It was extraordinary how much better Mrs. Payton was in the next few weeks. Every day she sat in the entry outside Mortimore's door, and hour after hour she and Miss Carter talked about Flora. Sometimes Mortimore was troublesome, and laughed or bellowed—and then his mother retreated; when he quieted down, she returned, and took up the story just where it had been interrupted. After each detail had been recited, and they had finally buried poor Flora, rehearsing every incident of the funeral, they would reach the question of the disposition of her possessions. Miss Carter had packed them up, and knew just how valueless they were—"except that lovely collar you gave her. NowIthink that is too good for the Salvation Army!"
At this point the discussion was apt to become heated, Miss Carter contending that Flora's things should be sent to one of the negro schools in the South, and Mrs. Payton standing firmly for the Salvation Army. Frederica, asked to decide between them, said, briefly, "Burn 'em."
"Wouldn't that be wasteful?" Mrs. Payton objected, gently.
She was very gentle to Fred now. Her daughter's statement about being "in love" had been a very greatshock to her, not because of its "indelicacy," painful as that was, but because it awoke in her an entirely new idea:Freddy was unhappy!It had never occurred to Mrs. Payton that Freddy could be unhappy about anything—Freddy, who was always so strong and self-sufficient! That she should suffer, made her mother feel nearer to her than she had since Frederica was little, and had scarlet fever, and Mrs. Payton hadn't taken off her clothes for four days and four nights. So, when her daughter's drooping lip expressed what she thought of that endless gossiping about Death outside Mortimore's door, Mrs. Payton was very gentle, and only said that it would be wasteful to burn Flora's things. Then she tried to explain that she sat near Morty to cheer Miss Carter. (Freddy must not think it was on Morty's account! It would be too dreadful if now, "on top of everything else," she should be brooding over those impatient words, repented of the minute they were spoken!)
But Fred displayed no signs of brooding over anything. She took up her interest in Life just where it had paused for a moment at the touch of Love. But before she settled down into the commonplaces, of real estate, and dances, and league work, she had that Pause out with herself....
She told her mother that she was going to the bungalow to put things to rights. (This was about five days after Flora's death.) "Everything is just as we left it. She hadn't even washed the dishes. And I left a few things there that I must bring home."
"Take Anne to help you."
"Anne would have a fit—she's so superstitious! No; I don't need anybody."
"I'll go with you," Mrs. Payton ventured.
Fred was frankly amused at the suggestion. "You! No; much obliged, but I don't want any one."
Mrs. Payton did not urge; back in her mind there was a dim memory of a time when she, too, had been alive—and suffered, and wanted to be alone. She said something, hesitatingly, to this effect to Arthur Weston, who dropped in that morning to know how they were getting along.
"Freddy has gone out to that awful place, to pack up," she said; "I'm sure it's very damp, and I'm terribly afraid she'll take cold. But she would go. Sometimes a person likes to be by themselves," she ended.
He was surprised at such understanding; but he only said, quietly, that he would drive out late in the afternoon and bring her home in his car. "She can have eight hours to herself," he said. (He had had some hours to himself in the last few days; hours of pacing up and down his library—saying over and over, "If Maitland isn't in love with her, why shouldn't I at least tell her that I—? No! I have no chance. But if sheshouldforget him? No, no. I mustn't think of it!")
For the eight hours alone Frederica had been thirsting:
Solitude.
Lapping—lapping—lapping water.
Wind in the branches.
Shadows traveling across distant hills.
And no human face! No human sound!
So, with Zip under her arm, she took the early train to Lakeville.
From the station she walked along the sandy road where dead leaves had begun to fill the wheel-ruts, down to the huddle of boarded-up cottages on the shore. The last time she had gone over that road, how thick the fog had been! Now, the lake was a placid white shimmer against the horizon's brooding haze, and the glimmering October sunshine lay like gilt on the frosted ferns and brakes. She did not meet a single soul. Except for Zip, dashing along in front of her, or an occasional crow cawing, and flapping from one tree-top to another, there was only the wide silence of the sky. The sense of getting away from people gave her a feeling of relief that was almost physical.
When she reached Lakeville the sight of Sunrise Cottage was like a blow; she stopped short, and caught her breath. The lamp Howard had left outside the house had fallen over—perhaps a squirrel had upset it; the solferino shade was in fragments; leaves had blown up on the porch. But the flinching was only for a moment—then she turned the key in the lock.
The bungalow, with its shut-up smell, was just as they had left it, except that, in some indescribable way, it had lost the air of human habitation. Perhaps because Death had been there. In the faint draught from the open door a sheet of music slipped from the piano to the floor and some ashes blew out of the fireplace. The cottage was absolutely silent.
Frederica felt cold between her shoulders. She did notwant to go in, she did not want to have to turn her back on the stairs that led up to the vacant rooms—Flora's room! She shivered; set her lips and entered—but she left the door open behind her into the living world.
The emptiness of the house clamored in her ears. She found herself looking, with a sort of fascination, at the disorder of the chairs—which stood just as Howard had pushed them aside when they brought Flora in. On the arm of the morris chair was a brass plate heaped with cigarette-ashes. For some obscure reason those ashes seemed to her unendurable—how they had glowed, and faded, and glowed again, filling the room with warm and lazy smoke, while she and Howard—She lifted the little tray and threw the ashes, almost with violence, into the fireplace. The movement broke the spell that had held her there looking at things—at the learned books, filmed with dust, at the half-burned candles, at the withered roses on the table. Zip nosed about at that water-soaked spot on the rug, and she spoke to him sharply; then went over and closed the piano.
After that, it was easier to go out to the kitchen, though there was still a tremor at the thought of those empty rooms overhead. Spread out on the table were the cards, just as Flora had left them. In the sink was the clutter of unwashed dishes.... Fred drew a long breath, opened all the windows, lighted a fire in the stove, and went to work.
Of course the exertion of packing and cleaning was a relief. There was a great deal to do. So much that she felt at first that she should need another day to getthrough with it. But her capability was never more marked—by noon she began to see the end. She ate her luncheon walking about, holding a sandwich in one hand and packing books with the other. She had arranged with her landlord to send a van to the cottage for the piano, and it was also to carry her things back to town; she had thought of every detail. It was the way she did all her work—drawing up leases, or talking to women's clubs, or, of late, "making things pleasant" at Payton Street. Even now, shrinking from the work that must be done up-stairs, where it was all so empty—so full of Flora!—she was efficient, methodical, thorough. She scanted nothing. Yet no amount of busyness dulled the ache of misery which had goaded her out here to be alone—but she was impatient at herself for feeling the ache.
It was so unreasonable to be miserable!
