"By herself?" said Laura, really startled. "You don't mean without even a maid?"
"So she says."
"Aunt Nelly will never allow it! And, really, it wouldn't be safe. She ought to take Flora along, at least."
Upon which Howard boldly tried Fred's own argument: "Why shouldn't she be alone? She'll have a revolver."
"I wouldn't do it for a million dollars!" said Laura. "And, besides, nobody goes to Lakeville; it's awfully common."
"Fred is above that sort of thing," Howard said. For once the good-natured Laura was affronted.
"I don't pretend to be like Fred—" she began, but he interrupted her:
"You? Of course you're not like Fred! You couldn't do the things she does!"
Laura gave him a cool glance: "I promised this dance to Jack McKnight. Perhaps we'd better start in?"
"I'd like to wring his neck," Howard declared, rising reluctantly.
When she and Jack were half-way down the room she told him that there was a new engagement in the air. "The girl's perfectly fine, but the man makes me tired," said Lolly, lifting her pretty foot in the prettiest and daintiest kick imaginable.
"Tell us," Jack entreated, one hand holding hers, and the other spread over her young shoulder-blades.
"Oh, it isn't out yet," she said, "and I don't know that it's—reallyon—but I bet it—will be—pretty soon!"
And she tossed her head a little viciously.
The two Misses Graham were very much interested in their real-estate agent.
"Agirl, to be in business," said the younger sister, doubtfully.
"It's very nice in her," said the elder sister. "I suppose the Paytons have lost their money and she has to support the family."
"She is certainly capable," Miss Mary admitted. "But it does seem strange for her to work in this way, when she could give music lessons, for instance."
"Perhaps she's not musical," Miss Eliza objected. "I hate to have a girl pounding the piano, when her talent lies in scrubbing floors." Miss Eliza Graham looked like a frayed old eagle; perhaps because for seventy years she had flapped unavailing wings against the Graham traditions.
Those traditions had kept her from the serious study of music, and later they had "saved" her from marriage with a man who had very little money. The younger Miss Graham looked, and was, as contented as a pouter-pigeon teetering about in a comfortable barn-yard. It was Miss Eliza, tall, thin, piercing-eyed, and sweet-hearted at seventy-two, who had, as she expressed it,"dug Mary up," and brought her to town for the winter. Miss Eliza was for a hotel, but Miss Mary felt that unmarried ladies should have the dignity of their own roof. "We can always have the escort of a messenger-boy, if we go out in the evening," she told her sister, who agreed, her eyes twinkling.
"Excellent idea. We can spank him if he doesn't behave properly!"
"Oh, mydearEliza!" Miss Mary protested, but she smiled indulgently. Eliza was the most precious thing in the world to the little, plump lady who made endless excuses to herself, and to everybody else, for "dear Eliza's ways." It was a "way" of Eliza's to forgive Youth for almost anything it did....
"Of course, Youth makes Age uncomfortable," she would concede. "New wine is very hard on old bottles! But if the bottles burst, it isn't the fault of the wine, it is the fault of the bottles—for having been empty!" The significance of those last words was quite lost on Miss Mary.
As the two sisters went over their little apartment, and discovered its possibilities, old Miss Eliza's interest centered in the youth as well as the sex of their real-estate agent. "Look at that wood-box!" she said;—"to think of a girl having so much gumption!"
"Oh, dear!" said Miss Mary—and pointed a shrinking finger at the stub of a cigarette on the parlor windowsill, "I thought I smelt smoke; a workman must have left it."
But the cigarette was the only fly in the ointment. Theapartment, with its "art" finishings, electricity, and steam-heat, was to the country ladies and their one elderly maidservant a miracle of beauty and convenience.
"Arthur was wonderfully wise in asking Miss Payton to attend to it for him," Miss Eliza said.
"I wonder if—it means anything?" Miss Mary queried, with an arch look. "After all, he must know her very well, to have told her just what we wanted—rooms and bath, and all that. It is rather intimate, you know."
"Ihopeit means something! I hope he has got over that wicked jilt, Kate Morrison!"
"Well, the Paytons are nice people," the younger sister said; "she was a Holmes, you know."
They were both eager to see dear Arthur and Miss Payton, for they felt sure they would know the moment they saw them together whether he had "got over" Kate. "When people are in love they always betray it," said Miss Eliza.
But when Mr. Weston brought Miss Frederica Payton to call, no "love" was betrayed on either side. In fact, the call was such an astonishing experience to the two sisters that they quite forgot their sentimental wonderings. Frederica accepted their thanks and appreciation very pleasantly, but a little bluntly. Oh, yes, the sunshine in the dining-room was very nice; she was glad they liked it. But she hoped they'd survive the jig-saw over-mantel and the awful tiles in the parlor. "They made me pretty sick," she said.
"Why, I thought the mantelpiece very artistic," Miss Mary said, blankly.
"The porcelain bath-tub is dandy," Fred said, with real pride.
"Dandy?" murmured Miss Eliza.
"It made me feel as if I could hardly wait for Saturday night to take a bath," the Real Estate Agent said. The two ladies looked startled—not at the antique joke, but to refer to bathing in Arthur's presence! "I mean the tub is bully," Fred explained; "and the plumbing—" Here she became so specific that her modest old clients grew quite red. She had been obliged to get a plumber in to work on the trap the afternoon before they came, but she was sure everything was all right now.
The door-bell rang at this moment, and while the Misses Graham, breathless under the shock of Miss Payton's thoroughness, welcomed (of all people!) old Mrs. Holmes, Fred was able to groan to Arthur Weston, "Can't we get out?"
"We cannot," he said, decidedly; "now brace up and be nice to your grandmother."
"Oh, Lord!" said Fred; but she was really very nice. She pecked at Mrs. Holmes's cheek through its white lace veil, and said "Hello, Grandma! How is anti-suffrage?" as politely as possible.
