DID YOU SEE THAT FISH JUMP
"DID YOU SEE THAT FISH JUMP?" HE ASKED. FREDERICAGAVE A DISGUSTED GRUNT
"My dear Freddy," he confessed, "you have enunciated a deep truth. The average poor devil of a male creature, toiling and slaving and digging into common sense to make a living, isn't very keen on having it crammed down his throat on his afternoon out. Not that I am that kind of person. I find your 'common sense' very diverting."
A little patch of red burned in her cheeks. "That's what has kept women slaves—'diverting' men! I believe you prefer fools, every one of you."
"We like our own kind," he teased her.
"Oh," she said, with sudden passion, "I am in earnest, and you won't be serious! This is a real thing to me, this emancipation of women. It means—a new world!"
"Yet this world," he began—the world before them, with its blue serenity of a gentle sky, its vitality of bursting buds and warm mists and cool, lapping water; the world of a woman's soul and body—was not this enough for any one? Why struggle for change? Why try to upset the existing order? And Frederica, speaking of such ugly things, was so very upsetting! As she spokeshe looked at him with the naked innocence which marks the mind of the reformer—that noble and ridiculous mind which, seeing but one thing, loses so completely its sense of proportion. The facts she flung at him he would have hidden from the eyes of girls. Yet he knew that they were facts.... He had protested that women should trust the chivalry of men, and she had burst out: "Thank you, I prefer to trust the ballot! 'Chivalry,' and women working twelve hours a day in laundries! 'Chivalry,' and women cleaning spittoons in beer-saloons! 'Chivalry,' and prostitution! No, sir! unless his personal interests are concerned, man's 'chivalry' is a pretty rotten reed for women to lean on!"
The crude words in which she swept away his comfortable evasions made him cringe, but he could not deny their accuracy, nor avoid the deduction that one of the reasons there continued to be "ugly" things in the world was that until now the eyes of women had been holden that they should not see them. Men had done this. Men had created a code which made it a point of honor and decency to hide the truth from women; to shield them, not from the effect of facts, but from the knowledge of facts!
Frederica's knowledge was dismaying to Arthur Weston, both from tenderness for her and from his own esthetic sensitiveness; it was all so unlovely!
"How do other men take this sort of talk?" he asked; "the Childs boys, for instance?"
"Bobby and Payton? I would as soon talk to Zip as to them! They are like their father; they have chubbyminds. Laura is the only intelligent person in that family. She gave in to Billy-boy about the parade," Fred said, regretfully, "but she did go with me last week when I talked suffrage to the garment-workers. I tell you what—it took sand for Laura to do that! Uncle William was hopping—not at her, of course, but at wicked Freddy; and Bobby and Payton cursed me out for leading Laura into temptation."
"How about Maitland?" he asked. He had taken Frederica's hand and was examining her seal ring. She let her fingers lie in his as lightly as though his hand had been Zip's head, and he found himself wishing that she were less amiable.
"Howard?"—her eyes brimmed suddenly with sunshine; "oh, Howard doesn't belong on the same bench with the chubby Childses! Hethinks,—and he entirely agrees with me."
"Which proves that he thinks?"
She saw the malice of his question, and rather sharply drew her hand from his.
"When is he coming home?" Weston asked.
"November," she said, shortly, and gave a flake of lichen a vicious jab that tossed it out into the water.
"How's he getting along with his shells?"
"All right, I guess. I don't hear from him very often. He's left the region of mails. I've sent him a good many pamphlets and an abstract of a paper I'm writing for the annual meeting of the league. One of these days he'll stop puddling round with shells and do something, I hope. I won't let up on him till he does."
"Merely being a fairly decent fellow isn't enough for you?"
"Notnearlyenough!"
"Oh, Fred, how young you are!" he sighed; then pulled Zip's tail and was snapped at.
Suddenly he looked her straight in the face. "Are you engaged to him?" he demanded, harshly.
"Heavens, no!" she said, laughing.
His hands tightened around his knees; he opened his lips, then closed them hard. "Ialmostmade a fool of myself," he told himself, afterward. However, his possibilities for folly were not visible to Frederica, who continued to lay down the law as to the work a man ought to do in the world. "When we get the vote," she said, "we'll show you what a citizen's responsibilities are."
"Thanks so much," he murmured. "You are going to do all the things we do, I suppose?"
"Of course," she said, joyfully; "everything—and a lot you don't do because you are too lazy!"
"I suppose you will leave us the right to propose?"
"I'll share it with you," she said, and they both laughed.
"Oh, my dear Fred," he said, "I must come back to the chestnut: you are our superiors, and we like you to be. I suppose that's because we are born hunters and are keen for the unattainable. We won't bag the game if it roosts on our fists."
"Well," s he reassured him, springing to her feet, "I'mnot going to roost on your fist; don't be afraid!"
"Try me," he said, under his breath. But she did not hear him.
"Come, Zippy, we must go home," she said, and extended a careless hand to Arthur Weston, as if to help him rise. He pretended not to see it.
("The next thing will be a wheeled chair!" he told himself, hotly.)
On the first of June Frederica transferred herself and a somewhat reluctant Flora from Payton Street to Lakeville.
"Flora thinks her beau won't go out there to see her," Miss Carter explained.
"Nonsense!" Fred said. "If he wants to see her he'll come, and if he doesn't want to see her she'd better find it out now." But she was not entirely unsympathetic, and told Flora there would be a piano in the cottage so that the music lessons could be continued—which raised the cloud a little.
A day or two later Mrs. Holmes called at No. 15 to bid Mrs. Payton good-by for the summer, and the next week the Childses dropped in, in the evening, for the same purpose. They all made their annual remark: "Howcanyou stay in town in the hot weather?" And Mrs. Payton made her annual reply: "I hate summer resorts. I'm much more comfortable in my own house." Nobody asked the real question, "How can you stay here with Morty?" And Mrs. Payton never gave the real explanation: "My life is perfectly empty except for Mortimore; that's why I stay with him."
When they had all left town Mrs. Payton, who changedher under-flannels and packed up her winter blankets by the calendar, put the stuffed furniture into linen covers, and told Anne to keep the shutters bowed all over the house—except in the ell; the sun was never shut out of the room with the iron bars over the windows. Then summer sleepiness took possession of the household. No one disturbed the quiet except when, occasionally, Arthur Weston, bored and kindly, dropped in to ask for a cup of tea. He told himself once, after a dull hour of drinking very hot tea and listening to plaintive details of Freddy's behavior, that he was going to leave directions in his will to have inscribed upon his tombstone, "He seen his duty, and he done it." It occurred to him that he would not wait for the tombstone to suggest that same duty to Frederica....
