed. "That would keep the wind off and the water wouldn't freeze if it was covered up."
"I never thought of that. Get back, Rosie!" Mrs. Gibbons made effort to catch her little daughter, but this time the child wriggled down from the foot of the bed and came toward me, hands behind her back, and stared up into my face.
"Whatcha name?"
I told her and asked hers, and without further preliminaries she came close to me and hunched her shoulders to be taken in my lap.
"We've got to go—we're bound to go, Miss Dandridge!" With a leap Bettina was out of her chair, and, catching the little girl by the hand, she drew her from me and dangled in front of her a once-silvered mesh-bag, took from it a penny, and gave it to her; then she turned to Mrs. Gibbons.
"We're awful glad we've seen you." Bettina nodded gravely to the woman on the bed. "And of course we won't tell anybody about Jimmy not being twelve yet; but Miss Heath wants him to go back to school, and she's coming to see you soon about it. We've got to go now."
In a manner I could not understand, Bettina, who had gotten up and was now standing behind Mrs. Gibbons, beckoned to me mysteriously, and, fearing the latter might become aware of her violent movements, I, too, got up and shook hands with my hostess.
"I will see you in a few days," I said. "There's no chance for Jimmy if he doesn't have some education. He ought to go back to school."
"Yes 'm, I know he ought, but he can't go." Jimmy's mother shook hands, limply. "The pickle-factory where I used to work is turning off hands every week, and I can't get nothing to do there. I don't know how to do nothing but pickles. Sometimes I gets a little sewing at home, but I ain't a sewer. The Charities sends me a basket of keep-life-in-you groceries every now and then, and the city gives me some coal and wood when there's enough to go round more than once, but I need Jimmy's money for the rent."
"If the rent were paid would you let him go back to school?"
"Yes 'm." The dull voice quickened not at all. "I'd be glad to let him go. I don't want him to work, but them that don't know how it is can't understand. You-all must come again. Good-by. Come back here, Rosie. You'll catch your death out there. Good-by."
In the open air, which felt good after the steaming heat of the bedroom-kitchen, Bettina and I walked for a few moments in silence, and then, slipping her arm in mine, she looked up at me with wise little eyes.
"Please excuse me for telling you, Miss Dandridge, but you're new yet in the places you've been going to since you came to Scarborough Square, and you'll have to be careful about taking the children on your lap and in your arms, if they're babies. You love children, and you just naturally hold out your hands to them, but if you don't know them very well, you'd better not. All of them ain't healthy, and hardly any—"
Bettina stopped and, standing still, looked straight ahead of her at a man and a young woman crossing the street some little distance from us. Then she looked up at me. The man was Selwyn. The girl with him was the odd and elfish little creature who had been hurt in Scarborough Square and whom he had helped bring in to Mrs. Mundy.
Bettina, who had opened the door for Selwyn on his last visit, and who had informed me the next day that she had "shivered with trembles" because of his great difference to the men in Scarborough Square, for the second time looked up at me.
"What is he doing down here?" Her finger pointed in the direction of the man and woman just ahead of us. "What's he talking to that girl for?"
I did not answer her at once. Amazement and unbelief were making my heart hot, and a flood of color burned my face. Of all men on earth, Selwyn was the last to find in this part of the town at this time of the evening, and as he bent his head to speak to the girl I noticed he was talking earnestly and using his hands in expressive gestures as he talked. Starting forward, I took a few steps and then stopped, sharply.
"I don't know what he is doing down here. Certainly he is at liberty to come here just as we come."
Bettina's eyes strained in the darkness. "I can't see her face. If we cross over we can catch up with them by the time they reach the corner where we could see her in the light." The grip of my hand on her arm made her stop. "I mean—"
"You don't know what you mean."
It was silly, childish, unreasonable, that I should speak sharply to Bettina, and equally unreasonable that fear and horror and sickening suspicion should possess me, but possessed I was by sensations hitherto unexperienced, and for a moment the gaslight from the lamp on the opposite street corner wavered and circled in a confusing, bewildering way. Sudden revelations, sudden realizations, were unsteadying me. Was Selwyn really some one I did not know? Was his life less single than I believed it? Hateful, ugly, disloyal questions surged tumultuously for a half-minute; then reason returned, and shame that I should insult him with doubt, cooled the flame in my face.
"It's too late to go to the Binkers. We'd better go home. We'll go there some other afternoon."
I turned from Bettina's amazed eyes. My tone of voice a moment before was still perplexing her, and unblinkingly she was searching my face. Hitherto her directness, her frankness of speech and use of words, had amused me, and I had permitted, perhaps, too great an exercise of her gift of comment; but applied personally it was a different matter.
"We'll go to the corner and turn there," I said. "That will be the nearest way home."
"But don't you want to see who she is?" Scarborough Square customs were those most familiar to Bettina, and they exacted understanding of doubtful situations. "Don't you want to see what—what she looks like?"
"Why should I? Mr. Thorne knows many people I do not know." I moved toward the corner. "Come on. It's getting late."
"Gentlemen like him don't know girls like her. She lives down here somewhere, and he lives where you used to live. He couldn't be sweet on her, because—because he couldn't." She caught up with me. "He's yours, ain't he, Miss Danny? You'd better tell him—"
I hated myself for looking across the street, but as I hurried on my eyes were following Selwyn and the girl, and when I saw the latter stop and bury her face in her hands, saw Selwyn say something to her, saw him turn in one direction and she in another, I, too, stopped; for a moment was unable to move.