When everything was done—the kitchen tidied, books and clothing and personal odds and ends packed, even the little white curtains in the empty rooms up-stairs, all limp and stringy from the creeping October fogs, pressed and folded and put away—it was still early afternoon. But there was no train into town until five; she would give herself up to the silence.
She went out on the porch and sat down on the lowest step in the sunshine. Zip ran about, chased a squirrel, then, curling up on her skirt, went to sleep. Sometimes she rubbed his ears, sometimes stared out over the lake—
She had been refused."I am hard hit," she admitted, and her face quivered. However, she could stand being hit! She could take her medicine, and not make faces.Arthur Weston had said that about her, and she liked to remember it.
Suddenly her mind veered away into all sorts of unrelated things. Queer that Howard cared so much for shells. He had found that pearl in a shell; the pearl that she had thought—oh, what a fool she had been!—was meant for her. That old seed-pearl set of her mothers', pin and ear-rings, would make a dandy pendant. She believed she'd ask her mother for it. Except on this shell-digging business, how entirely Howard and she agreed about everything! Few men and girls were so in accord, mentally. Imagine Howard trying to talk to any of the girls of her set—even to Laura—as he talked to her! Why, Laura would be dumb when he got on the things that were worth-while. He had once said that he would rather talk to her than any girl he knew; no—it was to "any man" he knew. For a moment the old pride rose—then fell. She almost wished hehadsaid to "any girl." Well; no girl—or man, either—could have done better than she did on that poster scheme. Howard would say so when she would tell him about it, and she was going to tell him; she was going to talk to him just as she had always talked—about everything on earth! Shemust; or else he would think that she was ... hard hit; and that she simply couldn't bear! The poster scheme reminded her of some league work she had neglected in these five days of tingling emptiness, and she frowned. "Gracious! I must attend to that," she said. She did not know it, but her bruised mind was fleeing for shelter into trivialities. Suddenly she took her purse out ofher pocket, thrust a thumb and finger into the place where she kept her visiting-cards, and took out a burnt match. She looked at it for a moment with a grunt of bitter laughter; then, finding a little stick, dug a hole in the path, laid the match in, covered it, and stepped on it, hard.
"That is the end," she said.
After a while she realized that she was cold, and went back into the house and kindled a fire. She sat down on a hassock, and stretched out her hands to the blaze. The sunshine came through the uncurtained window and laid a finger on the soot on the chimney back; its faint iridescence caught her eye. Was it only Monday night that she and Howard had sat here by the fire, and he had kicked the logs together on the andirons, and the sparks had caught in the soot and spread and spread in marching rosettes? Why, it seemed years! It was then that she had—asked him.
She wasn't ashamed of it! She had proposed and been refused. "He thought it was stunning in me to do it; he said so! He feels as I do about the equality of men and women in this kind of thing, as well as everything else. Of course, he may have said so just to—to make it easier for me? If I thoughtthat—"
The blood rushed into her face. She would not think that! It would be unendurable to think he had not been sincere. "He felt it was perfectly all right for me to be the one to speak. And it was!"
Of course it was. There was nothing for her to be ashamed of. She herself had once refused an offer ofmarriage, and certainly the rejected suitor had not seemed to suffer any pangs of shame! He had displayed a rather mean anger: "He wanted my money, and he was hopping mad when he couldn't get it. I didn't want to get anything. I only wanted to give! So why don't I brace up? I had a right to 'give.'"
She was quite certain that she had a right, so why was she so miserable? So—ashamed.
In spite of herself she said the word. She had shied away from it, and refused to utter it, a dozen times; but at last, here, alone, she had to tell herself the truth.
She was ashamed.
It is only when Truth speaks to us, as in the cool of the day the Voice of God spoke in the Garden, that the human creature knows he is ashamed. Not to feel Shame is to be deaf to that Voice. Frederica was not deaf; but the Voice was very faint, very wandering and indirect. She could hardly hear it. It spoke first in her vague wish that Howard had said he would rather talk to her than any "girl" he knew; and then it spoke in the wonder whether a man does like to be "asked."
"If he doesn't, it's just idiotic tradition. It belongs to the days of slavery!"
But how did the tradition grow up that a woman mustn't ask a man to marry her? She tried to remember something Arthur Weston once said about men being "born hunters." Her lip drooped, angrily; "Rot!" she said; "when it comes to love, a woman has as much at stake as a man. No, she has more at stake! She has the child. Queer," she thought, "the woman is always theone who sticks to the child." She wondered if that was because women pay such a price for children? It occurred to her, with a sense of having made a discovery, that all through nature, the mother cares for her offspring just in proportion to what it costs her to bring it into the world.
She rolled Zip over on his back and pulled his ears, her mind dwelling, with the ancient resentment of her sex, upon the unfairness of nature—for the father pays no price! "I wonder if that explains desertion? I wonder if men desert girls, after they've got them into trouble, simply because the child costs them nothing? But how the girls stick to the babies, poor things!Theyhardly ever go off on their own bat. And yet" (thus the Voice was speaking!), "the child needs a father to take care of it, as much as a mother, so the man and the woman ought to keep together.... Buthe'sthe one who goes off! It ought to be tit for tat! Women ought to do the deserting," she said, passionately; but a moment later came the cynical admission: "Men wouldn't mind being 'deserted.' They'd probably like it. They ought to bemadeto be constant. When we get the vote, we'll make laws to stop their 'deserting'!"
Then she wavered; as far as laws go, there were enough now. The fact was, men were naturally faithless! "I hate men," she said, between her set teeth. Arthur Weston was right, they were "hunters." They are constant—in pursuit. "We ought to keep them on the hot-foot, then they'd be more keen to stay with us!" In a flash came the rest of Weston's comment: "They won't bag the game, if it perches on their fists." Her face reddenedviolently. She had come, head on, against a biological fact, namely, that reluctance in the woman makes for permanence in the man.
Reluctance!...
Her mother's tiresome talk about "cheapness" was suddenly intelligible. How foolish the word had sounded! Yet, perhaps, under its foolishness lay a primitive fact: that the welfare of the child demands a permanent relation between the father and the mother. But in proportion as she is "cheap," he is temporary, and the relationship is jeopardized!
She did not put it into words, but she realized, amazed, that woman, whether she knows it or not, acts upon this old race knowledge. For the child's sake, she tries, by every sort of lure, to hold man to permanence which she will herself acquire by the fierce welding of agony. The surest "lure" is based upon the fact that man pursues that which flees; but all the lures spring from Nature's purpose to safeguard the child by giving it the care of two instead of one. For the "child" is the most important thing in the world!