As the Payton house fell into somnolence, Payton Street woke up. The air, stagnant between sun-baked brick walls, was a medley of noises that sometimes sank to a rumbling diapason, or sometimes stabbed the ear in single discords: the jangle of mule-bells, the bumping of the car on the switch, the jolt of milk-wagons over the cobblestones. In the provision-store all day long a parrot vociferated; from the livery-stable came the monotonous pounding of hoofs, or, when Mr. Baker sent out a hearse and some funeral hacks, the screech of grating wheels. Hand-organs came and went. Fruit-dealers cried their wares—"Strawberries! Strawberries! Strawb—" The ailanthus-shaded pavements swarmed with shrill-voiced children; they summoned one another to pull the parrot's tail or to look at the hearse; they assailed the ice-carts,reveling in the drip from the tail-boards and sucking what bits of ice they could scrape up. Sometimes they squabbled raucously, sometimes wept; sometimes, hushing their betraying giggles, crept into Mrs. Payton's front yard and climbed up on the iron dog "to play circus"—until Mrs. Payton, always on the watch, discovered them and sent Miss Carter down to drive them away.
Except for skirmishes with the marauding children, Mrs. Payton's days were very placid. She worked out new puzzles and dozed through stories in the magazines. She wrote twice a week dutiful letters to her mother, pausing occasionally to think of something to say or to listen, absently, to the swish of the watering-cart along the street; she liked the wet smell of the watered cobblestones mingling with the heavy odor of the blossoming ailanthus. There never seemed to be anything to tell Mrs. Holmes, except that she had been dreadfully busy, and that the "accommodating" waitress didn't keep her sink clean, and that the barber's children were very trying. Every fine afternoon, sitting opposite Miss Carter and Morty, she drove out to the park and home again. Once she summoned up all her energy and went to Lakeville to spend a day with Fred. She thought that if she didn't go, Freddy would believe she preferred to stay with Morty. ("Oh, if Ionlyhadn't told her I loved him best!" she used to reproach herself.) It was a bitter thing to Mrs. Payton to pass through Laketon and see the place where a Payton girl ought to be, "instead of living with all kinds of people in Lakeville!" When Fred met her at the station and brought her to the ugly little cottage—its garish interiorvivid, now, with yellow pennons—she tried, for the sake of peace, to restrain her disapproval of everything she saw, but she couldn't help saying she wondered how Fred could stand the solferino lamp-shade.
"Hideous," Frederica said, carelessly, "so why look at it? I never look at our Iron Virgin."
"There is some difference in value," Mrs. Payton reproved her.
"No, only in cost," her daughter said; then saw the color mount into her mother's face, and gritted her teeth. ("I needn't have said that—but it's true! Darn it, Iamlike him!") After that she tried to think of something pleasant to say, but what was there to talk about?—only the waitress, and the heat, and the barber's dirty children. Indeed, it would have been difficult to decide which found that visit to the bungalow the most trying, the mother or the daughter. Certainly it was a relief to both of them when it was over.
"Mother came out to the camp and I wasn't a bit nice to her," Fred bemoaned herself, one day, to Arthur Weston, when he met her entering No. 15 just as he was leaving it. He turned back and followed her into the parlor.
"And nobody can be so un-nice as you, when you put your mind on it," he said, genially.
She laughed. "You never talk through your hat to me; you're straight. That's why I like you."
"Then you'll like me more, for I'm going to be very straight," he warned her. He looked about for any kind of a cool seat, but subsided into a linen-covered feather-bed of a chair, close to the bust of Mr. Andrew Payton;his eye-glasses on their black ribbon dangling in a thread of sunshine, sent faint lights back and forth on the ceiling. "Life is very dull for your mother," he said, fanning himself with his hat; "why don't you come in oftener?"
Frederica, on the piano-stool, struck a careless octave. "Life dull? Why, I think it's wildly exciting! As for coming in, I'm too busy."
"Reforming the world? You might begin the reformation by making things happier here. Happiness is a valuable reformatory agent. You could cheer Mrs. Payton up, but you prefer 'being busy.'"
Fred colored. He had spoken to her once before in this same peremptory way, and she had been angry; now she was embarrassed. "I'm on my job. I've started a suffrage league—"
"There are other people who can start leagues. There is only one person who can make your mother happy."
"Mr. Weston, the relative value of picture puzzles and the emancipation of women—"
That made him really indignant; he stopped fanning himself and looked at her with hard eyes. "The doing of the immediate duty by each individual woman will emancipate the sex a good deal quicker than talking! You needn't stop your suffrage work to do your duty as a daughter. Did you ever hear anything about bearing one another's burdens?"
"Sounds like the Bible," Fred said.
"It is. I commend the book as a course in sociology."
"But," she defended herself, "Idocome home quiteoften. I'm going to be here to-night. I'm going to a dinner dance at the Country Club, and I'm coming back here to stay all night."
"Yes, you will come for your own convenience, not your mother's pleasure. See here, Fred! You once asked me if you were like your father,"—involuntarily she raised her hand, as if to fend off a blow—"I had great respect for Mr. Payton in many ways, but he had the selfishness of power.So have you.Whew!" he ended, rising, "I believe it's a hundred in the shade!"
Fred was silent.
"I am coming out to Lakeville in a day or two. Got my new car yesterday, and I am burning to display it."
Still she was silent. A watering-cart lumbered by and some children squealed in a sudden cold splash.
"Until now," he said, "I have believed that you were a good sport."
"And now you think I'm not?"
"You don't seem to know what the word Duty means;—which is another way of saying that you don't play the game."
"If the game is to make things pleasant for Mortimore, and put picture puzzles together, I don't care to play it," she said, cockily. She followed him to the front door and stood there as he went down the steps. But when he reached the gate she darted after him and clapped a frank hand on his shoulder. "You'rea dead game sport! I don't know any other man who'd have biffed me right in the face like that."
"I skinned my own knuckles," he admitted, with adroll gesture of rubbing a bruised hand. "Still, I don't mind, if it does you good."
"Cheer up! Maybe it will," she said, and, laughing, threw a kiss to him and vanished into the house. He laughed, too—then frowned. "She wouldn't have kissed her hand to Maitland. I don't count," he thought. As he walked off, hugging the shady side of the street, he added, "Iama fool!"
Frederica had not the slightest intention of becoming immediately domestic, but as she went up-stairs to dress she happened to glance down the little corridor in the ell, and there, outside Morty's door, was poor, faithful Miss Carter. Her one night off a week, when Mrs. Baker, from the livery-stable, took her place, did not suffice to lessen very much the burden of Morty's perpetual society, and that and the heat had obviously worn upon her.
"Miss Carter, why don't you go to the theater?" Frederica called to her, impulsively. "I'll stay with Morty to-night. I suppose we can't get Mrs. Baker on such short notice?"
"No, she can't come except on her regular night; and you are going to a dance, Miss Freddy," the tired woman objected, rather faintly.