We had reached the corner as Selwyn left the opposite one and came toward us. Head down, as if deeply thinking, he did not look up until close to us. Under the gaslight I waited, not knowing why, and Bettina being behind me, he thought I was alone when presently he saw me.
"Dandridge!" He stared as if stupefied with amazement. Lifting his hat mechanically, he came closer. "What in the name of Heaven are you doing here alone this time of night? Are you losing your mind?"
His entire absence of embarrassment, his usual disapproval of my behavior, his impatient anger, had an unlooked-for effect, and sudden relief and hot joy so surged over me that I laughed, a queer, nervous, choking little laugh.
"I am not alone. It is not yet six, and I have been to see a boy who is what you are not—the head of a house. I mean a house with a family in it. Have you, too, been visiting?"
His face flushed, and frowningly he turned away. "I had business down here. I had to come to it as it could not be brought to me. Where are you going?"
"Home."
Bettina, who in some unaccountable way had managed to stay behind me, came forward and bowed as if to an audience. "I've been taking her to where she goes, Mr. Thorne, and grannie knows all the places. There ain't one that's got a disease in it, and Mr. Crimm would tell us if it wasn't right to go to them. She don't ever go anywhere by herself. She's too new yet."
Selwyn smiled grudgingly. Bettina's fat and short little body made effort to stretch to protective requirements, and her keen eyes raised to his held them for a moment. Then she turned to me.
"Maybe he'd like to go to some of the homes we go to and see—"
"No. He doesn't want to see." I caught her hand and slipped it through my arm. "It's much more comfortable not to see. One can sleep so much better. Are you going our way?" I turned to Selwyn. "If you are, we'd better start."
For a full block we said nothing. Selwyn, biting the ends of his close-cut mustache, walked beside me, hands in his pockets and eyes straight ahead, and not until Bettina had twice asked him if he knew where Rowland Street was did he answer her.
"Rowland Street?" He turned abruptly, as if brought back to something far removed in thought. "What on earth do you know of Rowland Street?"
"Nothing—I never knew there was a street by that name until last week when I heard a girl talking to grannie, who said she lived on it. She did her hands, when she talked, just like the girl with you did." Bettina twisted hers in imitative movements. "She didn't keep her hands still a minute."
"Few girls do when they talk. They apparently prefer to use their hands to their brains." Selwyn's shoulders shrugged impatiently, then his teeth came together on his lip. Again he stared ahead and, save for Bettina's chatter, we walked in silence to Scarborough Square.
There had been few times in my life in which speech was impossible, but during the quarter of an hour it took us to reach home words would not come, and numbness possessed my body. A world of possibilities, a world I did not know, seemed suddenly revealing itself, and at its dark depths and sinister shadows I was frightened, and more than frightened. Conflicting and confusing emotions, a sense of outrage and revolt, were making me first hot and then cold, and distrust and suspicion and baffling helplessness were enveloping me beyond resistance. The happy ignorance and unconcern and indifference of my girlhood, my young womanhood, were vanishing before cruel and compelling verities, and that which, because of its ugliness, its offensiveness, its repulsiveness, I had wanted to know nothing about, I knew I would now be forced to face.
It was true what Mrs. Mundy and Aunt Matilda and Selwyn and even Kitty, four years younger than myself, had often told me, that in knowledge of certain phases of life I was unwarrantably lacking. Subjects that had seemingly interested other girls and other women had never interested me, and I took no part in their discussion. And now the protection of the past that had prevented understanding of sordid situations and polluting possibilities was being roughly torn away, and I was seeing that which not only stung and shocked and sickened, but I was seeing myself as one who after selfish sleep had been rudely waked.
Head and heart hot, I pushed back upleaping questions, forced down surging suspicion and tormenting fears, but all the while I was conscious that in the friendship that was mine and Selwyn's, the something that was more than friendship, a great gap had opened that was separating us. If he gave no explanation of his acquaintance with the girl he had just left, it must be because he could not. He knew my hatred of mystery, my insistence upon frankness between friends. Would he come in and talk as freely as he had ever done of whatever concerned him? Would he tell me—
As I opened the door with my latch-key Bettina bounded inside, and the light falling on Selwyn's face showed it white and worn. Something was greatly troubling him.
"Good night." He turned toward the steps without offering his hand. "It is useless to ask you not to go in such neighborhoods as you were in this evening, but if you knew what you were doing you would stay away."
"I know very well what I am doing. I am hardly so stubborn or wilful as you think. But if it is unwise for me to be in the neighborhood referred to, is it any less wise—for you?"
"Me?" The inflection in his voice was the eternal difference in a man's and woman's privileges. "It was not a question of wisdom—my being where you saw me. It was one of necessity. Moreover, a man can go where he pleases. A woman can't. No purity of purpose can overcome the tyranny of convention."
"Convention!" My hands made impatient gesture. "It's the drag-net of human effort, the shelter within which cowards run to cover. In its place it has purpose, but its place, for convenience sake, has been immensely magnified. And why is convention limited to women?"
It was childish—my outburst—and, ashamed of it, I started to go in, then turned and again looked at Selwyn. Into his face had come something I could not understand, something that involved our future friendship, and, frightened, I leaned against the iron railing of the little porch and gripped it with hands behind my back.
"Selwyn!" The words came unsteadily. "Have you nothing to say to me, Selwyn? Don't you know that I know the girl with you to-night was the girl who—who we brought in here last night? If you knew her, why—"
Staring at me as if not understanding, Selwyn came closer. In his eyes was puzzled questioning, but as they held mine they filled with something of horror, and over his face, which had been white and worn, spread deep and crimson flush. "You don't mean— God in heaven! Do you think the girl is anything to me?"
