The Project Gutenberg eBook ofThe unpretendersThis ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.Title: The unpretendersAuthor: Ruth CranstonRelease date: November 4, 2023 [eBook #72022]Language: EnglishOriginal publication: New York: John Lane Company, 1916Credits: Aaron Adrignola, Gísli Valgeirsson, Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE UNPRETENDERS ***
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
Title: The unpretendersAuthor: Ruth CranstonRelease date: November 4, 2023 [eBook #72022]Language: EnglishOriginal publication: New York: John Lane Company, 1916Credits: Aaron Adrignola, Gísli Valgeirsson, Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
Title: The unpretenders
Author: Ruth Cranston
Author: Ruth Cranston
Release date: November 4, 2023 [eBook #72022]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: John Lane Company, 1916
Credits: Aaron Adrignola, Gísli Valgeirsson, Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE UNPRETENDERS ***
CONTENTSTRANSCRIBER'S NOTE
THE UNPRETENDERS
BY THE SAME AUTHORTHE CHALK LINE.12mo.$1.25 net.VICTORY LAW.12mo.$1.30 net.COMPENSATION.12mo.$1.30 net.THE UNKNOWN WOMAN.12mo.$1.30 net.THE MECCAS OF THE WORLD.8vo.$2.00 net.JOHN LANE COMPANY, NEW YORK
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
JOHN LANE COMPANY, NEW YORK
BYANNE WARWICKAUTHOR OF“VICTORY LAW,” “THE CHALK LINE,” “COMPENSATION,” ETC.NEW YORKJOHN LANE COMPANYMCMXVICopyright, 1916, byJOHN LANE COMPANYPress ofJ. J. Little & Ives CompanyNew York U. S. A.
“PerhapsAnne——” suggested Michael.
“Why, yes—certainly, Anne,” seconded Doromea, eagerly. “Of course Timothy’s our friend, but Anne knows that we have just this last chapter and—all we need do is to ask her.”
“Um-m. What is she doing?”
“She was trimming a hat on the west porch a few minutes ago.”
“Trimming a hat?Why, she never has one on her head!” Anne’s husband looked at his unfinished manuscript aggrieved.
“I think it was Gladys-Marie’s hat.” Doromea struggled back of plot to remember. “It had a lookof Gladys-Marie—an incoherent sort of cloche, you know, that was meant to have been a sunbonnet.”
Michael laughed. “If you weren’t my sister I should be afraid of you,” he said, looking at her admiringly. “You see too deep—even in hats.”
“But I cannot trim them,” answered Doromea, seriously. “Anne can—she can make the most delicious hat out of an old square of lace or something. I can’t even tack a plume in place and have it look like anything but a curled poker.”
“You can only help write books,” smiled Michael, “and this one”—he smoothed the thick pile of closely written paper—“is the best you’ve ever helped to write. Er—suppose we just go and speak to Anne.”
The two figures, ludicrously alike in spite of the tall stoop of one and the trim roundness of the other, hurried around the house to the west porch.
“Is the book finished?” asked Anne, posing buttercups with an upward glance of amazement.
“No—that is, not quite—just that one more chapter, you know; but——”
“It must be finished to-day,” concluded Doromea,firmly, “and—the post came a few minutes ago and there was a letter from Timothy.”
“Yes?” Anne’s voice warmed. She had never seen Timothy, but Michael and Doromea had made him sound very nice.
“Timothy,” said Doromea, mildly indignant, “with all his excellences, has an abominable habit of not arriving psychologically at all.” (Michael beamed—there was not a phrase of Doromea’s turning whose cleverness he ever lost.) “He is coming this afternoon on the four-thirty,” plumped Doromea, with no cleverness at all.
“I had better meet him with the cart when I go to Aunt Hester’s,” Anne reflected, “unless—perhaps you had planned to meet him yourself, Dorry?”
“No”—Doromea magnanimously overlooked the abbreviation of her cherished name—“no, I hadn’t. Of course you’ve never seen him, but——”
“There’s no one else to get off,” Anne answered, simply.
“Oh, I didn’t mean that. I meant you have never met him, or anything.” Doromea alwaysfloundered in her explanations to Anne—perhaps because she found it necessary to make so many.
