"A dimple will be a great handicap in my life."
"A dimple will be a great handicap in my life."
"A dimple will be a great handicap in my life."
"Great Jupiter!" said the young man softly. "Why, some girls I know would give—But we can't discuss dimples, just now, can we? What I began to say, before you took my breath away, was that I think I've solved the clothes problem. You know there's a town about ten miles to the north—the county seat—and it occurs to me that if I set out to-night, I can be back here early in the morning with everything you'll need. I don't believe they'll suspect me, even if they have happened to read that a refuge girl has escaped. I can buy the skirt in one store, the hat in another, and so on, pretending they're for my sister—or my wife."
Jean's refractory dimple deepened.
"Make it your mother," she advised. "Wives and sisters prefer to do their own shopping."
"Very well, then. If you will jot down the measurements and other technicalities, I'll manage it somehow. As for money," he added, perceiving her falter, "I will take care of that, too, if you'll allow me. You will naturally need a loan."
Jean swallowed a lump.
"You're a brick," she said huskily. "I'll pay you back with the first money I earn."
The brick received her praise with a change of color appropriate to his title.
"Any fellow would be—be glad to help, you know," he stammered. "And you needn't feel that you must hurry to pay up, either. Wait until you're well settled among your friends."
"My friends! I have none."
"No friends!" He stared blankly. "Of course I realized that you could hardly go back home, but I took it for granted that there must be some place—somebody—"
"There isn't."
He sat down abruptly, bewildered with the complexities which beset an apparently simple situation. Jean herself began to entertain some misgiving. For the moment his opinion epitomized the world's.
"Where do you mean to go?" he asked.
"Across the state line first; then to New York."
"New York!"
"Yes; to find work. Why do you stare as if I'd said Timbuctoo?"
"I'm from New York."
"Are you?" She brightened wonderfully. "Then you can tell me where to find work. I'm willing to do anything at the start, but by and by I want to get into some good business. Women are succeeding in business on all sides nowadays. Why do you look so hopeless? Don't you think I can get on?"
"How can I answer you! If there were only some woman to whom I might take you. I've a sister, but—"
"But she wouldn't understand?"
"No, she wouldn't understand. Neither do you understand," he went on anxiously. "To be a stranger in New York, homeless, friendless, without work, the shadow of that place over there dogging your steps; with you what you are—trustful, unsuspicious, open as sunlight—Oh, I daren't advise you. I don't dare."
Jean was awed, but not downcast.
"I'll risk it," she replied stoutly.
Twice he opened his lips to speak, but rose instead and paced among the trees. Finally he confronted her.
"Why not go back?" he asked.
Jean widened her eyes upon him.
"Go back! Go back to the refuge?"
"Yes. Why not go back and see it through? No, no," he entreated, as her lip curled. "Don't think I'm trying to squirm out of my offer. That stands. It's you I'm considering. Remember that no matter how much you may make of yourself those people over there will have the power to take it from you. Should you marry—"
"I shall never marry."
"Should you marry—ah! you will—they can shame you and the man whose name you bear. Could you stand that? After all, isn't the other way better? Wouldn't a clean slate be worth its price?"
She shook her head.
"You don't realize what you ask. I can't go back. I can't. You don't know."
"I suppose I don't," he admitted.
"I'd rather run the risk—the risk of their finding me, the risk, whatever it is, of New York. As for friends—" she smiled upon him radiantly—"well, I'll have you."
"Yes," he promised. "You'll have me."
He accepted her decision, and at once made ready for his tramp across the hills. At parting he reminded her that to him she was still nameless.
"I'm not sure myself," she laughed. "I'll need a new name in New York!"
"But now?"
"Well, then—Jack."
"To offset the dimple, I suppose. Is it short for Jacqueline?"
"No; just Jack."
Jean's knight errant looked back once before the tree-boles shut her wholly away. She had dropped upon a log and was facing the blue reach of the lake. This was about six o'clock in the evening. At nine she had not shifted her position. It was perhaps an hour later when she sprang up abruptly, lit a candle which he had shown her in arranging for the night, and hunting out a pencil and paper, wrote a hurried note which she pinned to the tent-flap.
There were but two lines in all. The first thanked him. The second ran:—
"I've gone back to see it through."
V
The refuge, considered officially, was impressed. That any fugitive, let alone one who had outwitted pursuit, should freely present herself at the gatehouse, spiced its drab annals with originality. Jean Fanshaw, no less than Sophie Powell, had achieved distinction. The refuge dissembled its emotion, however. An escape was an escape, with draconic penalties no more to be stayed than the march of a glacier or the changes of the moon.
But even the refuge—from the vantage-point of a supposed ventilator reached by a secret stair—discerned that the prisoner of the guardhouse was unaccountably not the rebel of Cottage No. 6. The girl who dropped from the window would have found this duress maddening. Four brick walls were its horizon; its furnishing was a mattress thrust through a grudging door at night and withdrawn when the dim glow, filtering through a ground-glass disk in the ceiling, heralded the return of another day. It was always twilight within, for the occupations of a guardhouse require little light. Text-books, no other print, were sometimes permitted, but even these arid pastimes were not for Jean; the school taught nothing she had not mastered. Her resources were two: she might knit or she might think. She usually chose the latter.
Another thing puzzled the refuge—still considered officially. It was no novelty for a song to rise to the pseudo-ventilator (inmates so punished often sang out of bravado when first confined), but it was quite unprecedented for a girl with no couch but the floor, no outlook save the walls, no employment except knitting, companioned solely by her thoughts, to croon the words of a rollicking popular air as if she were content.
Jean, too, wondered unceasingly. Why had her old ideas of life cheapened? Save one chance stranger, men had met her on the footing of boyish good-fellowship which she required of them: why should this no longer seem wholly desirable? Why had she relished a chivalrous insistence on her sex? Why had she taken pride in the practice of a menial feminine art? Why had all things womanly shifted value? Why, above all, did she feel no regret that these things should be? Yet content was scarcely the word for her frame of mind. Her thoughts were a yeasty ferment out of which the unknown youth of the forest, whose very name was a mystery, began presently to emerge as an ideal figure. And this ideal man had on his part a conception of ideal womanhood! Here was the germinal truth at last.
While she pondered, two solitary weeks which by popular account should have been unspeakable, slipped magically away. She dreaded their end, for she knew that in the adamantine scheme of things six months of prison life, at very least, awaited her. Even to the average refuge girl the prison signified degradation; to Jean it also spelled Stella Wilkes. The abhorred contact did not begin at once, however, since it fell out that in runaway cases the powers were wont to decree yet another fortnight of isolation following the transfer from the guardhouse. But isolation in the prison was a relative term. The building's sights could be shut away; its sounds penetrated every cranny.
Such sounds! One of them broke Jean's light slumber her first night under the prison roof. It was a strand in the woof of her dreams at first, a monotonous, tuneless plaint, strangely exotic, like nothing earthly except the wailing of savage women who mourn their dead. She lay half awake for an interval, the weird chant clutching at her heart. Then, as it rose, waxing shriller with each repetition, she sat bolt upright with hair prickling and flesh acreep. It was a menace to the living, not a requiem; a virulent explicit curse.
