Mr. Benjamin Doolittle, by profession White-water's leading furniture dealer and funeral director, and by the accident of political fortune the manager of Mr. George Remington's campaign, sat in his candidate's private office, and from time to time restrained himself from hasty speech by the diplomatic and dexterous use of a quid of tobacco.
He found it difficult to preserve his philosophy in the face of George Remington's agitation over the woman's suffrage issue.
"It's the last time," he had frequently informed his political cronies since the opening of the campaign, "that I'll wet-nurse a new-fledged candidate. They've got at least to have their milk teeth through if they want Benjamin Doolittle after this." To George, itchingly aware through all his rasped nerves of Mrs. Herrington's letter in that morning'sSentinelasking him to refute, if he could, an abominable half column of statistics in regard to legislation in the Woman Suffrage States, the furniture dealer was drawling pacifically:
"Now, George, you made a mistake in letting the women get your goat. Don't pay no attention to them. Of course their game's fair enough. I will say that you gave them their opening; stood yourself for a target with that statement of yours. Howsomever, you ain't obligated to keep on acting as the nigger head in the shooting gallery.
"Let 'em write; let 'em ask questions in the papers; let 'em heckle you on the stump. All that you've got to say is that you've expressed your personal convictions already, and that you've stood by those convictions in your private life, and that as you ain't up for legislator, the question don't really concern your candidacy. And that, as you're running for district attorney, you will, with their kind permission, proceed to the subjects that do concern you there—the condition of the court calendar of Whitewater County, the prosecution of the racetrack gamblers out at Erie Oval, and so forth, and so forth.
"You laid yourself open, George, but you ain't obligated in law or equity to keep on presenting yourself bare chest for their outrageous slings and arrows."
"Of course, what you say about their total irrelevancy is quite true," said George, making the concession so that it had all the belligerency of a challenge. "But of course I would never have consented to run for office at the price of muzzling my convictions."
Mr. Doolittle wearily agreed that that was more than could be expected from any candidate of the high moral worth of George Remington. Then he went over a list of places throughout the county where George was to speak during the next week, and intimated dolefully that the committee could use a little more money, if it had it.
He expressed it thus: "A few more contributions wouldn't put any strain to speak of on our pants' pockets. Anything more to be got out of Old Martin Jaffry? Don't he realize that blood's thicker than water?"
"I'll speak to him," growled George.
He hated Mr. Benjamin Doolittle's colloquialisms, though once he had declared them amusing, racy, of the soil, and had rebuked Genevieve's fastidious criticisms of them on an occasion when she had interpreted her rôle of helpmeet to include that of hostess to Mr. and Mrs. Doolittle—oh, not in her own home, of course!—at luncheon, at the Country Club!
"Well, I guess that's about all for today."
Mr. Doolittle brought the conference to a close, hoisting himself by links from his chair.
"It takes $3000 every time you circularize the constituency, you know——"
He lounged toward the window and looked out again upon the pleasant, mellow scene around Fountain Square. And with the look his affectation of bucolic calm dropped from him. He turned abruptly.
"What's that going on at McMonigal's corner?" he demanded sharply. "I don't know, I am sure," said George, with indifference, still bent upon teaching his manager that he was a free and independent citizen, in leading strings to no man. "It's been vacant since the fire in March, when Petrosini's fish market and Miss Letterblair's hat st——"
He had reached the window himself by this time, and the sentence was destined to remain forever unfinished.
From the low, old-fashioned brick building on the northeast corner of Fountain Square, whose boarded eyes had stared blindly across toward the glittering orbs of its towering neighbor, the Jaffry Building, for six months, a series of great placards flared.
Planks had been removed from the windows, plate glass restored, and behind it he read in damnable irritation:
"SOME QUESTIONS FOR CANDIDATE REMINGTON."
A foot high, an inch broad, black as Erebus, the letters shouted at him against an orange background. Every window of the second story contained a placard. On the first story, in the show window where Petrosini had been wont to ravish epicurean eyes by shad and red snapper, perch and trout, cunningly imbedded in ice blocks upon a marble slab—in that window, framed now in the hated orange and black, stood a woman.
She was turning backward, for the benefit of onlookers who pressed close to the glass, the leaves of a mammoth pad resting upon an easel.