Fred was thinking hard. Sometimes she put a stick on the fire, and once she got up and paced about the room. It came over her, with a rush of surprise, that all the talk of what girls must and mustn't do, "all the drivel about 'propriety'!" was based on this same Race instinct.
She saw that for a girl to love a man, unasked, is neither ignoble nor immodest. It is divine to love—always! Such love is a jewel, worn unseen above a girl's heart; to offer it, is to take it out of its white shelter andfling it into hands that, not having sought it, will soon let it drop between indifferent fingers. She saw how this Race instinct has gradually—and oh, so painfully, oh, so foolishly, with failure, and agony, and tragic absurdities of convention, taught women the value of the reticence of modesty.
Taught them that they must not be "cheap"!
It came to her that it was the business of women like herself—the "new" women, who are going to set Woman free!—it was their business to discard the absurdities, but keep the beauties and dignities; for beauty and dignity are "lures," too. "Theyattract. I suppose that is what Grandmother means by 'charm,'" she reflected; "she said I hadn't any." Her face suddenly scorched; to discover a temperamental deficiency made her wince; it was like discovering a physical blemish. She understood, now, what Arthur Weston meant when he "rowed" about her being in the apartment alone with Howard. She had been "cheap." She had "perched on his fist." He had had no inclination to bag the game....
It was all very loose and incoherent thinking; she caught at one fact, only to find it contradicted by another fact. But in all her mental confusion one anguished wish stood fast:
"Oh, if Ionlyhadn't asked him!"
In her futile shame, her head fell on her knees and she caught her breath in a sort of sob—then sat upright, listening intently: a motor!Howard?In spite of reason, a leap of hope made her gasp.
She rose quickly, and stood, her hand over her lips—waiting.... Then she saw the car, and her heart seemed to drop in her breast; it was only Arthur Weston.
He came in, saying, cheerfully, he had heard she was packing, and had come out to bring her back to town. "We can load the tonneau with anything you want to take home," he said; "I suppose you haven't any tea for a wayfarer?" He was very matter-of-fact; he saw the tremor and heard the catch in the breath.
There was some tea, she said—but no cream; she would boil some water.
He sat down, and she waited on him, getting herself in hand, even to the extent of some pitiful little impertinences. Then, by and by, they carried her things out to the auto. "My landlord is going to send for the piano," she said; "all I have to do is to close the shutters."
He went about with her, helping her, teasing her, and scolding her because she was tired. When everything was done, and they were just leaving the house, she paused abruptly, and her hands went up to her eyes.
"Poor Flora!"
He was standing beside her, gentle and pitying, longing to draw those shaking hands down from her hidden face: "You were always good to her," he said.
"No!" she said, in a smothered voice; "no." Then, suddenly, she turned toward him and sank against his shoulder. He felt the sob that shook her from head to foot. Instinctively, his arms went about her, and he held her close to him; he was silent, but he trembled and those passionate and sensitive eyebrows twitched with pain. It was only for a moment that he felt hersobbing weight—then she flung her head up, her face quivering and smeared with tears. "What a liar I am! I'm not crying about Flora at all. I'm just—unhappy. That's all."
He took her hand and held it to his lips, silently.
"I'm tired," she said; "—no! no! Iwon'tlie—Iwon'tlie! I'm not tired. I've been a fool! That's all. A fool."
"We all have to be fools, Fred, before we can be wise."
She had drawn away from him, with a broken laugh. "You don't know anything about it!Youdon't know what it's like to be a fool!"
"Don't I? I was a very big fool myself, once. But I'm so wise now that I'm glad of all the blows my folly gave me then. I'll tell you about it, one of these days."
He told her as they drove back to town. "And," he ended, "I can see that the best thing that ever happened to me was to have Kate jilt me."
After Fred had gone out into the wilderness, and learned her lesson; after that long day in the cottage, when her mind had emptied itself of some of its own certainties, so that deep, primitive knowledges could flow into it, she took up life again in her own way. She went to her office, she exercised Zip, she accepted every invitation that came to her; but she got thin. "Scrawny," her grandmother called it. Also, she expended a good deal of money on a bridesmaid's dress—for something had happened! Happened, curiously enough, on the very afternoon when she was studying that hard page of Nature's book, all alone, in the empty cottage by the lake....
The very next morning Laura had burst into 15 Payton Street. "Swear not to tell," she said; and when Fred had sworn, the secret—glowing, wonderful! was told in two words:
"I'mengaged!"
Then came an ecstatic recital, ending with "I've decided on daffodil yellow for your dresses. Rather far ahead—for it isn't to be until the middle of December. But I think it's just as well to plan, don't you?"
"Of course it is," Fred agreed. ("Oh, if I only hadn't asked him!")
"Billy-boy will juggle out enough money for the finest satin going, for his only daughter; but you girls can have perfectly sweet flowered voile, over yellow charmeuse. I've a corking idea for your hats." Then she looked at Fred closely. "You're not a bit surprised; I believe you knew what was going to happen!"
Fred laughed non-committally. Laura herself had been so far from knowing what was going to happen, that Howard Maitland had to fairly pound it into her that he was in love with her! He had not meant to tell her so soon. It wouldn't be decent, he thought, remembering that night in the cottage. He hadn't meant to speak for at least a month. He was going to mark time, and forget that there had ever been a minute when Fred Payton had imagined she cared about him—"for, of course, that was all it amounted to," he told himself; "imagination!" There was more modesty than truth in his phrase, yet his conviction was sincere enough—"A girl like Fred couldn't really care forme. I'm not up to her!"
It was characteristic of his simple soul, that he told Laura the same thing, when he blundered into the proposal that he had meant to hold back for a month. It was wrung from him by his despair at her misunderstanding his feeling about Fred. He was in full swing of haranguing her upon the wonderfulness of her cousin—"Of course; she's perfectly stunning," Laura had interrupted; "I know she's simply great. But why on earth you two don't announce your engagement I can't imagine! You make me a little tired," she said, good-naturedly, but rather obviously bored.
"Announce ourwhat?"
"Engagement. Do you suppose we are all blind?"
Howard Maitland actually whitened a little under his Philippine tan. "You are mistaken, Laura," he said, quietly. "If I have given you the impression that Fred had the slightest feeling for me, I ought to be kicked."
Laura turned an indignant face toward him: "Do you mean to tell me that Fred has only been flirting with you? I don't believe it! She's not that kind."
They were in the Childses' parlor in the yellow dusk of the autumn afternoon. Laura had given her caller two cups of tea with four lumps of sugar in each cup, and Howard, between innumerable little cakes, had been telling her again of Frederica's behavior that terrible night at the camp. It was at least the third time that she had heard the grim details, and each time she had shivered and wished he would stop. To silence him, she had charged upon him for not announcing his engagement; it seemed flippant, but it would change the subject. His dismay made her forget Flora, in real bewilderment. Not engaged to Fred! Had Fred played with him?