"The matron to hell! The matron to hell! The matron to hell!"
The prison stirred.
"The matron to hell! The matron to hell! The matron to hell!"
Here a woman laughed; there one began softly to echo the cry; cell warily hailed cell.
"The matron to hell! The matron to hell! The matron to hell!"
The pulsing hate of it now filled the corridors. A door opened somewhere, and a metallic footfall began to echo briskly from iron stairs.
"Is it mesilf ye're wantin', darlin'?" called a fat-throated voice. "I'll not keep ye waitin'. With ye in a jiffy!"
There was a sound of shooting bolts, a brief scuffle, the click of handcuffs, and a ragged retreat. Presently a door slammed, and the matron's steps alone retraced the lower corridors. Far in the distance, muffled by intervening walls, its two emphatic words only audible, the eerie defiance still rose and untiringly persisted until it again entered the fabric of Jean Fanshaw's dreams.
That cry somehow struck the dominant note of the prison. Its bitterness, its mental squalor, its agonizing repression, its smouldering revolt, all focussed in that hysterical out-burst against constituted authority. Jean heard it again and again in the ensuing months, and in each instance it broke the stillness of night. The second time it startled, but did not frighten. The third she thrilled to its message, knowing it at last for her own fiery heartache made articulate. But this was afterward.
In the beginning Stella Wilkes overshadowed their background. She and Jean had had a grammar-school acquaintance in the days before respectability and the Wilkes girl—as Shawnee Springs knew her—parted company; and it was to this period of democratic equality and relative innocence to which Stella chose sentimentally to revert when she first found a chance to speak.
"Can't say I feel a day older than I did then," she went on, sociably. "Do I look it?"
Jean made some answer. Stella indeed seemed no different; looking a mature woman at sixteen, she had simply marked time since. A mole, oddly placed near one corner of her mouth where another girl would dimple, still fascinated by its unexpectedness. Stella noticed this and laughed.
"Remember how all you little kids used to rubber at my mole?" she said. "It made me mad. I don't care now when people stare, but I wish it was on my neck. 'Moles on the neck, money by the peck,' you know. Queer, ain't it, that two of us from the old West Street school should strike this joint together? It's just the same as if we'd gone away to college—I don't think! Any Shawnee Springs news to tell?"
"No," Jean answered, stonily.
Stella saw that her advances were unwelcome, and her mood veered.
"That's your game, is it?" She thrust her hard face closer. "So I ain't in your class, my lady—you that was so keen for the boys! You give me a pain. As if near the whole kit of us wasn't pinched for the same reason. Go tell the marines you're any better than the rest!"
It was Jean's first sharp conception of the brutal truth that the stigma of the reformatory was all-embracing. The world presently emphasized the stern lesson. True to her word on learning of the censorship, she had never written home; but her mother's letters, formal and mutilated as they were, had nevertheless meant more to her than she realized until her degradation to the prison lopped this privilege too away. The cumulative effect of Mrs. Fanshaw's correspondence, when finally read, was not tonic. Despite the censor, Jean gathered that Shawnee Springs now linked her name with Stella Wilkes's. A refuge girl was a refuge girl; degrees and shadings of misconduct lost themselves in the murky sameness of the stain. Her grateful wonder grew that her champion of the forest had had the insight to distinguish. His quixotic young faith and a heartening word now and then from Miss Archer, when some infrequent errand brought the little secretary near, between them redeemed humanity.
A torrid summer dragged into an autumn scarcely less enervating. The kitchen-gardens were arid; the grass-plots sere; the scant wisps of ivy wherewith Miss Archer, unsanctioned by the state, had attempted to soften the more glaring shortcomings of the architect, hung dead beyond all hope of resurrection; and the endless reaches of brick wall, soaked in sunshine by day, reeked like huge ovens the live-long night. The officials' tempers grew short, their decisions arbitrary beyond common; obedience became daily more difficult; riot, full-charged, awaited only its galvanizing spark.
This the prison contributed. Conditions were always hardest here, and the rage they fostered had gathered itself into an ominous hatred of the matron. Nor was this wholly due to her chance embodiment of law. That carried weight, of course, but the prime factor in her unpopularity was a stolid cynicism implanted by some years' prior service in a metropolitan police station. Joined to a temperament like the superintendent's, this could have been endured, though detested; but the former matron of a "sunrise court" mixed her doubt with a lumbering joviality against which sincerity beat itself in vain. Her smile was a goad; her laugh a stinging blow.
The revolt turned upon an old grievance. Breakfast was a scant meal in the prison, and the laundry squad, upon which the severest toil fell, had for months clamored for a mid-forenoon luncheon. This request was reasonable, but an intricate knot of red tape, understood clearly by nobody, had balked its granting, and the matron accordingly reaped a whirlwind which others had sown. All the week it threatened. On Monday perhaps half the workers in the laundry, headed by Stella Wilkes, repeated the old demand, and were sent about their business with heavy sarcasm.
"Lunch, is it!" drawled the matron, with her maddening grin. "Sure it's Vassar College, or Bryn Mawr maybe, these swells think they're attendin'! How triggynomtry, an' dead languidges, an' the pianoforty do tire the brain! Wouldn't you find a club sandwich tasty, young ladies? Or a paddy-de-foy-grass, now? Back to your tubs!"
Jean took no part in the demonstration, and as the Wilkes girl returned to her work she cursed her for a chicken-hearted coward. Since the day of her rebuff she had worn her enmity like a chip upon her shoulder. Jean met this, as she now met everything, with apathy. Stella, her unlovely associates bending over the steaming tubs, the nagging matron—one and all had their being in an unreal world, a nightmare country, which must be stoically endured until the awakening. The tomboy had become a mystic.
With this detachment she incuriously watched the rising storm. From Tuesday to Thursday the unrest spent itself in note-writing, a diversion, following Rabelaisian models in style, which was, of course, forbidden. The contraband pencils found ingenious hiding-places, however, and the notes themselves a lively circulation. One of these missives, written by Stella and mailed with a scuttleful of fresh coal in the laundry stove, fell under Jean's eye Thursday afternoon. It was intended for another, but some delay had bungled its delivery, and the flames unfolded it and betrayed its secret. Stella saw and pressed close.
"If you blab, I'll kill you," she threatened hoarsely. "That's straight."
Jean shrugged her away. She attached no weight to the scrawl's ungrammatical hints of violence. Such vaporings were as common as they were idle. Nor was she moved when, on Friday, during recreation, the matron's alertness checked, though it failed truly to appraise, a catlike dart of Stella's to the rear. She did not escape, however, a certain sympathetic share in the tension which set the last day of the week apart from other days. The nerves of a reformatory are high-pitched. To be always dumb unless bidden to speak, forever aware of a spying eye, eternally the slave of Yea and Nay—such is the common lot. Double the feeling of repression, and you get the prison and hysteria. From the rising-bell, Saturday, till she slept again, Jean's senses were played upon by vague malign influences. All felt them. If sleeve brushed sleeve, a scowl followed; muttered curses sped the passing of every dish at meals; and in the stifling night some one raised the heart-clutching chant against the matron. This was the time Jean hailed it for her own.