"Nonsense! I don't care about dancing. Go ahead. Get a ticket for 'Heels and Toes.' It's corking."
Her mother followed her into her room to thank her. "That's very sweet of you, Freddy. Not that Morty needs anybody when he once gets to sleep; so far as that goes, I don't need to go to the expense of having Mrs.Baker here on Miss Carter's evenings out; but I like to feel there's some one near, you know."
"It's less lonely for you," Fred said, with unwonted insight.
"Yes," Mrs. Payton agreed, wistfully. "She's somebody to talk to. You needn't sit in Morty's room; outside the door will do. And I'll sit with you."
"I want to read, so I'll sit inside by the light."
"Well, don't be nervous. He won't stir."
"I'm not in the least nervous," Fred said; "I'm only—disgusted."
Mrs. Payton's chin quivered. "You ought not to speak so about your brother. Remember, even if he isn't—bright, he's aman, and the head of the family." Fred looked at her with genuine curiosity; how could she say a thing like that! "Besides," Mrs. Payton added, "Doctor Davis always said his intellect was there; it isn't his fault that it is veiled."
"No, it isn'thisfault," Frederica said, significantly. She took her book into the bare room, which could not be carpeted or curtained because of the poor, destroying hands that sometimes had to be tied for fear they would claw and snatch, even at Miss Carter's heavy chair or at the table, screwed down to the floor. There was a drop-light over the table, and Frederica turned it on and opened her book; but she did not read much; the snoring breath from the bed disturbed her. Instead, she fell to thinking about Howard Maitland—sometimes she was impatient with herself for thinking of him so constantly! But the warm satisfaction that took possession of herwhenever he came into her mind, was an irresistible temptation. She did not often speculate upon his feeling for her. "He's fond of me," she told herself, once in a while, contentedly. That some time he would tell her he was fond of her was a matter of course. Just now, she fell to calculating how soon her last letter would reach him. One from him, acknowledging the receipt of some suffrage literature, had come that morning. "I don't believe one woman in fifty has your brains," he had written. Fred smiled; when he came home in November she would show him those "brains"! Apparently, Mr. Arthur Weston did not take much stock in them—"He prefers the domestic virtues," she thought, with a flash of amusement. "I wonder if I'm domestic enough to suit him, to-night? I suppose he would think it was better to sit with an idiot than to try to move the world along!" But the next minute she was contrite. "He can't help being old. I suppose this is the sort of thing his generation calls 'Duty'!"
She might have reflected further upon the foolishness of the past generation, if just then Mrs. Payton had not come stealthily along the hall. She stood in the doorway, raising a cautioning finger.
"Oh, you can't wake him," Frederica said, in her natural voice. But Mrs. Payton spoke in a whisper.
"Freddy, isn't your cottage damp—so near the lake? There's no surer way to take cold than—"
"Not a bit damp!"
"Does Flora make good coffee for you?"
"Bully."
"I hope she's more contented. Miss Carter says the whole trouble with Flora is she wants to get married, but she makes herself so cheap the men won't look at her."
Fred frowned. That word "cheap" always irritated her.
"Miss Carter is a good woman," Mrs. Payton went on, "but she's a little coarse once in a while."
"I suppose Flora wants a home of her own," Fred said, yawning; "when women have no brains they have to marry for homes."
"All women want homes, whether they have brains or not," said Mrs. Payton; "where would they have their babies if they didn't have homes? Freddy, it must be very lonely for you in Lakeville. Your Uncle William is really shocked about it. He says there are no people of our class there."
"Billy-boy is correct. I had two people of the better class in to supper last night—workers. Mother, one of the things the women's vote is going to do, besides giving the Floras of the world a chance to be independent of men, is to obliterate class lines."
"Then it will have to obliterate life," Mrs. Payton whispered. "Women need men to take care of them. And as for class, God makes a difference in people. You can't vote God down."
It was so unusual for Mrs. Payton to set her opinion against her daughter's that Frederica laughed, in spite of herself. Mrs. Payton laughed a little, too; then they both looked at the bed, but the heavy breathing went steadily on.
"Your grandmother thinks," Mrs. Payton said, impulsively, "that you would have more beaux if we lived up on the Hill."
"That's like her."
"Freddy dear, you know I have to stay here on account of Morty? Not that I'd do more for him than for you—I love you bothjustthe same! But I couldn't take him up on the Hill."
"'Course you couldn't! Mother, for the Lord's sake, don't listen to Grandmother! She's one of the type that keeps the world back."
"She doesn't like change, that's all," Mrs. Payton explained. She came in and sat down at the table.
"Yes; she doesn't like change," Fred agreed. "If Nature had listened to Grandmother we'd all be protoplasm still. Probably the grandmother of the first worm that sprouted legs, kicked. No, she couldn't kick," Fred said, chuckling, "because she didn't have the legs she despised; she just said, 'It isn'tdone!'"
Mrs. Payton looked perfectly blank.
"I'm going to use that idea in my paper," Fred said, with satisfaction.
"Do you think Howard Maitland likes you to write papers, dear?"
"Likes me to? Why shouldn't he? It wouldn't make a bit of difference to me whether he did or not, but as he has ordinary garden sense, I am sure he doesn't dislike it."
"Men," Mrs. Payton said, timidly, "don't like clever women."
"Clever men do."
"Your dear father was clever—but he married me."
The simplicity of that was touching, even to Frederica.
"You were a thousand times too good for him!"
Mrs. Payton was pleased, but she made the proper protest: "Oh, mydear! I had a letter from your grandmother yesterday; she thinks it's shocking—your living in Lakeville alone."
"Go on!" Frederica said, contemptuously.
"Hush-sh!" Mrs. Payton cautioned her.
Fred shrugged her shoulders. "You can't wake—That. Talk about being shocked,—I suppose it never occurred to Uncle William or Grandmother that their ideas of what is and isn't shocking, produced That?"
Mrs. Payton shrunk away as if her daughter had struck her; she murmured, chokingly, some wounded remonstrance, then tiptoed through the shadowy hall into the sitting-room. At the table, spread with an unfinished game of Canfield, she sat down, drearily. This was what always happened; they simply could not get along together! Whenever she held out empty hands, begging for love, they were slapped. She began to shuffle the cards, wondering painfully if it was because Freddy was still brooding over that thing she said about loving Mortimore best. "I'm afraid she's jealous," Mrs. Payton sighed.