"If Fred's been just flirting, she ought to be ashamed," Laura said, hotly; "she knew you were perfectly gone on her."
"Laura,youdidn't suppose such a thing?"
"That you were gone on Fred? Of course I did! I knew you were crazy about her, a year ago; and so did she. Howard, I'm awfully sorry."
"Sorry—for what?"
"For you."
Howard Maitland got on his feet, and walked the length of the room, and back; he said something under his breath. Then he drew up a chair beside her and took her hand.
"I never thought of such a thing."
"What!"
"You are the only girl I ever cared two cents for."
She put her hand against her young breast, in astounded question: "I?"
"I should think you'd have seen it. You, and—and everybody."
"But Howard, it can't be—me?" she protested, faintly.
"It's been you, always. When you accuse me of being in love with—with anybody else, and say everybody thought so, you just bowl me over!" His shocked astonishment left no doubt of his sincerity.
"But Freddy," Laura began—
He broke in sharply: "Fred knows how tremendously I admire her. I've always said so, to you and to her, too. And I believe she likes me as much as she likes any of us fellows—but of course I'm not up to her, and she never flirted with me in her life! She's not the kind of girl who wants to collect scalps," he said, almost with anger. "I never thought of—caring for her. Why, I—Icouldn'tcare for Fred!"
"But you were always talking about her, and—"
"Of course I talked about her! Doesn't everybody talk about her? But as for being in love with her—Laura, I tell you, you are the only girl in existence, so far as I'm concerned. I suppose you don't care anything about me."
Laura put her hands over her face, and laughed; then stretched them out to him, and the tears brimmed over.... "Oh, Howard, you are such a goose!"
There was a speechless moment; then he put his arms around her, kissed the fluffy hair that brushed his lips, and said, "Oh, my little darling! my little love...."
After that they had to talk it all over, and there were endless explanations.
"You do believe I never thought of—anybody else?" he asked, again and again. And she said yes, she believed it, but she didn't understand it.
"Why, I was so sure you were in love with her, I used to give you chances to be together. Do you remember that afternoon you went to say good-by to her, before you went to the Philippines? I stayed up-stairs to give you a chance to ask her."
"Laura!"
"I did."
"How could you be so absurd?"
"Everybody thought so."
That silenced him. He was horribly ashamed. It was his fault, then, that night in the cottage? "Everybody thought so." So, naturally, Fred thought so—and she was the noblest and most generous woman in the world! "It's my fault somehow, that she spoke," he told himself, in a passion of humiliation.
That night he wrote to her. The engagement was not to "come out" for two or three weeks;—"only the family must know," Laura said; but Howard had protested: "Fred—let's tell Fred?"
"Well," Laura consented, reluctantly, "I'll go and see her to-morrow morning and make her swear not to tell."
"She can keep a secret," he said. He did not add that Fred should learn the secret before to-morrow morning. "I'm the one to break it to her," he thought. Then mentally kicked himself for saying "break it."
When he sat down at his desk that night to write to her, his face was rigid at what was before him; it was nearly dawn before the task was finished; letters—long letters, short letters, letters expressing his admiration for her, letters ignoring it, letters about Laura, about the Philippines, about Flora—were written out, torn up, flung into the waste-basket. Then came the brief, blunt truth-telling: Laura had accepted him, and he knew that she, his old pal, would wish them happiness. Of course there was a postscript: she would be their very best friend, because they both thought she was the finest woman they knew.
When the letter was addressed and sealed, he went out into the four-o'clock-in-the-morning stillness, and walked over to Payton Street to slip it into the letter-box of the sleeping house. He would not trust it to the mail; he would run no risk of Laura's arriving before the first delivery. Fred mustn't be caught off guard! Then he walked home—glanced at a little suspiciously by an officer on his somnolent beat—about as uncomfortable a young man as ever realized his own happiness in contrast to some one else's unhappiness—for, in spite of his modest disclaimer, he knew that Fred was unhappy: "How wouldI feel if Laura had refused me? And, of course, Fred is harder hit than a man would be."
But, no matter how hard hit she was, thanks to that letter, the next morning, when Laura swore her to secrecy, and said that the bridesmaids' hats would bedreams! Fred's upper lip was smilingly stiff.
It was just after that that Mrs. Holmes began to say that her granddaughter was "scrawny."
Often, in those weeks before Laura's wedding, Mrs. Payton, working out a puzzle, or playing Canfield on the big rosewood table in the sitting-room, would stop and stare straight before her, with unseeing eyes.... Like a needle working its way through nerveless flesh toward some vital spot, a new emotion,anger, was penetrating the routine of her meaningless days.
Laura had cut Freddy out!
Love for Morty, the dam love, which is the habit of the body and has nothing to do with the intellect, was pushed aside by the new idea: Freddy was suffering because Laura had stolen her lover.
"It was despicable in her!" Mrs. Payton said to herself—and the needle-point of anger came a little nearer to that sleeping nerve of maternity, which, when it was reached, would, in a pang of exquisite pain, make her love Fred as she had never loved anything in her life.
Mrs. Payton put a black nine on a red eight; saw her mistake, frowned, and put out a mechanical hand to correct it. "I wonder if she would drink a glass of malted milk at night, if I fixed it for her?" she thought; and uncovered an ace. "Laura hasn't half her brains!" she said, and put the card in the ace row; "how could Mr. Maitlandsee anything to her—except looks? Sheispretty. But Freddy is worth a dozen of her, and he was head over ears in love with her! Yes; Laura simply took him from her! I shall never feel the same to Laura again;—and I suppose Bessie and William expect me to give her a handsome wedding-present." She wondered, with vague malice, whether there wasn't something in the house—the old wonder of the reluctant giver of gifts!—that she could send Laura? Some family silver; the epergne, for instance, three silver squirrels holding a platter on their heads.
The question of the wedding-present was so irritating to her, that in the afternoon, when Freddy came in, rather listlessly (this was in November—a month before the wedding), Mrs. Payton referred the matter to her—shifting her angry pain to Freddy's galled young shoulders. There was no wincing.
"What shall we give Laura?"
"Something bully! I was talking to her about it to-day, and asked her what she wanted. I think a rug is the thing."
"I wonder if some of the Payton silver—" Mrs. Payton began—but Fred threw up horrified hands.
"No! No second-hand goods! And it's got to be something first rate, too; (if it takes my last dollar!)" she added, under her breath.
The rug did not take quite the last dollar, but it took more than she could afford, and Laura was perfectly delighted with it. Howard, standing on it, his hands in his pockets, dug an appreciative heel into its silky nap, andmade his usual comment: "It's bully! Fred's taste is great!"