Sunday brought no relief. The piping heat held unabated; hard work, the week-day safety-valve, was lacking. Only the matron could muster a smile. That smile! The prison file, passing, chapel bound, in Sunday review, felt the heat hotter and life more bitter because of it. The eyes of one girl blinked nervously; the fingers of a second spread clawlike, then clenched; the jaws of another set. If that woman laughed! The quadrangle peopled rapidly. Every building spun its blue-gray thread into the paths. The earliest comers were quite at the chapel steps when the prison girls, issuing from their frowning archway last, swung reluctantly into the treeless glare. Their smiling matron stood just within the shadow, looking exasperatingly cool in her white linen, and outrageously at peace with herself and her smug, well-ordered world. Then, abruptly, some trifle—perhaps a missing button, possibly a curl where should be puritanic simplicity, nothing more significant—loosed her sarcasm, her laugh and revolt.
A cry, different from the midnight defiance, yet as terrible, burst from one of the prison girls. Shrill, bird-like, prolonged, it was such a sound as the tortured captive at the stake may have heard from the encircling squaws. It was well known in the refuge; decade had bequeathed it to decade; and it was always the signal of mutiny. As throat after throat took it up, the commands of the matrons became mere angry pantomime. Rank upon rank melted in confusion, and the mob, lusting for violence, awaited only its directing fury.
A leader rose. Stella had secretly fomented this outbreak; it was her storm to ride openly if she dared. Yet it was scarcely a question of daring. This was her supreme hour, hers by right of might; and had another seized the lead she would have crushed her. With black locks tumbled, eyes kindled, cheeks afire, wanting only the scarlet gear of anarchy to cap her likeness to those women of other speech who braved barricades like men, she rallied disorder about her as the fiercer flame draws the less. Her following flocked from every quarter of the quadrangle—high-grade girls, girls but just clear of the guardhouse; the mature in years, the tender; the froward, the meek; spawn of the tenements, wayward from the farm; beggars, vagrants, drunkards, felons, wantons, thieves. Hysteria answering to hysteria, madness to madness, like filings to the magnet they came, and, among them, Jean.
And, among them, Jean.
And, among them, Jean.
And, among them, Jean.
VI
Stella hailed the recruit with shrill satisfaction, clutched her by the arm lest her allegiance falter, and beckoned on her amazons.
"Smash the prison first," she screamed. "We'll show 'em."
Back into the grim archway they swept, a frenzied, yelling horde, and flung themselves into a fury of destruction. The window-panes crashed first; then followed fusillades of crockery from dining-room and kitchen. Nothing breakable survived; where glass failed, they demolished furniture; lacking wood, they fell upon the plumbing.
Treading close in Stella's vandal wake, Jean laid waste right and left with hands which she hazily perceived were but mere automata under another unknown self's control. She was a dual being, thinking one thing, doing its opposite. The active personality disquieted yet fascinated the critical real self, and she realized, half dismayed, that if Stella Wilkes should waver in her leadership, the mad, alien Jean Fanshaw would in all likelihood leap to replace her.
But Stella harbored no thought of abdication. Her reign had just begun. What was the too brief interval which had sufficed to wreck the hated prison! There was as good pillage in the cottages, she reminded them; better still in the administration buildings and the chapel. The chapel now! What splendid atrocities they could wreak upon the big organ! And after the chapel, why not storm the gatehouse? What were a handful of guards! The gatehouse and liberty! Fired with this dream of conquest, the mob armed itself with scraps of wreckage and trooped back to the entrance to confront a thorough surprise. Bolted doors blocked their triumphal progress—bolted doors and the matron, calm, resolute, unarmed, and absolutely alone.
The quadrangle, too, had had its happenings. With the superintendent absent, her assistant ill, and the few male guards at the gatehouse but mere creatures of routine, wholly incapable of the generalship which the crisis demanded, the outbreak could scarcely have been more effectively timed; yet order somehow issued from confusion. Officials acting separately bundled such of their charges as had not yielded to hysteria into the cottages, and hurried back to cope with the open mutiny. With this the prison matron demanded the right to deal. It had flamed out in her special province; it was hers to quench if her authority was to mean anything thereafter; and she stubbornly declined aid. Not even the guards might enter with her; she would meet the situation single-handed.
The rioters faced the lonely figure stupidly. Their clamor sank to whispers, then silence. Their eyes blinked and shifted under the cold survey which passed deliberately from girl to girl, missing none, condemning all.
Suddenly the matron levelled a finger at a weak-jawed offender in the van.
"Drop that stick!" she commanded.
The culprit sheepishly complied.
"You too!" She indicated the next, and was again obeyed. In the rear some one whispered.
"Stella Wilkes, come here."
Habit swayed the girl a step forward before she realized that she was tamely submitting, but she caught herself up with an oath, and returned stare for stare.
The matron's voice sharpened.
"Stella," she repeated, "come here."
The rebel's grip upon her cudgel tightened.
"Come yourself," she retorted. "Come if you dast!"
The matron dared. Force rather than psychology had ruled the police station of her schooling, and with the loss of her temper she reverted instinctively to its crude argument. A rush, a glint of handcuffs hitherto concealed, a violent brief struggle, a blow, a heavy fall—such were the kaleidoscopic details of a battle whose whole nobody saw perfectly, but from which Stella, the mob incarnate, emerged unmistakably a victor. Moblike, she was also merciless, and continued to rain blows which the half-stunned woman at her feet had power neither to return nor fend. One of them drew blood, a scarlet thread, which by fantastic approaches and doublings traversed the matron's now pallid cheek and stained the whiteness of her dress.
It was then Jean woke. She was no longer among the foremost. Separated from Stella in the sack of the upper floors, she had fallen late upon a mirror of the matron's, miraculously preserved till her coming, and had busied herself with its joyous ruin till the others had surged below and the rencounter at the door had begun. With her first idle moment apart from the common folly she experienced reaction; one glimpse of the scene below effected a cure. She loved the vanquished as little as the victor, but her every instinct for fair play and decency cried out against the wanton blows, and drove her hotly through the press to the dazed woman's side.
The surprise of the attack, more than its strength, disconcerted Stella, and Jean had pulled the matron to her feet before retaliation was possible. Nimble wits likewise counted most in the immediate sequel. Quite in the moment of her charge Jean spied a coil of fire-hose, which, used not half an hour ago for the sake of coolness, lay still connected with its hydrant, and its possibilities flashed instantly upon her. Before the ringleader's slow brain could divine her purpose she had thrust the nozzle into the matron's fingers and sprung to release the flood. Stella saw the advantages of this neglected weapon now, and plunged to capture it, but a stream as thick as a man's wrist took her squarely in the face with the pent energy of a long descent from the hills, and brought her gasping to her knees. Before she fairly caught her breath she was handcuffed and helpless, and the matron, all bustle and resource with the turning of the tide, was issuing crisp orders to as drenched, frightened, and abjectly obedient a band of rebels as ever made unconditional surrender.