“Well, that needn’t worry her any,” put in Michael. “Timothy will make her feel at ease right away.” And he smiled at Anne with an affection back of which lurked an impatience to be off and at work, now that incidental disturbances were disposed of.
“Then you’ll meet the four-thirty,” reminded Doromea, impressively.
“But you’re coming in to lunch?” called Anne, seeing them about to start off. “It’s almost time.”
“I don’t know if we’ll bother with lunch to-day,” returned Michael, absently. “You can ring, but don’t wait for us if we don’t come.”
“Gladys-Marie wants to go to the city,” commenced Anne, but the sharp corner of the porch cut off her audience; “and I must read to Aunt Hester and shell the peas,” she finished. “Gladys-Marie!”
“Yes’m—yes, my lady.” There was but one woman in the world to whom Gladys-Marie wouldacknowledge such subservience, but one woman before whom she would appear instantly—and awesomely.
“Here’s the hat, Gladys-Marie. Run along with it and have a good time, only come back so that you can get dinner; and, Gladys-Marie, perhaps you had better leave a little lunch on the buffet. I don’t believe the others will be quite ready to eat with me.”
“Never are,” muttered Gladys-Marie, handling the hat as though it were Venetian glass. “Sit with their noses glued over an old pad o’ paper all day long, ’n’ the house ’n’ the meals ’n’ Lady Elinore ’n’ me c’n go to—c’n go hang, ’s what I mean,” she apologized to Anne. “Oh, I know you think I’m the pert one with me nerve carried round in me side pocket, but I c’n see, I can; ’n’ if ever I see perruls cast before swine—Gee! it’s plainer ’n any Sunday-school chromo ever tried to be.”
She looked back at the pearl in question with a kind of wrathful tenderness. But the Lady Elinore, apparently, had not heard a word; only the softpart in her warm gold hair was visible above the sewing in her hands.
“She’s awful sweet,” sighed the worldling, pityingly, “’n’ twice as smart with hands as I am. But—my word! she ain’t clever! The way she lets herself get done an’ don’t even squirm about it pickles me!”
The fussy little train steamed off with an important backward lunge, as though to say, “There! I did the very best I could for you!” And Anne, who alone with the station-master saw what it had deposited, could understand how it lingered on the siding and switched back and forth several times after it had given every pretence of departing. For the spare, shortish person it had set down at the small station made of the station a suddenly very wonderful place indeed.
“You are Timothy,” said Anne, gravely, going forward. “I came to meet you—I am Anne, you know.”
“I am very glad to know.” When the spare person smiled like that the station-master straightened his tie and began to whistle. “For you to come to meet me is the most cordial introduction we could possibly have had. Is that your cart?”
“Yes.” Since Timothy mentioned it, Anne thought it was not such a bad cart, after all. “If you will put your bag inside I will get the milk-can.”
“Oh,I’llget the milk-can, miss,” offered the station-master, hastily, as though he were not in the habit of lounging over his pipe while he watched Anne carry it night and morning. “There you are!” He swung it up with a flourish.
“Thank you,” said Anne, and her eyes were bluer than before. “Did you hear him call me miss?” she asked Timothy almost before they rattled off. “He thinks I’m a girl.”
“I should say he was of a sound psychology,” pronounced Timothy. “I suppose he hasn’t seen Michael following you about, then?”
“No.” Anne drew the reins a shade tighter. “You see, Michael has been finishing his book—he and Doromea, I mean; and that keeps them verybusy. I come down for the milk by myself—unless sometimes Gladys-Marie comes along.”
“And Gladys-Marie is——”
“My maid. She is very fond of dime novels and chews gum. I think you will like her.”
“I am sure of it.” Timothy’s gray eyes had bent a little closer upon Anne’s serene naturalness. “Do Michael and Doromea like her?”
“They have no time for her. They are too busy making up characters for the book.”
“I suppose you help at that, too——”
“I?” Anne’s blue gaze marvelled at him. “Oh, no—I am not clever enough to help Michael. Doromea is the only one who does that. Isn’t she pretty—Doromea?”
“Yes,” said Timothy, so fulsomely that any woman would have known at once. “But I wish she would stop being clever,” he added, after a minute.