Frederica, alone, reflected upon her mother's assertion that men disliked clever women. It annoyed her, not because there was any truth in it, but because it reminded her of Woman's cowardly acquiescence in Man's estimate of her intelligence. Of course it was all right aboutHoward; Howard had sense! But men generally—did they really dislike clever women? If so, it merely meant that they were afraid of Truth. They wanted women to be timid, and pretty, and useless: to be slaves and playthings!—so they fooled them into the belief that silliness was attractive, and that slavery and virtue were the same thing. It was men who had taught women to believe that awful thing her mother had said about Morty's being "the head of the family"; had taught them to believe that a man—not because he was good, or wise, or strong, but because he was aman—was the one to rule!
"No wonder we are slaves; we've swallowed that lie since Adam. Well, there'll be none of it in mine!" she said. What was going to be in "hers"? Business, to begin with. She was going to make a success of her business. Her books had shown a better month—they should show a still better month, if she wore her shoes out walking about town to please clients! Yes, Success! It was not a personal ambition: there was no self-seeking in Fred Payton; she wanted to succeed because her success would show what women could do; show that a woman was as able as a man—as wise, as good ("better! better!" she told herself); show that a woman could rule, could achieve, could be "the head of the family"! The thing that was to be "in hers" was work to free women from the shackles of the old ideals, from content in sex slavery, with all its ignorances and futilities, its slackness of purpose and shameful timidities, that a man-made world had called "duties." And Howard, who was not "afraid of clever women," would help her! A passion of consecration tothe woman's cause rose in her heart like a wave. For the next hour she walked up and down the dimly lighted room, planning what she was going to do for women.
It was nearly twelve when Miss Carter's ponderous step told her she was free. She laughed good-naturedly at the thanks the refreshed woman was eager to give, but just as she was leaving the room Miss Carter's last word caught her ear:
"I've had such a pleasant time, Miss Freddy. I'll do my work better for it."
'Do her work better.'... In her eagerness to do her own work Fred had never thought very much of other people's; but what a different world it would be if everybody did their work better! "If every woman did her best on her job, even if it were only taking care of Mortimores, it would help things along," she told herself. "It's slackness on the job that holds the world back." Looked at from that angle, then—the bettering of Miss Carter's work—perhaps it did count to make things pleasant at Payton Street? The idea put a new light on Mr. Weston's call-down. Bearing other people's burdens had seemed not in the least worth while; but if cheering people up helped them to do their work—work which, after all, had to be done, somehow!—why, then there was sense in it. She saw no sense in "cheering" her mother, for her mother did nothing at all. Frederica had no dutiful illusions; Mrs. Payton was an absolutely useless human being—and her daughter was perfectly aware of it. "Shehas no burden to bear," Fred thought, carelessly. "But to give old fat Carter a hand by just amusing her,—thathelps the doing of work; andthatcounts! I'll come in oftener," she decided.
So, in her own fashion, by a back door, so to speak, Frederica Payton entered into the old idea ofDuty.
Fred was eager to impart to her man of business her wonderful discovery that visits to Payton Street should be made, not because of "duty," but because they were of value to the world.
"Your premises were wrong, but your deductions were correct," she instructed him, and he roared with laughter.
"Fred, you'll discover the Ten Commandments next. It's the same old result, only you call it by a different name. But go ahead; run the universe! I don't care what kind of oil you use, so long as the gears don't stick."
Mr. Weston's metaphors confessed the fact that he had achieved a motor so that he might go thirty miles for a cup of tea. He used to come out to the camp two or three times a week, and, shading his eyes from the magenta lamp-shade, and the frieze of Japanese fans, and the yellow "Votes for Women" flags, listen dreamily to Fred's theories for the running of the universe, and also to that paper on which she was so hard at work. She wanted his criticism, she said, but, of course, what she really wanted was his praise. She got it—meagerly, and with so many qualifications that, when all was said, it hardly seemed like praise at all. That he was doing his best to make her carry her little torch so that it might shed its glimmer oflight, yet not set things on fire, never occurred to her. If it had, she would have resented it hotly. As it was, his temperance never checked her vehemence, but neither did it irritate her. Her arrogant and shallow certainties, on the contrary, did occasionally irritate him, and, of course, they never brought him any conviction; but they did oblige him to be intellectually candid with himself, and his candor brought him to the point of telling her that he thought her generation better than his, because it was not afraid of Truth. "So, perhaps you women may save civilization," he said.
"Hooray!" said Fred.
"Hold on," he told her, dryly; "cheers are premature. What I mean is that feminism, with its hideously bad taste and its demand for Truth, ishere, whether we like it or not! Itmaymake the world over, or it may send us all on the rocks."
"Nonsense!"
"The hope in it is your brand-new sense of social responsibility. The menace is your conceited individualism."
"Of course you are not conceited yourself," she said, sweetly.
"I wish you wouldn't interrupt me! I concede that your sense of responsibility needs the tool of the ballot, just as a farmer needs a spade when he wants to raise a crop of potatoes. That is why I am compelled to call myself a suffragist."
"Hooray!" she said again.
He looked at her drolly. "It's queer about you—notyou, but your sex; you are mentally, but not emotionally, interesting. You are not nearly as charming as the ladies of my youth; you have no sense of proportion, and you jolt the life out of a man, by trying to jump the track the minute you get tired of the scenery. Also you are occasionally boring. But you can't help that; you are reformers."
"Are reformers bores?" she said.
"Always!" he declared.
"Why?"
"Because," he said, dryly, "they never suffer from any impediment in their speech."
Yet he was not so much bored that he stayed away from Lakeville. The place itself seemed to him entirely funny. Its very respectable population was made up of hardworking, good-naturedly vulgar folk, whose taste was painful or amusing, as you might happen to look at it. Once Fred made him stay to supper, and afterward go to a party with her and Laura—whose presence had been secured by judicious pressure upon Billy-boy. This especial festivity was called a "can-can" because the guests' idea of humor consisted in wearing a string of empty tin cans over their shoulders, with a resultant noise when they danced which gave, it seemed, a peculiar joy. Frederica's man of business, sitting on a bench with several gentlemen who mopped themselves breathlessly after their exertions and were obviously comfortable in their shirtsleeves, laughed until, he said, his sides ached.
"Youlikeit, Fred?" he asked, incredulously—she and Laura had taken him home with them to give himsomething cool to drink before he started on his midnight spin into town.
"Love it!" she said.
"Well," he said, "it seems to be a case of 'give me heaven for climate, but hell for company!' It would bore me to death."
They were on the little front porch of Sunrise Cottage—Laura lounging on the lowest step, looking up at the stars, and Arthur Weston sitting on the railing, sipping ginger-ale. Frederica, standing up, began to expatiate on the woman's club she had organized. After the first meeting she had turned it into a suffrage league, under the admiring eyes of ladies who whispered to each other that she wastheMiss Payton—"youknow? Society girl. Why, my husband says the Paytons could buy up every house in Lakeville and not know they'd put their hands in their pockets!" Fred had constant afternoon teas for these ladies—which would have been pleasanter if Flora, when waiting upon them, had been less haughty.