To her real conqueror Stella at least made full and volcanic acknowledgment. The guardhouse alone stemmed the sulphurous eruption which she poured out upon Jean's past, present, and future; and the girls who heard shivered thankfully that another than themselves must drag out existence under the blighting fear of such a requital. The official attitude was more dispassionate. Barring now and again a puzzled glance, as at some insoluble riddle, the matron in no wise singled her preserver from the common run of mutineers to whom she meted out added rigors and penalties for their offence. Far from hastening her return to cottage life by her service in the cause of law and order, Jean learned that she had narrowly escaped doubling her prison term, and that the fact that the good in her conduct had been allowed to weigh over against the evil was deemed a piece of extraordinary clemency.
Yet even if that brief reign of unreason had added a half-year of prison to the six months which a brief interval would round, its lesson would not have been dear-bought; for, as she had returned richer by a new conception of her womanhood from the flight of which the prison was the price, so now she wrung sanity from her yielding to madness. It terrified her that she could for one moment have become like these weak pawns in an incomprehensible game, and the recoil intrenched her in a fastness of self-control such as her girlhood had never conceived. Happily there came also at this time another influence no less wholesome and far-reaching.
One morning of early winter she quitted the prison in charge of a clerk from the superintendent's office, who led the way to Cottage No. 6. Jean's heart sank as they crossed the threshold. In the optimism born of new resolutions she had hoped for a different lot. What availed new resolutions here! But she was no sooner within than she was conscious of a changed atmosphere. Bare as they were, the corridors seemed less institutional; the recreation hall, glimpsed in passing, smiled an almost animate greeting; while the room in which she was told to await the cottage matron's leisure resembled the room it had been in nothing save its four walls. Amy Jeffries, dusting the window-seat as if she enjoyed it, was actually humming.
"Howdy!" she called. "Welcome home."
Jean lifted a warning finger.
"Somebody will hear," she cautioned. "Where will be your high grade then?"
Amy grinned broadly.
"Noticed it, did you?" She pivoted complacently before a mirror. "Don't I look for all the world like a trained nurse? Can't you just see me doing the wedding march with the grateful millionaire I've pulled through typhoid! Glory, but I am tickled to get out of checks!"
Jean was vexed at her folly.
"You'll get into them again mighty quick if she hears," she whispered. "Don't be a fool."
"She!" Amy turned to stare. "Well, if you're not in from the backwoods! You don't mean to say you haven't heard that the Holy Terror is gone?"
"Gone? You mean—"
"I mean g-o-n-e, gone—cleared out, skipped, skedaddled. Can't you understand plain English? I thought everybody knew. She left a week ago to be married."
"Married!"
"Ain't it the limit? Fancythatwith a husband!"
Jean tried, but failed. Stupendous as it was, this marvel paled in interest beside the fact that Cottage No. 6 had lost its martinet. Small wonder the house beamed.
"And the new matron is different?" she said.
"Different! Dif—" Amy became incoherent with amusement. "Say, but you folks in the jug have been exclusive since the riot! You shouldn't be, really you shouldn't. You miss so many things, you know. There was the Astor ball, and the Vanderbilt dinner, and the swellest little supper at Sherry's I've gone to this seas—"
All Amy's members were pinchable. Jean nipped the nearest.
"Has something happened, or hasn't there?" she demanded.
"Would I be talking here like a human being, not a jailbird, if something corking hadn't happened?" She had a table between them now. "Why, I wouldn't be high grade at all. There's been a new deal in No. 6 with a vengeance. You couldn't guess who's matron if I gave you all day."
Jean's face went suddenly radiant.
"Not Miss Archer!"
"You smart thing," said Amy, crestfallen.
"Then it's true! It's really true?" The news was too wonderful for credence. "I can't make it out."
"Neither can I. Why, she's even come over here at a smaller salary. Ain't that a puzzler? I know because I heard her talking it over with the Supe—the Terror had chased me up to the offices on an errand; and you can bet I listened when I caught on that there was something coming for No. 6. As near as I can figure it out, the riot's at the bottom of it, but just why that should make Miss Archer throw up a better job and better pay to camp down here beats little Amy. I'm no rapping medium."
Where Amy failed, Jean, with the clairvoyance of a finer nature, presently divined the truth. It flashed upon her at the end of an hour alone with the little matron, a wonderful, inspiring hour which she came to look back upon as crucial—a forking of the ways where to have chosen wrongly would have meant to miss life's best. Yet she could never take it apart; its texture was gossamer. It helped nothing to recall that the talk had sprung first from one or another of the room's inanimate objects—some cast, book, picture, or bit of pottery—whose sum mirrored Miss Archer's personality; yet one of them had surely been the key to a Garden of the Spirit where common things underwent magical transformations. The vague longings and aspirations which the forest meeting had sown, seemed rank, uncertain growths no longer; precious, rather, and infinitely desirable.
Jean drew a long breath when they separated.
"At first I could not understand why you came," she said; "but it's plain now. It was to help—to help girls like me."
VII
It was during the second spring that Mrs. Fanshaw came. Because of the little matron Jean had finally broken her resolve to write no letters home, whereupon her mother accepted the change as a sign of repentance which, after a seemly interval, she decided to encourage with her presence. Jean was keenly expectant of the promised visit. With the shifting of her whole point of view she now blamed herself for many of the things, so petty taken one by one, so serious in gross, which had made her home life what it was; and out of the reaction there welled an unguessed tenderness for her mother, shy of written expression, but eager to confess itself in deed.
The official who brought Jean to the waiting-room and remained near during the interview need not have turned a tactful back upon their meeting for Mrs. Fanshaw's sake. That lady was as composed as the best usage of Shawnee Springs's truly genteel could dictate under circumstances so untoward. Her features reflected the most decorous blend of pious resignation and parental compassion when the slender blue-and-white figure flung itself from the doorway into her arms, and she permitted the penitent to remain upon the bosom of her best alpaca for an appreciable space of time with full knowledge that a waterfall of lace, divers silken bows, and a long gold chain were lamentably crushed by the impact.
"Concentrate, child," she admonished firmly. "How often I've told you to aim at self-control at all times!"
Jean clung to her in a passion of homesickness, hearing nothing.
"Mother! Mother!" she repeated.
Mrs. Fanshaw detached herself, repaired the ravages, and turned a critical eye upon her daughter.
"What a fright they've made of you!" she sighed. "The color of that dress is becoming enough, but the pattern! Whathaveyou been doing to your hair?"
"My hair?" Jean fingered her braid vaguely. "Oh! You mean at the front? It must be plain, you know."
"And your hands! You never kept them like Amelia's, but now—why, they might be a day-laborer's."
"They are," said Jean.
But Mrs. Fanshaw's interest had fluttered elsewhere.
"I can't be too thankful that I spared Amelia this ordeal," she went on. "Amelia was anxious to come. She said she felt it was her duty, but I refused. She is so sensitive she could not have borne it. To see her own sister in such clothes and in such surroundings would have made an indelible impression."
Jean now had herself only too well in hand.
"I dare say the refuge might tarnish Amelia's girlish bloom," she retorted dryly. "I hope you'll feel no bad effects yourself, mother."
"I'm positive I shall," replied Mrs. Fanshaw, seriously. "My nerves are in a state already. But let that pass. Whatever the cost, I should have come long ago if your behavior had been always what it should. I could not come while you hardened your heart against God's will. Your stubbornness in the beginning—they wrote me fully, Jean; your unwomanly attempt to run away; that shocking riot, all showed—"
"That's past, mother."
