HOWARD DID NOT NOTICE HER PREOCCUPATION
HOWARD DID NOT NOTICE HER PREOCCUPATION. HE WAS POURINGOUT HIS PLANS, LAURA PUNCTUATING ALL HE SAID WITH CRIESOF ADMIRATION AND ENVY
"You've got to write to me, Fred," Maitland charged her; "I haven't any relations—'no one to love me.' Do write me the news once in a while."
"You're off day after to-morrow?" she repeated, vaguely; it came over her, in the midst of that tense listening for the shuffling step on the stairs, that she would not see him again—he would go away, and she would not have had a word alone with him! She felt, suddenly, that she could not bear it. For a moment she forgot Mortimore. "If you don't go up-stairs and say how-do-you-do to Mother, Laura," she said, abruptly, "you'll getyourself disliked. And your mother is in the sitting-room, too." Even if Miss Carter and Morty appeared, she couldn't have Howard leave her like this!
Just for an instant, Laura's face changed; then she flung her head up, and said, "Oh, yes; I want to see Aunt Nelly. I'll be right back. (I'll give 'em a chance," she told herself, grimly.)
Up-stairs, she roamed about the sitting-room, sniffing at the hyacinths, and looking into the little, devout books, and even adding a piece or two to the picture puzzle on the table. Then she sympathized with Mrs. Payton's Christmas fatigue—"you oughtn't to give so many presents, Aunt Nelly!"
"Oh, my dear, it gets worse each year! People send me things, and of course I have to pay my debts. So tiresome."
"It's awful," said Laura; and straightened her mother's toque, and kissed her. "Darling, your hat is always crooked," she scolded, cuddling her cheek against her mother's. "Mama, we're going to have a suffrage parade, in April; will you carry a banner?"
"Oh, my dear!" Mrs. Payton protested. "One of those horrid parades here? I thought we would escape that!"
"Your father won't think of letting you walk in it, Laura," Mrs. Childs warned her, with amiably impersonal discouragement.
Laura's face sobered: "You make him let me, darling," she entreated.
Mrs. Payton looked at them enviously. Nobody hated those vulgar, muddy, unladylike parades more than shedid, but she knew, in the bottom of her heart, that if Freddy had snuggled against her, as Laura snuggled up to Bessie, she would almost have walked in one herself!
"Papa says those parades are perfect nonsense," Mrs. Childs said; "what good do they do, anyhow?"
"We stand up to be counted," Laura explained.
"Papa won't allow it," her mother repeated, placidly.
"I'm sure Mr. Weston will use his influence to prevent Freddy's doing it," said Mrs. Payton.
Then the two ladies exchanged their usual melancholy comments on the times, and Laura listened, making her own silent comments on one fallacy after another, but preserving always her sweet and cheerful indifference to their grievances. She looked at the clock once or twice—surely she had given Howard and Fred time enough! But she waited for still another ten minutes, then, coughing carefully on the staircase, went down to the parlor.
Her consideration was unnecessary. Howard, standing with his hands in his pockets, his back to the fire, had been telling Frederica that he was going in for conchology seriously. "I know you don't think shells are worth much," he ended, after giving her what he called a "spiel" as to why he was going and what he was going to do. "But to me conchology is like searching for buried treasure! I've been pawing round for a real job, and now I've got it. I don't have to earn money, so I can earn work! And I think research work means as much to the world as—as anything else. I wanted you to know it was a real thing to me," he ended, gravely.
"Shells aren't awfully vital to civilization," she said.
He made no effort to justify his choice; he had confessed the faith that was in him, but it was too intimate to discuss, even with so good a fellow as old Freddy. ("You can't expect a woman to understand that sort of thing," he told himself; "women don't catch on to science—except Laura. She sees the importance of it.") Then he broke out about Laura's hat. "Isn't it dinky?"
"Yes," Fred said, impatiently; they were talking like two strangers! "Howard, I hate to have you away in April. We're going to have our parade then, and I counted on you."
"What for?" he said, puzzled.
"To walk," she said, impatiently. His little start of astonishment annoyed her. "Perhaps you are glad to miss it?"
"I guess I am," he admitted, honestly. "I'm afraid I'd show the yellow streak."
She was plainly disappointed in him.
"'Course I believe in suffrage," he said, "but I hate to see a lot of ladies walking in the middle of the street."
"We're not 'ladies'; we're women."
"You're a lady, and you can't escape it. And I'd hate to see Laura do it," he added.
Fred had not a mean fiber in her, and jealousy is all meanness; but, somehow, she felt a stab of something like pain. She did not connect it with Laura; it was only because he was indifferent to what was so important to her—and to Laura, too. And because he was going away, and here they were, he and she, just being polite to each other!
"Laura and I don't enjoy the middle of the street," she said; "but I hope we won't funk it."
"Youwon't," he said; "you are the best sport going!"