"She calls all our neighbors 'common people,'" Fred said.
Laura laughed: "Wait till we get the vote and we'll have equality, won't we, Fred?"
"You bet we will!"
"You won't," Weston assured them, "because there ain't no such thing. My dear infants, the Lord made us different, and no vote can change His arrangements."
"That's what Mother said; I was quite astonished to have Mother pull off an opinion on me," Fred said.
"Your mother has a great many opinions, and mighty sensible ones, too."
She gave him a surprised look, like a child catching an older person in a foolish statement. "Oh, well," she said, "of course, it's hard for people of your generation to keep up with the procession."
If he flinched, nobody saw it. "You being the 'procession,' I suppose?" he said, raising an amiable eyebrow—but he did not feel amiable. Then he looked at his watch and said he must start.
"Oh, don't go!" Fred entreated.
"You two girls ought to be in bed," he said. They went with him and watched him crank his machine; as he threw in the clutch, he called back, a little anxiously, "Make her loaf, Laura! She's tired."
Indoors, while they were locking up, Laura giggled. "He's daft about you, Freddy!"
"Mr. Weston? My dear, you're mad! He looks on me as a granddaughter."
"Those aunts or cousins, or whatever they are, of his," Laura said, sleepily, "are at the hotel, and I went with Mother to call on them. The old one, who looks like an eagle, is perfectly sweet; but the pouter-pigeon one said that she did not think the young woman of to-day, who went into business, 'was calculated to make any man happy.' 'Course, I knew she was afraid you would catch 'dear Arthur'! But really—"
"Come on," Fred interrupted, starting up-stairs.
Laura stumbled along behind her. "Really, I think he is gone on you."
"Goose!" The idea was too absurd to discuss; instead, when she was combing her hair Fred called throughthe partition that separated the tiny bedrooms and said she wanted to tell Laura something.
"Come in!" Laura called back; and Frederica, comb in hand, came in, and sat on the edge of the bed. At first she talked about Flora, who didn't like to come out to the camp, because it took her away from her beau. "The McKnight chauffeur is very attentive," Fred said; "fortunately for me, Jack's going off with the car for all of August, or I'm afraid she'd leave me, so as to get back to town. Isn't it funny how crazy women in the lower classes are to get married?"
Laura nodded, sleepily.
"Want me to read you Howard's last letter?" Fred said, and took it out of the pocket of her kimono.
Laura, curled up on the bed, listened. "He's right," she said, when Frederica, with due carelessness, read Howard's panegyrics on her brains; "you are terribly clever, Freddy."
"Go off!" Fred said. "Laura, he's awfully down on Jack McKnight. You wouldn't look at him, would you?"
"At Jack? The idea! If there wasn't another man in the world, I wouldn't look at Jack."
"I want you to do something," Fred said.
"All right. What?"
"It will take nerve."
Laura opened her eyes quickly. "If it's another parade—"
"No! No! Nothing like that. Parades are only to show the strength of the attacking army. I want you toattack!"
Laura sighed. "But Father and Mother are so opposed—"
"This is something personal I want you to do."
Laura was obviously relieved.
"It's about Jack McKnight. When he proposes to you—"
"He won't."
"Don't be silly! He will if you let him. And I want you to let him. Then, when you turn him down, tell himwhy."
"Why? He'll know why! Because I'm not in love with him."
"I want you to tell him the reason you're not in love with him."
Laura, flushing to her temples, sat up in bed. "It's none of his business! Or,—or anybody's!"
"Itishis business—to know that a decent woman won't look at a fast man!"
"Oh," Laura said, tumbling back on her pillow, "I didn't know you meant that. I thought you meant ... something else."
"That's what I'm up to," Frederica said. "I'm going to get all the girls I know to promise, not only that they won't play with dissipated fellows, but that they'll tell 'em straight out why they won't!"
Laura was silent.
"Truth!" Fred said, flinging up her head, her hair falling back over her shoulders, and her eyes bold and innocent. "Truth is what we want! If we can get this bill through the Legislature—'no marriage without a cleanbill of health'—we'll accomplish a lot for the sake of Truth. I wish you'd signed the petition, Laura. You believe in it?"
"Of course I believe in it. But imagine trying to make Mama understand it!—and Father would have had a fit."
"That's the trouble with women!" Fred said, passionately. "We've been too much afraid of men having fits. Let 'em have fits! It will be good for them. We've let them demand that we should be straight, and we've never had the sand to demand that they should be straight, too. But we're going to do it now. We are going to demandTruth! Oh," she said, tears suddenly standing in her eyes, "just plain truth, between men and women, nothing more than that,—would make the world over!"
Laura sighed and shook her head. "As for playing only with the straight ones, I don't see how we can know? It doesn't seem fair not to dance with a man just because some other girl tells you she's heard something—you'd always hear it from a girl."
"General reputation," Fred began; but still Laura hesitated.
"Well, then, when wedoknow it of ourselves, let's hold together and turn 'em down. Everybody knows Jack drinks. I've seen him when he was pretty well loaded," Fred said, her lip drooping with disgust. "He's crazy about you, Laura; give him a leg up by telling him why you wouldn't look at him!"
"Oh, Freddy, really—"
"This is what I'm going to work for," Frederica said, "to teach women to teach men! It's our job, because women are more intelligent than men."
"I don't think Mother is more intelligent than Father," Laura demurred.
Fred swallowed her opinion of the collective Childses' intelligence; "I've thought it all out," she said; "I'm going to give my life up to urging women to set the pace! And we've both of us got to marry men who will join our crusade."
"They won't," Laura prophesied; then added, with sudden, frowning decision: "anyhow, so far as I'm concerned, it doesn't matter. I'm not going to marry anybody."
Fred gave her a quick look. "Why?"
"Well, I don't want to."
"Of course, marriage generally hampers a woman," Frederica conceded. "Perhaps because most of us are tied down to the old idea that it's got to be permanent,—which might be a dreadful bore! I suppose that's a hold-over from the time that we were chattels, and men taught us to feel that marriage was permanent—forus! They didn't bother much with permanence for themselves! But I admit that marriage—as men have made it, entirely for their own comfort and convenience, with its drudgery of looking after children—is stunting to women. Queer, though, how they don't mind it! Look at the girls we know—Rose Marks and Mary Morton, and the rest of our class who are married—they haven't a thought above their babies and their owners—theycall 'em 'husbands'! Did you know Rose has resigned from theleague? She says she hasn't time to attend the meetings; but I know better. It's because that perfectly piffling Marks man (howcouldshe marry him?—he has no nose, to speak of, and such a silly chin!) doesn't approve of us. I suppose you think it's better for a woman not to marry if she really wants to accomplish anything?"
"Well, no; not just that. Men marry, and yet they accomplish things," Laura said.