"Past, yes; but not forgotten. Shawnee Springs never forgets anything. Your escape was in the papers. I wrote you all that."
"They never let me know. Not in the home papers, the county papers?"
"No." Mrs. Fanshaw drew herself up. "Consideration for me prevented that outrage. The editors preserved the same delicate silence that they kept when you were arrested. But you don't seem to remember that city dailies are read in Shawnee Springs. One vile sheet even printed your picture."
The girl's face crimsoned painfully.
"Oh!" she cried sharply. "How could they! Where could they get it?"
Her mother hesitated.
"Amelia was in a way responsible," she admitted. "She was naturally anxious at your disappearance, and when a nice-mannered young man called and said that if he had your description he could help in the search, the dear girl received him with open arms. How couldsheknow he was a reporter!"
"She gave that man my picture!"
"Like a trusting child. Amelia has felt all our trouble so keenly. For weeks after you were sent away she could scarcely look one of her set in the face. She said she felt like a refuge girl herself. I had to appeal to our pastor to make her see that neither of us was to blame. She shrank from the world even then, but the world came to her."
"Meaning Harry Fargo?" queried Jean, emerging suddenly from the gloom induced by Amelia's imbecility.
"Harry was particularly sweet," admitted Mrs. Fanshaw, archly. "In fact, he has become a son to me in everything but name. If Amelia would only—but I mustn't gossip."
Jean smiled without mirth.
"I think she'll land him," she encouraged.
Her mother frowned.
"What a common expression!" she rebuked. "I thought at first I noticed an improvement in your language. Your voice is certainly better—much lower. It's the prison discipline, I presume. But speaking of Harry, I really think we may regard it as, well, reasonably sure. I must say I'm pleased. Harry is so eligible."
Jean silently reviewed young Mr. Fargo's points; athlete second to none in the gymnasium of the local Y.M.C.A.; gifted with a tenor voice particularly effective at church festivals in ballads of tee-total sentiment; heir presumptive to a mineral spring, a retail coal business, and a seat in the directorate of the First National Bank; clearly destined, in fine, to bloom one of the solid men of his community. Joined to these virtues, present and prospective, he seemed sincerely, if not ardently, fond of Amelia, and Jean with her whole heart wished her sister's long-drawn-out wooing godspeed.
Perhaps she couched this less happily than she might. At all events, Mrs. Fanshaw took warm-offence at some allusion to the suitor's leisured siege.
"Under the circumstances," she remarked severely, "it's a wonder his attentions have continued at all. No eligible young man in Shawnee Springs can be expected to want a sister-in-law whose name everybody mentions in the same breath with Stella Wilkes's, and you know the Fargo family is as proud as Lucifer. I don't see that they have any call to set themselves up as they do—the Tuttles were landowners in the county twenty years before a Fargo was heard of; but there is certainly some excuse for their standing off about Amelia. You don't seem to appreciate how painful her situation has been. People were only just pitching on something else to talk about after you went, when you stirred the scandal up again by running away. That nearly spoiled everything. I had it on the best of authority—Mrs. Fargo's dressmaker is mine now—that Harry and his father actually came to words. Then, to cap the climax, we'd no sooner settled down in peace than the vulgar riot happened. Nobody knew positively whether you were implicated, but they naturally judged you were, and of course I couldn't conscientiously deny it when they asked me point-blank. It has been terrible—terrible."
Jean was swept away upon the flood of egotism. She forgot that she too had a point of view. Their wrongs were the great wrongs.
"I'm sorry," she said humbly. "It's true I didn't realize. I don't want to stand in Amelia's way. You won't have reason to complain again while I am here."
"I don't expect I shall. I can't conceive of another thing you could be up to, even if your disposition to considerourfeelings a little should change. If they'll only marry before your term expires!"
Jean's lips tightened.
"There's almost a year and a half yet," she said grimly. "Surely that's time enough."
"It would be for anybody but a Fargo," sighed her mother. "They're slow at everything. We can only hope and wait. It's been very hard."
"I'll try not to make it more so afterward," Jean returned. "I suppose I must go back to the Springs at first. When a girl goes out they take her—home. But I'll not stay. I'll go away at once."
"Go away! There are none of the relatives you can visit. The Tuttles all feel the disgrace as if it were their own. As for your father's folks—"
"I don't mean to visit. I mean to work—to live."
Mrs. Fanshaw focussed her parochial mind upon this outlandish suggestion, assuming, as was her habit with novel impressions, an air of truculent disapproval.
"Perhaps you still think you can gallivant about the country like a man?" she remarked.
"No. I've got over that. I shall find some woman's work."
"You mean you'll cook, scrub, do the servant's drudgery you've learned here? That would be a nice tale to go the rounds of the Springs!"
"I would cook or scrub if I had to, but I've been taught other things. One of the girls who's leaving this fall—her name is Amy Jeffries—knew no more about earning a living than I when she came here, but she has an eight-dollar-a-week place waiting for her in New York. She's going with a ready-made cloak firm. It was Miss Archer who got her the place, and she says when the time comes she can probably do as well by me."
"New York!" Mrs. Fanshaw shied with rural timidity from the fascinating name. "You in New York! I must get Amelia's opinion. What if it should prove a way out!"
During the remainder of the call the talk strayed mainly in a maze of Shawnee Springs gossip which Jean followed in a lethargy beneath which throbbed an ache. She had grown to value her home, not for what it had been, but for what it might be, and to realize that it was beyond doubt the more a home without her, cut deep. Mrs. Fanshaw had amputated an ideal.
It in no way eased the smart to feel that her mother intended no downright brutality. Indeed, as Jean did her the justice to perceive, she tried in her clumsy way to be kind. She reverted again to the agreeable change in the girl's voice, approved her quieter manner, and, looking closer, even discerned a neatness in general upon which she bestowed measured praise. It was in the midst of these final note-takings that she detected her daughter in a vain attempt to conceal some object in the folds of a pocketless dress.
"What are you doing?" she demanded in abrupt suspicion. "What are you hiding from me?"
The girl started.
"Nothing," she said evasively.
"Nothing! You were always truthful at least."
"I mean nothing important."
Mrs. Fanshaw laid a firm grasp upon the shrinking hand, and dragged its secret to light.
"Embroidery!" she exclaimed.
Jean's cheeks were poppies.
"Yes," she faltered.
"Whose is it?"
"Mine."
The reluctant monosyllables whipped Mrs. Fanshaw's curiosity wide awake.
"No more nonsense," she charged. "Tell me at once who gave you this."
"Nobody," confessed Jean faintly. "I—I made it."
"You!" A pair of glasses, black-rimmed and formidable, bore instantly upon the marvel and searched it stitch by stitch.
Jean waited breathless. Wrought with infinite labor not of the hands alone, the little piece of needlework was absurdly freighted with meaning. In the old days she had loathed such employment as ardently as her sister loved it, but of late she had set herself doggedly to learn the art, since it seemed to her that this more than anything else would typify her new outlook, her return to sex. As such a symbol she had brought her handiwork into the visitors' room. As such, before their meeting, she had hoped her mother might interpret it. Even now, bereft of illusions as she was, she still hoped something, she knew not what.