Of course, to make things pleasant for Mrs. Holmes, the Misses Graham repeated all their appreciation of Miss Freddy's efficiency. "She will make an admirable housekeeper," Miss Mary said, in her gentle way.
"She ought to," said Frederica's grandmother. "I'm sure I brought her mother up to know how to keep house! But it is just a fancy of Freddy's to do this sort of thing;"she waved a knuckly white glove at the apartment, which caused Frederica to roll her eyes at Mr. Weston. "Of course, I know it isn'tdone, but it's an amusement for her," Mrs. Holmes explained, "and I have so much sympathy with young people—my daughter says I am all heart!—that I love to have the child amuse herself."
She was trying to preserve the Payton dignity, but she was very nervous; she could have said it all so much better if that pert creature had not been sitting there, her knees crossed, and displaying a startling length of silk stocking. She knew that no sense of propriety would keep Fred quiet if she took it into her head to contradict anybody, and she was glad when the two ladies changed the subject, even though it was for the gunpowdery topic of suffrage, on which, it appeared, the younger Miss Graham had strong feelings.
"I am sure female influence is not only more refining, but more effective than the ballot could possibly be," she said.
Of course Fred rushed in: "You're an anti?"
"Yes, my dear," Miss Mary said, smiling.
"To get things done by 'influence' is to revert, it seems to me, to the methods of the harem," said Fred, earnestly. Frederica was never flippant on this vital topic of suffrage, unless she was angry. Her grandmother's retort supplied the anger:
"Woman's charm will always outweigh woman's ballot," said Mrs. Holmes, with smiling decision. (She, too, was getting hot inside.)
"The antis," Fred flung back, "think that all thatis necessary is to 'sit on the stile, and continue to smile'!"
"What did you say?" said Mrs. Holmes, frowning. "Young people speak so indistinctly nowadays! We were taught proper enunciation when I was young."
"Woman," said Miss Mary, raising her voice, "is a princess, but her God-given rule lies in the gentle domain of the home."
"Gosh!" said Fred—and two of her auditors laughed explosively. But Frederica was red with wrath. "I've seen the 'princess' exercising her God-given rule in cleaning the floors of saloons on her hands and knees, because she had to support the children that her husband had foisted on her and then deserted. Do you think under such 'gentle circumstances' her charm would do as much for her as a vote?"
One does not know just how much of an explosion there would have been if the elder Miss Graham had not come to the rescue: "Ah, well, there are so many good reasons on both sides, that I'm glad I don't have to decide it!" Then she began to talk of old friends in Grafton; but, alas, as a subject Grafton, too, was somewhat dangerous; old Mr. So-and-so died two years ago; and Mrs. Black—did Mrs. Holmes remember Mrs. Black? "I am sorry to say she is very ill," Miss Mary said. The chatter of gossip was—as it so often is with age—a rehearsal of sickness and death. In the midst of it Mrs. Holmes clutched at a gold mesh-bag that was slipping from her steep lap, and tried to rise:
"I think I must go. (Oh, do pick up that bag, Freddydear.) I am too tender-hearted," she confessed, "I can't bear to hear unpleasant things!"
"Well, let us talk of pleasant things," Miss Eliza said; but she looked at the frightened old face under the white veil;—"and 'the feet of the bearers' are coming nearer to her every day!" she thought.
Mrs. Holmes sat down again, reluctantly. Of course, from the Misses Graham's point of view, there could be nothing pleasanter for a grandmother to hear than plaudits of Miss Freddy's efficiency; so they went back again to that. Dear Arthur had told them how hard she had worked (again Freddy's eyes rolled toward dear Arthur); engaging tradesmen, and making the landlord do the necessary repairing.—"Oh, my dear," Miss Mary interrupted herself, "I meant to warn you that one of your workmen left a half-smoked cigarette here. I knew you would want to reprove him. Dear me! in these days, with all the new ideas, the working-people are very careless. But I feel so strongly our responsibility to them, that I always tell them of their mistakes."
"The working-people didn't make any mistake this time," Fred said; "you mustn't blame the plumber,"—the temptation to get back at her grandmother was too much for her—"it was my own cigarette." There was a stunned silence. "Howard Maitland and I were smoking here quite a while," she said, sweetly. "But I thought I'd aired the room out. I'm awfully sorry,—cigarette-smoke does hang about so." ("'Amusement'!" she was saying to herself; "I'll 'amuse' her!")
But Mrs. Holmes was equal to the occasion. She shookan arch and knobby finger at her granddaughter. "Naughty girl! But that's one of the things that is done nowadays," she said; "ladies smoke just as much as gentlemen, don't they, Mr. Weston?"
"More," he declared, gayly; but he watched his two cousins. Had they taken it in that Maitland and Fred had been in the flat together? It had apparently not struck Mrs. Holmes—or if it had, she chose to ignore it; she was talking, with a very red face, about all sorts of things. It seemed a favorable moment to drag his candid ward away, and he did so, with effusive promises to come again soon—all the time looking out of the corner of his eye at the Misses Graham's farewell to Fred. Alas, Miss Mary's were hardly visible.
But Miss Eliza followed them into the hall, and put a hand on Fred's arm: "I don't mind the smell of smoke in a room half as much as I do on a girl's lips," she said, smiling; "they ought to be like roses." Then she gave the angular young arm a little pat and ran back.
"What a duck she is!" Fred said, honestly moved; "I wish I hadn't let out at Grandmother!"
Her repentance did not soothe Arthur Weston. "I'd like to shake you," he said, as they got into the elevator.
"Me? What's your kick? I thought I behaved beautifully! I kissed an inch of powder off Grandmother's cheek. There's no satisfying you. I supposed you'd give me a bunch of violets, with 'For a good girl,' on the card. Don't be an old maid! Even Miss Graham isn't. She's a dear!"
"I may be an old maid, but you are an imp!" he said. In the taxi, as they rushed, with open windows, across thecity back to Payton Street, he spoke more gravely. "You ought not to have gone wandering around in vacant apartments with Maitland." He was really annoyed, and showed it.
