"But he needs it," argued the dentist, plaintively. "I'd also like, if it could be managed, to say a few things to the head of the firm."
"Indeed you mustn't," cried Jean. "Promise me you'll say nothing about it in any way!"
"Can't I eventellRose what I think?"
"Never. I've got to accept this thing and make a new start. I must forget it, not brood over it. You mustn't thrash him, you mustn't tell him what you think—above all, you mustn't go to the firm. Promise me you won't!"
"All right," he assented, manifestly puzzled. "A girl looks at things differently. I've got another proposition, though, which I hope you won't veto. Any prejudice against dentists, present company excepted?"
"No," smiled Jean.
"Some folks have, you know. Can't understand it myself. Why isn't it as high-toned to doctor teeth as it is to specialize an inch higher up, say, on the nose? Yet socially the nose-specialist gets the glad hand in places where the dentist couldn't break in with a Krupp gun. It makes me hot. But enough said along that line just now. What I started in to tell you is that there's an opening at the parlors."
"For me—a girl?"
"For a girl?" Paul pretended to weigh this handicap gravely. "Of course, a lady assistant is generally a man, but still—"
Jean was unfamiliar with this adjunct of modern dentistry.
"What must she do?" she asked.
"Be a lady and assist. That sums it all up. Some old fogies would specify thirty summers and a homely face, but I believe in a cheery office straight through. We've been looking round for the right party lately—the girl who has the berth now is going to be married; but it never occurred to me to offer it to you until to-day. It would mean eight dollars a week right at the start, and a raise just as soon as they appreciate what an air you give the whole place. There'd be more still in it if you liked the work well enough to branch out."
"Branch out? In what way?"
"Operating-room. At first you'll act as secretary and cashier, receive patients, and see that the hulk of a janitor keeps the parlors neat. Then, if you get on as I think you will, you'll very likely have an assistant yourself, and put in most of your time elsewhere. A clever girl can be no end of help in the operating-room. Say, for instance, I'm doing a contour filling, which, let me tell you, needs an eagle-eye and the patience of a mule. Well, while I pack and figure how to do an artistic job, you anneal gold and pass it to me in the cavity. See what I mean? One bright little woman we had for a while drew thirty-five a week, but she was a trained nurse, too."
Jean had doubts of her usefulness amid these technicalities, but the office work sounded simple, and she caught thankfully at the chance.
The dentist waved aside her gratitude.
"I'm simply doing a good stroke of business for the Acme Painless Dental Company," he said. "I'll tell Grimes in the morning that I've located the right party,—Grimes is the company, by the way, the whole painless ranch,—and you can drop in later and cinch the deal."
Jean's thoughts took a leap ahead to ways and means, and she drew a worn shoe farther beneath her skirt.
"You're sure I'll do?" she hesitated.
"You! I only wish you could see some of the procession who've answered our ad." Then, almost as if he read her mind, he added with unwonted bashfulness: "If I were in your place, I'd borrow Amy's black feather boa for your first call. It suits you right down to the ground."
She took the hint laughingly. There were more things than the boa to be borrowed for the conquest of Grimes. She was touched by Paul's transparent diplomacy, and glad that in his slow man's way he had at last perceived why their outings had ceased. So, by grace of Paul and Amy, it fell out before another week elapsed that the affianced lady assistant of the Acme Painless Dental Company left to prepare for her bridal, and Jean reigned in her stead.
The company's outworks on Sixth Avenue were a resplendent negro and a monumental show-case, both filled with glittering specimens of the painless marvels accomplished within. The African wore a uniform of green and gold, and all day forced advertisements into the unwilling hands of passers-by, chanting meanwhile the full style and title of the establishment in a voice which soared easily above the roar of the elevated trains overhead. Passing this personage, you mounted a staircase whose every step besought you to remember the precise whereabouts of the parlors, while yet other placards of like import made clear the way at the top and throughout the unmistakable corridor leading to the true and only Acme Painless Dental Company's door.