In fairness to Mrs. Fanshaw it should be recorded that she apparently grasped some hint of this. Relatively speaking, her smile was encouraging. Viewed from her own standpoint, she all but scaled the top note of praise when, extending the embroidery at last, she said,—
"It is almost as good as Amelia's."
The new Jean was still no candidate for sainthood. White to the lips with anger, she caught the emblem of her regeneration from Mrs. Fanshaw's profaning hand and tore it to little strips.
VIII
Thenceforward Jean dreaded nothing so much as any return to Shawnee Springs whatsoever. Here, for once, she found herself in perfect accord with her mother, for, as the time of her release drew near, young Mr. Fargo's sauntering courtship took a sudden spurt, not clearly explicable to himself, whose prime and bewildering result was the fixing of his wedding day.
Dear Amelia naturally longed for her sister's presence at the culmination of her happiness (so Mrs. Fanshaw put it), but there were the Fargos to consider—they were not cordial, by the way—and if the refuge authorities made no objection, would it not perhaps be better if she met the official having Jean in charge at some intermediate point, from which she could proceed at once to her new calling? Jean, she was convinced, would understand.
Jean understood very well, but was thankful. She would rather serve another month in the refuge than be an unwelcome guest at Amelia's marriage. In truth, had she been put to a choice, she would have elected further confinement to her mother's roof in any case. She thought of the reformatory, not Shawnee Springs, as home, and this in a sense which embraced more than Miss Archer and the transformed Cottage No. 6. She loathed the life no less than in the beginning, but time had knit her to its every phase. The cowed, drab ranks had long since ceased to seem alien. Their deprivations, their meager privileges, their rights, their wrongs, their sorrows, their spectral gayeties, all were hers. She had thought to dart from the gatehouse like a wild thing from a trap. In reality she paused to look back with a lump in her throat.
Yet it was a blithe world outside, the fog and gloom of a November rain notwithstanding. Even the wet glisten of the mire seemed cheery. A hundred trivialities, unheeded by her companion, absorbed her unjaded eyes. The red and green liquids of a druggist's window lured her as in childhood; then the glitter of a toy-shop enticed, or the ruddy invitation of a forge. Station and train were each a mine of entertainment. The ticket-buying was an event of the first magnitude; the slot-machines, the time-tables, the news-stands, the advertisements, all the prosaic human spectacle had the freshness of novelty. She noted that women's sleeves had a fullness of which the little tailor-shop in the refuge was but dimly aware; that men's hats curled closer at the brim; that the trainmen wore a different uniform; that one rural depot or another had received a coat of paint.
Mrs. Fanshaw was in waiting.
"There's a train back to the Springs in twenty minutes," she announced briskly, after a preoccupied dab at Jean's cheek, "and under the circumstances"—she was always under circumstances—"I know you won't mind if I take it instead of waiting till your own goes out. What with presents arriving, the dressmaker, and the snobbish behavior of Harry's family, I expect as it is to find Amelia on the edge of nervous prostration. Every minute is precious, we're so rushed. In fact, I could not find time to pack a single stitch for you to take to New York. Anyhow, I understood from your last letter that the refuge would fit you out with the necessaries, which is certainly a help at this time when I'm paying out right and left for Amelia. Why," she wound up suddenly, "your suit is actually tailor-made!"
"Yes," said Jean.
"Excellent material, too," commented Mrs. Fanshaw, fingering the texture. "Does every girl fare as well?"
"The low-grade girls get no jackets, only capes; and their material isn't so good."
"Then you're high grade! You never wrote me."
"I did not think it would interest Shawnee Springs."
Mrs. Fanshaw looked aggrieved.
"You are a strange child," she complained; "so secretive, so self-centered. I suppose your suit was made in the refuge?"
"Yes."
"By one of the inmates?"
"By one of the inmates—myself."
"Strange child!" said her mother again. "Strange child!"
Linked by nothing save a distasteful past, they sat together for an interval in constrained silence. Even at their friendliest, mother and daughter had lacked conversational small change. Presently Mrs. Fanshaw's roving eye encountered the dial of a train-indicator and brightened.
"The Shawnee Springs accommodation is on time for once," she announced.
Jean responded with sincerity that she was glad. That her own train was as plainly registered an hour late, with the equally obvious consequence that she must arrive after nightfall in a strange city, was unimportant.
Mrs. Fanshaw opened her hand-bag.
"Here is the price of your ticket to New York," she said, counting out the exact fare. "You had better buy it at once."
Jean did so. When she returned from the ticket-office her mother was smoothing the creases from a bank-note.
"Did they supply you with any money?" she asked cautiously.
"With two dollars."
"Is that all?"
"They paid my fare here."
"How niggardly in a great state! I can spare you so little myself. But you will begin work at once?"
"To-morrow morning."
"Then ten dollars ought to answer until you draw your first earnings, if you are not extravagant."
"I shan't stop at the Waldorf," promised Jean, grimly. She took the bill, as she had taken the money for the ticket, without thanks, saying only, "I will pay it back."
Another blank silence fell. Mrs. Fanshaw stirred restively.
"I hope that Jeffries girl can be depended on to meet you," she presently remarked.
"I think she can."
"It's certainly a convenience to know somebody at the start, but I don't feel that she is a very desirable associate, whatever Miss Archer thinks. You can drop her later, of course, whenever it seems best."
"Drop her!"
Mrs. Fanshaw jumped at the vehemence of the exclamation.
"How abrupt you are! What I mean to say is that you will hardly want to keep up these reformatory acquaintances. If I were you I should make it a rule to recognize none of them you can by hook or crook avoid. Possibly this girl is superior to most of her class. I don't think you ever mentioned just why she was sent to the refuge?"
Jean's eyes discharged an angry spark.
"You're quite right," she retorted. "I never have."
Mrs. Fanshaw was still waiting in becoming patience for Jean to repair this omission when her train was announced. They rose and faced each other awkwardly.
"Well, good-by," said the elder woman, presenting her cheek.
"Well, good-by," said Jean.
She watched her mother into a car, and through successive windows traced her bustling progress to a seat. Mrs. Fanshaw found no leisure for a last glance outward, and Jean, by aid of certain sharply etched memories, divined that she was absorbed in repelling seat-mates. So occupied, she vanished. Jean could have cried with ease, but sternly denied herself the luxury. She yet retained something of her old boy-like intolerance of the tear-duct, though the refuge, acquainting her with nerves, had dulled the confident edge of her scorn. Tears, she now perceived, like tea, had uses for women other than purely physical.
Happily life's common things still wore a bloom of surpassing freshness for her cloistered eye. This second station, like yet unlike the first; the tardy train, thundering importantly in at last; the stirring flight into the unknown, each served its diverting turn. As dusk settled, the landscape became increasingly littered with signs trumpeting the virtues of breakfast foods, women's wear, or plays current in the metropolitan theatres; while the villages grew smarter in pavement and lighting till she mistook one or two for near suburbs of the great city itself. Then the open spaces grew rare. Did the semblance of a field survive, it was gridironed by streets of the future or sprawled upon by huge factories, formless leviathans of a thousand gleaming eyes. Town linked itself to town.