From their point of vantage in the second story of the Jaffry Building, the candidate and his manager could see that each sheet bore that horrid headline:
"QUESTIONS FOR CANDIDATE REMINGTON."
The whole population of White water, it seemed to George, was crowded about that corner.
"I'll be back in a minute," said Benjie Doolittle, disappearing through the private office door with the black tails of his coat achieving a true horizontal behind him. As statesman and as undertaker, Mr. Doolittle never swerved from the garment which keeps green the memory of the late Prince Consort.
As the door opened, the much-tried George Remington had a glimpse of that pleasing industrial unit, Betty Sheridan, searching through the file for the copy of the letter to the Cummunipaw Steel Works, which he had recently demanded to see. He pressed the buzzer imperiously, and Betty responded with duteous haste. He pointed through the window to the crowd in front of McMonigal's block.
"Perhaps," he said, with what seemed to him Spartan self-restraint, "youcan explain the meaning of that scene."
Betty looked out with an air of intelligent interest.
"Oh yes!" she said vivaciously. "I think I can. It's a Voiceless Speech."
"A voice l—" George's own face was a voiceless speech as he repeated two syllables of his stenographer's explanation.
"Yes. Don't you know about voiceless speeches? It's antiquated to try to run any sort of a campaign without them nowadays."
"Perhaps you also know who that—female—" again George's power of utterance failed him. Betty came closer to the window and peered out.
"It's Frances Herrington who is turning the leaves now," she said amiably. "I know her by that ducky toque."
"Frances Herrington! What Harvey Herrington is thinking of to allow——" George's emotion constrained him to broken utterance. "And we're dining there tonight! She has no sense of the decencies—the—the—the hospitality of existence. We won't go—I'll telephone Genevieve——"
"Fie, fie Georgie!" observed Betty. "Why be personal over a mere detail of a political campaign?"
But before George could tell her why his indignation against his prospective hostess was impersonal and unemotional, the long figure of Mr. Doolittle again projected itself upon the scene.
Betty effaced herself, gliding from the inner office, and George turned a look of inquiry upon his manager.
"Well?" the monosyllable had all the force of profanity.
"Well, the women, durn them, have brought suffrage into your campaign."
"How?"
"How? They've got a list of every blamed law on the statute books relating to women and children, and they're asking on that sheet of leaves over there, if you mean to proceed against all who are breaking those laws here in Whitewater County. And right opposite your own office! It's—it's damn smart. You ought to have got that Herrington woman on your committee."
"It's indelicate, unwomanly, indecent. It shows into what unsexed degradation politics will drag woman. But I'm relieved that that's all they're asking. Of course, I shall enforce the law for the protection of every class in our community with all the power of the——"
"Oh, shucks! There's nobody here but me—you needn't unfurl Old Glory," counseled Mr. Doolittle, a trifle impatiently. "They're asking real questions, not blowing off hot-air. Oh, I say, who owns McMonigal's block since the old man died? We'll have the owner stop this circus. That's the first thing to do."
"I'll telephone Allen. He'll know."
Allen's office was very obliging and would report on the ownership on McMonigal's block in ten minutes.
Mr. Doolittle employed the interval in repeating to George some of the "Questions for Candidate Remington," illegible from George's desk.
"You believe that 'WOMAN'S PLACE IS IN THE HOME.' Will you enforce the law against woman's night work in the factories? Over nine hundred women of Whitewater County are doing night work in the munition plants of Airport, Whitewater and Ondegonk. What do you mean to do about it?"
"You 'DESIRE TO CONSERVE THE THREATENED FLOWER OF WOMANHOOD.'"
A critical listener would have caught a note of ribald scorn in Mr. Doolittle's drawl, as he quoted from his candidate's statement, via the voiceless speech placards.
"To conserve the threatened flower of womanhood, the grape canneries of Omega and Onicrom Townships are employing children of five and six years in defiance of the Child Labor Law of this State. Are you going to proceed against them?"
"'WOMAN IS MAN'S RAREST HERITAGE.' Do you think man ought to burn her alive? Remember the Livingston Loomis-Ladd collar factory fire—fourteen women killed, forty-eight maimed. In how many of the factories in Whitewater, in which women work, are the fire laws obeyed? Do you mean to enforce them?"
The telephone interrupted Mr. Doolittle's hateful litany.