Frederica was equally annoyed. "I am a business woman. Howard was obliging enough to take me around in his car. In the flat we talked for a while. Why shouldn't we? If he had been a girl, I suppose we could have sat there until midnight and you would have never peeped!"
"But may I call your attention to the fact that he's not a girl?"
"May I callyourattention to the fact that there is such a thing, between men and women, as intellectual relations?" She was getting angry, and her anger betrayed her self-consciousness.
"You compel me," he retorted, "to remind you that there are other relations between men and women which are not markedly intellectual."
"There're none of that kind in mine, thank you! I—"
But he interrupted her, dryly: "Of course you know you had no business to do it. You remind me, Fred, of one of those dirty little boys who put a firecracker under your chair to make you jump. Look here, it's unworthy of a 'business woman' to do unconventional things simply because they are unconventional."
"I didn't!"
"You are like all the rest of your sex—self-conscious as hens when they see an automobile coming! You knew it was queer to shut yourself up there with that darnedfool, Maitland,and that's why you loved doing it," he flung at her. "That's the trouble with women nowadays; not that they do unusual things, but they are so blamed pleased to be unusual! And if they only knew it, they don't shock a man at all. They only bore him to death."
"I—"
"But I suppose you can't help it; you are so atrociously young," he ended, sighing.
Frederica was almost too angry to speak. "I am old enough to do as I choose!"
"Only Youth does as it chooses," he told her. "Reflect upon what I have said, my dear infant, and profit by it.... Stop at the iron dog!" he called to the driver. And the next minute Frederica, buffeted by the high, keen wind, ran past the dog, whose back was ridged with grimy snow, and, holding on to her hat with one hand, let herself into the hall with her latch-key.
"What's the matter withhim?" she thought, slamming the front door behind her; "it isn't his funeral!"
At the jar of the banging door, Andy Payton's hat moved slightly on the hat-rack, and something snarled at the head of the stairs.
"It's nothing, Morty—only sister," a motherly voice said; and Miss Carter leaned over the baluster:
"I'm just bringing him down to his supper; he's a little nervous this evening."
"Oh," Fred said, shortly; "well, wait till I get out of the way, please." She stepped into the unlighted parlor, and stood there in the darkness, between the piano and the bust of Mr. Andrew Payton; as she waited, her hand fell on the open keyboard, and she struck a jangling chord. "Flora has been playing on the sly," she thought; "poor old Flora!" Then for a moment her fingers were rigid on the keys—the scrabbling procession was passing through the hall down to the room where Mortimore's food was given to him. When the door closed behind him she drew a breath of relief. She never looked at her brother when she could avoid it. As she went up-stairs she paused on the landing to call out, "Hello, Mother!"
Mrs. Payton answered from the sitting-room: "Don't you want some tea, dear?"
Frederica hesitated; she didn't want any tea, but—"I suppose it pleases her," she thought, resignedly; and went into the pleasant, fire-lit room, with its bubbling teakettle and fragrance of Roman hyacinths blooming on the window-sills. "Finished your puzzle?" she asked, good-naturedly.
Mrs. Payton, grateful for a little interest, said: "No; I've been doing up Christmas presents most of the afternoon. I'm pretty tired! Tying all those ribbons is dreadfully hard work," she ended, with an air of achievement that was pathetic or ridiculous, as one might happen to look at it. Her daughter, glancing at the array of white packages tied with gay ribbons, did not see the pathos. That slightly supercilious droop of the lip which always made Mrs. Payton draw back into herself, showed Fred's opinion of the "hard work"; but she only said, laconically:
"Mr. Weston took me to call on the old maids. No, I don't want any tea, thank you."
"You oughtn't to call them 'old maids'; it isn't respectful."
"It's what they are—at least, the younger one is. The other one is very nice. But they are both of 'em of the vintage of 1830."
Mrs. Payton was sufficiently acquainted with her daughter's picturesque, but limited, vocabulary to know what "vintage" meant, so she said: "Oh, no; they are not so old as that. I don't think Miss Graham is much over seventy."
"I waked Miss Mary up!" Frederica said, joyfully.
"I am sorry for that," Mrs. Payton sighed.
Fred shrugged her shoulders. "Grandmother will tattle,—yes, she was there; deaf as a post, and all dolled up like a plush horse;—so I suppose I might as well tell you just what happened." She told it, lightly enough. "Old Weston threw fits in the taxi, coming home," she ended.
"I should think he might! Freddy, really—"
Her daughter looked at her with narrowing but not unkind eyes. "I wish I knew why people fuss so over nothing," she said.
Mrs. Payton put her empty cup back on the tray with a despairing sigh: "If you can'tseethe impropriety—"
"Oh, of course, I see what you call 'impropriety'; what I don't see is why you call it 'improper.' What constitutes impropriety? The fact that, as Grandmother says, 'it isn'tdone'? I could mention a lot of things that are done, thatIwould call improper! Wearing nasty false fronts, as Grandmother does, and silly tight shoes. A thing is true, or it's a lie. That distinction is worth while. But what you call 'impropriety' isn't worth bothering about."
"Truth and falsehood are not the only distinctions in the world. Things are fitting, or—not."
"Howard and I talked, in an empty flat," Fred said; "I suppose if it had been in our parlor, with the Egyptian virgin out in the hall chaperoning us, it would have been 'fitting'?"
Mrs. Payton wiped her eyes. "There's no use discussing anything with you. WhenIwas a young lady, if my mother had reproved—"
Fred made a discouraged gesture: "Oh, don't let's go back to the dark ages. As for Howard—I'll see him at my office, if it makes you any happier."
"Why can't he call on you in your own house? You cheapen yourself by—"
"Mother, there's no use! I couldn't stand it. Mortimore—"
"Frederica!"