Her face reddened with pleasure. "Oh, I don't know," she disclaimed, modestly.
It was at this moment that Laura's considerate delay ended. "I'm off!" she called, gaily, from the hall; "Howard needn't come until he is good and ready!"
He was ready in a flash. He gave Frederica's hand a hearty squeeze, then turned to help Laura down the front steps.
Fred closed the door upon them, and went back into the parlor. "He is going away," she said to herself, blankly. Her knees felt queer, and she sat down. "Well, at any rate, Morty didn't butt in; I couldn't have borne that...."
Out in the wintry dusk, the other two were silent for a while. Then Maitland said, "Howcanshe stand that house?"
"She's perfectly fine," Laura said, loyally.
"She's a stunner," the young man declared; "I never knew anybody just like her. Big, you know. Straightforward. I take off my hat to Fred in everything!"
Laura gave him a swift look. ("Have they fixed it up?" she thought; "I gave 'em time enough!")
"But I wish she wouldn't mix up with Smith," he said.
"Smith believes in votes for women."
"What's that got to do with it? He's the worst kindof a boss. As Arthur Weston says, to put Smith in to purify politics, is like casting out devils by Beelzebub, the Prince of Devils."
"Oh, well, we stand by the people who stand by us!"
"She's dead wrong," Howard said, carelessly, "but I hope she'll write to me when I'm away. I shall want to hear that Smith has been snowed under."
"Of course she'll write to you," Laura encouraged him. ("No, they can't have fixed it up. He wouldn't say that, if they were engaged.")
"Say, Laura, I suppose you—it would bore you to send me a postal once in a while? You might tell me how Fred's business is getting along."
"She can tell you herself. (Good gracious! She's turned him down! Poor old Howard!) I'm not very keen on writing letters, but I'll blow in a postal on you once in a while, to tell you that Fred is still in the market."
"I'd be awfully pleased if you would," he said, eagerly.
They were crossing Penn Park, and Laura, looking ahead, said, nervously: "See this dreadful person coming along the path! Is he drunk?"
"He certainly is," Howard said, laughing. She drew a little nearer to him—and instantly he had a friendly feeling for the lurching pedestrian!
"It frightens me to death to see a man like that," she said.
"He ought to be arrested," Howard said, joyfully—her shoulder was soft against his! "Not that he would hurt anybody—he's just happy."
"I'm not sandy, like Fred," she confessed.
"Oh, Fred would undertake to reform him," he agreed, laughing.
"Fred is—oh!" she broke off with a little shriek; the man, stumbling, had caught at her arm.
"Excuse me, lady, I—" Howard's instant grip on his collar spun him around so suddenly that the rest of the hiccoughing apologies were lost in astonishment; he stood still, swaying in his tracks, and gaping at the receding pair. "The dude thought I was mashin' his girl," he said, with a giggle.
"Did he touch you?" Howard said, angrily. He had caught her to him as he swung the man aside, and just for an instant he felt the tremor all through her. "I ought to have choked him!"
But she was laughing—nervously, to be sure, but with gaiety: "Nonsense! poor fellow—he stumbled! Of course he caught at my arm. Only just for a minute it frightened me—I'm such a goose!"
"You're not!" he said. But for the rest of the way to the Childses' house, he was very much upset. Laura had been scared, and it was his fault; he had taken the west path through the park, because that was the longest way home, and then he had bowled her right into that old soak! "I could kick myself for taking the west path," he reproached himself, again and again.
He hardly slept that night with worry over having made Laura Childs nervous. "She's the scariest little thing going!" he thought; "but she has sense." She had agreed with him in everything he said about the value of research work, and when he declared that science wasthe religion of the man of intellect she had said, "Yes, indeed it is!" "That shows what kind of a mind she has," he thought; "but wasn't she cute about not smoking! Her 'father wouldn't let her.' Of course he wouldn't! A girl like that could no more smoke a cigarette than a—a rose could," he ended. This flight of fancy moved him so much that he made a memorandum to send Laura some roses the next day—"and old Fred, too; she's a stunning woman," he said, with real enthusiasm.
Howard Maitland's departure in January for the Philippines surprised several people.
"Why should he take such a long journey?" Miss Mary Graham said to Miss Eliza—"unless it is that he discovered that Miss Payton is not the sort of girl to make any man happy, and simply left the country."
"I wager he carried a mitten with him!" Miss Eliza said.
"What! You think she refused him? Maria Spencer says she's only too anxious to get him. Meeting him in empty apartments! Perhaps that disgusted him. A gentleman does not like to be pursued."...
"Why has he gone away?" Mrs. Childs asked Laura, mildly interested.
"Because he wants to hunt for shells."
"But I thought he was so attentive to Freddy?"
"Maybe she turned him down."
"She'll get a crooked stick at last, if she doesn't look out," her father said, over the top of his newspaper.