Entering here to the trill of an electric bell, you came full upon the central office, or, as the leaflets read, the elegant parlor, from which the operating-rooms led on every hand. In character this apartment was broadly eclectic. Jean's special nook, with its telephone, cash-register, and smart roll-top desk, was contemporary to the minute; yet in the corner diagonally opposed, a suit of stage armor jauntily bade the waiting patient think upon knights, jousts, and the swashbuckling Middle Ages. In still another quarter a languorous slave girl of scanty raiment, but abundant bangles, postured upon a teak-wood tabouret, backed by way of further realism with Bagdad hangings and a palm of the convenient species which no frost blights and an occasional whisk of the duster always rejuvenates. The chairs were frankly Grand Rapids and built for wear, though the proprietor's avowed taste ran to a style he called "Lewis Quince"; and the gilt he might not employ here he lavished upon the frames of his pictures, which, nearly without exception, were night-scenes wherein shimmering castle windows or the gibbous moon were cunningly inlaid in mother-of-pearl. In the midst of all this, now pacifying the waiting with vain promises of speedy relief, now pottering off into this room or that in as futile attempts to make each of several sufferers believe his blundering services exclusive—big, easy-going, slovenly, yet popular—moved Grimes.
Of the operating-rooms, which by no means approached the splendor of the parlor, the next best to Grimes's own was Paul Bartlett's, for Paul was a person of importance here. Of the four assistant dentists, he was at once the best equipped and the best paid, receiving a commission over and above his regular thirty-five dollars a week. The more discriminating of the place's queer constituency coolly passed Grimes by in Paul's favor, but the elder man was not offended. A month or so after Jean's coming he even offered his clever helper a partnership, which Paul unhesitatingly declined. He was ambitious for an office of his own, when his capital should permit, and he planned it along lines which would have fatigued his slipshod employer to conceive.
"It's all too beastly bad," he told Jean, in answer to her query why he did not accept Grimes's offer and insist on reform. "You'd simply have to burn the shop from laboratory to door-mat. To advertise as he does is against the code of dental ethics, and his practice ought to be jumped on by the board of health. Look at this junk!" he added, shaking an indignant fist under the nose of the slave girl. "Lord knows how many good dollars it cost, and yet we haven't got more than one decent set of instruments in the whole shebang. I reach for a spatula or a plugger that I've laid down two minutes before, and I find it's been packed off by old Grimes to use on another patient. As for sterilizing—faugh! You could catchanythinghere. How he's shaved through so far without a damage suit euchres me."
"Yet I like him," said Jean.
"So do I. So does everybody. And he's getting rich on the strength of it."
"I'm getting rich on the strength of it, too," Jean laughed. "Next week I shall really be able to put money in the bank."
Better paid, better dressed, with easy work and not infrequent leisure to read, she felt that at last she had begun to live. Her position long retained a flavor of novelty, for the dental company's patrons were infinitely various and furnished endless topics of interest to herself and Paul. They usually went to and from Mrs. St. Aubyn's together, and as the summer excursion season drew on, their Sunday pleasurings began to flourish afresh. Sometimes Amy joined them, but more often she made labored excuses, and they went alone. Jean thought her more secretive and reserved than of old, and Paul, too, remarked a change.
"How did you two get chummy?" he asked abruptly, after one of Amy's declinations. "You're not at all alike."
"Chums are usually different, aren't they?" Jean said, her skin beginning to prickle.
"Not so much as you two. You're a lady and she—well, she isn't. Known her some time?"
"Yes."
"Where did you meet? You were certainly green to the city when you struck our house. Amy's an East Sider Simon-pure."
"It was in the country. Amy stayed in the country once."
"Shawnee Springs?"
"No, no. Another place."
"Was that where you knew Miss Archer?"
Jean turned a sick face upon him, but Paul's own countenance was without guile.
"I've overheard you and Amy mention her once or twice," he explained.
"Yes," she stammered. "We both knew her there."
"Out of breath?" he said, still too observant. "I thought we were taking our usual gait."
She blamed the heat and led him to speak of other things, but the day was spoiled. She debated seriously whether it were not wise to make a clean breast of her refuge history, but Paul's belief in her unworldliness had its sweetness, and the fit chance to dispel his illusion somehow had not come when Stella, for weeks almost forgotten, so involved the coil that frankness was impossible.
XV
Motley as were the dental company's patrons, Jean never entertained the possibility of Stella's crossing the threshold, till her coming was an accomplished fact. Luckily she happened to be elsewhere in the office when the bell warned her that some one had entered, and she was able, accordingly, to sight the caller with her admiring gaze fixed upon the slave girl. Her own retreat was instant and blind, and by a spiteful chance took her full tilt into the arms of Paul.
"What's up?" he demanded, holding her fast. "What's happened to you?"
She was dumb before his questions. He noticed her pallor and helped her into the nearest operating-chair.
"There is a patient waiting," she got out at last.
"You're the first patient," he said; and brought smelling-salts, which he administered with a liberal hand. "You girls eat a roll for breakfast and a chocolate caramel for lunch, and then wonder why you faint."