Alien's bright young man begged to report that McMonigal's block was held in fee simple by the widow of the late Michael McMonigal.
Mr. Doolittle juggled the leaves of the telephone directory with the dazzling swiftness of a Japanese ball thrower, and in a few seconds he was speaking to the relict of the late Michael.
George watched him with fevered eyes, listened with fevered ears. The conversation, it was easy to gather, did not proceed as Mr. Doolittle wished.
"Oh! in entire charge—E. Eliot. Oh! In sympathy yourself. Oh, come now, Mrs. McMonigal——"
But Mrs. McMonigal did not come now. The campaign manager frowned as he replaced the receiver.
"Widow owns the place. That Eliot woman is the agent. The suffrage gang has the owner's permission to use the building from now on to election. She says she's in sympathy. Well, we'll have to think of something——"
"It's easy enough," declared George. "I'll simply have a set of posters printed answering their questions. And we'll engage sandwich men to carry them in front of McMonigal's windows. Certainly I mean to enforce the law. I'll give the order to theSentinelpress now for the answers—definite, dignified answers." "See here, George." Mr. Doolittle interrupted him with unusual weightiness of manner. "It's too far along in the campaign for you to go flying off on your own. You've got to consult your managers. This is your first campaign; it's my thirty-first. You've got to take advice——"
"I will not be muzzled."
"Shucks! Who wants to muzzle, anybody! But you can't say everything that's inside of you, can you? There's got to be some choosing. We've got to help you choose.
"The silly questions the women are displaying over there—you can't answer 'em in a word or in two words. This city is having a boom; every valve factory in the valley, every needle and pin factory, is makin' munitions today—valves and needles and pins all gone by the board for the time being. Money's never been so plenty in Whitewater County and this city is feelin' the benefits of it. People are buying things—clothes, flour, furniture, victrolas, automobiles, rum.
"There ain't a merchant of any description in this county but his business is booming on account of the work in the factories. You can't antagonize the whole population of the place. Why, I dare say, some of your own money and Mrs. Remington's is earning three times what it was two years ago. The First National Bank has just declared a fifteen per cent. dividend, and Martin Jaffry owns fifty-four per cent. of the stock.
"You don't want to put brakes on prosperity. It ain't decent citizenship to try it. It ain't neighborly. Think of the lean years we've known. You can't do it. This war won't last forever—" Mr. Doolittle's voice was tinged with regret—"and it will be time enough to go in for playing the deuce with business when business gets slack again. That's the time for reforms, George,—when things are dull."
George was silent, the very presentment of a sorely harassed young man. He had not, even in a year when blamelessness rather than experience was his party's supreme need in a candidate, become its banner bearer without possessing certain political apperceptions. He knew, as Benjie Doolittle spoke, that Benjie spoke the truth—White-water city and county would never elect a man who had too convincingly promised to interfere with the prosperity of the city and county.
"Better stick to the gambling out at Erie Oval, George," counseled the campaign manager. "They're mostly New Yorkers that are interested in that, anyway."
"I'll not reply without due consideration and—er—notice," George sullenly acceded to his manager and to necessity. But he hated both Doolittle and necessity at the moment.
That sun-bright vision of himself which so splendidly and sustainingly companioned him, which spoke in his most sonorous periods, which so completely and satisfyingly commanded the reverence of Genevieve—that George Remington of his brave imaginings would not thus have answered Benjamin Doolittle.
Through the silence following the furniture man's departure, Betty, at the typewriter, clicked upon Georgie's ears. An evil impulse assailed him—impolitic, too, as he realized—impolitic but irresistible. It was the easiest way in which candidate Remington, heckled by suffragists, overridden by his campaign committee, mortifyingly tormented by a feeling of inadequacy, could re-establish himself in his own esteem as a man of prompt and righteous decisions.
He might not be able to run his campaign to suit himself, but, by Jove, his office was his own!
He went into Betty's quarters and suggested to her that a due sense of the eternal fitness of things would cause her to offer him her resignation, which his own sense of the eternal fitness of things would lead him at once to accept.
It seemed, he said, highly indecorous of her to remain in the employ of Remington and Evans the while she was busily engaged in trying to thwart the ambitions of the senior partner. He marveled that woman's boasted sensitiveness had not already led her to perceive this for herself.