Laura came and sat on the arm of his chair. "Fred doesn't need a stick, Billy-boy; she can walk alone."
"Every one of you needs a stick," Mr. William Childs assured her; "and I don't know that I would confine itto the thickness of my thumb, either, as the English law does." He reached up a plump hand and pulled her ear. Afterward he told his wife that Lolly was down by the head: "What's the matter with her, Mother?" he said. His two sons might have failed in their various businesses, or taken to their beds with mumps or measles, and he would not have looked as anxious as he did when he heard the little flat note in Laura's voice. "Is she off her feed because I won't let her walk in that circus parade of Fred's?"
"Well, she's disappointed."
"I won't have a girl of mine tramping through the mud—"
"Perhaps it won't be muddy."
"It will! It always is. Anyway, I hope it will be. But if she is upset about it, I'll take her to St. Louis with me that week, so she won't feel she's backed out. Mother, you don't supposeshe'smissing that Maitland chap, do you? Hey? What?"
"Oh, dear me, no! Why, Mr. Maitland has been paying attention to Freddy for the last year."
"Why doesn't she take him, and stop all her nonsense? I hear she told those poor, silly strikers in Dean's rubber-factory to support Smith, the 'Woman's Candidate'! Much 'supporting' they can do! And the joke of it is, Smith himself owns the controlling stock. She had better be at home, darning her stockings."
"Oh, now, Father, you must remember it isn't as if Ellen didn't have plenty of servants to do things like that."
"I hear she's signed that petition to have certain kinds of diseases registered.Idon't know what the world's coming to, that girls know about such things!"
"Well, of course, girls are more intelligent than they used to be."
"If she's so intelligent, I'll give her a book on Bacon-Shakespeare that will exercise her brains,—and she can stop concerning herself with matters that decent women know nothing about. Thank Heaven, our Laura is as ignorant as a baby! Or, if Fred is so bent on reforming things, let her have a Sunday-school class," said Mr. Childs, puffing and scowling. "Look here, Mother, if you have any influence over her, try and get her to take young Maitland. I should sleep more easily in my bed if I thought she had a man to keep her in order."
"But he has gone away," Mrs. Childs objected.
"That's because she has turned him down. Maybe he'll never think of her again; I wouldn't, if I were a young fellow! I'd want awoman, not a man in petticoats. But if he does get on her track again, tell her to take him; tell her I say she'll get a crooked stick if she waits too long. You're sure Laura isn't blue about him?"
"Now, Father! You are the most foolish man about that child!..."
"Why has Maitland gone on that expedition, Fred?" said Mr. Weston.
"You can search me," said Miss Payton.
Arthur Weston's hands, concealed in his pockets, tightened. "She has refused him!" he said to himself. (Alas!shooting ducks on the marshes had not helped him!) He had dropped in at 15 Payton Street, and Fred had taken him up to the flounced and flowery sitting-room.
"Mother'll be in pretty soon," she said; "so let's talk business, quick!" She was apparently absorbed in "business," which, as the winter thawed and drizzled into spring, flagged very much. "And the office rent goes right along, just the same," she told her trustee, ruefully. "I think, if I could have a little car to run around and look at places—"
"Maitland put that idea in your head!"
Frederica did not defend her absent adorer. Instead, she wailed over the rapacity of her landlord.
"You ought to have made your rent contingent on your customers," Mr. Weston teased her; and roared when she took it seriously and said she wished she had thought of it. "Give me some tea, Fred," he said; "these questions of high finance exhaust me." Then he asked the usual question, and Fred gave the usual answer. "But what do you hear from him?" Weston persisted. "I suppose you write to him occasionally? You mustn't be too cruel."
"Well, I don't hear much," she said. She took a letter out of her pocket and handed it to him.
When he had read it, he was silent for a while. ("If this is the sort of letter a blighted being writes," he reflected, "love has changed since my time.")
"Dear Fred," the letter ran, "I'm having the time of my life. Tell Laura Childs I saw a shell necklace that she'd be perfectly crazy about. The dredging ..."
Then followed two pages about shells, which Mr. Weston, raising a bored eyebrow, skipped.
"Those books you sent were bully. They look very interesting. I haven't had time to read them yet. Tell Laura they use boa-constrictors here instead of cats; and tell her that the flowers are perfectly wonderful."
Then came something about suffrage, ending with a ribald suggestion that the suffragists should get a Filipino candidate—"He wouldn't cost so much as the chief of bosses, Mr. Smith; a Moro will root for 'votes for women' if you promise him a bottle of whisky."
"He is not losing sleep over being rejected," Arthur Weston thought, as he handed the letter back to her.... He had lost some sleep himself, lately: "And there's no excuse for it," he told himself; "I didn'tfallin love, I strayed in—in spite of sign-posts on every corner! And now I'm in, I can't get out. Damn it, I will get out!" But each day it seemed as if he 'strayed' farther in....