Mrs. Payton's gesture of command was inescapable. Involuntarily Fred's lips closed; when her mother spoke to her in that tone, the childish habit of obedience asserted itself. But it was only for a moment:
"Of course you don't mind him," she said; "you are fond of him. But you can't expect me to feel as you do." She drew in her breath with a shiver of disgust.
"I love you both just the same!" Mrs. Payton said, emphatically.
Frederica was not listening. "Oh, by the way," she said, "I've heard of a little bungalow, at that camp place, Lakeville—you know?—that I can rent for twenty-five dollars a month. I'm going to hire it for next summer—rather ahead of time, but somebody might grab it. I want to have a place to go, when I have two or three days off. I hope you'll come out sometimes. And—and Miss Carter can bring Morty," she ended, with generous intention.
Mrs. Payton was silent. She was saying to herself, despairingly, "She's jealous!"
"Well, I must go and dress," Frederica said, and got herself out of the room, acutely conscious of her mother's averted face. "'Cheapening' myself—how silly!" shethought, as she closed her own door. When she took her cigarette-case out of her pocket, Miss Graham's words came into her mind and she smiled; but she lighted a cigarette and, standing before her mirror, practised knocking off the ashes. Was it this way? Was it that way? How does the "kid boy" do it? She tried a dozen ways; but she could not remember the entirely unconscious gesture which had pleased Howard Maitland. "How funny and old-fashioned old Miss Graham was! But quite sweet," she thought. It occurred to her, as she took out her hair-pins, that Miss Graham's antiquated ideas did not irritate her, and her mother's did. For a moment she pondered this old puzzle of humanity: "Why are members of your family more provoking than outsiders?" After all, Miss Graham, with her "roses," was just as irrational as Mrs. Payton with her fuss about propriety and "cheapness"—or Arthur Weston, gassing about "relations which are not markedly intellectual." She was angry at him, but that phrase made her giggle. She sat down on the edge of her bed, her brush in her hand, her hair hanging about her shoulders; it had been very interesting, that "cheap" and entirely "intellectual" hour alone with Howard in the darkening flat....
She put her elbow on her knee, her chin in her hand, and smiled. Of course she knew what her mother, and Mr. Weston—"poor old boy!"—and her grandmother, and the Misses Graham all had in the back of their minds. "Idiots" she said, good-naturedly. If they could have heard the plain, straight, man-to-man talk in the empty apartment, they would have discovered that nowadays men andgirls are not interested in thoseunintellectual relations at which her man of business had hinted. She remembered Howard's look when he said he would rather talk to her than to any man he knew—and she lifted her head proudly! No girly-girly compliment could have pleased her as that did. It was just as she had always said, the right kind of man knows that a woman wants him to talk horse sense to her, not gush. If the tabbies, and Mr. Weston, and her mother had heard that talk, they wouldn't worry about sentiment! Suddenly, she recalled that strange feeling she had had below her breastbone as she looked at Howard sprawling in the arm-chair. She remembered her curious impulse to touch him, and the rosy warmth that seemed to go all over her, like a wave; she thought of that pang of pleasure when his hand crushed hers so that the seal ring had cut into the flesh and hurt her. "I wonder—?" she said; and bit her lip. Then her face reddened sharply; she flung her head up like a wild creature who feels the grip of the trap.
Love?
For an instant she felt something like fright. "Of course not! He's just a bully fellow, and I like him. Nothing more; I don't—" She caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror, and the image held her eye. The vivid, smiling face, a little thin, with the color hot, just now, on the high cheek-bones; dark, wavy hair, falling back from a charming brow which, pathetically enough (for she was only twenty-five), had lines in it. "Heavens!" she said, "I believe Ido!" She laughed, and, jumping to her feet, shook the mane of hair over her eyes. But before she began tobrush it she lifted the hand Howard Maitland had gripped, and kissed it hard, once—twice!
"I do—care," she said; "I didn't know it was like this!" She glowed all over. "I am in love," she repeated, amazed.
While she tumbled the soft, dark hair into a loose knot on the top of her head she tried to whistle, but her lips were unsteady. She did not know herself with this quiver all through her, and the sudden stinging in her eyes, and something swelling and tightening in her throat. She forgot the shocked old maids, and the disgusted trustee. She was in love! She began to sing, but broke off at a faint knock.
"Dinner's ready, Miss Freddy."
"Come in, Flora," Frederica called out; "and hook me up." She smiled so gaily at the silent creature, not even scolding when the slim, cold finger-tips touched her warm shoulder, that the woman smiled a little, too. "I thought this was your afternoon out?" Fred said, kindly.
"I 'ain't got no place in partic'lar to go. Anyway, I knew your ma wasn't goin' to be in, and—"
"I bet you played on the piano," Frederica said, smiling at herself in the glass.
"Well, yes'm, I did," the woman confessed. "I picked out the whole of 'Rock of Ages.'"
"Flora! Don't look so low-spirited; I believe you're in love. Have you got a new beau? I've been told that people are always low-spirited when they're in love."
Flora simpered; "Ah, now, Miss Freddy!"
"Come! Who is he? You've got to tell me!"
"Well, Mr. Baker's got a new man on. That there snideArnold's been bounced. Good riddance! He never did 'mount to nothing. Me, I'm sorry for the girl he married; she'll just slave and git no wages. That's what marryin' Arnold'll do for her!"
"That's what marrying any man does for a woman," Miss Payton instructed her; "a wife is a slave."
But Flora's face had softened into abject sentimentality. "This here new man, Sam,he'ssomething like. Light, he is; and freckled." Then her face fell: "Anne says he's got a girl on the Hill. Don't make no difference to me, anyhow. It's music I want. If I was young, I'd git an education, and go to one of them conservmatories and learn to play on the piano."