Sometimes, looking back on the night that Flora died, Howard wondered if it all (except the poor soul's suicide) was not a dream? For Fredwasso "bully"!... Entering into all Laura's ecstasies and anxieties; crazy to know who would make the wedding-dress; perfectly wild over Howard's present to his bride; frantic because it was too early to get jonquils for the rope down each side of the aisle.... That astounding moment in the bungalow must have been, Howard told himself, a dream! Two dreams—his and Fred's, for she evidently cared no more for him than for old Weston.
So the days passed (Howard thought they never would pass!) and the Day drew near. When it came, Frederica Payton's head was as high as any of the other young heads. There were eight of them, in most marvelous and expensive yellow hats, to follow the shimmering Laura up the aisle. At the reception afterward, Frederica, in her vivid joyousness almost—so her Uncle William said—"took the shine off the bride! Remember Shakespeare (asyou'dsay)—
"Bring in our daughterClothed like a bride ...See, where she comes,Appareled like the spring,"—
"Bring in our daughterClothed like a bride ...See, where she comes,Appareled like the spring,"—
"Bring in our daughterClothed like a bride ...See, where she comes,Appareled like the spring,"—
"Bring in our daughter
Clothed like a bride ...
See, where she comes,
Appareled like the spring,"—
Mr. Childs quoted, puffing happily—"but that frock you've got on is spring-like, too—all yellow and white, like buttercups and daisies."
"I'm rather stuck on it, myself," Fred said, complacently; she was standing beside Arthur Weston, eating ice-cream with appetite.
"Well," her uncle said, chuckling, "I may tell you in confidence—Hey, Howard!" he interrupted himself, clutching at the passing bridegroom, "I was just telling Freddy that I was very much astonished when I learned that you were to be my son-in-law. I thought you were making up to her!"
"Tome?" said Fred, incredulously; "he never knew I existed when Laura was around!"
"I'm just looking for Laura now," Howard said, with a gasp; "she's deserted me!" he complained, laughing—and escaped.
"Oh," Mr. Childs said, clapping his niece on the shoulder so heartily that her ice-cream spilled over, "of course I know, now, that it's always been Laura!"
"Yes," Fred agreed, gaily, "he's been dead set for Lolly for the last two years."
So she got through with the Day.... When she reached home, and up in her own room took off the yellow hat, she took off that gallant smile, too; she had worn it until the muscles about her lips were stiff. She was profoundly fatigued; too fatigued to feel anything but relief that the wedding was over. Even the old ache of wishing she "hadn't told him" was numbed. It was part of the generosity of her honest, sore young heart, that she felt a faint satisfaction in the fact that, anyhow,hewas happy; as for Laura—"how mean I am to—dislike her! It wasn't her fault, and she's just the same old Lolly. Iwon'tdislike her! I'll love her, just as I've always loved her." When she went down to dinner that night she put the smile on again, and was very airy and smart in her comments to Mrs. Payton upon the Childs family, and the company in general.
"Laura was perfectly sweet! But Aunt Bessie is too fat to wear such tight clothes. Why do the fat fifties always wear tight clothes?... Grandmother wasn't shy on powder, was she?... Billy-boy would talk about Bacon at his own funeral!... How many kinds of a fool do you suppose that old hag, Maria Spencer, is?... I—I guess I'll go to bed. I was an idiot to eat ice-cream; it always makes my head ache."
Perhaps her head ached too badly for sleep. At any rate, hours later, when 15 Payton Street had sunk into midnight darkness, she heard a board creak under a careful step in the hall, and sat up in bed, saying, sharply, "Who's that?"
"It's I, dear. Don't be frightened." Mrs. Payton came feeling her way across the room to Fred's bedside.
"Is anything the matter? Is Mortimore—"
"No, no; nothing! Only, Freddy, my darling, I—I just want to tell you something." She sat down on the edge of the bed, and Frederica heard her draw in her breath in a sob.
"Mother! Are you ill?"
"No—no. But Freddy, I—I didn't mean it when I said that about Mortimore."
"Said what?" Fred said, frowning with anxiety; "here, let me light the gas!"
"No, don't!" Mrs. Payton put a restraining hand on her daughter's shoulder; "about—about loving him best. I don't, dear; truly I don't."
"But, Mother!"—Fred put her arms about the soft, loose figure that tumbled into sobs against her—"I didn't know you said it, and if you did, I don't mind it in the least!" She felt her mother's tears on her cheek, and gathered her up against her breast; "Why, Mother! It's all right—really it is. It's all right to love him best—"
"But I don't—Idon't! I love you best."
"Why," Fred soothed her, "I didn't even remember you'd said it. You only told me I was like Father—and that did me good."
"No! I never said you were! And it isn't so. You'renot—not a bit! My little Freddy!"
Frederica smiled grimly in the darkness, and she let the statement pass; for suddenly something surged up in her breast; something she had never felt in her life; something that was actual pain; she had no name for it, but it made the tears sting in her eyes. "There, dear, there!" she comforted her cowering mother; ... "I understand," she said, brokenly; "I understand!"
It is a wonderful moment, this moment of "understanding." It made Fred draw the foolish gray head down on her young breast, and caress and comfort it, as years ago her own little head had been caressed and kissed. They were both "mothers" at that moment.
So Laura's wedding-day was lived through. And by and by the weeks that followed were lived through. Andthen the months pushed in between Fred and that night at the camp. She never spoke of Howard and Laura.
"I wonder if she's got over it," Mrs. Payton speculated, wistfully. She was glad, for her part, that the bride and bridegroom had gone abroad, and she did not have to see them—"especially Laura!" she used to say to herself, bitterly. If Fred was bitter, she didn't show it; she was absorbed in league work, and a really growing real-estate business; it was all she could do to find time to listen when her mother talked, and talked, and talked—or people, or puzzles, or parlor-maids! But how could she fail to listen—no matter how dull and foolish the talk was—remembering that midnight of pity?
"Freddy is getting very companionable," Mrs. Payton told Arthur Weston. He had come upon Fred bending over a puzzle spread out on the big table in the sitting-room, and trying to fit one wriggly piece of blue after another into a maliciously large expanse of uncharted sky; she had been obviously relieved at the chance to shift the entertainment of Mrs. Payton to his shoulders.
"I've got to go to a league meeting," she excused herself. When she had gone and he was standing with his back to the fire, sipping his tea and talking pleasantly of the weather, or the barber's children, or poor Flora's tendency to put too much starch in the table linen (raising his voice, in a matter-of-fact way, when there was a noise behind the door of the other room), he agreed warmly with Mrs. Payton's tribute to her daughter: "Freddy is getting companionable."