I did not answer, and, turning, he went down the steps and I into the house.
For the past ten days I have been a very restless person. Mrs. Mundy looks at me out of the corners of her kind and keen and cheery little eyes when she does not think I am noticing, but she asks me nothing. Mrs. Mundy is the wisest woman I know.
If only I could sleep! During the days I am busy, but I dread the long nights when questions crowd that, fight as I may, I cannot keep from asking. Selwyn is my friend. I never doubt a friend. But why does he not come to me? Why does he not make clear that which he must know is inexplicable to me?
I may never marry Selwyn, but certainly I shall marry no one else. How could we hope for happiness when we feel so differently toward much that is vital, when our attitude to life is as apart as the poles? When each thinks the other wrong in points of view and manner of living? Selwyn was born in a house with high walls around it. He likes its walls. He does not care for many to come in, and cares still less to go outside to others. Few people interest him. All sorts interest me. We are both selfish and stubborn, but both hate that which is not clean and clear, and save from his own lips I would not believe that in his life is aught of which he could not tell me.
I have never told him I loved him, never promised to marry him. To live in his high-walled house with its conventional customs, its age-dimmed portraits, its stiff furnishings, and shut-out sunshine, would stifle every cell in brain and lungs, and to marry him would be to marry his house. I hate his house, hate the aloofness, the lack of sympathy it represents. Its proud past I can appreciate, but not its useless present. Save his brother Harrie, it is the one thing of his old life left Selwyn. At the death of his father he bought Harrie's interest and it is all his now. I would not ask him to live elsewhere, but I would choke and smother did I live in his house. And yet—
Ten days have passed and I have neither seen nor heard from Selwyn.
I have often wondered, on waking winter mornings in my very warm bed, how it would feel to go out in the gray dawn of a new day and hurry off to work. Now I know.
For more than a week I have been up at five forty-five, and at six-thirty have been hurrying with Lucy Hobbs, who lives around the corner, to the overalls-factory, where she is a forewoman. It is dark and cold and raw at half-past six on a winter morning, and the sunrise is very different from what it is in summer.
Each morning as I started out with Lucy, and hurried down street after street, I watched the opening doors of the shabby, dull-looking houses we passed with keen interest. Ash-cans and garbage-pails were in front of many of them, and through unshuttered windows a child could occasionally be seen with its face pressed against the pane, waiting to wave good-by to some one who was leaving. Out of the doors of these houses came men and women and boys and girls, who hurried as we hurried, and with a word to some, a wave of her uplifted hand to others, a blank stare at others again, Lucy seemed leading a long procession. Around each corner and from every car that passed came more "Hands," and each morning when the factory was reached a crowd that jammed its entrance and extended half a block up and down the street was waiting for the opening of the door, out of which it would not come until darkness fell again.
For the first day or two I was noticed with indifference on the part of some, resentment on the part of others, but on the third day, as I took my place in the pushing, laughing, growling crowd that made its way up several flights of stairs to the big room where shabby clothes are changed for yet shabbier working ones, my good-mornings were greeted with less grudging acknowledgments, and now we are quite friendly, these "Hands" and I, and through their eyes I am seeing myself and others like me—seeing much and many things from an angle never used before.
They nodded to me less hesitatingly as the days went by, and at the noon hour, when I have my lunch with first one group and then another, I find them, on the whole, frank and outspoken, find they have as decided opinions concerning what they term people like that—which term is usually accompanied by a gesture in the direction where I once lived—as said people have concerning them, to whom, as a rule, they also refer in much the same manner and with the same words. With each group on either side of its separating gulf the conviction is firm that little is to be hoped for or expected from the other, and common qualities are forgotten in the realization of distinctive differences.
"What's the most you ever made a week?" The girl who asked the question moved up for me to sit on the bench beside her, and, unwrapping a newspaper parcel, took from it a large cucumber pickle, a piece of cheese, a couple of biscuits, and half of a cocoanut pie, and laid them on a table in front of her. "Help yourself." She pushed the paper serving as tray and cloth toward me. "I ain't had much appetite lately. Hello, Mamie! Come over here and sit on our bench. What you got good for lunch? My stomach's turned back on pie. I'd give ten cents for a cup of coffee."
"Everywhere else but this old hothouse sells it for two cents a cup without, and three cents with." The girl called Mamie nodded to me and took her seat on the bench. "I don't like milk nohow, and I'd give the money glad for something hot in the middle of the day. Don't nothing do your insides as much good as something piping hot. Say—I saw Barker last night." Her voice lowered but little. "He and I are going to see 'Some Girl' at the Bijou next week. It's all make-up—his being sweet on Ceeley Bayne! That knock-kneed, slew-footed, pop-eyed Gracie Jones got that off. I'm going to get one them lace-and-chiffon waists at Plum's for $2.98 if don't nobody get sick and need medicine between now and Wednesday. Seems like somebody's always sick at our house."
The question asked me had been forgotten, and, glad to escape the acknowledgment that I had never earned a dollar in my life, I got up on the plea that I must see a girl at the other end of the room, and walked across it. As I went I scanned each face I saw. Consciously or subconsciously I had been hoping for days that I would see a face which ever haunts me, a face I wanted to forget and could not forget. Everywhere I go, in factories or mills or shops or homes; in the streets, and at my windows, I am always wondering if I shall see her. She was very unhappy. Who is she? Why was Selwyn with her? It is my last thought at night, my first in the morning.