When they had run for a long time within what she knew must be the limits of the city itself, a brakeman mouthed some unintelligible remark from the door, and the train came to a stop. Jean caught up her bag, but observing that a drummer of flirtatious propensities, who for an hour past had shared her seat, made no move, was left in doubt.
"Isn't this New York?" she asked.
Her seatmate surveyed her facetiously.
"Some of it," he said. "Want any particular part of the village?"
"The main station," blushed the provincial.
"You mean the Grand Central. Sit tight then. This is only a Hundred-and-twenty-fifth Street—Harlem, you know, where the goat joke flourishes. Never saw a billy there myself, and I boarded a year on Lenox Avenue, too."
Jean turned from a disquisition on boarding-houses to the car-window. In its night-time glitter of electricity the street which he dismissed with a careless numeral quite fulfilled her rural notion of Broadway. If these were but the outposts, what was the thing itself!
They shot a tunnel presently, which the drummer berated in terms long since made familiar by the newspapers, threaded a maze of block-signals and switch-lights, and halted at last in an enormous cavern of a place which she needed no hint from her now too friendly neighbor to assure her was truly New York.
The drummer urged his escort, but she eluded him in leaving the car and hurried on in the press. Nearing the gate, however, her pace slackened. The bigness of the train-shed confused her, and she was daunted by the clamor of hackmen and street-cars which penetrated from without. Amy had written that she would meet her if she could leave her work, but Jean could spy her nowhere in the waiting crowd banked in the white glare of the arc-lights beyond the barrier. They were unfamiliar to the last pallid urban face.
She had gone slowly down the human aisle and was wavering on the outskirts, uncertain whether to wait longer or adventure for herself, when the drummer reappeared at her elbow.
"Didn't your party show up?" he said. "I call that a mean trick. You had better let me help you out, after all. You look like a girl with sand. What say we give 'em a lesson? We can have supper at a nice, quiet little place I know up the street, take in a show afterward, and then when we're good and ready hunt up your slow-coach friends. Is it a go?"
She looked every way but toward him, saw a policeman, and aimed forthwith for the shelter of his uniform. Halfway she felt her hand seized, turned hotly, expecting the drummer, and plumped joyfully into the arms of a young person of fashion who greeted her with an ecstatic hug.
"Amy! I was never so glad to see you!"
The girl emerged from the embrace, panting.
"I really think you are," she said. "Sorry to keep you waiting. There was a block on the 'L.' What was that fellow saying to you?"
When Jean had told her she peered eagerly into the crowd.
"I find blond hair lets you in for a lot of that," she commented. "He was a traveling man, you say?"
"I think so."
"Sort of sandy, with a reddish mustache? I could only see his back."
"Sandy? I'm not sure. I avoided looking at him."
Amy was silent while they passed to the street, and continued to scan the faces about her. When they had wormed into a street-car packed with standing women and seated men she spoke again of Jean's adventure.
"Did he say what line of goods he was carrying?" she asked.
"No," Jean answered indifferently. The spectacle of the pavement without had already ousted the drummer from her thoughts.
"Or where he lived?"
"Where he lived?" She turned now and saw that the girl's eyes were very bright. "He mentioned that he had boarded here somewhere—Harlem, was it?"
"Harlem!" Amy's pink cheeks turned rose-red. "And did he have a scar, a little white scar, near his eyebrow?"
"I didn't notice."
"I wish you had."
Jean eyed her narrowly.
"I wish I had, too, if it matters so much," she returned.
Amy donned a mask of transparent indifference.
"Of course it doesn't matter," she said. "At first I thought it might be somebody I used to know."
IX
They alighted at a kind of wooded island, girt by trolley lines and crisscrossed by many paths, along one of which they struck. Although it was November, the benches by the way frequently held slouching forms, sodden men or unkempt women, at whom none glanced save a fat policeman. Neighboring electric signs lit the lower end of the little park brilliantly, and here, cheek by jowl with restaurant, vaudeville, and saloon, Jean suddenly spied an august figure with which school-history woodcuts had made her familiar from pinafores.
"Why, this is Union Square!" she cried triumphantly. "I know it by Washington's statue over there. And this street we're coming to must be Broadway."
"You're not so slow," said Amy, halting at the curb. "Here's another chance to show your speed. Mind you step lively when I see a chance." In the same breath she dragged her charge into a narrowing gap between two street-cars, dodged a truck, circled a push-cart, and issued miraculously, safe and sound, upon the farther side.
They traversed now a street of entrancing shop-windows over which Jean exclaimed, but which Amy in her sophistication dismissed with the brief comment that the real thing was elsewhere. With the same careless unconcern she dropped, "This is Fifth Avenue," at their next crossing; but she immediately discounted Jean's awe by adding, "Not the swell section, you know," and hurried from its unworthy precincts toward an avenue which the elevated railroad bestrode. This, too, was wonderfully curious, with its countless little shops and stalls, but Amy allowed her a mere taste of it only and whipped round a corner into a dimly lit street of dwellings, each with a scrap of a dooryard tucked behind an iron fence.
As they mounted the high steps of one of these houses, Jean remarked with due respect that it was unmistakably a brownstone front—a species of metropolitan grandeur upon which untravelled Shawnee Springs often speculated vaguely; though its dilapidation, obvious even by night, helped to put her at her ease. A placard inscribed, "Furnished Rooms and Board," held a prominent station in one of the basement windows, which was further adorned with a strange symbol upon red pasteboard, explained by Amy, while they waited, as a mute appeal to a certain haughty city official whose business was the collection of garbage.
"The landlady's name is St. Aubyn," Amy further imparted; "or at any rate that's what she goes by. She's the grass-widow of an actor. Some people say her real name is Haggerty, but that needn't bother us. We can't afford to be finicky, or at least I can't."
"Nor I," agreed Jean.
Mrs. St. Aubyn, who at this juncture opened the door in person, looked a weary-eyed woman of fifty-odd, in whose face still lingered some melancholy vestiges of charm. She greeted, without enthusiasm, Amy's buoyant announcement that she had brought her a new boarder, saying that, although she had no complaint to make of Miss Jeffries and supposed she should get on equally well with her friend, on the whole she preferred men.
"They all do," cried Amy, in mock dudgeon. "Every blessed boarding-house in New York prefers men."
The actor's grass-widow did not question this sweeping statement, evidently deeming it a truism which needed neither explanation nor defence, but went on to say that inasmuch as Miss Jeffries already knew the rooms and prices, and since she herself was dog-tired, and the turnips were burning, and the cream-puffs had not come, and one could not trust the best of servants beyond one's nose, she would leave them to themselves, all of which she delivered with dwindling breath, backing meanwhile toward the basement stair, till voice and speaker vanished together.
"Don't mind her little ways," consoled Amy, leading the way upward. "She is really tickled to death to see you. The elevator's out of order," she added facetiously, "but I'm on the first floor—counting from the roof down. A good place it is, too, on hot summer nights when breezes are scarce."