Frederica frowned. The suggestion of a fundamental difference in men and women annoyed her. "Of course, it doesn't follow that a woman stands still when she marries. If she and the man are in absolute sympathy, intellectually, she needn't vegetate. For my part, I expect to marry,—I want children. But I shall go on with my work. I consider my work of more importance than putting babies to sleep!"
"Everybody can't afford to have somebody put their babies to sleep for them," Laura objected.
"Fortunately I can! I shall have a trained nurse. When a child is well, a trained nurse is every bit as good as a mother. And when it is ill, she's better."
"Suppose your husband doesn't think so?"
"Then he won't be my husband! But I sha'n't run any such risk! I shall marry a man who absolutely agrees with me in everything."
"Maybe he'd like you to agree with him."
"I will, after I've pulled him up to my level," Fred said, grinning.
"I suppose Mr. Howard Ferguson Maitland doesn't need any pulling up?" her cousin said, softly.
Fred's face burned red. "My dear, he is not the only pebble on the beach!"
"He gets home in November," Laura said. "Freddy, it's nearly one, and I'm perfectly dead with sleep!"
Frederica laughed and got up; then hesitated. There was a little droop in Laura's face that she didn't like. "Lolly," she said, "you're bothered. Is it—Jack?"
"Darn Jack!" Laura said. "I loathe him."
"Good girl!" Fred said, with a relieved look. "You scared the stuffing out of me for a minute!"
"You needn't be worried," Laura told her, dryly. "Jack has not played with my young affections. Oh, no; I'm cut out for an old maid! I'm not clever like you."
Frederica, in genuine relief from that moment of anxiety, was betrayed into reassuring truth-telling: "Mother says men don't like clever women."
"If Aunt Bessie could hear H. M. talk about you she'd change her mind."
Fred threw an impulsive arm about her and kissed her. "Oh,Laura!" she said. Laura laughed, and kissed her back again, and said if she didn't get out she'd fall asleep in her arms.
But when Fred, blushing like any ordinary girl, had left her to those deferred slumbers, Laura Childs lay awake a long time....
Frederica, alone in her tiny room, had a very sober minute. As she thought it over, Laura's "loathing" did not seem quite convincing. "She's got something on her chest," Fred said. Even when they were little girls she had loved her cousin more than any one in the world, andto have Laura depressed disturbed her sharply. "Canit be Jack?" she asked herself. "I wish Payton or Bobby would kick him!" That she should hand the infliction of such chastisement over to a brother showed that Fred could revert to the type she despised. But she was so troubled about Lolly that she almost forgot her satisfaction in being told—what she already knew!—that Howard appreciated her cleverness.
Except for the Lakeville ladies, so looked down upon by Flora, Fred had very few visitors that summer. Even Laura did not come very often, though Lakeville was only five miles from Laketon. Perhaps she was afraid of being asked questions. In September both girls were invited by a school friend to come to the seashore for two or three weeks, but Laura waited to know that Fred had declined the invitation ("I can't fool with Society. I'm on my job!" said Fred) before she, Laura, accepted it.
There was, however, one formal call which gave Frederica great joy; her grandmother and Miss Eliza Graham came over from the Laurels to see her—and she never behaved more outrageously! She told Mr. Weston afterward that she had had the time of her life joshing Mrs. Holmes. He assured her that she was an imp, but that he would gladly have paid the price of admission if he had only known that the circus was going to take place. He asked his cousin about it afterward, but her description of the scene was not so funny as Fred's. Indeed, it was rather pathetic—poor Freddy, fighting her grandmother, while Miss Eliza stood outside the ring, so to speak, and watched, pityingly.
"For there's nothing one can do for her, Arthur," MissEliza told him; "she's got to get some very hard knocks before she'll give up advising the Creator how to manage His world."
She and Mr. Weston had found a deserted spot on the veranda at the Laurels, and she told him what she thought of Freddy. "It's a sort of violent righteousness that possesses the child," she said. "Where does she come from, Arthur? That mother! That grandmother! She must be a foundling."
"Her father had power. His righteousness was not very violent, but his temper was."
"She must make her mother very unhappy."
"Yeast makes dough uncomfortable, I suppose," he admitted.
"She's an unscrupulous truth-teller," Miss Graham said, and repeated some of the impertinently accurate things that Frederica, sitting in her ugly little living-room, with the Japanese fans on the walls, and yellow "Votes for Women" pennons over the doors, had flung at Mrs. Holmes. "Her grandmother said the 'women of to-day cheapened themselves'; to which she replied that 'the women of yesterday were dear at any price'!"
"She told me she had merely been truthful," Mr. Weston said. "Justifying herself on the ground of Truth is Fred's form of repentance. But the girlsuffers, Cousin Eliza!"
"She'll have to suffer a good deal before she'll amount to anything," Miss Eliza said, dryly; "I wanted to shake her! Arthur, if you had any missionary spirit, you would marry her."
"But Cousin Mary says she is 'not a young woman who is calculated'—"
They both laughed. "Nonsense! If she gets a master, she'll make him happy. A good-natured boy won't do. The gray mare would be the better horse. Marry her and beat her."
"Maitland will have to do the beating," he said. But he could not evade her.
"Don't be a fool. Take her! I know you want her."
"I do," he confessed. "But the little matter of her not wanting me seems to be an obstacle."
Miss Eliza, her old eagle head silhouetted against the dazzle of the lake, meditated; then she said, "Is she engaged to Mr. Maitland?"
"No, but she's going to be. Besides, dear lady, I am forty-seven and she is twenty-six. Youth calls to Youth! Please don't suggest that she might prefer to be an 'old man's darling.'"
"You're not an old man. But the average young man—if he fell in love with her—would be under her thumb."
"Why do you say 'if'? Maitland has fallen in love with her, head over heels! He can't stop talking about her brains for five minutes at a time!"
Miss Eliza gave him a keen look. "Well, perhaps human nature has changed since my time. Then, a boy didn't fall in love with a girl's brains, though a grown man sometimes did. Cleverness in a girl is like playfulness in a kitten; it amuses a middle-aged man. The next thing he knows, he's in love!"
"Amuses!" Arthur Weston broke in, cynically; "to'amuse' a middle-aged man doesn't seem a very satisfying occupation for a girl. Don't you think she'd rather have a boy's ridiculously solemn devotion?"
"But don't I tell you?—Love comes next! And I know you are in love, because you are so foolish. Arthur, I'm ashamed of you! Do have some spunk. Get her! Get her! I don't believe she's in love with that boy."
He gave a rather hopeless laugh. "Oh, yes, she is. I haven't the ghost of a chance; besides—" he paused, took off his glasses, and put them on again, with deliberation—"besides, if I had a chance, I'd be a cur to take it. As you know, I had a blow below the belt. A man never quite gets his wind again, after a little affair like mine. It would be great luck for me to have Fred, but what sort of luck would it be for her to spend her life 'amusing' me?"