“Men always want wives who are not clever, don’t they?” Anne meditated. “So many peoplesaid that when Michael married me. Are the women in your stories clever, Mr.—Timothy?”
“Never,” asserted Mr. Timothy, solemnly—and traitorously to Doromea.
“They—they are just plain women?”
“Just plain women. That is why women never buy the magazines they’re in.”
“But men do?”
“Oh, yes—men who have married the clever ones like to remember that there are the other kind. And men who have married the other kind—your kind” (this time it was Anne who straightened the little frill at her throat)—“like to be reminded how sensibly they have done for themselves.”
“Michael does not read your stories,” said Anne, turning a sharp corner carefully. “He says he does not understand them in you.”
Timothy’s quaint twisty mouth grew twistier for a moment. Then he said, “That is because he does not understand me in them—or you, or anybody else one sees day after day—and never sees at all.”
“One doesn’t see you day after day,” objectedAnne. “If one never saw you at all, though, one would always be sure that one had—that one had wanted to.” She looked up at his glasses without coquetry. “Doromea and Michael have talked a great deal about you.”
Timothy groaned. “And said clever things about me, I suppose—epigrams?” He waited, as for the worst.
“I think so. Yes, Doromea said you were a literary Roycrofter—that is an epigram, isn’t it?”
“I’m afraid so—or a Mission-made metaphor. I wish”—Timothy’s voice grew wistful—“she had said she hated me.”
“Said she hated you? Oh! I see”—Anne remembered—“you want her to be in love with you.”
“She is in love with me,” admitted Timothy, modestly. “Only she thinks it’s beneath her—being in love at all, I mean. She thinks it isn’t subtle.”
“I suppose it isn’t,” Anne meditated, allowing the horse to walk in zigzag laziness across the road and back. “That must be why I don’t mind it,” she decided, as they came in sight of the house. “I’vebeen in love ever since Michael asked me to try to be—and a long time before that.”
Timothy looked at her again more closely. “Michael should write better books,” he murmured, getting down to open the gate.
“So you really didn’t mind our not meeting you?” Doromea’s anxiety was most appealingly clothed in a rose-sprigged frock. “You see, Anne offered, so we thought——”
“You thought you couldn’t be more gracious to me,” finished Timothy, glad that Doromea’s hair curled over the ears as unsubtly as ever. “By the way, where is Anne?” He looked about the wide homely porch, where a work-bag and a tennis racquet spoke of some one, evidently just a plain woman.
“She is getting dinner.” Doromea shifted uncomfortably to another chair. “I wish I could help her, but I can’t even boil an egg—and not have it crack! Anne is so practical.”
“And so impractical,” appended Michael. “Fancy letting Gladys-Marie go to the city when Timothywas coming! And of course there was no one by whom to send the manuscript, once we had finished it. Anne had gone over to read to Aunt Hester, and Doromea hadn’t the least idea how to hitch up.”
“Neither had you,” added Doromea, a little warmly.
“Naturally not—having been brought up in the city with you.”
“Poor people!” Timothy’s gray eyes commiserated them. “But now that the book is done, you can begin to learn something?”
“I mean to find myself,” said Doromea, loftily. “And I shall have to go off alone for the whole day in order to do it.”
“That would be very rude—and no help at all to you. Why not take Gladys-Marie along?” Timothy meant it—though he had never seen Gladys-Marie.
“I would, if she were not so typical.” Doromea was quite serious. “Nowadays one must insist upon the unusual, or grow usual oneself. Even one’s maid is an influence.”
Michael looked triumphantly at Timothy—theywere used to holding some argument together as to Doromea’s cleverness.
“I see—then how important we usual ones are, aren’t we?—for if it wasn’t for us, all of you’d be usual, too!” Timothy’s smile included Anne, who came out just at that moment, completely covered with a checked blue apron.
“Anne—Timothy!” Doromea’s voice showed what she thought of aprons.
“Yes, I know—I met him.” Anne sat down, innocently, and began to fan her flushed face. “Dinner’s ready,” she added, as an incident.
Both Doromea and Michael jumped up at once. “We didn’t have a bite of lunch,” cried Michael, plumping down into his chair and attacking the olives rather crudely. “By the time we had finished the book, you had gone to Aunt Hester’s——” he turned to Anne.