"Why has H. M. gone off?" Laura asked Frederica.
"Why, you know! Shells," Fred said, astonished at the question.
"Tell that to the marines. Freddy, you bounced him!"
"I did not."
"Well, then, if you didn't, what color are the bridesmaids' dresses to be?" Laura retorted.
"Get out!" said Frederica.
"Why has Mr. Maitland left town?" Mrs. Payton asked her daughter.
"Shells."
"Oh," Mrs. Payton said; "but I thought he—you—I mean, I supposed ... Freddy, he's a nice fellow. I wish—"
"Oh, nice enough," Fred admitted, carelessly.
"She's refused him," Mrs. Payton thought; and sighed.
Even Flora had to ask her question: "Mr. Maitland has gone away, they say, Miss Freddy?"
"So I hear."
"Men," said Flora, heavily, "is always going away! Why can't they stay in one place, same as ladies?"
"They are not so important as we are," Miss Freddy assured her.
"If they was all swep' out of the world, it would be just the same to me," said Flora, viciously.
Fred kept a severely straight face; all the household knew poor Flora had had another disappointment.
"Why?"—"Why?"—everybody asked. But Frederica only thought "why." Her first feeling when he went away had been a sort of blank astonishment. Of course, it was all right; there was no reason he shouldn't go, only—"Why?"
Every day, as she worked at her desk, or took a trolley-car to the suburbs to inspect some apartment, or sat in absorbed silence opposite her mother at the dinner-table, she was saying,why? She was certain that he was fond of her. "Did he go because he thought I was so deep in business that I wouldn't bother with him? Or becausehe wanted to show me he could put in really serious licks of work? Or because he was afraid I'd turn him down? Of course, I am awfully matter-of-fact," she admitted; "but all the same, he's blind if he thinks that!"
Sometimes, when her mother commented vaguely on the weather, or on Flora's indelicacy in being so daft about men, or Miss Carter's perfectly unreasonable wish to go to the theater once a week, besides her regular evening out—"Idon't go once a year," Mrs. Payton said—Frederica would start and say, "Beg your pardon? I didn't hear you." Nor would she hear her mother's dreary sigh.
"Freddy has nothing in common with me," Mrs. Payton used to think, and sigh again. It did not occur to her to say, "I have nothing in common with Freddy." Certainly, they had nothing of mutual interest to talk about.... Mrs. Payton was wondering dully whether she had not better take a grain of calomel; why they would not eat cold mutton in the kitchen; whether Flora wouldn't be a little more cheerful now, for Miss Carter said that the McKnights' chauffeur was making up to her.... Fred was wondering how soon her last letter would reach Howard Maitland; foreseeing his interest in its contents—the news that Smith had been beaten, but pledged to the support of suffrage in his next campaign; calculating as to the earliest possible date of his reply.... Mrs. Payton was right; they had nothing in common. By and by, as the weeks passed, the mother and daughter, together only at meals, lapsed into almost complete silence.
"I love both my childrenjustthe same, but Mortimoreis more of a companion than she is," Mrs. Payton thought, bitterly.
There was, however, one moment, in April, when Frederica did talk.... Mrs. Holmes had come in to dinner, and somehow things started badly. Mrs. Payton had said, sighing, that she was pretty tired; "I really haven't got over the Christmas rush, yet," she complained. And Frederica, with a shrug, said that the Christmas debauch was getting worse each year. Then the suffrage parade was discussed. It had taken place the day before, in brilliant sunshine, and on perfectly dry streets, which greatly provoked Mrs. Holmes, who had prayed for rain. Naturally, she made vicious thrusts at the women who took their dry-shod part in it. She was thankful, she said, that William Childs had locked Laura up; anyhow,shehadn't disgraced the family!
"Do you call taking her to St. Louis 'locking her up'?" Fred inquired. "Laura gave in to Billy-boy, which was rather sandless in her. She is a dear, but she hasn't much sand."
"She has decency, which is better. To show yourselves off to a lot of coarse men—"
"Mr. Weston watched the procession."
"Only coarse women would do such a thing! And Arthur Weston might have had something better to do!"
Frederica held on to herself; she even refrained from quoting Mr. Weston's comment on the parade: "No doubt there were women in the procession who liked to be conspicuous; but there were others who marched with the consecration of martyrs and patriots!" But of course itneeded only a word to bring an explosion. The word was innocent enough:
"That Maitland boy," said Mrs. Holmes—"I've dropped my napkin, Flora; pick it up—why did he suddenly leave everything and go off?"
"Freddy says he's gone to dig shells," said Mrs. Payton.
"Dig what?" said Mrs. Holmes; "people mumble so nowadays, nobody can understand them! Oh, shells? Yes. Funny thing to do, but I believe it's quite the thing for rich young men to amuse themselves in some scientific way. I suppose it doesn't need brains, as business does."