She finally persuaded him to leave her on her promising that she would not stir till his return, and he went in her stead to receive Stella, whom he brought to a room so near that almost every word was audible. Stella had evidently visited the parlors before. She addressed Paul familiarly as "Doc," spoke of other work he had done for her, and lingered to make conversation after he had fixed an appointment. The dentist's responses were cool and perfunctory, and in leaving she chaffed him on having lost his old-time sociability.
He returned with a red face to find Jean outwardly herself.
"Better?" he said awkwardly.
"Much better."
Paul fidgeted with the mechanism of the chair.
"As long as you're O.K. now," he went on, "I'm not sorry you missed that party. That's the worst of Grimes. He caters to all sorts. You heard her talk, I suppose?"
"Yes."
He furtively studied her face. "I hope you don't think we're as friendly as she made out?"
"Oh, no."
Paul looked greatly relieved.
"I bank a lot on what you think," he said. "You're the kind of girl who makes a fellow want to toe the mark."
"Don't," she entreated, writhing under his praise. "You rate me too high."
"Too high!" He laughed excitedly and caught her hand when she moved to go. "You didn't mind my telling you?" Then, without awaiting a reply, he blurted: "There's a heap more to say. I want to take you out of all this—away from such riffraff as the girl you didn't see; I want—I want you, Jean."
She tried to speak, but he read refusal in her troubled eyes and cut her short.
"Don't answer now," he begged. "I didn't expect to tell you this so soon. I don't expect you to say yes straight off. I'm not good enough for you, Lord knows, but nobody could care more. Promise me you'll think it over. Promise me that, anyhow."
She would have promised anything to escape. Again at her desk, she strove to think things out, but from the whirl of her thoughts only one fixed purpose emerged: she must know the day and hour of Stella's intended return, for this detail had escaped her. Making some excuse, therefore, when Paul came for her at closing time, she watched him to the street and then hurried to search his operating-room for the little red-covered book in which his personal appointments were kept. It was not in its usual place, however, nor in his office-coat behind the door, nor in any possible drawer of the cabinet. He had evidently slipped it into some pocket of the suit he wore.
She dragged home in miserable anxiety, pinning all her hopes on obtaining a glance at the book while the dentist was at dinner; but this plan failed her, too, since that night, contrary to his custom, Paul made no change in his dress. The book was in his possession. Of this she was certain, for a corner of its red binding gleamed evilly at her from beneath his coat. Once, in an after-dinner comparison of biceps, which the insurance agent inaugurated in the hall, the thing actually fell to the floor at her feet, only to be noted by a watchful chorus before she might even think of advancing a casual ruffle. She devised a score of pretexts for asking Paul to let her see it, any one of which would have passed muster before his enamored eyes, but she dismissed each as too flimsy and open to suspicion; and so, before a safe course suggested itself, the evening was gone, and she climbed her three flights to spend hours in horrid wakefulness succeeded by even more merciless dreams.
Fate was kinder on the morrow. Paul laid the appointment-book upon an open shelf of his cabinet in the course of the forenoon, and she seized a moment when he was scouring the establishment for one of his ever-vagrant instruments, to wrest its secret at last. She found the record easily. It was among the engagements for that very day: "Miss Wilkes, 11-11.30." The little clock on the cabinet indicated ten minutes of eleven now!
She evaded Paul, who was returning, caught up her hat, and telling Grimes that she was too ill to work that day—which the big incompetent sympathetically assured her he could see for himself—fled in panic to the stairs only to behold Stella's nodding plumes already rounding the sample show-case below. Fortunately she was mounting with head down, and it took Jean but an instant to dart for the staircase to the floor above, from whose landing, breathless, lax-muscled, yet safe, she followed Stella's rustling progress to the dental company's door. When she cautiously descended, the hall reeked with a musky perfume from which she recoiled as from a physical nearness to the woman herself.
Luncheon brought Paul and questions which she answered, as she could, from behind her closed door. He had no suspicion of the real cause of her sudden leaving, ascribing her indisposition, as yesterday, to insufficient nourishment, and joined his imagination to Mrs. St. Aubyn's, and that of the proprietor of a neighboring delicatessen shop, in the heaping of a tray whose every mouthful choked. It tortured her to brazen out this deception, but unaided she could see no other way, and advisers there were none. She might have confided in Amy, had the need arisen earlier; but Amy was become a creature of strange reserves and silences.