"Indeed she is!" he said, and added that she wasremarkably clever about puzzles—which pleased Mrs. Payton very much. This new sense of sympathy which held Fred down to picture puzzles, made her try to avoid topics on which she knew she and her mother could not agree. As the winter went on, the especial topic to be avoided was a strike among the rubber workers. Fred was passionately for the strikers, who were all girls. She went constantly to Hazelton, where the factory was, to give what help she could to the union women, and to admonish them that the way to cure industrial conditions, which all fair-minded people admitted were frightful, was by the ballot.
"Get the man's ballot, and you'll get the man's wages!" was her slogan—and she was quite fierce with her man of business when he pointed out the economic fallacy of her words.
"The kingdom of God cometh not by the ballot," he admonished her.
"I feel as if I were going to Sunday-school!"
"A little Sunday-school wouldn't hurt you. It never seems to strike you," he ruminated, "that if 'laws,' which you are so anxious to have a hand in making, could settle supply and demand, the men, poor creatures, would have feathered their own nests a little better."
To which Miss Payton replied, concisely, "Rot!"—and continued to tell the strikers that suffrage was a cure-all.
It was in March that one of the morning papers announced, with snobbish detail, that Miss Freddy Payton, a "young society girl," had "patrolled" to keep off scabs. That evening, at dinner, Mrs. Payton, mortified to deathat the notoriety, and encouraged by Arthur Weston's presence at the table, ventured into controversy:
"When I was a young lady—" she began, and instantly Frederica's lance was in rest! She did not mean to be cruel—but she couldn't help being smart. Her mother's injured sense of propriety was batted back to her across the dinner-table, like a shuttlecock from a resounding battledore.
"You may say what you like," Mrs. Payton said, obstinately, "but I don't believe it would make a bit of difference to give those perfectly uneducated Italian girls a vote. It hasn't," she ended, with one of those flashes of shrewdness so characteristic of dull women, "made any difference in the men's wages. And, anyhow, I don't understand why you like to mix yourself up with all sorts of persons."
"The Founder of your religion mixed Himself with all sorts of persons," Frederica said, wickedly; "but, of course, He would not be in society to-day."
"That is a very irreverent thing to say," Mrs. Payton said, stiffly.
("Now, why," Mr. Weston pondered, "why doesn't the atrocious taste of that sort of talk cure me? Because," he answered himself, "it 'amuses' me! Oh, Cousin Eliza, you are a wise old woman!")
As for Frederica, she was not conscious that her lack of taste was amusing; but she knew it was unkind, and felt the instant stab of remorse. ("I'm just like Father!" she groaned to herself); then with resolution she began to talk about puzzles; she said she thought the reason hermother couldn't work out that six-hundred-piece one was because the people who made it had omitted some pieces, and it never could be got out.
"Try it a few days longer," Fred said, "and then, if you want me to, I'll write to the people who manufactured it and ask them about it. Arthur Weston! I am going to stand by those girls in Hazelton until they win out!"
"When they do, their work will stop," he prophesied, mildly. "The factory hasn't paid a dividend for three years, and if wages go up, it will shut up. I happen to know how they stand."
"Laura's back," Fred said, abruptly; "they got home yesterday. I asked her if she'd walk in the parade, and she said, 'Howard wouldn't like it!' That sort of thing makes me tired."
The invitation to walk in the parade had not been given easily. Fred had forced herself to ask Laura, for very shame at the ache of resentment which neither reason, nor her old habit of affection for her cousin, could conquer. Laura's refusal gave her a sort of angry satisfaction. "Of course!What could you expect? She's a sweet little thing, but she has no mind to speak of. Poor Howard! She must bore him to death." As for Howard's not liking parades,—well, that was queer. He never had quite realized their value; probably because he hadn't really thought about them. She would talk it over with him sometime, and make him understand. She was not in the least annoyed with Howard, but it was all she could do to hide her contempt for Laura; "Whydowomen grovel so before men? It makes me perfectly sick!" Even when Laura, with the old, puppy-like devotion, offered, one morning, to go with her to Hazelton where Fred was to address the strikers, it was not easy to be cordial.
"I'll tag around after you, and clap," Laura said.
"Howard willing?" Fred said, sarcastically.
Laura laughed: "I haven't asked him. He's in Cincinnati. Won't be home until this afternoon."
"I suppose you wouldn't go if he wasn't?"
"I suppose I wouldn't," Laura said, simply.
Fred's lip drooped. But she only said, good-naturedly, "Come along!" They went to Hazelton by trolley, Fred having vetoed Laura's limousine: "It's too much 'Lady Bountiful.' Your gasolene for a week would pay a girl's board for a month."
In the long ride, spinning and jouncing through the countryside until they reached the squalid outskirts of the little town, Frederica listened to Laura's talk of Europe—and Howard. Of Paris frocks—and Howard. Of the voyage home—and Howard.
"I won't be horrid, Iwon't! I love her just exactly the same—" Fred was saying to herself, staring out of the window at the flying landscape, at the woods where the leafless trees were showing the haze of swelling buds, at the snow, melting in the frozen furrows. "Yes...." "No...." "Really?" she would say, when sometimes Laura's chatter paused. ("Oh, how bored Howard must be by this sort of thing!" she thought. She couldn't help remembering how differently she had talked to Howard—the big things, the real things! "Poor old Howard!") Once there was quite a long pause, and Fred stopped watching the racing landscape and looked at Laura. It was then that Laura softly told her a piece of news:
"Of course, Howard's awfully pleased. He wants a girl, but I want a boy."
Frederica was silent for a moment: then, very gentle and tender, "I'm awfully glad," she said, and squeezed Laura's hand.
Then the chatter began again, and Fred looked out ofthe window at the snow melting on slopes that faced the sun.
The hall in Hazelton where the strikers were awaiting Frederica was terribly hot and stuffy, and packed with women crowding so closely about the melon-shaped iron stove that the air was stifling with the smell of scorching clothes. It occurred to Laura, opening a window surreptitiously, that the girls were here as much for the sake of the glowing stove as for the chance to hear Fred. She watched her cousin with shrinking admiration. What she said did not particularly interest her, but Frederica's intimacy with the girls made her wonder. "Shetouchesthem!" Laura thought, with a quiver of disgust.
When Fred had made her speech—which Laura vociferously applauded—they all trooped out into the street, but paused while Frederica (Laura skulking behind her) stood in the doorway for a further harangue. Unfortunately—because the knot of listening girls obstructed the sidewalk—a police officer, shoving them out of the way, happened to show some rudeness to a little Italian, who, in return, jabbering shrilly, struck at the man's patient and restraining arm, which caused him to gather her two delicate wrists in one big, vise-like hand, and hold her, a little, kicking, struggling creature, who made about as much impression on his large blue bulk as a sparrow might make upon a locomotive.