"I'll give you some lessons, one of these days," Fred promised her, good-naturedly. "Poor old Flora," she said to herself, as the maid, like a fragile brown shadow, slipped out of the room. "'He's got a girl on the Hill'! I wonder how I'd feel if Howard had 'a girl on the Hill'?" Again the tremor ran through her; she could not have said whether it was pain or bliss. "I certainly must teach Flora her notes," she said, trying to get back to the commonplace. Then she forgot Flora, and, bending forward, looked at herself in the glass for a long moment. "I'll get that hat at Louise's," she said, turning out the gas; "it's the smartest thing I've struck in many moons."
Mr. Weston, riding home in the taxi, was not without some astonishment at himself. Why was he so keenly annoyed at Fred's bad taste? Why had he such an ardent desire to kick Maitland? He might have gone further in his self-analysis and discovered that, though he wanted to kick Howard, he did not want to haul him over the coals, as a man of his years might well have done—merely to give a friendly tip as to propriety to a youngster whom he had seen put into breeches. Had he discovered this reluctance in himself, Arthur Weston might have decided that his indignation was based on a sense of personal injury—which has its own significance in a man of nearly fifty who concerns himself in the affairs of a woman under thirty. The fact was that, though he thought of himself only as her grandfatherly trustee, Frederica Payton was every day taking a larger place in his life. She amused him, and provoked him, and interested him; but, most of all, the pain of her passionate futilities roused him to a pity that made him really suffer. He could not bear to see pain. Briefly, she gave him something to think about.
His displeasure evaporated overnight, and when he went up to her office the next morning he was ready toapologize for his words in the taxi. But it was not necessary. Fred, in the excitement of receiving a letter asking her fee for hunting up rooms, had quite forgotten that she had been scolded.
"I think I'd better advertise in all the daily papers!" she announced, eagerly.
"You're a good fellow," he said; "you take your medicine and don't make faces."
"Make faces? Oh, you mean because you called me down last night? Bless you, if it amuses you, it doesn't hurt me!"
The sense of her youth came over him in a pang of loneliness, and with it, curiously enough, an impulse of flight, which made him say, abruptly: "I shall probably go abroad in January. Can I trust you not to advertise yourself into bankruptcy before I get back?"
"Oh, Mr. Weston," she said, blankly; "how awful! Don't go!"
"You don't need me," he assured her; but a faint pleasure stirred about his heart.
"Need you? Why, I simply couldn't live without you! In the first place, my business would go to pot, without your advice; and then—well, you know how it is. You are the only person who speaks my language. Grandmother talks about my vulgarities, and Aunt Bessie talks about my stomach, and the Childs cousins talk about my vices—but nobody talks about my interests, except you. Don't go and leave me," she pleaded with him.
The glow of pleasure about his heart warmed into actual happiness. "Please don't think I approve of you!"
She looked at him with her gray, direct eyes, and nodded. "I know you don't. But I don't mind;—you understand."
"But," he said, raising a rueful eyebrow, "how shall I make Cousin Mary 'understand' your performances?"
"By staying at home and keeping me in order! Don't go away."
It was the everlasting feminine: "I need you!" There was no "new woman" in it; no self-sufficiency; nothing but the old, dependent arrogance that has charmed and held the man by its flattering selfishness ever since the world began.
He was opening the office door, but she laid a frankly anxious hand on his arm. "Promise me you won't go!"
He would not commit himself. "It depends; if you get married, and shut up shop, you won't want a business adviser."
"I sha'n't get married!" she said, and blushed to her temples.
Mr. Weston saw the color, and his face, as he closed her door and stood waiting for the elevator, dulled a little. "She's head over ears in love with him. Well, he's a very decent chap; it's an excellent match for her,—Oh," he apologized to the elevator boy, on suddenly finding himself on the street floor; "I forgot to get off! You'll have to take me up again." In his own office he was distinctly curt.
"I am very busy," he said, checking his stenographer's languid remark about a telephone call; "I am going to write letters. Don't let any one interrupt me"—and the door of his private office closed in her face.
"What's the matter withhim?" the young lady asked herself, idly; then took out her vanity glass and adjusted her marcel wave.
Arthur Weston put his feet on his desk, and reflected. Why had he said what he did about going to Europe? When he went up to see Fred, nothing had been farther from his mind than leaving America. Well, he knew why he had said it.... Flight! Self-preservation! "Preposterous," he said, "what am I thinking of? I'm fond of her, and I'm confoundedly sorry for her, but that's all. Anyhow, Maitland settles the question. And if he wasn't in it—she's twenty-five and I'm forty-six." He got up and walked aimlessly about the room. "I've cut my wisdom teeth," he thought, with a dry laugh, and wondered where the lady was who had superintended that teething. For Kate's sake he had taken a broken heart to Europe. The remembrance of that heartbreak reassured him; the feeling he had about Fred wasn't in the least like his misery of that time. He gave a shrug of relief; it occurred to him that he would go and see some Chinese rugs which had been advertised in the morning paper; "might give her one for a wedding present?—oh, the devil! Haven't I anything else to think of than that girl?" He stood at the window for a long time, his hands in his pockets, looking at three pigeons strutting and balancing on a cornice of the Chamber of Commerce. "She interests me," he conceded; then he smiled,—"and she wants me to stay at home and 'take care of her'!" Well, there was nothing he would like better than to take care of Fred. The first thing he would do would be toshut up that ridiculous plaything of an "office" on the tenth floor. Billy Childs put it just right: "perfec' nonsense!" Then, having removed "F. Payton" from the index of the Sturtevant Building, they—he and Fred—would go off, to Europe. He followed this vagrant thought for a moment, then reddened with impatience at his own folly: "What an idiot I am! I'm not the least in love with her, but I'll miss her like the devil when she marries that cub Maitland. She's a perpetual cocktail! She'd be as mad as a hornet if she knew that I never took her seriously." He laughed, and found himself wishing that he could take her in his arms, and tease her, and scold her, and make her "mad as a hornet." Again the color burned in his cheeks; he would do something else than tease her and scold her; he would most certainly kiss her. "Oh, confound it!" he said to himself, angrily; "I'm getting stale." He didnotwant to kiss her! He only wanted to make her happy, and be himself amused. "That is the difference between now and ten years ago," he analyzed. "Kate never 'amused' me; oh, how deadly serious it all was!" He speculated about Kate quite comfortably. She was married; very likely she had half a dozen brats. Again he contrasted his feeling for Fred with that brief madness of pain, and was cheered; it was so obvious that he was merely fond of her. How could he help it—she was so honest, so unselfconscious! Besides, she was pathetic. Her harangues upon subjects of which she was (like most of mankind) profoundly ignorant, were funny, but they were touching, too, for her complacent certainties would so inevitably bring her into bruisingcontact with Life. "She thinks 'suffrage' a cure-all," he thought, amused and pitiful,—"and she's so desperately young!" In her efforts to reform the world, she was like some small creature buffeting the air. In fact, all this row that women were making was like beating the air. "What's it about, anyhow?" he thought. "What on earth do they want—the women?" It seemed to him, looking a little resentfully at the ease and release from certain kinds of toil that had come to women in the last two or three decades, that they had everything that reasonable creatures could possibly want. "Think how their grandmothers had to work!" he said to himself. "Now, all that these ridiculous creatures have to do is to touch a button—and men's brains do the rest." Certainly there is an enormous difference in the collective ease of existence; women don't have to make their candles, or knit their stockings, as their grandmothers did:—"yet, nowadays, they are making more fuss than all the women that ever lived, put together! What's the matter with 'em?"