She left her room at evening and braved the galling solicitude of the dining room. Mrs. St. Aubyn was for extracting her precise symptoms, and led a discussion of favorite remedies, to which nearly all contributed some special lore, from the librarian, who swore by a newspaper cholera mixture, to the bankrupt, whose panacea was Adirondack air. Paul refrained from the talk, perceiving that Jean wished nothing so much as to be let alone. He was more silent than she had ever known him at table, and she twice surprised him in a brown study, of which Amy was seemingly the subject. Dinner over, he brought about a tête-à-tête in an upper hall, a meeting made easy by the boarders' summer custom of blocking the front steps in a domestic group, of which Mrs. St. Aubyn, watchful of other clusters obviously less presentable, was the complacent apex.
"I didn't trot out a remedy downstairs," he said, "but I've got one all the same. It's a vacation."
"But—" Jean began.
"No 'buts' in order. I've got the floor. It's a vacation you need, and it's a vacation you'll have. Grimes has arranged everything. You're to have a week off, beginning to-morrow, and your pay will go on same as ever."
"This is your doing."
"No," he disclaimed; "it's Grimes's. I only told him it would do you more good now than in August. It was due you anyhow."
"But I'm not sick," she protested. "I can't let you think I am. It's not right to deceive—"
"The question now before the house," Paul calmly interposed, "is, Where do you want to spend it? How about Shawnee Springs?"
"No."
"Thought not. You never mention the Springs as though you pined to get back. Ever try Ocean Grove, where the Methodists round up?"
"No."
"Then why don't you? There's more fun in the place than you'd think. They can't spoil the ocean, and Asbury Park is just a stone's throw away whenever the hymns get on your nerves. I mention Ocean Grove, because Mrs. St. Aubyn's sister has a boarding-house there—Marlborough Villa, she calls it—where she'll take you cheap, coming now before the rush. I'll run down Sunday and see how you're making out."
He had an answer for every objection, and in the end Jean let herself be persuaded, although to yield here seemed to imply a tacit assent to other things she was wofully unready to meet. The future stretched away, a jungle of complexity. Perhaps the sea, the real sea she had never beheld, for Coney Island did not count, would help her think it out.
Early the following morning the dentist saw her aboard the boat.
"You'll not mind if I come down?" he asked.
She smiled "No" a little wanly, but he went away content. Sunday would be crucial, she foresaw. He would press for his answer then, and she——Perhaps the salt breeze would shred these mists.
But neither the breeze, full of the odor of sanctity, which cooled encamped Methodism, nor the secular, yet not flagrantly sinful, atmosphere of the twin watering-place, had aided much when the week-end brought Paul to solve the riddle for himself.
Many things allied in his favor. In the first place, Jean was unfeignedly glad to see him, as the agitated veranda rockers of Marlborough Villa bore witness. In a world which she had too often found callous, Paul Bartlett, for one, had proved himself a practical friend. She felt a distinct pride in him, too, as he withstood the brunt of the veranda fire; a pardonable elation that, in a social scheme overwhelmingly feminine, she led captive so presentable a male.
Again, Paul was tactful in following up his welcome. His only concern Saturday evening, and throughout Sunday till almost the end, was seemingly to give her pleasure. Sometimes she played the cicerone to her own discoveries: now a model of Jerusalem, its Lilliputian streets littered with the peanut shucks of appreciative childhood; the pavilion where free concerts were best; the bathing-beach where the discreetly clothed crowd was most diverting; or a little lake, remote from the merry-go-rounds and catch-penny shows, which she secretly preferred to all. Or Paul would display the results of his past researches. He knew an alley in one of the great hotels, where she had from him her first lesson in the ancient game of bowls; a catering establishment whose list of creams and ices exceeded imagination; and a drive—Sunday morning this—past opulent dwellings, whose tenants they commiserated, to an old riverside tavern overhung by noble trees.
Sundown found them watching the trampling surf from the ramparts of their own sand-castle, which Paul, guided by her superior knowledge of things mediæval, had reared. The transition from sandcastles to air-castles was easy, and presently the man was mapping his future.
"Grimes wants me to renew our contract," he said. "It runs out October first, you know. But I think it's up to me to be my own boss. I've got what I needed from the dental company—practical experience. If I stay on, I may pick up some things I don't need, just as the other fellows finally drop into old Grimey's shiftless ways. I don't want to take any of his smudge intomyoffice. He can keep his gilt gimcracks and his slave girl and his bogus armor. A plain reception-room, but cheerful, I say; and an operating-room that's brighter still. Canary or two, maybe; plants—real plants—and fittings strictly up to date. Electricity everywhere, chair best in the market, instruments the finest money will buy, butout of sight. No chamber of horrors for me! As for location, give me Harlem. I know a stack of folks there, and I like Harlem ways. I've even looked up offices, and I know one on a 'Hundred-and-twenty-fifth Street that just fills the bill. Well, that's part of the programme."