Yesterday I was at the box-factory where Jimmy Gibbons works. It is his last week there. On the fifteenth he starts again to school. Knowing the president of the company well, I asked that Jimmy should be my guide through the various departments, and permission was given. I wish Jimmy were mine.
"Miss High-Spy 'ain't got any love for on-lookers, and we'd better not stay in here long." Jimmy's voice was cautious, but his eyes merry, and, glancing in the direction of the sour and snappy person watching each movement of each worker, I agreed with him that it was not well to linger. The room was big and bare, its benches filled with white-faced workers, and the autocrat who presided over it seemed unconscious of its stifling, steamy heat and sickening smells of glue and paste. Going out into the hall, Jimmy and I went to a window, opened it, and gave our lungs a bath.
"What does she do it for? Is she crazy?"
"Not asylum-crazy—mean-crazy." Jimmy's head nodded first negatively, then with affirmation. "She's come up from the beginning place, and used to be a fire-eater before she got to be boss of our bunch, and the men say people like that, people who ain't used to driving, drive harder than any other kind when they get the chance. She's a bully to the under ones, but the uppers—" Jimmy's eyes were lifted to mine and his lips made a whistling sound. "If Mr. Pritchard kicked her in the face, she'd lick the soles of his shoes when he was doing it, if she could. She wants to be boss of the room up-stairs and Mr. Pritchard can put her where he pleases. If he don't do it, he'd better, the women say, 'count of her knowing more about him than he knows she knows. I don't know what 'tis, but I hate her. All of us hate her."
"Why doesn't some one speak to Mr. Johns? Certainly he can't know—"
"Yes 'm, he does. Joe Dickson and Bob Beazley told him once, and the next week they got a hand-out. High-Spy made Mr. Pritchard do it. Mr. Johns leaves those kinds of things to him. Swell folks like him 'ain't got time to look after folks like us. He's awful rich, ain't he?"
"He isn't poor. When are you going to have your lunch?" I looked at my watch. "Can't you go out and have it with me? I'll ask Mr. Johns. Come on, quick. I'll see the other rooms when I come back."
Jimmy shook his head. "I can't go. I ain't being docked 'count of being with you, because Mr. Pritchard sent me, but he wouldn't let me come back if I went out. I been sent down to him once to-day, and please 'm don't ask him, please 'm don't!"
In Jimmy's voice was something of terror, and his hands slipped in and out of his trousers' pockets with nervous, frightened movements. His usually merry little mouth with its pale lips quivered oddly, and in his eyes, as he turned away, were tears I could not understand.
I put my hand on his shoulder, lifted his face to mine. "What is it, Jimmy? What has happened that you don't want me to ask Mr. Johns to tell Mr. Pritchard you can go with me? Why are you afraid?"
"I ain't afraid. Yes 'm, I am. I—I've been docked once to-day. Please 'm don't ask Mr. Pritchard nothing! High-Spy makes him punish me whenever—"
"Punish you!" I straightened indignantly. "Why does he punish you?What right—"
"I don't mean licking. But he keeps me out of the room when I'm sent out, and docks me at the end of the week. Mother needs every cent. She's back in the rent. I was sent out to-day."
"But why? What were you doing?"
"Nothing—leastways I didn't mean to. There wasn't none of us sick this morning, and Billy Coons was acting down behind High-Spy's back, and I tried not to laugh. She don't let us laugh. But she said I did. I didn't laugh—" Jimmy's voice was protesting. "I just smiled and it—it busted."
"Is that why she made you go out of the room?" I turned away and looked out of the window lest the accident to Jimmy's smile be mine. "Is that why she sent you out?"
He nodded. "Mr. Pritchard kept me out an hour. Sometimes he lets me make it up at lunch. I was going to ask him to let me to-day, but—"
"I'm preventing. I'm glad of it! When are you going to eat your lunch?"
"I've done et it—" Jimmy's tongue moistened his lips. "I et it on my way here this morning. I got paid off last night and I took out five cents and gave the rest to mother, and this morning I bought a pie with it and et up every bite. It might have been hooked when I was out the room, so I'm glad I didn't save none. I got it at Heck's. He keeps the best pies in town for five cents. They're real fat."
I was paying little attention to Jimmy. At the open window I could see a young girl across the street with a baby in her arms. She had brought it from a small frame house with high steps leading to a sagging porch, in the door of which a large and kindly-faced woman was standing, arms folded and eyes watching the movements of the girl. As the latter lifted her head, on which was no hat, I leaned forward, my heart in my throat. The odd, eager young face, the boyish arrangement of the hair above it, the quick, bird-like movements of the slender body, had burned for days and nights in my brain, and I recognized her at once.
"Jimmy," I said, "come here." I drew him to the window with nervous haste, my fingers twitching, my breath unsteady. "Who is that girl with the baby? There she is, turning the corner. Look quick! Do you know her?"
Jimmy shook his head. "Never saw her. Can't see her now." He leaned far out the window, but the girl had disappeared, and the woman in the doorway had gone in and closed the door.
I must have said something, made some sort of sound, for Jimmy, turning from the window, looked at me uneasily, in his eyes distress and understanding.
"What's the matter, Miss Heath? You'd better sit down. Did the heat make you sick? You're—you're whiter than that wall."
A sickness which Jimmy could not understand was indeed upon me, and unsteadily I leaned against the window-frame, looking at, but not seeing, him, and not until he spoke again did I remember I was not alone.
"Is it very bad? You look as if it hurts so. Wait a minute—I'll get you some water."