He grew quite hot over the ingratitude of the sex. His old Scotch housekeeper, reading her Bible, and sewing from morning to night, was far happier than these restless, dissatisfied creatures, who, in the upper classes, flooded into schools of design and conservatories of music—not one in a hundred with talent enough to cover a five-cent piece!—and in the lower classes pulled down wages in factories and shops. "Amateur Man," he said, sarcastically. "Suppose we tried to do their jobs?" Then he paused to think what Fred's job, for instance, would be. Not discovering it offhand, he told himself again that ifwomen would keep busy, like their grandmothers—his contemptuous thought stopped, with a jerk; how could women do the things their grandmothers did? What was it Fred had got off—something about machinery being the cuckoo which had pushed women out of the nest of domesticity? "Why," he was surprised into saying, "she's right!"
He came upon the deduction so abruptly that for a moment he forgot his sore feeling about Frederica's youth. Suppose the women should suddenly take it into their heads to be domestic, and flock out of the mechanical industries, back to the "Home"? Arthur Weston whistled. "Financially," said he, candidly, "we would bu'st in about ten minutes."...
"Do you want to give me those prices to Laughlin before I go out to lunch?" a flat voice asked in the outer office; he slid into his desk-chair as the door opened.
"I haven't had time to look them up yet. Don't wait."
He took up his pen, but only made aimless marks on his blotting-paper; the interruption jarred him back into irritated denial of possibilities: "She amuses me, that's all; I'm not in the least—in love." Suddenly, with a spring of resolution, he took down the telephone receiver and called up a number. The conversation was brief: "Hello! Jim?... Yes; I'm Arthur. Look here, I want to break away for a week.... Yes—break away. B-r-e-a-k. I'm stale. Can't you go down to the marshes with me, for ducks?... What? Oh, come on! You're not as important as you think.... What?... I'll do the work—you just come along!"
There followed a colloquy of some urgency on his part, and then a final, satisfied "Good boy! Wednesday, then, on the seven-thirty."
He had hardly secured his man before he regretted it; the mere prospect of the arrangements he must make for the trip began to bore him. However, he sat there at his desk and made some memoranda, conscious all the time of a nagging self-questioning in the back of his mind. "I'm not!" he said, again and again. "I'll get some shooting and clear my brain up."
But by the time he had sent a despatch or two, and called Jim Jackson up a second time to decide some detail, he knew that shooting would not help him much. The nag had settled itself: he had accepted the revelation that he was "interested" in Freddy Payton. With the contrast between the pain of the old wound and the new, he would not use the word "love," but "interest" committed him to an affection, tender almost to poignancy. Of course there was nothing to do about it. He must just take his medicine, as Fred took hers, "without making faces." There was nothing to strive for, nothing to avoid, nothing to expect. She was as good as engaged to Howard Maitland, and it would be a very sensible and desirable match;—to marry a man of forty-six would be neither sensible nor desirable! No; the only thing left to her trustee was to take every care of her that her eccentricities would permit, guard her, play with her, and correct her appalling taste. "Lord! what bad taste she has!" Also, while he and Jackson were wading about on the marshes for the next week, kick some sense into himself!
That very evening, dropping in to the Misses Graham's and partaking of a bleakly feminine meal, he laid his lance in rest for her.
Miss Mary was full of flurried apologies at the meagerness of the supper-table, but old Miss Eliza said, with spirit, that bread and milk would be good for him! "Now, tell us about that child, Arthur," she commanded.
"You mean Fred Payton, I suppose?" he said, raising an annoyed eyebrow. "I don't call her a 'child.'"
"You are quite right," Miss Mary agreed, in her little neutral voice; "she is certainly old enough to know how to behave herself."
"It's merely that she wants to reform the world," Miss Eliza said, soothingly. "Reformers have no humor, and, of course, no taste;—or else they wouldn't be reformers!"
"Your dear cousin Eliza is too kind-hearted," Miss Mary said; but her own kind, if conventional, heart made her listen sympathetically enough to the visitor's excusing recital of the hardships of Fred's life.
Once, she interrupted him by saying that it was, of course, painful—the afflicted brother. And once she said she hoped that Miss Payton was a comfort to her mother—"though I don't see how she can be, off every day at what she calls her 'office'—a word only to be applied, it seems to me, to places where gentlemen conduct their business. When I was young, Arthur, a girl's first duty was in her home."
"Perhaps there is nothing for her to do at home," Miss Eliza said.
"There is always something to do, in every properly conducted household. Let her dust the china-closet."