"Nonsense! I won't listen to such—" she paused, while three girls, romping along, arm in arm, swept past them, down the veranda. "Pretty things, aren't they?" she said, looking after them with tender old eyes; "how lovely Youth is!—even when it does its best to be ugly as to clothes and manners, like two of those youngsters. They didn't even see us, they were so absorbed in being young, bless their hearts! The outside one who bowed is a Wharton girl. She is a charming child, charming! And doing wonderfully at college. But those others—!"
"Awful," he agreed. "Cousin Eliza, what's the matter with women, nowadays?"
"Perfectly simple. They are drunk!"
"Drunk?"
"With the sudden sense of freedom. My dear boy,reflect: When you were born—no, you're too young"—he waved a deprecating hand, but he liked the phrase—"whenIwas born—that's seventy-three years ago—women were dependent upon your delightful sex; so, of course, they were cowards and you were bullies. Oh, yes; there were exceptions! There were courageous women, and henpecked men. And, of course, cowardice didn't always know it was cowardly, and bullying was often nothing but kindness. But you can say what you please, women were not free! They had to do what their men wanted—or quarrel with their families, and strike out for themselves! And what was there for them to do to earn their living? Outside of domestic service, nothing but teaching, sewing, and Sairey Gamp nursing! When I was a girl I did not know enough to teach and I hated sewing. So, if I had wanted to do anything my father and mother didn't approve of, I couldn't have kicked up my heels and said, 'I'll support myself!' Besides, I shouldn't have dared. The Fifth Commandment was still in existence when I was young. But now," she ended, "that's all changed. Girls can kick up their heels whenever they feel like it!"
He laughed, and said that Fred Payton had kicked entirely over the traces.
"She's not the only one," Miss Graham said; "those three girls who passed us have done it. That nice Wharton child is going to study law, if you please! Yes, Freedom! It's gone to their heads; it's champagne on empty stomachs. Empty only for the last two generations—before that there were endless occupations to fill our stomachs.(My metaphors are a little mixed!) When I was a girl, the daughters of a house, even when people were as well off as Father, always had things to do—'Duties,' we called them. But nowadays there's not enough housework to go round; so if girls are rich, they play at work in—in anything, just to kill time! Like your Miss Freddy."
"Fred is making a success of her real-estate business," he said; "I hadn't a particle of faith in it, but she's making it go."
"It doesn't matter whether you have faith or not; the change has come:she had to have something to do! That's the secret of the situation, and there's no use kicking against it. You men have just got to accept the fact of the change. All you can do is to fall back on the thing that hasn't changed, and never can change, and never will change. Give girls that and they will get sober!"
He looked puzzled.
"My dear boy, let them bewomen, be wives, be mothers! Then being suffragists, or real-estate agents, or anything else, won't do them the slightest harm. Marry them, Arthur, marry them!"
"All of them?" he protested, in alarm.
She laughed, but held her own. "I always tell Mary that all that nice, bad child, your Freddy Payton, needs, is a husband. Which Mary thinks is very indelicate in me. But it's true. As for suffrage that the women are all cackling about, I don't care a—a—"
"Damn?" he suggested.
"Copper," she reproved him. "I don't care a copper about it! I've always called myself an anti, but I neverreally gave it much thought, one way or the other, until I went to an anti-suffrage meeting last year; that made me a suffragist! I declare, the foolishness of some of their arguments against voting went a long ways toward proving that perhaps they reallyhaven'tthe brains to vote! Somebody said—Bessie Childs, I believe it was—that the ballot would take woman out of the Home. I reflected that Bridge took Bessie out of her home, for three or four hours once a week, and voting would take her out for three or four minutes, once a year. But I kept quiet until somebody intimated that the 'hand that rocks the cradle' is not competent, if you please, to deposit a ballot! Then I stood right up in meeting, and said, 'I'm only a poor old maid, but to my way of thinking, if the hand is as incompetent as that, it is far more dangerous to trust a cradle to it than a ballot!'"
"What did they say to that?"
"They said a cradle was every woman's first duty. 'But it would be most improper in me to have a cradle!' I said. I know they thought me coarse."
"So you are a suffragist?"
"Indeed I'm not! I went to a suffrage meeting, and really, Arthur, I was ashamed of my sex; such violence! such conceit! such shallowness! such impropriety! One of them said that any married woman whose husband did not believe in suffrage should leave him or else have branded on her forehead a word—I cannot repeat to you the word she used. And another of them said that all the antis were 'idiotic droolers.' I thought of my dear sister, and I just couldn't stand that! I said, 'Well, ladies, ifthe women who don't want the vote are idiots, is it wise to thrust it upon them? Will idiots make good voters?'"
"You had 'em there."
"No; they just said 'the vote would educate women.' And as for women not wanting it—'why, we'll cram it down their throats,' one of them said. Nice idea of democracy, wasn't it? She explained that some slaves hadn't wanted freedom, but that was no reason for not abolishing slavery! And, of course, she was right. The suffragists have brains, you know, Arthur. Well, as a result of a dose of each party, I'm nothing at all—very much."
"You're agin' 'em both?" he suggested.
"Oh, I still call myself an anti, because the antis are, at least, harmless; but I really don't care much, one way or the other. No; the thing that troubles me isn't suffrage or non-suffrage; it's the fact that somehow women seem to be fighting Nature.Thatworries me. I know that Nature can be depended upon to spank them into common sense when she gets hold of them, but, unfortunately, men won't help Nature out. They don't like girls like Miss Payton—I mean, the young men don't. They don't like girls who are cleverer than they are; but no girl is cleverer than you! Do 'come out of the West, Lochinvar, come out of the West'!"
He laughed and shook his head. "My dear cousin, I am dead in love with you, so don't try to turn my affections in another direction. Besides, Howard Maitland is coming home the end of November."
But it was the middle of October that saw Howard Maitland back again in town. In spite of Frederica's friendly assurance that Jack McKnight hadn't a ghost of a chance, that "queue" lining up at Mr. William Childs's front door-steps bothered him. So, with many large cases of specimens, and a mahogany tan on his lean face, he arrived, one morning, on the Western express. He hardly waited to remove the evidences of several nights in the sleeping-car, before reconnoitering the Childs house. The queue was not visible, but neither was Laura. She was in Philadelphia, a maid told him, and would not be back for another week. He went off rather crestfallen.
"I'll go and see Freddy," he consoled himself.
As he shot up in an elevator in the Sturtevant Building, whom should he run across but old Weston! "I'm on my way to the real-estate office," he said, grinning like the cub he was, at Fred's plaything.
Mr. Weston did not grin. "I believe she's in her office. Thought you weren't to get home until next month?"