For a second, Betty seemed startled, even hurt. She colored deeply and her eyes darkened. Then the flush of surprise and the wounded feeling died. She looked at him blankly and asked how soon it would be possible for him to replace her. She would leave as soon as he desired.
In her bearing, so much quieter than usual, in the look in her face, George read a whole volume. He read that up to this time, Betty had regarded her presence in the ranks of his political enemies as she would have regarded being opposed to him in a tennis match. He read that he, with that biting little speech which he already wished unspoken, had given her a sudden, sinister illumination upon the relations of working women to their employers.
He read the question in the back of her mind. Suppose (so it ran in his constructive fancy) that instead of being a prosperous, protected young woman playing the wage-earner more or less as Marie Antoinette had played the milkmaid, she had been Mamie Riley across the hall, whose work was bitter earnest, whose earnings were not pin-money, but bread and meat and brother's schooling and mother's health—would George still have made the stifling of her views the price of her position?
And if George—George, the kind, friendly, clean-minded man would drive that bargain, what bargain might not other men, less gentle, less noble, drive?
All this George's unhappily sensitized conscience read into Betty Sheridan's look, even as the imp who urged him on bade him tell her that she could leave at her own convenience; at once, if she pleased; the supply of stenographers in Whitewater was adequately at demand.
He rather wished that Penny Evans would come in; Penny would doubtless take a high hand with him concerning the episode, and there was nothing which George Remington would have welcomed like an antagonist of his own size and sex.
But Penny did not appear, and the afternoon passed draggingly for the candidate for the district attorneyship. He tried to busy himself with the affairs of his clients, but even when he could keep away from his windows he was aware of the crowds in front of McMonigal's block, of Frances Herrington, her "ducky" toque and her infernal voiceless speech.
And when, for a second, he was able to forget these, he heard from the outer office the unmistakable sounds of a desk being permanently cleared of its present incumbent's belongings.
After a while, Betty bade him a too courteous good-by, still with that abominable new air of gravely readjusting her old impressions of him. And then there was nothing to do but to go home and make ready for dinner at the Herrington's, unless he could induce Genevieve to have an opportune headache.
Of course Betty had been right. Not upon his masculine shoulders should there be laid the absurd burden of political chagrin strong enough to break a social engagement.
Genevieve was in her room. The library was given over to Alys Brewster-Smith, Cousin Emelene Brand, two rusty callers and the tea things. Before the drawing-room fire, Hanna slept in Maltese proprietorship. George longed with passion to kick the cat.
Genevieve, as he saw through the open door, sat by the window. She had, it appeared, but recently come in. She still wore her hat and coat; she had not even drawn off her gloves. And seeing her thus, absorbed in some problem, George's sense of his wrongs grew greater.
He had, he told himself, hurried home out of the jar and fret of a man's day to find balm, to feel the cool fingers of peace pressed upon hot eyelids, to drink strengthening draughts of refreshment from his wife's unquestioning belief, from the completeness of her absorption in him. And here she sat thinking of something else!
Genevieve arose, a little startled as he snapped on the lights and grunted out something which optimism might translate into an affectionate husbandly greeting. She came dutifully forward and raised her face, still exquisite and cool from the outer air, for her lord's home-coming kiss. That resolved itself into a slovenly peck.
"Been out?" asked George unnecessarily. He tried to quell the unreasonable inclination to find her lacking in wifely devotion because she had been out.
"Yes. There was a meeting at the Woman's Forum this afternoon," she answered. She was unpinning her hat before the pier glass, and in it he could see the reflection of her eyes turned upon his image with a questioning look.
"The ladies seem to be having a busy day of it."
He struggled not quite successfully to be facetious over the pretty, negligible activities of his wife's sex. "What mighty theme engaged your attention?"
"That Miss Eliot—the real estate woman, you know—" George stiffened into an attitude of close attention—"spoke about the conditions under which women are working in the mills in this city and in the rest of the county—" Genevieve averted her mirrored eyes from his mirrored face. She moved toward her dressing-table.
"Oh, she did! and is the Woman's Forum going to come to grips with the industrial monster and bring in the millennium by the first of the year?"
But George was painfully aware that light banter which fails to be convincingly light is but a snarl.
Genevieve colored slightly as she studied the condition of a pair of long white gloves which she had taken from a drawer.