"I'd as soon put a tornado into a china-closet as that girl! She ought to be turning a windmill," Miss Eliza said.
Her cousin gave her a grateful look, but the other lady was very serious. "I thought her manner to her grandmother most unpleasant. Youth should respect Age—"
"Not unless Age deserves respect!" cried Miss Eliza, tossing her old head.
Arthur Weston had seen that same flash in Fred's eyes. ("How young she is!" he thought.) But her sister was plainly shocked.
"Oh, mydearEliza!" she expostulated. "I am not drawn to Mrs. Holmes myself, but—"
"Neither is Fred drawn to her," Weston interrupted; "and she is so sincere that she shows her feelings. The rest of us don't. That's the only difference."
"It is a very large difference," Miss Graham said; "this matter of showing one's feelings is as apt to mean cruelty as sincerity. It's the reason the child has no charm."
"I think she has charm," he said, frowning.
There was a startled silence; then Miss Eliza said, heartily: "Don't worry about her! Just now she thinks it's smart to put her thumb to her nose and twiddle her fingers at Life—but she'll settle down and be a dear child!"
Miss Mary shook her head. "If I were a friend of the young lady, I should worry very much. Maria Spencer called on us yesterday, and told us a most unpleasantstory about her. She spent the night at an inn with this same young man that she smoked with here. Oh, an accident, of course; but—"
"Miss Spencer is the town scavenger," Weston said, angrily.
Miss Mary did not notice the interruption. "I cannot help remarking that I do not think that such a young woman would make any man happy." ("It was difficult to bring the remark in," she told her sister, afterward; "but I felt it my duty.")
"The man who gets Fred will be a lucky fellow," her cousin declared.
"You know her very well, I infer," Miss Mary murmured. "I observe you use her first name."
"Oh, very well! And I knew her father before her. But the use of the first name is one of the new customs. Everybody calls everybody else by their first name. Queer custom."
"Veryqueer," said Miss Mary.
"Very sensible!" said Miss Eliza.
"Ah, well, we must just accept the fact that girls are not brought up as they were when—when we were young"—Arthur Weston paused, but no one corrected that "we." He sighed, and went on: "The tide of new ideas is sweeping away a lot of the old landmarks; myself, I think it is better for some of them to go. For instance, the freedom nowadays in the relations of boys and girls makes for a straightforwardness that is rather fine."
"Well," said Miss Mary, "I don't like what you call 'new ideas.' 'New' things shock me very much."
"I'm rather shocked, myself, once in a while," he agreed, good-naturedly.
"What will you do, Mary, when the 'new' heaven and the 'new' earth come along?" Miss Eliza demanded.
The younger sister lifted disapproving hands.
"As for the girls smoking," Weston said, "I don't like it any better than you do. In fact, I dislike it. But my dislike is æsthetic, not ethical."
"I hope you don't think smoking is a sign of the 'new' heaven," Miss Mary said;—but her sister's aside—"the Other Place, more likely!"—disconcerted her so much that for a moment she was silenced.
"I never could see," said Miss Eliza, "that it was any wickeder for a lady to smoke than for a gentleman; but, as I told the child, a girl's lips ought to be sweet."
"Her smoking is far less serious than other things," said the younger sister, sitting up very straight and rigid. "I do not wish to believe ill of the girl, so I shall only repeat that I do not think she will make any man happy."
"She will," Miss Eliza said, "if he will beat her."
"Oh, mydearEliza!" Miss Mary remonstrated. Then she tried to be charitable: "However, perhaps she is engaged to this Maitland person, in which case, though her taste would be just as bad, her meeting him here would be less shocking."
"If she isn't now, she will be very soon," Frederica's defender said.
"Well," said Miss Mary, grimly, "let us hope so, for her sake; although, as I say, I donotfeel that she—"
Miss Eliza looked at her cousin, and winked; he chokedwith laughter. Then, with the purpose of saving Freddy, he began to dissect Freddy's grandmother—her powder and false hair; her white veil, her dog-collar—"that's to keep her double chin up," he said. "Yes! She isverylively for her age!" He wished he could say that old Mrs. Holmes was in the habit of meeting gentlemen in empty apartments—anything to draw attention from his poor Fred!
When he left his cousins, promising to come again as soon as he got back from his shooting trip, and declaring that he hadn't had such milk toast in years, he knew that he had not rehabilitated Frederica. "But Cousin Mary feels that she has done her duty in warning me. Cousin Eliza would gamble on it, and give her to me to-morrow," he thought; "game old soul! But even if Howard wasn't ahead of the game, the odds would be against me—forty-six to twenty-five—and, besides, what could I offer her? Ashes! Kate trampled out the fire."
In those next few weeks Fred Payton was a little vague and preoccupied. The revelation which had come to her in that moment before the mirror when she had kissed her own hand, remained as a sort of undercurrent in her thoughts, although she did not put it into words again. Instead, she added Howard Maitland to her daily possibilities: Would she meet him on the street?—and her eyes, careless and eager, raked the crowds on the pavements! Would he drop into her office to say he had fished up a client for her?—and she held her breath for an expectant moment when the elevator clanged on her floor. Would he be at the dance at the Country Club?—and when he cut in, and they went down the floor together, something warm and satisfied brooded in her heart, like a bird in its nest. Sometimes she rebuked herself for letting him know how pleased she was to see him; and then rebuked herself again: Why not? Why shouldn't she be as straightforward as he? Hadn't he told her he would rather talk to her than to any man he knew? She flung up her head when she thought of that; she was not vain, but she knew that he would not say that to any other girl in their set. She was very contented now; not even the ell room at 15 Payton Street seriously disturbedher. The fact was, Life was so interesting she hadn't time to think of the ell room—Howard, herself, her business, her league! Yet, busy as she was, she remembered Flora's desire for music lessons, and every two or three days, before it was time to set the table for dinner, she stood by the togaed bust of Andy Payton, trying to teach the pathetically eager creature her notes. But the lessons, begun with enthusiasm, dragged as the weeks passed; poor Flora's numb mind—a little more numb just now because Mr. Baker's Sam had suddenly vanished from her horizon—could not grasp the matter of time. Fred's hand, resting on her shoulder, could feel the tremor of effort through her whole body, as the thin, brown fingers stumbled through the scales:
"Now! Count: One—two—three—"
"One—two—oh, land! Miss Freddy, I cain't."