Jean was roused from visions of her own.
"I know you'll succeed," she said.
"That's part of the programme," he repeated; then, less confidently: "The other part includes a snug little flat just round the corner, where a fellow can easily run in for lunch. I don't mean a bachelor's hall. I mean abona-fidehome, with a wife in it—a wife named Jean!"
He was a likable figure—clean-cut, earnest, manly—as he waited in the dusk, and the home he offered had its appeal. Marriage would solve many problems. She would be free of the grinding struggle for a livelihood, which the stigma of the refuge made dangerous. She would be free of the fear of such vengeance as Stella could wreak. If the need arose, it would be a simple matter, once they were married, to tell Paul the truth of things. His love would make light of it. As for her love——But what was love? Where in life did one meet the rose-colored dream of fiction? Love was intensified liking, and Paul, as has been recorded, was a likable figure—clean-cut, earnest, manly—as he waited in the dusk.
Yet, even then, recurred a still undimmed picture wherein, against a background of forest birches, there shone an indubitable hero of romance.
XVI
Jean shrank from the congratulations of the boarding-house and the office, and they decided at the outset to keep their engagement to themselves.
"Not barring your mother, of course," Paul amended. "To play strictly according to Hoyle, I expect I ought to drop her a line. What do you think?"
"It won't be necessary," Jean said.
The dentist sighed thankfully.
"Glad to hear it. The chances are she'd say no, straight off the bat, if I did. Letter-writing isn't my long suit. What will you say about a proposition like me, anyhow?"
"Nothing."
"Nothing? Least said the better, eh?"
"I mean I'm not going to write."
"Not at all?"
"Not till we are married. I will write home then."
Paul whistled meditatively.
"Mind telling why?" he queried. "Can't say that this play seems according to Hoyle, either."
Jean's real reason was rooted in a fear that Mrs. Fanshaw's erratic conscience might be capable of a motherly epistle to Paul, setting forth the refuge history. So she answered that she and her family were not in sympathy, and was overjoyed to find that Paul thought her excuse valid.
"I know just how you feel," he said. "My governor and I could never hit it off. But about writing your mother: we'll need her consent, you know. You're still under twenty-one."
"I come of age September tenth."
"But we want to be married the third week in August."
"We can't," said Jean; and that was the end of it.
This postponement notwithstanding, it seemed to her that she fairly tobogganed toward her marriage. Even before her return to work, Paul notified Grimes of his intention to shift for himself after October and leased the office of which he had told her. With the same energy, of which he gratefully assured her she was the dynamo, he promptly had her hunting Harlem for the little flat, just around the corner, of his imaginings. For so modest a thing, this proved singularly elusive, and it took a month of Sundays, besides unreckoned week-day explorations, before they lit finally upon what they wanted, in a building so new that the plumbers and paper-hangers still overran its upper floors.
The "Lorna Doone" was an apartment house. The prospectus said so; the elevator and the hall service proved it. Mere flats have stairs and ghostly front doors which unseen hands unlock. Mere flats have also at times an old-fashioned roominess which apartments usually lack; but as Paul, out of a now ripe experience with agents and janitors, justly remarked, they have no tone. This essential attribute—the agents and janitors agreed that it was essential—seemed to him to exhale from the Lorna Doone with a certainty not evident in many higher-priced buildings whose entrances boasted far less onyx paneling and mosaic. Besides tone or, more correctly perhaps, as a constituent of tone, this edifice had location, which Jean was surprised to learn was a thing to be considered even in this happily unfashionable section.
There was Harlem and Harlem, it appeared; and taught partly by Paul, partly by the real-estate brokers, she became adept in the subtle distinctions between streets which seemingly differed only in their numerals. For example, there was a quarter,thequarter to be accurate, once called Harlem Heights, which now in the full-blown pride of its cathedral, its university, and its hero's mausoleum, haughtily declared itself not Harlem at all. They had scaled this favored region in their quest, admired its parks, watched the Hudson from its airy windows, and hoped vainly to find some nook their purse might command; but they had to turn their steps from it at last. This glimpse of the unattainable was a strong, if not controlling, factor in their final choice.
"We can't be hermits and live in a hole," Paul argued. "I know a big bunch of people here already, and we'll soon know more. We've got to hold up our end. Nice name we'd get in our club if we didn't entertain once in a while like the rest."
"Our club!" she echoed. "We're to join a club?"