"Of course the Woman's Forum is only for discussion," she said mildly. "It doesn't initiate any action." Then she raised her eyes to his face and George felt his universe reel about him.
For his wife's beautiful eyes were turned upon him, not in limpid adoration, not in perfect acceptance of all his views, unheard, unweighed; but with a question in their blue depths.
The horrid clairvoyance which harassment and self-distrust had given him that afternoon enabled him, he thought, to translate that look. The Eliot woman, in her speech before the Woman's Forum, had doubtless placed the responsibility for the continuation of those factory conditions upon the district attorney's office, had doubtless repeated those damn fool, impractical questions which the suffragists were displaying in McMonigal's windows.
And Genevieve was asking them in her mind! Genevieve was questioning him, his motives, his standards, his intentions! Genevieve was not intellectually a charming mechanical doll who would always answer "yes" and "no" as he pressed the strings, and maintain a comfortable vacuity when he was not at hand to perform the kindly act. Genevieve was thinking on her own account. What, he wondered angrily, as he dressed—for he could not bring himself to ask her aid in escaping the Herringtons and, indeed, was suddenly balky at the thought of the intimacies of a domestic evening—whatwas she thinking? She was not such an imbecile as to be unaware how large a share of her comfortable fortune was invested in the local industry. Why, her father had been head of the Livingston Loomis-Ladd Collar Company, when that dreadful fire—! And she certainly knew that his uncle, Martin Jaffry, was the chief stockholder in the Jaffry-Bradshaw Company.
What was the question in Genevieve's eyes? Was she asking if he were the knight of those women who worked and sweated and burned, or of her and the comfortable women of her class, of Alys Brewster-Smith with her little cottages, of Cousin Emelene with her little stocks, of masquerading Betty Sheridan whose sortie of independence was from the safe vantage-grounds of entrenched privilege?
And all that evening as he watched his wife across the crystal and the roses of the Herrington table, trying to interpret the question that had been in her eyes, trying to interpret her careful silence, he realized what every husband sooner or later awakes to realize—that he had married a stranger.
He did not know her. He did not know what ambitions, what aspirations apart from him, ruled the spirit behind that charming surface of flesh.
Of course she was good, of course she was tender, of course she was high-minded! But how wide-enveloping was the cloak of her goodness? How far did her tenderness reach out? Was her high-mindedness of the practical or impractical variety?
From time to time, he caught her eyes in turn upon him, with that curious little look of re-examination in their depths. She could look at him like that! She could look at him as though appraisals were possible from a wife to a husband!
They avoided industrial Whitewater County as a topic when they left the Herrington's. They talked with great animation and interest of the people at the party. Arrived at home, George, pleading press of work, went down into the library while Genevieve went to bed. Carefully they postponed the moment of making articulate all that, remaining unspoken, might be ignored.
It was one o'clock and he had not moved a paper for an hour, when the library door opened.
Genevieve stood there. She had sometimes come before when he had worked at night, to chide him for neglecting sleep, to bring bouillon or chocolate. But tonight she did neither.
She did not come far into the room, but standing near the door and looking at him with a new expression—patient, tender, the everlasting eternal look—she said: "I couldn't sleep, either. I came down to say something, George. Don't interrupt me——" for he was coming toward her with sounds of affectionate protest at her being out of bed. "Don't speak! I want to say—whatever you do, whatever you decide—now—always—I love you. Even if I don't agree, I love you."
She turned and went swiftly away.
George stood looking at the place where she had stood,—this strange, new Genevieve, who, promising to love, reserved the right to judge.
The high moods of night do not always survive the clear, cold light of day. Indeed it requires the contribution of both man and wife to keep a high mood in married life.
Genevieve had gone in to make her profession of faith to her husband in a mood which touched the high altitudes. She had gone without any conscious expectation of anything from him in the way of response. She had vaguely but confidingly expected him to live up to the moment.
She had expected something beautiful, a lovely flower of the spirit—comprehension, generosity. Living up to the demand of the moment was George's forte. Indeed, there were those among his friends who felt that there were moments when George lived up to things too brightly and too beautifully. His Uncle Jaffry, for instance, had his openly skeptical moments. But George even lived up to his uncle's skepticism. He accepted his remarks with charming good humor. It was his pride that he could laugh at himself.