"It isn't amusement," Frederica said; "it's work."
Upon which her grandmother retorted, shrewdly: "Anything you do because you want to, not because you have to, is an amusement, my dear. Like your real-estate business."
Frederica's lip hardened.
"However," Mrs. Holmes conceded, "to make his way in the world, a rich man, fortunately, doesn't need to be intelligent, any more than a pretty girl needs to be clever"—she gave her granddaughter a malicious glance; "all the same, young Maitland had better settle down and get married, and spend some of the Maitland money. (There goes my napkin again, Flora!)"
"I'd have no respect for him, if he did," Fred said. "He would be too much like this family—living on dead brains."
Her grandmother turned angry eyes on Mrs. Payton. "You may know what your daughter means, Ellen; I'm sure I don't!"
"I'll tell you what I mean," Frederica said, "you and Mother simply live on the money your husbands made and left you when they died. Since you were a girl, when you had to work because you were poor, you have never done a hand's turn to earn your living. Mother has never done anything. You are both parasites. Well, I am, too; but there's this difference between us: I am ashamed, and you are not. I am trying to do something for myself. But the only thing you two will do for yourselves will be to die." She looked at her speechless grandmother, appraisingly. "Yes, death will be a real thing to you, Grandmother. You can't get anybody else to do your dying for you."
"Ellen!Really!" Mrs. Holmes gasped out.
"Freddy, stop!" her mother said, hysterically.
"Well, what have either of you ever done to earn what you are at this moment eating?" Fred inquired, calmly.
Mrs. Payton was speechless with displeasure, but Mrs. Holmes, shivering from the chill of that word Fred had used, helped herself wildly from a dish Flora had been holding, unnoticed, at her elbow. "Ellen, I simply will not come here, if you allow that girl to speak in this way—before a servant, too!" she added, as Flora retreated to the pantry.
"I merely told the truth," Fred said, with a bored look.
"Well," said her grandmother, "thenIwill tell you the truth! You are a very unpleasant girl. And I don't wonder you are not married—no man would be such a fool as to ask you! A girl who cheapens herself by locking herself up in empty flats with any young man shehappens to meet, and signs indecent petitions, and rants in the public streets to a lot of strikers—why, you are not alady! You are as plain as a pike-staff; and you have no manners, and no sense, and no heart—you've nothing but cleverness, which is about as attractive to a man as a hair shirt! Maria Spencer told me she expected you would be ruined; but I said I would think better of you if you were capable of being ruined, or if anybody wanted to ruin you. You are not a woman; you are a suffragist! That's why you haven't any charm; not a particle!"
"Thank Heaven!" Frederica murmured.
"Well, unless men have changed since my day," Mrs. Holmes said, shrilly, "a man wants charm in a woman, more than he wants brains."
"It is a matter of indifference to me what men want," Fred commented.
Her grandmother did not notice the interruption—"Though whenwewere young, some of us had brains and charm, too! There! That's the truth, and how do you like it? Ellen, why do you have your napkins starched so stiffly—they won't stay on your lap a minute!"
"I never noticed her looks," Howard Maitland was saying, as he and another member of the Survey Expedition lounged against the railing of their tubby little vessel and looked idly down on an oily sea. They had been talking about women—or Woman, as Frederica Payton would have expressed it; and, naturally, she herself came in for comment.
"Pretty?" Thomas Leighton had asked, sleepily. It was very hot, and the flats smelt abominably; both men were muddy and dripping with perspiration.
Howard meditated: "I never noticed her looks. She keeps you hustling so to know what she's talking about, that looks don't count. She says things that make you sit up—but lots of girls do that."
"They do. Boring after the first shock. But they enjoy it. It draws attention to 'em. Our grandmothers used to faint all over the lot, for the same purpose."
"Sometimes," Howard said, grinning, "when they get going about sex, I don't know where to look!"
"Look atthem. That's what they want. And as most of 'em don't know what they're talking about, you needn't be uncomfortable. When they orate on Man's injustice to Woman—capital M and capital W—I get a little weary."
"I'm with 'em, there!" Maitland said.
The older man gave a grunt of impatience: "It isn't men who are unfair to women; it's Nature. But I don't see what can be done about it. Even the woman's vote won't be very successful in bucking Nature."
"I don't agree with you! Nature is perfectly impartial. Brain has no sex!"
"Nature impartial?" Leighton repeated, grimly; "Maitland, when the time comes for you to sit outside your wife's room, and wait for your first-born, you will not call Nature impartial. Theories are all very pretty, but just try waiting outside that door—" his face twitched; and Howard, remembering vaguely that Mrs. Leighton had been an invalid since the birth of their only child, changed the subject:
"Miss Payton's just sent me a cartload of suffrage literature; came on the tug yesterday."
"Suffragist?—you, I mean?"
"Yes; aren't you? Let's get in the flap of that sail."