"Sure. Bowling club, I mean. Everybody bowls in Harlem. We must think about the office, too. It's the women who make or break a dentist's practice, and sooner or later they find out how he lives and the kind of company he keeps."
After a reflective silence he frightened her by asking abruptly whether she remembered a loud girl who had come to the dental parlors for an appointment the day of her first illness.
"The chatty party who thought I wasn't sociable," he particularized. "Her name's Wilkes."
Jean remembered.
"Well, she came back," pursued the dentist, slowly. "I filled a tooth for her the next morning. She had a good deal to say."
She brought herself to look at him. If the past must be faced now, she would meet it like the honest girl she was. But Paul's manner was not accusing, and when he spoke again, it was of neither Stella nor herself.
"How much does Amy get a week?" he asked.
She told him, and he nodded as over a point proved.
"Would it surprise you to hear that she draws five dollars less? That does surprise you, doesn't it?"
"How do you know?"
"My drug-department patient told me long ago. I didn't think much about it at the time, for some girls dress well on mighty little; but when—well, the long and short of it is, that Wilkes woman knows Amy!"
Jean pulled herself together somehow. Amy's defense was for the moment her own.
"Need that condemn Amy?" she said.
"Of course not," returned Paul judiciously. "It might happen to you, or anybody. Perhaps she says she knows me. It's the way she came to know her that counts. The Wilkes girl got very confidential when I left her mouth free. She had tanked up with firewater for the occasion, and it oiled her tongue. I didn't pay much attention until Amy Jeffries's name slipped out, but I listened after that. I thought it was due you."
"And she said—?"
"She said a lot I won't rehash, but it all boils down to the fact that they both graduated from the same reformatory."
She must tell him now! White-faced, miserable, she nerved herself to speak.
"Paul!" she appealed.
He was instantly all concern for her distress.
"Don't take it so hard," he begged. "She isn't worth it."
"You don't understand. I—I knew."
"You knew what?"
"About the—reformatory. I once told you I met Amy in the country."
"I remember."
"Well," the confession came haltingly, "it was the refuge I meant. I met her at the refuge."
She waited with eyes averted for the question which should bare all. Instead, she suddenly felt Paul's caress and faced him to meet a smile.
"Youarea trump!" he ejaculated. "To know all the while and never give her away!"
He had not understood! Trembling like a reprieved criminal, she heard him go on to complete his self-deception.
"I was going to ask you to let Amy slide after we were married," he said, "but if you believe in her this much, I reckon she's worth helping. I don't suppose all refuge girls are of the Wilkes stripe."
The crisis past, she half regretted that she could not have screwed her courage to the point of a full confession, but this feeling was transitory. Paul rested content with his own explanations and talked of little else than their flat, and she, too, presently found their home-building absorbing.
A more minute inspection of the Lorna Doone, after the signing of the lease, revealed that the outer splendor had its inner penalties.
"Looks like a case of rob Paul to pay Peter, this trip," said the dentist. "Peter is the owner's first name, you know. The woodwork is cheap, the bathtubs are seconds, and the closets, as you say, aren't worth mentioning. I'll gamble the building laws have been dodged from subcellar to cornice. I hear he has run up a dozen like it, and every blessed one on spec. That's why we're getting six weeks' rent free. It's anything to fill the house and hook some sucker who hankers for an investment and never suspects the leases don't amount to shucks."
"Don't they?"
"Ours doesn't. Why, the man as much as told me to clear out when the building changes hands, if I like."
Jean looked round the bright little toy of a kitchen where they stood.
"I shan't want to leave," she said. "It already seems like home."
It seemed more and more a home as their preparations went forward. They were not supposed to enter into formal possession till late in August, but the complaisant owner gave Paul a key some weeks before and made no objection to their moving in anything they pleased. So it fell out that their modest six-rooms-and-bath in the Lorna Doone became in a way a sanctuary to which they went evenings when they could, and made beautiful according to their light.
It was a precious experience. Such wise planning it involved! Such ardent scanning of advertisements, such sweet toil of shopping, such rich rewards in midsummer bargains! They did not appreciate the magnitude of their needs till an out-of-the-way store, which fashion never patronized, put them concretely before their eyes in a window display. In successive show-windows, each as large as any of their rooms at the Lorna Doone, this enterprising firm had deployed a whole furnished flat. Furthermore, they had peopled it. In the parlor, which one saw first, a waxen lady in a yellow tea-gown sat embroidering by the gas-log, while over against her lounged a waxen gentleman in velvet smoking-jacket and slippers—a most inviting domestic picture, even though its atmosphere was somewhat cluttered with price-marks.