"There, now, keep quiet, sissy," he said, wearily.
But Catalina kicked harder than ever, and the officer shook her, gently. It was at that moment that Fred's eye fell upon him.
"I'll stop that!" she said, between shut teeth.
"Oh, Fred, don't do anything," Laura entreated,—but Fred was at the man's side.
Her anger disconcerted him. "It's against the law to obstruct the sidewalk," he explained.
"I had no hand in making the law, and therefore I shall not obey it!"
"Better can that talk, and keep it for the Court," said the man, beginning to get red in the face. To which Frederica retorted by telling him her opinion of men in general and policemen in particular.
A man can stand kicks from little feet, but "lip"—after a certain point of forbearance has been reached, is another matter. Fred punctuated her remonstrances by putting an abrupt hand on his arm, and instantly there was an unseemly scuffle, in which Laura, running out from the shelter of the doorway, tried to draw Fred away. The result was that before they really knew what had happened, the little Italian, Miss Frederica Payton, and Mrs. Howard Maitland found themselves in a patrol-wagon rumbling and jouncing along over the icy Belgian blocks, a taciturn man in a blue coat sitting in the doorway of the van to prevent any possible leap to liberty.
The whole thing was so sudden that the cousins were perfectly bewildered. Even as they were being hustled into the wagon, a crowd had gathered, springing up, apparently, out of the ground. There had been a sea of faces—good natured, amused, unconcerned faces; a medley of voices, jeering and hooting, or raucously sympathetic; a vision of the striking girls—for whose cause they werethere!—forsaking them, melting away, fleeing around corners and up side-streets; then, the jolting along through the noon emptiness of the streets, toward the station-house.
Frederica, getting her breath, after the suddenness of it all, grew very much excited. She scented the fray—the contest between man-made laws and unconsulted woman! It occurred to her—though Laura said, in despairing tones, "Oh, Fred,pleasedon't"—to fling some suffrage literature into the street over the head of the officer; she did it until he told her to "set still, you!" At which Catalina, hearing her defender reproved, kicked him, causing him to turn around and grab her ankle; he held it in one great paw, and whistled, absently.
Fred was furious. "Don't touch that girl's ankle!" she said.
"Shut up," he replied, calmly; and, oblivious of both of them, still holding Catalina's little kicking feet, he began to talk over his shoulder to the driver of the van about the price of cucumbers. "Here, you!" he interrupted himself—"stop biting, sissy! Gee! this chippy has teeth—" and he poked Catalina, playfully, with his club. Frederica whitened with rage, but Catalina lapsed suddenly into such abject fright that when they reached their destination she had to be lifted out of the wagon, and pushed—not too gently—up the steps into the station-house. Laura, who got out next, was shaking so that the officer put a friendly hand under her elbow to assist her. Frederica followed the other two, her head high with anger and interest.
In the station-house, the receiving-room, with its one dirt-incrusted window, was dark, even at one o'clock—perhaps because, shoulder-high on the long-unwashed paint, was a dado of grime left by innumerable cringing backs. There was one back against it now; a drunken man, with wabbling head and glassy, half-shut eyes, was whining and sobbing, and trying to keep on his legs. When the sergeant asked his name, he answered by a hiccough which the officer, as indifferent and efficient as a cog in some slowly revolving and crushing wheel, translated into "Thomas Coney." "Come, stop crying; be a perfect gentleman, Tommy, be a perfect gentleman!" he said, yawning. And, curiously enough, Tommy straightened up and swallowed his sobs.
"Look at him!" Fred whispered to Laura; "he's getting hold of himself! I suppose that's his idea of a perfect gentleman."
Laura, rigid with misery, made no answer. When Thomas had been disposed of—watched by Frederica's intent eyes—she and Laura, whose knees were plainly shaking, and Catalina, who was sobbing and calling upon God, lined up in front of the sergeant's desk. Frederica answered the usual questions with brief directness; her attitude toward the big, bored officer was distinctly friendly and confidential; as he closed the blotter, she began to tell him that she had been urging the girls to demand the bal— Before she could finish the word, she found herself, to her angry amazement, being moved along toward the corridor.
"But—stop! I have not finished. And I want to telephone, and—"
"What number?"
Both girls spoke at once, Frederica giving Mr. Weston's number, and Laura, stammering with apprehension that Howard might not go directly home from the train, naming her own house. "Ask Mr. Weston to hunt Howard up," she implored her cousin. The telephoning was fruitless, as neither gentleman could be found.
"You can try 'em again over at the House of Detention," the man said, not unkindly. "Move on! Move on!"
They moved on, in spite of themselves, assisted by the impersonal pressure of an officer's hand on Fred's shoulder—Laura shivering all over, Fred's face red with displeasure at the affront of not being listened to, Catalina perfectly happy and inclined to giggle.
"You'll make Mr. Weston find Howard?" Laura said, in a frantic whisper, as they walked across the courtyard to the little jail back of the station-house. "Oh, I was going to meet him,—and I amhere!"
Fred shrugged her shoulders: "Why did you come, if you mind it so? (Married women are awfully poor sports," she thought.)
"Do you think I'd funk and leave you?" Laura retorted; and Fred's face softened.
"Howard will be so upset—" Laura said, quivering.
"Nonsense! He'll see the fun of it," Fred assured her. In matters of this kind, she understood Howard better than little Lolly ever could....
Her face was glowing with excitement! This meant something to the Cause! An old phrase ran through her mind, "The blood of the martyrs is the seed,"—"I tellyou what, Laura," she said, under her breath, "this ridiculous business is the seed of a big thing; it has given me a great idea:let women refuse to obey the laws, until they are allowed to make them!"
"This way," said the officer, and herded them into the receiving-room of the House of Detention. The next few minutes stung even Fred's aplomb—they were searched! The indignity of hands passing down her figure—hands not rough, not unkind, not insulting, merely mechanical,—made her unreasonably, but quite furiously, angry. Laura was a little shocked, but her dignity was simple and unshaken. Catalina, her dirty, streaky face puffed with crying, laughed loudly with amusement.
"This is abominable!" Fred said, her voice shaking. The matron, making notes on a pad, paid no attention to the protest. It was all in the day's work—human wreckage washed up out of the gutter, rose in this bleak, stone-lined room every day; rose, flooded into the surrounding cells, where it vociferated, wept, pleaded, stood rigid with fury and shame, or else collapsed into sodden slumber. Then, by and by, it ebbed away. And the next day, and the next, the same drift and ruin of humanity flooded in and drifted out.