"Do I look like a suffragist?" the other man demanded.
Howard surveyed him. "I don't know the earmarks, but you show traces of intelligence, so I suppose you are."
"I'll tell you the earmarks—in the human male: amiable youth or doddering age."
"You're not guilty on the amiability charge, and you don't visibly dodder. So I suppose you're an anti."
"Not on your life! It's a case of a plague on both your houses."
They were silent for a while, looking across the lagoon at a low reef where, all day long, the palms bent andrustled in the hot wind; then Leighton broke out: "For utter absence of logic I wouldn't know which party to put my money on."
"Play the antis," Howard advised.
But the other man demurred. "It's neck and neck. Some of the arguments of the antis indicate idiocy; but some of the suffs' arguments indicate mania—homicidal mania! It's a dead heat. It's queer," he ruminated; "each side has sound reasons for the faith that is in it, yet they both offer us such a lot of—truck! One of the mysteries of the feminine mind, I suppose." He knocked the ashes out of his pipe on the deck-rail, and yawned. "As an example of 'truck,' I heard an anti say that for a woman to assume the functions of a man, and vote, was to 'revert to the amœba.' Can you match that? But, on the other hand, look at the suffs! My own sister-in-law (a mighty fine woman) told me that men 'were of no use except to continue the race.'"
"That's going some!"
"But of course," the older man said, "it is ridiculous to make sex either a qualification or a disqualification for the ballot; and it's absurd that my wife shouldn't have a vote when that old Portuguese fool from Gloucester, Massachusetts, who guts our fish and can't speak English so that an American dog could understand him—has it."
"That's just it!" Howard said, surprised at his fairness.
"Why multiply him by two?" Leighton said, dryly.
"We wouldn't be a democracy if we discriminated against the uneducated!"
"I don't. I discriminate against the unintelligent.You'll admit there's a difference? Also, allow me to remind you that democracy is not the ballot; it's a state of mind."
"Very well!" Maitland retorted. "Make intelligence the qualification: the women put it over us every time! They are far more intelligent than men."
"I'd like to hear you prove it."
"That's easy! Girls can stay in school longer than boys, so they are better educated."
"But I'm not talking about schooling!" Leighton broke in; "I mean just common sense as to functions of the ballot. Let women ask for an intelligence qualification, and I'll be the biggest kind of a suff! But while they don't know any more about what the ballot can and can't do, than to gas about its raising woman's wages—oh, Lord!" he ended, hopelessly.
"Suffrage in itself is educating," Howard instructed him.
Leighton nodded. "It ought to be. But I can't see that it has perceptibly educated our fish-gutter. Still, you'd like to meet his wife at the polls?"
The suffragist hesitated: "When women get the vote, they'll change the election laws, and weed out the unfit."
Leighton lifted despairing hands: "When you say things like that, I feel like putting my money on the suffs! Mait, get out of the cradle! Our grandfathers made a mess of it, by dealing out universal male suffrage; and our fathers made a worse mess in giving it to the male negro; now the women want to make asses of themselves, just as we did. They are always yapping about being our 'equals.' Theyare! They are as big fools as we are.Bigger, for they have the benefit of observing our blunders, and being able to avoid them—and they won't do it! Because Mr. Portugee has the ballot, Mrs. Portugee must have it, too. They say it wouldn't be 'fair' to leave her out. You'd think they were a parcel of schoolgirls! If women would ask for a limited suffrage, ask for the vote for my wife, so to speak—a vote foranyintelligent woman, cook or countess!—I'd hold up both hands, and so would most men."
"It isn't practical."
"Practical enough, if we wanted to do it. And think what we could accomplish—the intelligent men,andthe intelligent women! The people who buy and sell Mr. Portugee would be snowed under;—which is the reason the corrupt element in politics object to a limited suffrage for women! They need Mr. Portugee in their business, and rather than lose him, they'll take Mrs. P., too. So what's the use of talking? Votes for Women will come, in spite of all the antis in the land, for in this woman's scrimmage, though the antis have the charm, the suffragists have the brains; and brains always win, no matter how bad the cause! They'll get it—I'm betting that they'll get it in five years."
"You ought to hear Miss Payton talk about it," Maitland said; "she'd floor you every time. She's got a mighty pretty cousin," he rambled off; "shehas charm."
"Suffragist?"
"Laura Childs? You bet she is! And she has brains. Not like Miss Payton, of course. But—" he straightened up, and his eyes began to shine; his description of Laura was so explicit that his companion smiled.
"Oh, that's the lay of the land, is it?" he said.
To which Howard responded by telling him to go to thunder. "Trouble with Miss Childs," he said, "is that the fellows are standing in a queue up to her father's door-steps, waiting to get a chance at her."
"Why did you step out of line?"