At the moment of Genevieve's touching speech he lived up to exactly nothing. He didn't even smile. He only stared at her—a stare which said:
"Now what the devil do you mean by that?"
Genevieve had a flicker of bitter humor when she compared her moment of sentiment to a toy balloon pulled down from the blue by an unsympathetic hand.
The next morning, while George was still shaving, the telephone rang. It was Betty.
"Can you have lunch with me at Thorne's, where we can talk?" she asked Genevieve. "And give me a little time tomorrow afternoon?"
"Why," Geneviève responded, "I thought you were a working girl."
There was a perceptible pause before Betty replied.
"Hasn't George told you?" "Told what?" Genevieve inquired. "George hasn't told me anything."
"I've left the office."
"Left! For heaven's sake, why?"
Betty's mind worked swiftly.
"Better treat it as a joke," was her decision. There was no pause before she answered.
"Oh, trouble with the boss."
"You'll get over it. You're always having trouble with Penny.
"Oh," said Betty, "it's not with Penny this time."
"Not with George?"
"Yes, with George," Betty answered. "Did you think one couldn't quarrel with the noblest of his sex? Well, one can."
"Oh, Betty, I'm sorry." Genevieve's tone was slightly reproachful.
"Well, I'm not," said Betty. "I like my present job better. It was a good thing he fired me."
"Firedyou! George firedyou?"
"Sure thing," responded Betty blithely. "I can't stand here talking all day. What I want to know is, can I see you at lunch?"
"Yes—why, yes, of course," said Genevieve, dazedly. Then she hung up the receiver and stared into space.
George, beautifully dressed, tall and handsome, now emerged from his room. For once his adoring wife failed to notice that in appearance he rivaled the sun god. She had one thing she wanted to know, and she wanted to know it badly. It was,
"Why did you fire Betty Sheridan?"
She asked this in the insulting "point of the bayonet" tone which angry equals use to one another the world over.
Either question or tone would have been enough to have put George's already sensitive nerves on edge. Both together were unbearable. It was, when you came down to it, the most awkward question in the world.
Why, indeed, had he fired Betty Sheridan? He hadn't really given himself an account of the inward reasons yet. The episode had been too disturbing; and it was George's characteristic to put off looking on unpleasant facts as long as possible. Had he been really hard up, which he never had been, he would undoubtedly have put away, unopened, the bills he couldn't pay. Life was already presenting him with the bill of yesterday's ill humor, and he was not yet ready to add up the amount. He hid himself now behind the austerity of the offended husband.
"My dear," he inquired in his turn, "don't you think that you had best leave the details of my office to me?"
He knew how lame this was, and how inadequate, before Genevieve replied.
"Betty Sheridan is not a detail of your office. She's one of my best friends, and I want to know why you fired her. I dare say she was exasperating; but I can't see any reason why you should have done it. You should have let her leave."
It was Betty, with that lamentable lack of delicacy which George had pointed out to her, who had not been ready to leave.
"You will have to let me be the judge of what I should or should not have done," said George. This piece of advice Genevieve ignored.
"Why did you send her away?" she demanded.
"I sent her away, if you want to know, for her insolence and her damned bad taste. If you think—working in my office as she was—it's decent or proper on her part to be active in a campaign that is against me——"
"You mean because she's a suffragist? You sent her away forthat! Why, really, that'styranny! It's like my sending away some one working for me for her beliefs——"
They stood staring at each other, not questioningly as they had yesterday, but as enemies,—the greater enemies that they so loved each other.
Because of that each word of unkindness was a doubled-edged sword. They quarreled. It was the first time that they had seen each other without illusion. They had been to each other the ideal, the lover, husband, wife.
Now, in the dismay of his amazement in finding himself quarreling with the perfect wife, a vagrant memory came to George that he had heard that Genevieve had a hot temper. She certainly had. He didn't notice how handsome she looked kindled with anger. He only knew that the rose garden in which they lived was being destroyed by their angry hands; that the very foundation of the life they had been leading was being undermined.
The time of mirage and glamour was over. He had ceased being a hero and an ideal, and why? Because, forgetting his past life, his record, his achievement, Genevieve obstinately insisted on identifying him with one single mistake. He was willing to concede it was a mistake. She had not only identified him with it, but she had called him a number of wounding things.