"Wasn't. But—well, I got kind of stale on shells, and I thought I'd like some smoke and soot for a change. So I came home. Oh—you get off here?"
"Yes," Mr. Weston said, briefly, and stepped out into the echoing corridor. In his private office he sat down, and, with his hands in his pockets, his legs stretched out in front of him, regarded his boots.
"Well, he's back," he said to himself.
After a long time he got up, put on his hat, and, heedless of the questioning young lady at the typewriter, slammed his office door behind him. "I'm hard hit," he told himself, roughly, as he stepped into the descending elevator. "It appears that I am capable of feeling something more than 'amusement.' I'll go and buy the wedding-present. The application of a check that I can't afford may be curative."
The cure would have seemed still more necessary if he could have seen how Howard was welcomed in the real-estate office. Frederica's astonished pleasure was as frank as a man's.
"Good work!" she said, and struck her hand into his. "But I didn't expect you for a month!"
"I couldn't stand it any longer," he told her, joyously. "How's business? How's Laura?"
"Well, clients are not exactly blocking the corridors," she said; "but I'm bursting with pride; I came out ahead last month!"
"Gee!" he said, admiringly. "Well, tell us the news!"
"I've finished my paper," she said. She pushed an open map aside so that she could sit on the edge of her big office table, and looked at him delightedly. "I'm crazy to read it to you. Sit down and light up!" She struck a match on the sole of her shoe, and handed it to him.
"I'm crazy to hear it! Laura's skiddooed. I went to Billy-boy's"—he blew the match out and dropped it on the floor;—"and got thrown down on the front steps."
"Yes, she's playing around with the Mortons. I was asked, but—there are so many more interesting things here! Howard, they are talking about abolishing the red-light district, and we're going to get that bill I wrote you about, through the Legislature, if webust!"
"What bill?"
"Registration. Health certificate—or no marriage license! You've got to roll up your sleeves and get busy."
"All right," he agreed, promptly. "She's not engaged, is she?"
"Who? Laura? Heavens, no! She has something else to think of than your sex. Look here: why don't you come out to my bungalow and we'll talk things out?" She explained that though she had moved back to Payton Street she still used the camp when she had what she called a "night out." "I take Flora along for propriety. Isn't that rich? I tell you what, I've been a boon to the whole connection. I've given 'em something to talk about!"
"What's the matter with going out in my car this afternoon?" he asked. But she put him off until the next day. She was thinking that she must brace the house up and arrange for a rattling good supper! "We'll have a big fire," she thought, cozily, "and we'll sit up and talk till all's blue.... You'll stay all night?" she said. "I've a very decent little guest-room."
For once she startled him, but her frank gaze made him almost ashamed of his instinctive sense of fitness.He said no, he wouldn't stay all night; he had to be on hand very early the next morning to look after a consignment of freight. "But I'll turn up at Payton Street in the car to-morrow afternoon, about four. Is that right?"
"Just right," she said. She had decided quickly that she would send Flora out Friday morning with provisions. "I bet he'll take notice when I feed him!" she thought. "What kind of a salad shall I have? Not one of those footling 'ladies' luncheon' things, all nuts and apples and stuffed truck. Men want just lettuce or tomatoes. No fancy doings!"
She was anxious to get rid of him and go home and make her plans. It occurred to her to ask her mother what kind of cheese a man would like. But no, that would involve her in a lot of talk about "propriety." She nodded to him over her shoulder as he left the office, and the next minute she heard the elevator door clang behind him. Then, with a furtive glance about the room, as if to make sure she was alone, she stooped and picked up that half-burnt match which had lighted his cigarette.... For a minute she held it in her hand, then laughed, shamefacedly, and put it in her pocket-book. Her face was vivid with happiness. She pulled down the top of her desk, then flung it up again, and scrawled on one of her business cards: "Closed until Monday morning." "I'll stick that in the door," she said; "I sha'n't be able to spare a minute for the office to-morrow." But, despite her haste, she stood for a dreamy moment smiling into space. Then she sat down in her revolving chair and sunk her chin on her fist.
He couldn't stand it any longer!
The words sang themselves in her heart. "Goose! Why did he 'stand it' as long as he did? Well, he didn't lose any time getting to the Sturtevant Building!" She felt quite confident that he wouldn't "stand it" longer than the next night, then, alone before the fire in her little house, he would—ask her. The thought was like wine! But instantly another thought made her quiver. Why should he "ask," when she was so ready to give? She wished that instead of "asking" her he would take things for granted. She wished he would just say: "When shall we be married, Fred?" And she would say, just as nonchalantly, "Oh, any old time!" And he would say, "To-morrow?" And she would say, "Oh, well, the family wouldn't like it if we didn't let 'em celebrate getting me off their hands!" She thought of Laura's anxiety about the bridesmaids' dresses, and smiled. "I hate that kind of fuss as much as men do, but it would be a shame to disappoint Lolly." So she would say, "Call it a month from now." Then he would urge—that brought the other thought again. Why should he urge?—when all she wanted was to give! Oh, how much she wanted togive! Her heart seemed to rise in her throat, and she said, aloud, "Why not? Why not?" A pang of happiness brought the tears to her eyes. It was not only love that stirred her—the simple, human instinct—it was the realization that love was seconded by an intellectual conviction, and that she could show by her own act that women and men are equals, not only in all the things for which she had been fighting (they seemed so little now!)—opinions, rights, privileges; but equals also in this supreme business ofloving. Yes, there was no reason why she should not be the one to ask. No reason why she should not be the beggar! The generosity of it made her glad from head to foot. She stood up, her lips parted, her breath catching in her throat; she would give, before he could ask! It was a sacramental instant; for with the purpose of giving—"herself, her soul and body"—was that exalted realization that an opinion of the mind can be merged with an impulse of the body. She was profoundly shaken and solemn. Suddenly she put her hands over her face, and stood motionless: there were no words, but the gesture was a prayer. When a little later she left her office her face was white. She was happier than she had ever been in her life.
She walked home, stopping, on a sudden impulse, to buy a bunch of violets for her mother. At her own front door she met the postman, who gave her a card from Laura: "I'm going on to Boston—to stay with the Browns. Home next week." Under the little scrawling signature, "L. C.," was another line: "Why not write H. M. and tell him to bring home some Filipino gauze for the bridesmaids' dresses?"
Frederica bit a joyous lip. "Imp! Well," she thought, with a queer little matronly air of amusement, "she'll get her dress sooner than she expects." Then she thrust her key into the lock and let herself into the hall; the light in the red globe flickered in the draught of fresh air, and Andy Payton's hat moved slightly. The shut-up stillness of the house was full of a sickly fragrance: "Bay rum!" Fred said, resignedly. "She has a headache, I suppose."