"I'll tell you the kind of a girl she is," Howard said, ignoring the question. "Of course, a man never would get stuck with Laura at a dance, but she's the kind, if shethoughthe was stuck, would make some sort of excuse—say she wanted to speak to her mother—so as to shake him. No man ever wants to get clear of Laura, but she's that kind of girl. That's why men hang round so."
"You evidently didn't hang round?"
Howard yawned. "Did I show you the pearl I found yesterday?" he asked, and produced, after much rummaging in his various pockets, a twist of paper. Leighton inspected the pearl without enthusiasm.
"Good so far as it goes. Hardly big enough for the ring."
Howard gave him a thrust in the ribs. "I'm going down to the cabin."
In his sweltering state-room he looked at his find, critically. "No, it isn't big enough," he decided. "Well, maybe I'll never have a chance to produce a ring," he added, dolefully; then he dropped the pearl into his collar-box, and mopped the perspiration from his frowning forehead. "Wonder if I shall ever be cool enough in this life to wear a collar?" he speculated. After all, whyhadhe steppedout of the line? "I wish I'd prospected before I left home!" Yet he realized that he had not known how much Laura counted in his life until he got away from her. Out here, "digging for buried treasure" in the blazing sun, lying on deck through velvet, starlit nights, the recollection of that "queue" lining up at Billy-boy's front door-steps had become first an irritation, and by and by an uneasiness. He had had one card from her,—"7° above. Don't you wish you were as cold as we are?" The photograph on the back revealed a snowy mountain-side that was tantalizing to a man who had nothing to look at but blazing, palm-fringed reefs, and who, for weeks, had been sweating at 104°. And it was not only the temperature that tantalized him—in the foreground of the picture were half a dozen of his set on skis. Laura, in a sweater and a woolly white toque, was putting a mittened hand into Jack McKnight's, to steady herself. Howard had not liked that card. "McKnight's got on his Montreal rig, all right," he thought, contemptuously; "he always dresses for the part!"
It was that postal which had aroused his uneasiness about the queue, and set him to counting the weeks until he could get into the line again. Also, it made him write rather promptly to Frederica Payton:
"Hasn't Jack McKnight got any job? He's a pretty successful loafer if he can go off skiing all around the clock. Why doesn't Laura put an extinguisher on him? How is Laura? I suppose she and Jack are having the time of their young lives this winter."
It was well on in July before Fred's reply to thatparticular letter reached him, and it made him tell Tom Leighton that Miss Payton—"You remember I told you about her?"—was the finest woman he had ever known. "No sentimental squash about Freddy Payton!" This tribute was given because Fred had said:
"Laura hasn't confided in me, but I'm betting that she'll turn Jack McKnight down. He's not good enough to black her boots, and nowadays women demand that men—"
At this point Howard folded the letter and put it in his pocket. "Laura'll bounce him!" he said to himself; and for the next hour he expatiated to Mr. Leighton upon the charm of common sense in a woman—the woman being Miss Payton, of whom his hearer was getting just a little tired; but he was confused, too. At the end of an hour his gathering perplexity found words:
"But I thought it was the pretty cousin you were gone on?"
"You did, did you?" Howard said. "Digging shells has affected your brain, Tommy."
Spring had sauntered very slowly up the Ohio Valley that year. During a cold and slushy April, Frederica paid her advertising bills, and was assured that the Misses Graham would want her to engage an apartment for them in the autumn. Also, she found a flat for a lady with strikingly golden hair, who later departed without paying her rent. This created a disgruntled landlord and instructed the real-estate agent in the range of adjectives disgruntled landlords can use. In May she was almost busy in finding houses on the lake and in the mountains for summer residents; but her traveling expenses to and from the various localities were so large that she had to apply to her man of business for an advance from her allowance.
"Look here, Fred," he said, "you can't live on your future commission from Cousin Eliza. Don't you think you've had about enough of this kind of thing?"
"I do not!" she said. "You can sponge my head between rounds, but you can't stop the mill. I don't pull off the gloves till I see it through. And I'm twenty-two dollars ahead of last month!"
She had induced him to go with her and Zip to see the tiny furnished cottage she had hired for the summerin Lakeville—the cheerfully vulgar suburb of Laketon where persons of her own sort played at farming. Lakeville was only a handful of flimsy frame houses scattered along under the trees close to the sedgy edge of the lake. Wooden piers ran out into deep water, and, when the season opened, collected joggling fleets of skiffs and canoes about their slimy piles. As yet, the houses were unoccupied, but the spirit of previous tenants, as indicated by names painted above the doors—"Bide-a-Wee," and "Herestoyou"—had been very social. Sentimental minds were confessed in "Rippling Waves," and "Sweet Homes." Fred's "bungalow," its shingled sides weathered to an inoffensive gray, was labeled, over its tiny piazza, "Sunrise Cottage."