“Yes,” said Anne, setting down the water-pitcher. “There was lunch on the buffet, you know.”
“I told you!” Doromea triumphed at Michael. “Isaid Anne wouldn’t forget—but you wouldn’t even go and look.”
“Oh, well——” Michael’s voice was a shade less agreeable than usual. “I knew she was busy in the garden all morning, and trimming Gladys-Marie’s hat—I didn’t suppose she’d think. Anyway, what does it matter? The dinner’s tremendously good. Come, Timmie, tell us what you’ve been doing—more Plain Stories?”
“Not so many more.” Timothy wondered inadvertently if Michael had put Anne’s elbows in the book—they were exceedingly nice elbows. “You see, there aren’t so many Plain People left to write about. Every one’s going in for being extraordinary, these days—psychic or something.” He looked at Doromea inquiringly.
“I go to New Thought lectures,” defended Doromea, promptly.
“Do you?” Timothy asked Anne.
“I don’t have time—besides, I’m afraid I wouldn’t understand. I never went to college or anything.”
“Oh!” said Timothy, approvingly.
“You see, Anne”—Doromea interposed with a quick kindliness—“Anne always lived in the country before she came to New York to keep house for her grandfather—that winter we met her—so she isn’t as interested in the new mental trend. You must take it up when we go back, though, dear; after all, it’s the thing that counts—one’s psychic education.”
“I should say that depended on what one counts with.” But Timothy said it so low that nobody heard him.
“Psychic education——” Michael crumpled his roll thoughtfully. “In the book there’s a woman (Faero’s her name) who is absolutely the most perfect psychic completion you ever encountered. Simply arippingcreation, isn’t she, Doromea?”
“Wonderful!” Doromea sighed admiration; then she smiled, and all her dimples came out, which was to Timothy much more important. “You see, this woman, this Faero, has a way of seeing things—the most subtle, evanescent sort of things that nobody could possibly see——”
“Eh?” Timothy bolted, involuntarily.
“And it’s she who gathers up all the threads of the plot—there really isn’t so much plot, Michael—”
“No, not so much plot——” Michael paused vaguely over a stalk of asparagus. “People are sick of plot nowadays. They want something less apparent, less——”
“So this Faero is a sort of psychic gleaner,” went on Doromea, eagerly. “All the subtleties other people let fall unnoticed she picks up and treasures, until the mental of her, the infinitely fine sensitive perception that’s stretched to the vibration of a thin, thin silken string——”
“Gee whiz! Now ain’t I the late one! Me walkin’-papers ’n’ the cashless mitt’s all I deserve, I guess—but honest, Lady Elinore, if y’ could uv seen that Theatorium show! My word! it had Sothern ’n’ Marlowe lookin’ like two ice-cream freezers—yes’m! Why, when that girl, Phylo-Floretta, jumped out of a forty-six story buildin’, into her waitin’ lover’s arms, with Popper hangin’ out the winder threatenin’ air-ships—my eye! I says toMamie, I says, this may be riskay, but it’s life, I says! ’N’ y’ c’n take it from me it was, too—oh!” From the window Gladys-Marie became suddenly aware of new audience, and hunted for her vanity-bag to see if her hat was on straight.
“A quaint person,” commented Doromea, when the buttercup hat had passed on, to the tune ofThe Rosary, “though a trifle hectic in her descriptive parts.”
Michael glanced again triumphantly at Timothy.
“I must go and see her about breakfast,” said Anne, rising.
“I thought you would play to us.” Michael’s voice was wistful as a child’s. “Anne always plays to us after dinner,” he explained to Timothy.
“I don’t play,” disclaimed Anne; “I only hum a little. There—tuck yourself up—I’ll play for a while.” She brought his pipe over to the hammock, and arranged two chairs undemonstratively tangent, before she went in to the piano.
Timothy, who had wandered into the yard, gazedat Michael; he was puffing peacefully as the simple little Irish ballad came to emphasize his comfort.
“Does the Lady Elinore always sing like that?” Timothy asked Gladys-Marie, who appeared (quite without reason) on the side porch.