"Tyrant" was the least of them, and, worse than that, she had, in a very fury of temper, told him that he "needn't take that pompous"—yes, "pompous" had been her unpleasant word—"tone" with her, when he had inquired, more in sorrow than in anger, if this were really his Genevieve speaking.
There was a pause in their hostilities. They looked at each other aghast. Aghast, they had perceived the same awful truth. Each saw that love [Illustration: "You mean because she's a suffragist? You sent her away forthat? Why, really, that'styranny!"] in the other's heart was dead, and that things never could be the same again. So they stood looking down this dark gulf, and the light of anger died.
In a toneless voice: "We mustn't let Cousin Emelene and Alys hear us quarreling," said George. And Genevieve answered, "They've gone down to breakfast."
The two ladies were seated at table.
"We heard you two love birds cooing and billing, and thought we might as well begin," said Alys Brewster-Smith. "Regularity is of the highest importance in bringing up a child."
Cousin Emelene was reading theSentinel.George's quick eye glanced at the headlines:
Candidate Remington Heckled by Suffragists. Ask Him Leading Questions.
"Why, dear me," she remarked, her kind eyes on George, "it's perfectly awful, isn't it, that they break the laws that way just for a little more money. But I don't see why they want to annoy dear George. They ought to be glad they are going to get a district attorney who'll put all those things straight. I think it's very silly of them to ask him, don't you, Genevieve?"
"Let me see," said Genevieve, taking the paper.
"All he's got to do, anyway, is to answer," pursued Cousin Emelene.
"Yes, that's all," replied Genevieve, her melancholy gaze on George. Yesterday she would have had Emelene's childlike faith. But this stranger, who, for a trivial and tyrannical reason, had sent away Betty—how wouldheact?
"They showed these right opposite your windows?" she questioned.
"Yes," he returned. "Our friend Mrs. Herrington did it herself. It was the first course of our dinner. If you think that's good taste—"
"I would expect it of her," said Alys Brewster-Smith.
"But it makes it so easy for George," Emelene repeated. "They'll know now what sort of a man he is. Little children at work, just to make a little more money—it's awful!"
"Talking about money, George," said Alys, "have you seen to my houses yet?" "Not yet," replied the harassed George. "You'll have to excuse my going into the reasons now. I'm late as it is."
His voice had not the calm he would have wished for. As he took his departure, he heard Alys saying,
"If you'll let me, my dear, I'd adore helping you about the housekeeping. I don't want to stay here and be a burden. If you'll just turn it over to me, I could cut your housekeeping expenses in half."
"Damn the women," was the unchivalrous thought that rose to George's lips.
One would have supposed that trouble had followed closely enough on George Remington's trail, but now he found it awaiting him in his office.
Usually, Penny was the late one. It was this light-hearted young man's custom to blow in with so engaging an expression and so cheerful a manner that any comment on his unpunctuality was impossible. Today, instead of a gay-hearted young man, he looked more like a sentencing judge.
What he wanted to know was,
"What have you done to Betty Sheridan? Do you mean to say that you had the nerve to send her away, send her out of my office without consulting me—and for a reason like that? How did you think I was going to feel about it?"
"I didn't think about you," said George.
"You bet you didn't. You thought about number one and your precious vanity. Why, if one were to separate you from your vanity, one couldn't see you when you were going down the street. Go on, make a frock coat gesture! Play the brilliant but outraged young district attorney. Do you know what it was to do a thing of that kind—to fire a girl because she didn't agree with you?"
"It wasn't because she didn't agree with me," George interrupted, with heat.
"It was the act of a cad," Penny finished. "Look here, young man, I'm going to tell you a few plain truths about yourself. You're not the sort of person that you think you are. You've deceived yourself the way other people are deceived about you—by your exterior. But inside of that good-looking carcass of yours there's a brain composed of cheese. You weren't only a cad to do it—you were a fool!" "You can't use that tone to me!" cried George.
"Oh, can't I just? By Jove, it's things like that that make one wake up. Now I know why women have a passion for suffrage. I never knew before," Penny went on, with more passion than logic. "You had a nerve to make that statement of yours. You're a fine example of chivalry. You let loose a few things when you wrote that fool statement, but you did a worse trick when you fired Betty Sheridan. God, you're a pinhead—from the point of view of mere tactics. Sometimes I wonder whether you'veanybrain."