"That's you and me," said Paul, tenderly ungrammatical.
Jean was less romantically preoccupied.
"I'd quite forgotten curtains," she mused. "They'll take a pretty penny."
Thereupon the dentist discovered things which he had overlooked.
"We must have a bookcase," he said. "That combination case and desk certainly looks swell. What say to one like it?"
"Have you any books?"
"I should smile. I've got together the best little dental library you can buy."
"Then you'll keep it at your office," decided Jean, promptly. "When we have a library about something besides teeth, we'll think about a case."
The shopkeeper's imaginative realism extended also to the other rooms. Real fruit adorned the dining-room buffet; the neat kitchen was tenanted by a maid in uniform, whom they dubbed "Marie" and agreed that they could do without; while in one of the bedrooms they came upon a crib whose occupant they studiously refrained to classify.
"But for kitchenware," said Paul, abruptly, "the five-and-ten-cent stores have this place beaten to a pulp."
With this, then, as a working model, to which Paul was ever returning for inspiration, they made their purchases. It was, of course, his money in the main which they expended, but Jean also drew generously on her small hoard. They vied with each other in planning little surprises. Now the dentist would open some drawer and chance upon a kit of tools for the household carpentering, in which his mechanical genius reveled; or Jean would find her kitchen the richer for some new-fangled ice-cream freezer, coffee-machine, or dish-washer which, in Paul's unvarying phrase, "practically ran itself." They derived infinite amusement also from the placing and replacing of their belongings—a far knottier problem than any one save the initiate may conceive, since the wall spaces of flats, as all flat-dwellers know, are ingeniously designed to fit nothing which the upholsterer and the cabinet-maker produce. Luckily they discovered this profound law early in their buying, though not before Paul, adventuring alone among the "antique" shops of Fourth Avenue, fell victim to an irresistible bargain in the shape of a colonial sideboard which, joining forces with an equally ponderous bargain of a table, blockaded their little dining room almost to the exclusion of chairs.
Half the zest of all this lay in its secrecy; for although the boarding-house suspected a love affair,—and broadly hinted its suspicions,—it innocently supposed their frequent evenings out were spent at the theaters. Quite another theory prevailed at the Lorna Doone, however, as Jean learned to her dismay one Sunday when she was addressed as "Mrs. Bartlett" by the portly owner, whom they passed in the entrance hall.
"Oh, they've all along taken it for granted we're married," said Paul, carelessly. "I thought it was too good a joke to spoil."
Jean did not see its humor.
"We must explain," she said.
"And be grinned at for a bride and groom! What's the use? It will be true enough two weeks from now."
She privily decided that she would undeceive the owner at the first opportunity, but the chance to speak had not presented itself when far graver happenings brushed it from her thoughts as utterly as if it had never been.
XVII
Amy had, in fairness, to be told as August waned. To Jean's suggestion that very likely either the stenographer or the manicure would be glad to share the room of the three dormers, she replied that she could easily afford to keep it on by herself while she remained.
"It won't be for long," she vouchsafed airily. "In fact, I'm going to be married myself."
Jean's arms went round her instantly, the restraint of months forgotten.
"And you've never breathed a word!" she reproached.
"No more have you," retorted Amy, glacial under endearments.
"I know, I know. But you have seemed so different. You have kept to yourself, and I thought—"
"You thought I wasn't straight," Amy took her up bitterly as Jean hesitated. "I knew mighty well what was in your mind every time I got a new shirt-waist or a hat."
"You weren't frank with me."
"I couldn't be."
"I don't see why."
"Because," she wavered, melted now, "because you are you, so strait-laced and—and strong. I've always been afraid to tell you just how things stood."
"Afraid, Amy? Afraid of me!" Jean felt keenly self-reproachful. "I am horribly sorry. Heaven knows I haven't meant to be unkind. I've found my own way too hard to want to make things worse for anybody else, you above all. You believe me, don't you?"
"Yes."
"Then be your old self, the Amy who made friends with me in Cottage No. 6. Who is he? Any one I know?"
"You've met him."
"I have! Where?"
Amy's color rose.
"Remember the night you struck New York?"
"Perfectly."
"And the traveling man who jollied you?"
"Yes."
"Well," she faltered, "he's the one. His name is Chapman."
Jean was too staggered for a prompt response, but Amy was still toiling among her explanations.
"You mustn't think anything of his nonsense that night," she went on. "It was only Fred's way. He's a born flirt. You couldn't help liking him, Jean, if you knew him."