I caught him as he started to run down the hall, and drew him back. "I don't want any water. I am not sick." My head went up. "The smell of paste would make me ill if I stayed, however, and I'm not going to stay to-day. I'll come some other time. Run on and join the other boys. Tell your mother"—I seemed groping for words—"tell your mother I will see her before you start to school. Run on, Jimmy, and thank Mr. Pritchard for lending you to me. And laugh as much as you want to, Jimmy. Laugh all you can before—you can't!"
Over the banister the child was leaning anxiously, watching me as I stumbled down the steps. At their foot I turned and waved my hand and laughed, an odd, faint, far-away laugh that seemed to come from some one else; and then I went into the street and found myself crossing it, impelled by surging impulse to know—
To know what? At the foot of the rickety stairs leading to the high porch from which I had seen the girl come I stopped. All I had been repressing, fighting, resisting for days past, had in a moment yielded to horror, and hurt that seemed past healing, and I was surrendering to what I should know was impossible. I must be mad!
With a shudder that was half a sob I turned away and walked down the street and into the one which would lead to Scarborough Square. As I walked my shoulders straightened. What was the matter with me? Was I becoming that which I loathed—a suspicious, spying person? I was insulting Selwyn. He knew I hated mystery, however, knew the right of explanation was mine, knew that I expected of any man who was my friend that his life should be as open as my life. If I had hurt him, angered him by my question when I last saw him, he had hurt, had angered me far more. For now I was angry. Did he imagine I was the sort of woman who accepted reticence with resignation? I was not.
At the corner Mr. Fogg was standing in the door of his little shop, holding a blue bottle up to the light and examining it with critical care. He had on his usual clothes of many colors, shabby from much wearing, but in his round, clean-shaven face, pink with health and inward cheer, was smiling serenity, and in his eyes a twinkle that yielded not to time or circumstance. His second-hand bookshelf, his canary-birds and white rabbits, his fox-terriers and goldfish are friends that never fail, and in them he has found content. His eagerness to chat occasionally with some one who cares, as he cares, for his beloved books, is not at times to be resisted, but I was in no mood to talk to-day. I wondered if I could hurry by.
"Good morning!" The blue bottle, half filled with water, in which a tiny bulb was floating, was waved toward me, and a shaggy white head nodded at me. "It's a fine day, ain't it?—a fine day for snow. Good and gray. I think we'll have some flakes before night. Kinder feel like a boy again when it's snowing. I don't know yet which season I like best. Every one has got its glory. What you been up to to-day? Seeing some more things?"
I nodded. "I wish I could come in, but I can't." I shivered, though I was not cold. "I am going up-town." A minute before I had no intention of going up-town, but to go indoors was suddenly impossible. Whatever was possessing me must be fought off alone. "I will bring you my copy of Men and Nations to-morrow. Keep it as long as you wish."
"Thank you, ma'am. Thank you hearty. I'll take good care of it. I suppose you haven't heard of the widow Robb? Her name's Patty, you know, and she's got a beau. He's named Cake. Luck plays tricks with love, don't it? Don't get caught in a snow-storm. You ain't"—his voice was anxious—"you ain't thinking of leaving us, are you? The girls down here are needing of you, needing sore. All of us are needing of you."
I shook my head. "Of course I'm not thinking of leaving you." I waved my hand in response to his wave of the bottle, and, not seeing where I went, I turned the corner and, head bent to keep out of my face the tiny particles of sleet and snow beginning to fall, walked for some distance before noticing where I was.
Much of my city, unknown to me a short while ago, was now familiar, but to much I was still a stranger, and presently I was wondering concerning the occupants of the houses I was passing. The shabby gentility and dull respectability of the latter was depressing, and to escape the radiation of their dreariness I turned into first one street and then another, and as I walked the girl with the boyish face walked with me, the face with its hunted fear. She had held the baby as if frightened, and when she turned the corner she was running. She was so young. Could the baby be hers? It must be hers. Nothing but a mother-face could have in it what hers had. Why was she afraid, and of what?
The streets were becoming rough and unpaved before I noticed I was nearing the city limits, and, cutting across afield, I got into the Avenue, toward the end of which was Selwyn's house. As I neared it my steps slowed. For years the Thorne property had been on the outskirts of the city, but progress had taken it in, and already houses, flagrantly modern and architecturally shameless, offered strong contrast to its perfect lines, its conscious dignity, its calm aloofness, and its stone walls which shielded it from gaping gaze and gave it privacy. The iron gates were closed, the shutters drawn, and from the place stillness that was oppressive radiated, a stillness that was ominous.
Pride was undoubtedly Selwyn's dominating characteristic. Pride in his name, in its unstained honor, in the heritage of his fathers; and in the presence of his house it seemed an ugly dream—the picture ever in my mind, the picture of Selwyn walking slowly with a young girl in the dark of a winter afternoon in a section of the city as removed from his as sunlight is removed from shadow. In his nature was nothing that could make such association imaginable. If no higher deterrent prevented, pride would protect him from doubtful situations. He was sensitive to higher deterrents, however, as sensitive as I.
Passing the gates, on the stone columns of which the quaint, old-fashioned lamps of former days were still nightly lighted, I glanced through them at the snow-covered lawn and the square-built, lonely house, occupied now only by Selwyn and his younger brother Harrie, then again hurried on. The Avenue with its great width and unbroken length, its crystal-coated trees and handsome houses, was now deserted save for hurrying limousines and an occasional pedestrian; and safe in the fierceness of the snow, from encounter with old friends, I decided to walk home through the section of the city which was the only part I once knew well, and just as I decided I knocked into some one turning a corner as I approached it.