After further telephoning had been promised by the matron, the three girls were placed in a cell. Catalina at once flung herself full length on the bench that ran along two sides of it; Fred sat down and took out her note-book. "I mustn't forget one incident," she told herself. The experience had penetrated below the theatrical consciousness of martyrdom, and roused a primitive anger,not for herself, or the other two (of whom, to tell the truth, she thought very little), but against the wastefulness of a system which permitted this wreckage to sweep in and sweep out—unchecked, unchanged, over and over. She saw, as she had never seen before, the righteousness of woman's demand that she should have a hand in the making and the administering of Law. She was impressed, not so much by the injustice of leaving the punishment of women to men, as by the irrationality of it.
"There ought to have been a woman in that station-house," she said; "and there ought to be women police officers and judges. Just wait till we get the vote, Laura—we'llstop this idiocy! That's what it is: idiocy, not justice."
Laura was not concerned about terms; she stood, tense and trembling, gripping the iron bars of the door. "Howard will be so upset, and Father will be dreadfully angry!"
"Oh, yes," Fred agreed, carelessly, "Uncle William will have a fit, of course. But I'll bet on Howard! Mother will almost die of it, I'm afraid," she said, her face sobering; "I'm sorry about that. But, of course, Laura, that's the penalty of progress. We—you and I and Howard—are moving the world, and the old people have got to get out of the way or get run over!"
Laura was silent.
"The thing that hits me hardest," said Frederica, "is the way women won't stand together. Every one of those girls took to their heels."
"Oh,whenwill Howard come?" said Laura, with a sobbing breath. She was not sorry she had stood by Fredwhen all the rest of them "took to their heels," only—"I'll die if he doesn't come soon!" she thought, shaking very much. Once she glanced over her shoulder at Frederica, who was straining her eyes (the cell was lighted only from the hall) over her note-book, and she felt a faint thrill of admiration. Imagine, making notes at such a moment!
The afternoon passed; hours—hours—hours.
"Oh, when will somebody come?" Laura said, in a whisper. Frederica had put up her note-book, and seemed absorbed in thought. Catalina was asleep.
There came a sound of voices in the outer court, and again Laura clutched at the iron bars. (She had been at the grating ever since the lock was turned upon them.)
"It's Howard!"
Even Fred was moved to stand up and peer out into the whitewashed corridor—then both girls shrank back; a drunken negress was being pulled along over the flagstones of the passage to the receiving-room; a few minutes later, she was pulled back again, and they heard the clang of a cell door; then yells, then evidently sickness; then cries upon God and the devil, and a torrent of unspeakably vile invective. Even Fred quailed before it, and Laura clung to her in such a paroxysm of fear that they neither of them heard the hurrying feet outside on the flagging—then the lock was flung out, and Howard caught his wife in his arms.
"I just got word," he said, hoarsely; "Weston caught me at the club. My darling!"
The tears were in his eyes and his face was as white asLaura's. Behind him, Arthur Weston looked grimly over his head at Frederica.
"I had to chase him all around town," he said, "or we'd have been here before. And it's taken time to bail you out."
"I'm sorry to have bothered you," Fred said; "but it's been an awfully valuable experience to Laura and me.Iwouldn't have missed it for anything!"
The matron, faintly interested, was standing by to see the end of it. "Them swells will learn something," she whispered, to her assistant; "I guess that thin one ain't bad. I thought she was. Well, good-by, ma'am," she said, listlessly; and went back to work on a piece of dingy embroidery until the next dumping of human rubbish should claim her attention.
Out in the courtyard Frederica made a little delay. Where was Catalina to go? What was she to do? "Out on bail? Does that mean she's got to come back here again?"
"It means that she's got to report at the municipal criminal court," Mr. Weston instructed her; "and so have you and Laura, unless I can patch things up."
"Good!" Fred said, eagerly, "I wanted to know the end of this silly business!"
She got into the limousine, where Laura, still very white, had been placed by Howard, who put an unabashed arm about her. His impatience at Fred's delay was obvious.
"Mr. Weston! for the Lord's sake, shut her up!" he said, angrily.
Frederica, sitting down beside him, gave him anastonished look. "It was I who was talking, not Catalina," she explained; "I was telling her what to do. Of course I couldn't go away and leave her to shift for herself. Howard, this has been a great experience!"
Howard's jaw set: "Laura, dear," he whispered, "it's all right. Don't shake so, Kitty! It's all right. Mr. Weston will fix it up so you needn't go to court."
"You see," Fred began, volubly, "it all happened because of the policeman's rudeness to that poor little Catalina; Laura and I had to protect her, and—"
"Look here"—Howard turned a fierce face upon her—"you can make a fool of yourself, all you want to, but I'll thank you not to drag my wife into your damned nonsense!"
Frederica stared at him, open-mouthed.
"Maitland," the other man said, gravely, "I am sure you will apologize for that."
Howard's hand clenched over his little Laura's; he swallowed, and set his teeth. "If I have been rude, I apologize. But the fact remains; Fred ought not to have dragged Laura into any such disgusting and indecent business!"
"Oh, Howard!" Laura protested; "she didn't. I did it myself. It wasn't Fred's fault."
Frederica was silent, but Weston saw her face fall into lines of haggard amazement. As they went spinning along back to town, Howard gave himself up to whispering to Laura. Arthur Weston asked one or two questions, and Frederica told him, briefly, just what had caused the disturbance that ended in the "interesting experience." For the most part no one spoke.
At the Maitland house, Howard almost lifted his little wife out of the car; he was quivering with pain at her pain—at the thought that her ears had heard the moans of Life, that her eyes had seen its filth and horror; he was so angry at Frederica that he could not trust himself even to look at her. Of course he made no farewells. He closed the door of the limousine with a bang, and said, through the open window:
"Mr. Weston, do anything,anything! so that Laura won't be dragged into it. Any amount of money, of course! And the newspapers—good Lord! Can we fix them?"
"I'll see what can be done," Weston said; and the car spun away.
Frederica turned a bewildered face upon him. She stammered a little:
"He didn't"—her voice fell to an astonished whisper—"understand."
They scarcely spoke until they reached the Payton house; it was dusk when they went up the steps together and rung the front-door bell. ("I am coming in to explain things to your mother," he said, quietly.) But as they stood waiting for the door to be opened, Frederica, looking at him with miserable eyes, made a gesture of finality.
"I never knew him," she said.
As they heard the feet of the parlor-maid coming through the hall, she gripped his arm with her trembling hand:
"Arthur," she said, in a whisper; "just think! I asked—I asked him to marry me. And this is what he is!"