Jean met her wistful appeal for sympathy, woman-wise. Words were impossible at first. By and by, when she could trust herself to speak, she wished her happiness.
"Does he—know?" she added.
Amy's fair skin went a shade rosier.
"My record, you mean? Nobody knows it better. Don't you—don't you catch on, Jean? He was the—the man!"
"He! You've taken up with him again! The man who saw your stepfather send you to the refuge and never lifted a finger—"
"Don't!"
"Who let his child—"
"Stop, I tell you!" She barred Jean's lips passionately. "You see! Is it any wonder I couldn't bear to tell you? I wish to God I'd never said a word."
Jean stared blankly at this lamb turned lioness.
"Forgive me," she begged. "Perhaps I don't understand."
"Understand! You!" She laughed hysterically, "Yet you're going to be married! If you loved Paul Bartlett, you'd understand."
"You must not say that."
"Then don't say things that hurt me. Understand! If you did, you would know that it would make no difference if he was rotten clear through. But he's not. Fred never knew about the baby. He cried when he heard—cross my heart, he did. He said if he'd known—but what's the use of digging up the past! He is trying to make up for it now. He's been trying ever since we ran across each other again. It was in the cloak department he caught sight of me," she digressed with a pale smile. "I was wearing a white broadcloth, sable-trimmed evening wrap, and maybe he didn't stare! He couldn't do enough for me. That's where the new clothes came from. I could have had money if I'd wanted it—money to burn, for he makes a lot; but I wouldn't touch it. It would have looked—oh, you see for yourself I could not take money. You don't sell love, real love, and God knows mine is real! I've never stopped loving him. I never can."
She, too, it appeared when she grew more calm, aspired to be mistress of a flat.
"Though not at the start," she continued. "Fred wants to board at first. He says I've had work enough for one while. I said I shouldn't mind that kind of work, but he is dead set on boarding, till I've had a good long rest. Fred can be terrible firm. But by and by we're to keep house, and you'll be able to tell me just what to do and buy. You will, won't you, Jean?" she ended anxiously. "You'll stick by me?"
"Yes," Jean promised.
"And you'll come to see me—afterward? Say you'll come."
"Yes, I'll come."
"And you won't let Fred suspect that you've heard about—about everything? I want him to see that I know a girl like you. I've talked to him about you, but I've never let on that you're a refuge girl yourself. Promise me you will be nice to him!"
"I'll try."
Amy kissed her fervently.
"This makes me awful happy," she sighed. "I think a heap of you, Jean. Honest, I do. You come next to Fred."
As a proof of her affection she presently bought a wedding gift of a pair of silver candelabra which she could ill afford, and which Jean accepted only because she must. These went to flank Grimes's gift—for he was party to the secret now—a glittering timepiece for their mantel, densely infested with writhing yet cheerful Cupids, after the reputed manner of his admired "Lewis Quince." Mrs. St. Aubyn's contribution was a framed galaxy of American poets: Bryant, Emerson, Longfellow, Whittier, Lowell, Holmes, and Walt Whitman, the last looking rakishly jocular at the Brahminical company in which he found himself thus canonized.
Everything was finally in place at the Lorna Doone, and with the actual beginning of their lease-hold Paul moved his personal chattels from Mrs. St. Aubyn's to the flat, and slept there nights. This was the twenty-fifth of August. A week later Jean climbed the Acme Painless Dental Company's sign-littered stairway for her last day's service. She was a little late, owing to a fire which had impeded traffic in a near-by block, and the morning's activity at the parlors was already under way. She busied herself first, as usual, at her desk, sorting the mail which the postman had just left. In addition to the office mail there were personal letters for Grimes and the various members of the staff, which she presently began to distribute, reaching Paul's operating-room last of all.
The dentist was at work, but he glanced up when she entered and sent her a loverlike look over his patient's head. No creature with eyes and a reasoning brain could have misread it, and the occupant of the chair, who had both, squirmed to view its object; but Paul threw in a strategic "Wider, please," and held the unwilling head firmly to the front.
"Chuck them anywhere, Jean," he directed, his glance dropping to her hand.
Her obedience was literal; the next instant the letters strewed the rug at his feet. With the enunciation of the name, the patient twisted suddenly from Paul's grasp, and Jean found herself staring full into the malignant eyes of Stella Wilkes.
Paul first found voice.
"We'll go on, Miss Wilkes," he said, his gaze still intent upon the tragic mask, which was Jean.
Stella waved him aside.
"Hold your horses, Doc," she rejoined coolly. "I've met an old friend."
"Do you know each other?" It was to Jean he put the question.