"Oh, Miss Heath!" The woman drew back. "The snow was so thick I didn't see you. Did I hurt you?"
"Not a bit." I wiped my face, damp with melted flakes which had brushed it. "What are you doing up here? You look as frozen as I feel. Have you got on overshoes?"
The woman shook her head. "I haven't got any. I wouldn't have come out, but I had to bring some work back to Mrs. Le Moyne. If she'd paid me I'd have bought a pair of rubbers. But she didn't pay me. She said she'd let me have the money next week."
"Next week! You need it this minute. How much does she owe you?"
"Four seventy-five for these last things, and four twenty-five for those I made last week. I don't know what I'm going to do." The woman's hands, cold and stiff, twisted nervously. "I don't reckon she's ever had to think about rent, or food, or fuel, or overshoes. People like that don't have to. I wish they did, sometimes."
"So do I. Come on; it's too cold to stop. We'll go down to Benson's and get something hot to warm us up. I forgot about lunch. Turn your coat-collar up—the snow is getting down your neck—and take my muff. I've got pockets and you haven't."
As we started off a large limousine with violets in the glass vases of its interior, upholstered in fawn-colored cloth, stopped just ahead of us, and a woman I did not know got out of it, followed by one I knew well. Fur coats entirely covered their dresses, and quickly the chauffeur opened an umbrella to protect their hats. As we passed I started to speak to Alice Herbert, but, turning her head, she gave me not even a blink of recognition. At first I did not understand; then I laughed.
"Who is that?" Mrs. Beck's voice was awed. "Ain't they grand? Do you know them?"
"No." I put my hands in the pockets of my long coat. "I used to know one of them, the feeble-minded one. We'd better go over to High Street and take a car to Benson's. The storm's getting worse. We'll have to hurry."
The street lamps were being lighted as we reached Scarborough Square, and at sight of the house, in the doorway of which Mrs. Mundy was standing, I hurried, impelled by impulse beyond defining. Mrs. Beck had left me at the corner, and as Mrs. Mundy closed the door behind me she followed me up the steps.
"I've been that worried about you I couldn't set still long at a time, and Bettina's been up three times to see that your fire was burning all right. I knew you didn't have your umbrella or overshoes. It's a wonder you ain't froze stiff. I'll bring your tea right up."
"I've had tea, thank you." I held out first one foot and then the other to the blazing coals, and from the soles of my shoes came curling steam. "It's a wonderful storm. I'd like to walk ten miles in it. I don't know why you were worried. I'm all right."
"I know you are, but"—she poked the fire—"but I wish you wouldn't go so hard. For near two weeks you haven't stopped a minute. You can't stand going like that. I wish I'd known where to find you. Mr. Thorne was here this afternoon. He was very anxious to see you."
"Mr. who?" I turned sharply, then put my hands behind me to hide their sudden twisting. I was cold and tired, and the only human being in all the world I wanted to see was Selwyn. It was intolerable, this tormenting something that was separating us. "When was he here?" I asked, and leaned against the mantel.
"He came about three, but he waited half an hour. He didn't say much, but he was powerful put out about your not being home. He couldn't wait any longer, as he had to catch a train—the four-thirty, I think."
"Where was he going?" I sat down in the big wing-chair and the fingers of my hands interlaced. "Did he say where he was going?"
"He didn't mention the place, just said he had to go away and might be gone some time. He'll write, I reckon. He was awful disappointed at not seeing you. He asked me—" Mrs. Mundy, on her knees, unbuttoned my shoes and drew them off. "Your feet are near 'bout frozen, and no wonder. Your stockings are wet clean through, and I'm letting you sit here in them when I promised him I'd see you didn't kill yourself doing these very things. You just put your feet on the fender while I get some dry clothes. He says to me, says he: 'Mrs. Mundy, the one human being she gives no thought to is herself, and will you please take care of her? She don't understand'"—
"Oh, I do understand!" My voice was wearily protesting. "The one thing men don't want women to do is to understand. They want us to be sweet and pretty—and not understand. Selwyn talks as if I were a child. I am perfectly able to take care of myself."
"Maybe you are, but you don't do it—least-ways, not always. I promised him I wouldn't let you wear yourself out, and I promised him—"
"What?"
"That I wouldn't let you go too far. He says you've lost your patience with people, specially women, who think it's not their business to bother with things that—that aren't nice, and you're apt to go to the other extreme and forget how people talk."
"About some things they don't talk enough. Did—did he leave any message for me?"
Again Mrs. Mundy shook her head. "I think he wanted to talk to you about something he couldn't send messages about."
Selwyn has been gone two weeks. I have heard nothing from him. I do not even know where he is.
Yesterday, over the telephone, Kitty reproached me indignantly for not coming oftener to see her. Each week I try to take lunch or dinner with her, but there have been weeks when I could not see her, when I could not get away. Scarborough Square and the Avenue are not mixable, and just now Scarborough Square is taking all my time.
Daily new demands are being made upon me, new opportunities opening, new friendships being formed, and though my new friends are very interesting to me, I hardly think they would be to Kitty. I rarely speak of them to her.