"Yes, you can. Try again."
"Why don't you jest show me a tune?"
"You have got to know your notes first; and you've got to count, or you never can learn."
"I don't want to learn, Miss Freddy; I want to play! Oh," she said once, clutching her hands against her breast, "Iwantto play!" Her mournful eyes, black and opaque, gleamed suddenly; then a tear trembled, brimmed over, and dropped down on the work-worn fingers. "I cain't learn, Miss Freddy; I 'ain't got the 'rithmetic. I want to make music!"
Alas, she never could make music! The clumsy hands, the dull brain, held her back from the singing heights! "I cain't learn 'rithmetic," she said (sixteenth andthirty-second notes drew this assertion from her); "and if I cain't play music without 'rithmetic, I might as well give up now."
"Well, you can't," Frederica said, helplessly. She had cut out the last quarter of her league meeting to come home and give Flora a music lesson. (Up-stairs, Mrs. Payton, listening to the thump of the scales, confided to Mrs. Childs that she didn't approve of Flora's playing on the piano. "The parlor is not the place for Flora," she said.) But, watched by Mr. Andrew Payton's marble eyes, the slow fingers went on stumbling over the keys, until Frederica and her pupil were alike disconsolate.
"You poor dear!" Fred said, at last, putting an impulsive arm over the thin shoulders; "tryoncemore! And, Flora, Sam isn't the only man in the world. Come now, cheer up! You're well rid of Sam."
"Sam?" said Flora, her face suddenly vindictive; "I ain't pinin' for no Sam! He was a low-down, no-account nigger—" The door-bell rang, and she jumped to her feet. "I must git my clean apron!" she said; and vanished into the pantry.
Frederica waited, frowning uneasily; callers were not welcome at 15 Payton Street when Fred was at home—the consciousness of the veiled intellect up-stairs made her inhospitable. But it was only Laura and Howard Maitland, both of them tingling with the cold and overflowing with absurd and puppy-like fun.
"Feed us! Feed us!" Laura demanded; "we've walked six miles, and we're perfectly dead!"
"Pig!" said Fred; "wait till I yell to Flora. Flora!Tea!" Her heart was pounding joyously, but with it was the agonizing calculation as to how long it would be before Miss Carter and her charge came clopping down the front stairs on their way to the room where Mortimore had his supper. "I don't mind Laura," Fred told herself, "but if Howard sees Morty, I'll simply die!"
"Don't you want me to light up?" Maitland was asking; and without waiting for her answer he scratched a match on the sole of his boot, and fumbled about the big, gilt chandelier to turn on the gas.
"I didn't know you played, nowadays," Laura said, looking at the open piano. "Gracious, Freddy, you do everything!"
"Oh, I'm only teaching poor Flora. She has musical aspirations. Howard, cheer up that fire!"
Tea came, and Laura said kind things to Flora about the music lessons; and then they all three began to chatter, and to scream at each other's jokes, Frederica all the while tense with apprehension.... ("Miss Carter won't have the sense to hold on to him; he'll walk right in!")
But, up-stairs, her mother, leaning over the balusters to discover who had called, had the same thought, and was quick to protect her.
"It's your Lolly," Mrs. Payton said, coming back to her sister-in-law; "and I think I hear Mr. Maitland's voice. I must tell Miss Carter to go down the back stairs with Morty." Having given the order, through the closed door between the two rooms, she sat down and listened with real happiness to the babel of young voices in the parlor. "I do like to have Freddy enjoy herself, as a girl in herposition should," she told Mrs. Childs; "just hear them laugh."
The laughter was caused by Howard's displeasure at Fred's story of some rudeness to which she had been subjected in canvassing for Smith—"The Woman's Candidate."
"If I'd been there, I'd have punched the cop's head!" he said, angrily.
Fred shrieked at his absurdity. "If he'd said it toyou, you'd only think it was funny; and what's fun for the gander, is fun for—"
"No, it isn't," he said, bluntly.
"Howard," Laura broke in, "do tell Freddy the news!"
"It isn't much," he said, modestly; "I'm ordered off; that's all."
"Ordered off?" Fred repeated; "where?"
"Philippines," Laura said. "Government expedition. Shells and things. Starts Wednesday."
"I've wanted to go ever since I was a kid," Howard explained. "It's the Coast Survey, and I've been pulling legs all winter for a berth, and now I've got it. I came in to see you pipe your eye with grief at my departure."
"Grief? Good riddance! You lost me a client, taking me out to see those fool flats in Dawsonville. Have another cigarette. Lolly, how about you?"
"No," Laura sighed. "Billy-boy would have a fit if I smoked." She looked at Fred a little enviously. "I'm crazy to," she confessed.
"Oh, don't," Maitland said; "it isn't your style, Laura."
"Howard, do you really start Wednesday?" Fred said, soberly.
He nodded. "It's great luck."
"You'll have the time of your life," Laura assured him; "why do men have all the fun, Freddy?"
"Because we've been such fools to let 'em."
"Ladies wouldn't find it much fun—wading round in the mud," Howard protested.
"They ought to have the chance to wade round, if they want to!" Fred said—and paused: (was that Miss Carter, bringing Mortimore? Her breath caught with horror. She was sure she heard the lurching footsteps. No; all was silent in the upper hall).
Howard did not notice her preoccupation; he was pouring out his plans, Laura punctuating all he said with cries of admiration and envy. ("I'lldieif Morty comes in!" Frederica was saying to herself.)