George had turned white with anger.
"That'll just about do," he remarked.
"Oh, no, it won't," said Penny. "It won't do at all. I'm not going to remain in a firm where things like this can happen. I wouldn't risk my reputation and my future. You're going to do the decent thing. You're going to Betty Sheridan and tell her what you think of yourself. She won't come back, I suppose, but you might ask her to do that, too. And now I'm going out, to give you time to think this over. And tonight you can tell me what you've decided. And then I'll tell you whether I'm going to dissolve our partnership. Your temper's too bad to decide now. Maybe when you've done that she won't treat me like an unsavory stranger."
He left, and George sat down to gloomy reflection.
To do him justice, the idea of apologizing to Betty had already occurred to him. If he put off the day of reckoning, when the time came he would pay handsomely. He realized that there was no use in wasting energy and being angry with Penny. He looked over the happenings of the last few hours and the part he had played in them, and what he saw failed to please him. He saw himself being advised by Doolittle to concentrate on the Erie Oval. He heard him urging him not to be what Doolittle called unneighborly. The confiding words of Cousin Emelene rang in his ears.
He saw himself, in a fit of ill-temper, discharging Betty. He saw Genevieve, lovely and scornful, urging him to be less pompous. All this, he had to admit, he had brought on himself. Why should he have been so angry at these questions? Again Emelene's remark echoed in his ear. He had only to answer them—and he was going to concentrate on the Erie Oval!
There came a knock on the door, and a breezy young woman demanded,
"D'you want a stenographer?"
George wanted a stenographer, and wanted one badly. He put from him the whole vexed question in the press of work, and by lunch time he made up his mind to have it out with Betty. There was no use putting it off, and he knew that he could have no peace with himself until he did. He felt very tired—as though he had been doing actual physical work. He thought of yesterday as a land of lost content. But he couldn't find Betty.
He bent his steps toward home, and as he did so affection for Genevieve flooded his heart. He so wanted yesterday back—things as they had been. He so wanted her love and her admiration. He wanted to put his tired head on her shoulder. He couldn't bear, not for another moment, to be at odds with her.
He wondered what she had been doing, and how she had spent the morning. He imagined her crying her heart out. He leaped up the steps and ran up to his room. In it was Alys Brewster-Smith. She started slightly.
"I was just looking for some cold cream," she explained.
"Where's Genevieve?" George asked.
"Oh, she's out," Alys replied casually. "She left a note for you."
The note was a polite and noncommittal line informing George that Genevieve would not be back for lunch. He felt as though a lump of ice replaced his heart. His disappointment was the desperate disappointment of a small boy.
He went back to the gloomy office and worked through the interminable day. Late in the afternoon Mr. Doolittle lounged heavily in.
"Have some gum, George?" he inquired, inserting a large piece in his own mouth.
He chewed rhythmically for a space. George waited. He knew that chewing gum was not the ultimate object of Mr. Doolittle's visit.
"Don't women beat the Dutch?" he inquired at last. "Yes sir, mister; they do!"
"What's up now?" George inquired. "The suffragists again?"
"Nope; not on the face of it they ain't. It's the Woman's Forum that's doin' this. They've got a sweet little idea. 'Seein' Whitewater Sweat' they call it.
"They're goin' around in bunches of twos, or mebbe blocks o' five, seein' all the sights; an' you know women ain't reasonable, an' you can't reason with them. They're goin' to find a pile o' things they won't like in this little burg o' ours, all right, all right. An' they'll want to have things changed right off. I want to see things changed m'self. I'd like to, but them things take time, an' that's what women won't understand.
"Jimminee, I've heard of towns all messed up and candidates ruined just because the women got wrought up over tenement-house an' fire laws an' truck like that. Yes sir, they're out seein' Whitewater this minut, or will be if you can't divert their minds. Call 'em off, George, if you can. Get 'em fussy about sumpen else."
"Why, what have I to do with it?" George inquired.
"Well, I didn't know but what you might have sumpen," said Mr. Doolittle mildly. "It's that young lady that works here, Miss Sheridan, an' your wife what's organizin' it. Planning it all out to Thorne's at lunch they was, an' Heally was sittin' at the next table and beats it to me. You can see for yerself what a hell of a mess they'll make!"