Miss Hardy, the woman labor inspector for the state, a girl who had worked in various factories since she was twelve and who had gotten her education at a night school, where often she fell asleep at her desk, I find both entertaining and instructing, but Kitty would not care for her. She wears spectacles, and Kitty has an unyielding antipathy for women who wear spectacles. Neither would she care for Miss Bayne, another state employee, a clever, capable woman who is an expert in her line. It is her business to discover feeble-mindedness, to test school children, and inmates of institutions to which they have been sent, or of places to which they have gone because of incapacity or delinquency or sin of any sort; and nothing I have read in books has been so revealing concerning conditions that exist as her frank statements simply told.
In my sitting-room at Scarborough Square she comes in frequently for tea with me, and meets there Fannie Harris, the teacher of an open-air school for the tuberculosis children of our neighborhood; and Martha White, the district nurse for our particular section; meets Miss Hay, a probation officer of the Juvenile Court, and Loulie Hill, a girl from the country who had once gone wrong, and who is now trying to keep straight on five dollars a week made in the sewing-room of one of the city's hospitals. Bettie Flynn, who lives at the City Home because of epileptic fits, also comes in occasionally. Bettie is a friend of Mrs. Mundy. Owing to kinlessness and inability to care for herself, owing, also, to there being nowhere else to which she could go, she has been forced to enter the Home. Her caustic comments on its management are of a clear-cut variety. Bettie was born for a satirist and became an epileptic. The result at times is speech that is not guarded, a calling of things by names that are their own.
These and various others who are facing at short range realities of which I have long been personally ignorant, are taking me into new worlds, pumping streams of new understandings, new outreaches, into my brain and heart, and life has become big and many-sided, and a thing not to be wasted. Myself of the old life I am seeing as I never saw before, seeing in a perspective that does not fill with pride.
Last night I went to my first dinner-party since Aunt Matilda's death. In Kitty's car I watched with interest, on the way to her house, the long stretches of dingy streets, then cleaner ones, with their old and comfortable houses; the park, with its bare trees and shrubs, and finally the Avenue, with its smooth paving and pretentious homes, its hurrying cars of luxurious make, its air of conscious smartness. As contrast to my present home it interested greatly.
Kitty's house is very beautiful. She is that rare person who knows she does not know, and the house, bought for her by her father as a wedding-gift, she had put in the hands of proper authorities for its furnishings. It is not the sort of home I would care to have, but it is undeniably handsome, and undoubtedly Kitty understands the art of entertaining.
Her dinner-party was rather a large one, its honor guest an English writer whose books are unendurably dull; but any sort of lion is helpful in reducing social obligations, and for that purpose Kitty had captured him. She insisted on my coming, but begged me not to mention horrid things, like poor people and politics and babies who died from lack of intelligent care, but to talk books.
"So few of the others talk books, except novels, and he thinks most modern novels rotten," she had told me over the telephone. "So please come and splash out something about these foreign writers whose names I can't remember. Bergyson is one, I believe, and Brerr another, and France-Ana—Ana something France. He's a man. And there's another one. Mater. . . Yes, that's it. Maeterlinck. And listen: Wear that white crepe you wore at my wedding; it's frightfully plain, but all your other things are black. I don't see why you still wear black. Aunt Matilda hated it."
As I went up-stairs to take off my wraps I smiled at Kitty's instructions. In her room she hastily kissed me.
"Do hurry and come down. I'm so afraid he'll come before the others, and I might have to talk to him. Literary people are the limit, and this one, they say, is the worst kind. Billy refuses to leave his room until you go down; says he'd rather be sent to jail than left alone with him ten minutes. He met him at the club."
Holding me off, she surveyed me critically. "You look very well.That's a good-looking dress. It suits you. I believe you wear pearlsand these untrimmed things just to bring out your hair and eyes.Nobody but you could do it."
Stopping her short, quick sentences, she leaned forward. "There he is, coming up the steps with Mr. Alexander. Come on; they're inside. We can go down now. By the way"—she pinned the orchids at her waist with unnecessary attention—"Selwyn got back yesterday. He will be here to-night. Dick Moran is sick, and Selwyn is taking his place. At first he declined to come. For weeks he's been going nowhere, but he finally promised. Are you ready?"
Without looking around she went out of the room, and without answering her I followed. I was conscious chiefly of a desire to get away, to do anything but meet Selwyn where each would have to play a part; but as I entered Kitty's drawing-room and later met her guests I crowded back all else but what was due her, spoke in turn to each, and then to Selwyn, as if between us there was no terrifying, unbridged gulf.
Kitty's dinners are perfect. I am ever amazed at the care and consideration she gives to their ordering. In art and letters she is not learned, but she is an expert in the management of household affairs, and her dinner invitations are rarely declined.
At the table, with its lilacs and valley-lilies, its soft lights and perfect appointments, were old friends of mine and new acquaintances of hers, and with the guest of honor I shared their curiosity. Very skilfully Kitty led the chatter into channels where the draught was light, and obediently I did my best to follow. There was much talk, but no conversation.
"Oh, Miss Heath!" A young girl opposite me leaned forward. "I've been so crazy to meet you. Some one told me that you'd gone in for slums. It must be so entrancing!"
I looked up. For a second Selwyn's eyes held mine and we both smiled, but before I could speak Kitty's lion turned toward me.
"Yes—I heard that, too." Fixing his black-rimmed glasses more firmly on his big and bulging nose, Mr. Garrott looked at me closely. "In my country slumming has become a fad with a—a certain type of restless women who have to make their living, I suppose. But I wouldn't fancy you were—"
"She isn't."
Jack Peebles, now happily married, blinked in my direction, signaled me to say nothing, then turned to the Englishman. "Miss Heath can do as she chooses, being Miss Heath, but the Turks are right. Women ought to be kept behind latticed windows, given a lute, and supplied with veils, and if they ask for anything else, they should be taken from the window."