She showed the narrow rear hall-bedroom she now occupied; a rather bigger cell, deriving its ventilation solely from a skylight, which Jean might have at the same price; and, finally, in enviable contrast, a really spacious chamber at the front, possessing no less than three windows,—dormers, it was true, yet windows,—a generous closet, and a steam-radiator, all within their united means did they care to room together. Amy tried to state the case dispassionately, but she could not weigh the advantages of three dormers, a full-grown closet, and a steam-radiator with perfect calm, and after one glance, not at these persuasive features, but Amy's, Jean promptly voted for the joint arrangement.
Amy hugged her rapturously.
"If you only knew how I've wanted it!" she exclaimed. "You can't possibly do better for your money than here. Take my word for it, I've tramped everywhere to see. It has a lot of good points. For one thing, you'll be within walking distance of a warm lunch that won't cost extra, and that's a big item, I can tell you. Besides, you'll meet nice people. A dentist has the second floor front who's a regular swell, but real sociable, and in the hall-bedroom, third floor back, there's an old man who works in the Astor Library. He knows so much, I'm almost afraid to talk to him. Why, they say he had a college education! Then, there's a girl who typewrites for a law firm down in Nassau Street—she's on our floor; another who's a manicure; and a quiet old couple that used to have money, but lost it in Wall Street. All those are permanents. There are two others, a man and his wife, who may go any time because they belong to the profession."
"Which?" asked Jean, innocently.
"Why, the stage. Mrs. St. Aubyn always calls it 'the profession.' She gets actors off and on who are waiting for engagements. She must have known a stack of them once."
Jean shrank from the thought of dining with this array of fashion, learning, and talent, particularly when she discovered that one long table held them all; but nothing could have been less formal than the meal. The prodigy of learning from the Astor, who, by virtue of intellect or seniority, sat at the head of the board in pleasing domestic balance to Mrs. St. Aubyn at the foot, chatted amiably with Jean and Amy, quite like a person of ordinary attainments. The stenographer exchanged ideas upon winter styles with the wife of the shorn lamb of Wall Street, who, on his part, forgot his losses in a four-sided discussion, with the manicure and the professional birds of passage, of the President's latest speech, a document which it tardily developed none of them had read.
Mrs. St. Aubyn's conversation dealt mainly with the food, and was aimed at the maid, whose blunders were apparently legion, but even she found leisure, as did every person in the room, for a quip with the jocund ruling spirit of the feast, Dr. Paul Bartlett. Coming last, the dentist instantly leavened the whole lump. He drew gems of dramatic criticism from the players, got the bookworm's opinion of a popular novel, inquired the day's happenings on 'Change' from the shorn lamb, discussed a murder trial with the legal stenographer, the outrageous rise in price of coal with Mrs. St. Aubyn, and the growing extravagance of women's sleeves with Amy and the manicure, all between the soup and fish. In fine, as Mrs. St. Aubyn loudly whispered to Jean in leaving the dining room, he was the life of the occasion. Whether he heard this or not, Doctor Bartlett redoubled his efforts, if they were efforts, when after eddying uncertainly about the newel post of the main hall the company finally drifted into the drawing-room.
This was not a blithesome apartment. It ran extraordinarily to length and height, Jean thought, rather to the scamping of its third dimension, and was decorated after the dreary fashion of the decade immediately succeeding the Civil War. Its woodwork was black walnut, its chandelier a writhing mass of tortured metal, its mantelpiece a marble sepulchre. A bedizened family Bible of some thirty pounds avoirdupois, lying upon a stand ill designed to bear its weight, blocked one window, while a Rogers group, similarly supported, filled the other. The pictures were sadly allegorical save one, a large engraving entitled "The Trial of Effie Deans." Yet, despite these handicaps, the dentist contrived to give the room an air of cheer. Spying a deck of cards upon the entablature of the mausoleum, he performed a mystifying trick, which he followed with fortunes, told as cleverly as a gypsy's, and with feats of sleight of hand. Then, dropping to the piano-stool, he coaxed from the venerable instrument a two-step which set everybody's feet beating time; passed from this to a "coon song" one could easily imagine was sung by a negro; and, finally, chief marvel of all, he succeeded in luring everybody except Jean into joining the chorus of the latest popular air. In the midst of all these things he narrated most amusing little stories, mainly of dentists' offices, punctuated with dental oaths and imprecations like "Holy Molars" and "Suffering Bicuspid," which sounded comically profane without being so.
The girls discussed him animatedly from their pillows in the wonderful room of three dormers.
"Didn't I tell you he was sociable?" Amy demanded. "Can't he sing simply dandy? And isn't he good-looking?"
Jean gave a general assent. She liked the young fellow's breeziness. She liked his cleanliness, too, and remarked upon it.
"I noticed it first of all," she said.
"Yes, and what's better," added Amy, "you'll never see him look any different. He says soap and water mean dollars in his business. That's one reason why he's so run after at the parlors. None of the other dentists there seem to care."
"Then he hasn't an office of his own?"
"Not yet. He works in a Painless Dental Parlor over on Sixth Avenue. You'll know the place by a tall darky in uniform they keep at the foot of the stairs to hand out circulars."
"Do you suppose he thought it strange that I didn't sing with the rest?" Jean asked anxiously. "He looked round twice."
"I shouldn't wonder. He couldn't guess, naturally, that you've had a steady diet of hymns for three years. Still, that song is only just out, and half of us didn't know the words."
"Did I do anything else queer?"
"Well, you tried hard to pass dishes down the line, instead of letting the maid do it, and you looked sideways a good deal without turning your head. I don't think of anything else just now unless it's that you're as nervous as a cat. Miss Archer did her best to make us girls act like other human beings, but she didn't run the whole refuge, more's the pity. I've got a stack of things to thank her for. Do you notice I don't say 'ain't' any more?"
"Yes."
"She broke me of that. She said I'd find it paid to speak good English, and I have. Already it's meant dollars to me, just like the doctor's soap and water."
Jean wondered how grammatical accuracy could further the making of cloaks, but Amy had suddenly become too drowsy to explain. Rest came less easily to the newcomer. The muffled roar of the elevated railroad, heeded by the urban ear no more than the beat of surf, teased her excited senses to insomnia. Oblivion came abruptly when she despaired of sleep at all, and then, as quickly, morning, with Amy shaking her awake. The light from the three dormers was still uncertain and the air chill, for though the prized radiator clanked and whistled prodigiously, it emitted no warmth.
Jean sprang up hurriedly.
"Am I late?"
"No; early. I thought you'd better get down to Meyer & Schwarzschild's a little before time the first day. You'll have to wear your street-suit there, of course, but you need another skirt and a big apron for work. Just use these I've laid out as long as you like."
"But you'll need them yourself."
Amy smiled mysteriously.
"No, I shan't," she returned, shaking down a smart black skirt over a petticoat which gave forth the unmistakable rustle of silk. "In fact, this is my work-dress—or one of them." She revolved slowly before the glass a moment, relishing Jean's astonishment, then went on: "I'll have to own up now. The cat was almost out of the bag last night. I didn't want to tell you till this morning. I thought it might discourage you. I'm not with Meyer & Schwarzschild any more."
"You've left the cloak firm!" Jean was taken aback, but tried to hide her disappointment. "I'm glad you've done better," glancing again at Amy's magnificence; "it's easy to see you have."