"I think that's why I took it," she told Mr. Weston, when, having inspected its shoddy interior and paused on the porch to look at the far-off church spire of Laketon, they wandered down to a ledge of rock that jutted out into the lake; "women are going to raise the sun of freedom!"
"I hope they won't, accidentally, raise Cain," he murmured. "Fred, the lamp on your center-table almost put my eyes out! Do the Lakevillians really think that kind of junk beautiful?"
"They do. But don't be cocky; we thought it beautiful ourselves not so very long ago—if it was only expensive enough! Look at the parlor in Payton Street."
"That magenta shade with the autumn leaves on it is the most horrible thing I ever saw," he said, shuddering.
"I shall have lots of candles and a student's lamp to mitigate it," she comforted him.
They had settled down on the rock, Zip dozing against Fred's knee. It was an exquisite May afternoon. Everything was very still; once a bird fluted in the distance, and once, on the piazza of a boarded-up cottage, a chipmunk scurried through the drift of last year's leaves. A haze of heat lay on the water that crinkled sometimes under a cat's-paw of wind, and then lapped faintly in the sedges. The woods, crowding close to the shore, were showing the furry grayness of young oak leaves, and here and there a maple smoldered into flame. Frederica, absently poking a twig under patches of lichen and flaking them off into the water, was saying to herself that in about six months Howard Maitland would be at home.
"Lakeville is so unnecessarily hideous," Mr. Weston meditated; "I can't see why you should like it."
"Because my friends come here—people whowork! I'm going to start a suffrage club for them."
"How grateful they will be!" he said. His amiability when he was bored was very marked.
"But I had to cave," Fred said, "about having Flora here when I stay all night. The Childs family felt they would be compromised if people in Laketon knew that Billy-boy's niece flocked by herself in Lakeville. The Childses are personages in Laketon! Aunt Bessie is the treasurer of the antis, and runs a gambling-den on Thursday afternoons—she calls it her Bridge Club. And Billy-boy has a Baconian Club, Saturday nights. My, how useful they are! As my unconventionality would injuretheir value to society, I said I would hold Flora's hand. How much use do you suppose Flora would be if thieves broke in to steal?"
"She would be another scream. And you'll like to have her wash the dishes for you."
"Flora is too much in love to wash dishes well," Fred said. "Besides, I don't mind washing 'em, andIdo it well. The idea that women whothinkcan't do things like that is silly. We do housework, or any other work, infinitely better than slaves."
"'Slaves' being your mothers and grandmothers?"
Frederica nodded, prying up a piece of moss and snapping the twig off short.
"Oh, Fred, you are very funny!"
"Glad I amuse you. Pitch me that little stick under your foot."
He handed it to her, and she began to dig industriously into the cracks and crevices of the old gray rock. "The idea of calling Mrs. Holmes a slave is delightful," he said.
"She is a slave to her environment! Do you think she would have dared to do the things I do?"
"She wouldn't have wanted to."
"You evade. Well, I suppose you belong to another generation." Arthur Weston winced. "Don't you think it's queer," she ruminated, "that a man like Howard Maitland is satisfied to fool around with shells?" Whenever she spoke of Howard, a dancing sense of happiness rose like a wave in her breast. "Why doesn't he get into politics, and do something!" she said. Her voice was disapproving, but her eyes smiled.
"Perhaps he likes to keep his hands clean."
"Oh," she said, vehemently, "that's what I hate about men. The good ones, the decent ones, are so afraid of getting a speck of dirt on themselves! That's where women—not Grandmother's kind—are going to save the world.Theywon't mind being smirched to save the race!"
"Frederica," her listener said, calmly, "when that time comes, may God have mercy on the race. Your grandmother (I speak generically) thought she saved the race by keeping clean."
"And letting men be—" she paused to find a sufficiently vehement word. "It's the double standard that has landed us where we are; it has made men vile and kept women weak. We'll go to smash unless we have one standard."
"Which one?" he asked; "yours or ours?"
"You know perfectly well," she said, for once affronted.
"I only asked for information. There's no denying that there are members of your sex who rather incline to our poor way of doing things. Oh, not that we are not a bad lot; only, to be our equals, it isn't necessary to sit in the gutter with us. Continue to be our sup—"
"Let's cut out bromides," she said. "You (I, also, speak generically)—"
"Thanks so much!"
"—have pulled enough of your 'superiors' down to share your gutter. It's time now for men to get out of the gutter and come up to us."
"You breathe such rarefied air," he objected. He really wished that on a day of such limpid loveliness she wouldstop undressing life. He liked to be amused, but once in a while Frederica was just a little too amusing, and he was in the faintest degree bored, as one is bored by a delightful and obstreperous child. He gazed dreamily into the spring haze, watched a ripple spread over the lake, and noted a leaning willow dip its flowing fingers into the water.
"Did you see that fish jump?" he asked.
Frederica gave a disgusted grunt. "Men are all alike. You talk common sense to them and they go to sleep!"