"I don't agree with you." Mr. Garrott filled his fork with mushrooms and raised it to his mouth. "The Turks carry their restraint too far. Women should have more liberty than is given them in Turkey. They add color to life, add to its—"
"Uncertainties." Selwyn made effort to control the smile the others found uncontrollable. "In your country, now, the woman-question is interesting, exciting. There they do things, smash things, make a noise, keep you guessing. Over here their behavior is much less entertaining. Their attitude is one of investigation as well as demand. They have developed an unreasonable desire to know things; know why they are as they are; why they should continue to be what they have been. They are preparing themselves by first-hand knowledge and information to tell what most of us do not want to hear."
Selwyn's eyes again for a moment held mine, and in my face I felt hot color creeping. Never before had he defended, even with satire, what he had told me a hundred times was folly on my part. He turned to Mr. Garrott.
"Why on earth perfectly comfortable, supposedly Christian human beings should want personally to know anything about uncomfortable, unfit, under-paid ones—"
"Oh, but I think they ought to!" Again the pretty little creature in green chiffon nodded toward me. "But you won't let Miss Heath have a chance to say anything! Some one told me such queer people came to see her. Factory-girls and working-women and—oh—all sorts of people like that. Is it really so, Miss Heath?"
"Very interesting people come to see me. They are undoubtedly of different sorts, but one of the illuminating discoveries of life is that human beings are amazingly alike. Veneering is a great help, of course. If you knew my friends you would find—"
"I'd love to know them. I always have liked queer people. I've been crazy to come and see you, but mother won't let— I mean—"
"Mrs. Henderson says she met a young man when she went to see you who was the cleverest person she ever talked, to." Gentle Annie Gaines was venturing to come to my help. "He seemed to know something of everything. She couldn't remember his name."
"It's difficult to remember. He's a Russian Jew. Schrioski, is his name." At the head of the table I felt Kitty squirm, knew she was twisting her feet in fear and indignation. I turned to her English guest.
"I have another friend who will be so glad to know I have met you, Mr. Garrott. He is one of your most intelligent and intense admirers. He has read, I think, everything you've written."
Absorbed in his salad, evidently new and to his liking, Mr. Garrott was not impressed by, or appreciative of, my attempt to follow Kitty's instructions. With any reservations of my bad taste in talking shop I would have agreed, still, something was due Kitty. "He tells me"—I refused to be ignored—"that he keeps an advance order for everything you write; buys your books as soon as they are published."
"Buys them!" With the only quick movement he had made, Mr. Garrott turned to me. "I'd like to meet him. I'm glad to know there's somebody in America who buys and reads my books. Usually those who buy don't read, and those who read don't buy. But tell me—" Again the corners of his mouth drooped, and again his spectacles were adjusted. "Why did you go in for—for living in a run-down place and meeting such odds and ends as they say you meet? You're not old enough for things of that kind. An ugly woman, uninteresting, unprovided for—she might take them up." He stared at me as if for physical explanation of unreasonable peculiarities. "You believe, I fancy—"
"That a woman is capable of deciding for herself what she wants to do."
Again Jack Peebles's near-sighted eyes blinked at me, but in his voice there was no longer chaffing. "She believes even more remarkable things than that. Believes if people, all sorts, knew one another better, understood one another better, there would be less injustice, less indifference, and greater friendship and regard. Rather an uncomfortable creed for those who don't want to know, who prefer—"
"But you don't expect all grades of people to be friends? Surely you don't expect—"
I smiled. "No, I don't expect. So far I'm only hoping all people may, some day—be friendly."
Kitty was signaling frantically with her eyes, and in obedience I again performed as requested, for the third time turned to Mr. Garrott.
"I heard a most interesting discussion the other day concerning certain present-day French writers. I wonder if you agree with Bernard Shaw that Brieux is the greatest dramatist since Moliere, or if—"
"I never agree with Bernard Shaw."
Mr. Garrott frowned, and, taking up his wine-glass, drained it. Putting it down, he again stared at me. "I don't understand you. You don't look at all as I imagined you would."
At the foot of the table Billy was insisting upon the superiority of the links of the Hawthorne to those of the Essex club, and Kitty, at her end, was giving a lively account of a wedding-party she had come across at the station the evening before when seeing a friend off for her annual trip South, and at first one and then the other Mr. Garrott looked, as if not comprehending why, when he wished to speak, there should be chatter. Later, when again we were in the drawing-room, he continued to eye me speculatively, but he was permitted no opportunity to add to his inquiries; and when at last he was gone Kitty sat down, limp and worn at the strain she had been forced to endure.
"What business is it of his how you live and what you do?" she said, indignantly. "He's an old teapot, but you see now what I mean. I'm always having to explain you, to tell—"
"Don't do it. I'll forgive much, but not explaining. Your lion doesn't roar well, still, a lion is worth seeing—once." I turned to Selwyn. "I beg your pardon. Did you speak to me?"
"I asked if I could take you to Scarborough Square. I have a taxi here."
"Thank you, but I am spending the night with Kitty. I am not going back."
In astonishment Kitty looked at me, then turned away. I had told her I could not stay. I had not intended to stay, but I could not talk to Selwyn to-night. There would not be time and there was too much I wanted to say.
Selwyn's shoulders made shrug that was barely perceptible, and without offering his hand he said good night. In the hall I heard him speak to Kitty, then the closing of the door and the starting of the taxi, then silence.
Dawn was breaking when at last I slept.