Gladys-Marie listened. “I guess it’s you,” she said, finally, fumbling with her pompadour. “Sometimes she sounds kind a sad, but—I guess nobody could help pinchin’ their gladness a little when you’re around——” Her eyes under the pompadour went from Timothy to the two chairs Anne had left. One of them was occupied. “Her hair curls real pretty, don’t it?” she added, generously—for Doromea and Gladys-Marie had a vegetable understanding only. “An’ that rose-color is awful becomin’——”
Timothy threw away his light and turned toward the rose-sprigged chair. “It is a pretty dress, isn’t it?”
“Lady Elinore made it,” returned Gladys-Marie, proudly. “Sure it’s a pretty dress!”
Doromea and Michael and Timothy sat on the porch. “I can’t think it has been really two weeks since you’ve been here.” From the steps Doromea looked at Timothy a bit dolefully. “But it must be—since it was two weeks ago we—we sent the book off. Must you actually go to-morrow, Timothy?”
“It seems a breach of sense to admit it,” Timothy agreed, looking at her through the gloaming, “but my editors imagine that the summer has created some new Plain People—at least they want me to come and see.”
“I suppose so,” Doromea sighed. “I wish some one wanted me to come and do something,” she added, vehemently, under her breath. “Goodness knows there’s been nothing to do here, since the book’s been finished. Anne seems to be busy every minute,” she observed, aloud, “but I don’t sew or cook or row, or anything—I don’t even play the piano!” This with a gust of indignation, as some very good playing came through the window.
“It’s the book’s fault.” Michael’s voice soundedrather weary. “If I hadn’t held you to the book every minute, you might have learned these other things. But I never imagined for a moment that the publishers would reject it—it seemed so much better than the first one, so much subtler——”
“What did they say about it?” Timothy moved to where he could not see the quiver of Doromea’s lips.
“They said”—Michael repeated with the monotony of one who has gone over the lesson many times—“that they were much surprised and not a little disappointed over the decided inferiority of this book compared with the other; that I seemed to have striven for an effect rather than for a truthful portrayal of actual life. Oh, they tore it up sharply enough!” he concluded, breaking off as though the recital choked him.
“They did say,” Doromea comforted, wiping her eyes back of Michael’s cushions—“they did say there was some clever dialogue in it—you remember, Michael, where Faero talks with the rector? They mentioned that especially.”
“Yes—yes”—Michael caught at the consolation—“where she says, ‘One can be so many worse things than bad,’ and—Why, Anne said that, Doromea; funny, isn’t it? Don’t you know, when we were talking about that stable-boy who stole—the one who had been in the Reformatory? You said you thought he was the baddest boy in the world, and Anne—why, yes, of course!”
“What else did they say was especially good?” Timothy’s voice suggested, with suspicious impersonality.
“Why, farther on, the scene between the kitchenmaid and the policeman—that was a story of Gladys-Marie’s, Anne told us—awfully natural, you know, and—er—local-colorish. They like that.”
“Yes, and the bit about the ladies’ clubs.” Doromea would not allow Michael to omit anything.
“Surely, that—that was funny, you know——” Michael laughed heartily for the first time since yesterday, when the book had come back. “That was a conversation Anne had with—Doromea!” He sat all at once bolt upright in his hammock. “Everyone of those things was Anne’s! Every single one of them—do you know that, Doromea?—and the publishers said they were the only clever things in the book!”
“Anne—clever?” Doromea stumbled, dazed with the dawning of it. “Why—why, Michael!”
“Yes”—Michael was standing up now, and almost excited—“yes, those were Anne’s things—the clever ones—and all the rest was rot. We sat in there racking our brains over subtle things to say, and all the time, if we’d just listened to Anne, we could have written a perfectly extraordinary book—the cleverest book in the world! It’s maddening—it’s——”
“Do you know why it would have been the cleverest book in the world?” asked Timothy, quietly—for Anne’s singing stopped just then. “Because it would have been the story of just a plain, ordinary woman—and that’s the rarest woman one can find to write about—women like Anne, and that little Patsy sister of mine, and a host of others. Whydon’t you go in,” he said to Michael, gently, “and ask her to help you find her?”
As Michael slipped through the long window, Timothy moved to the step below Doromea. “Aren’t you convinced that she’s the subtlest woman, too—this plain, ordinary woman?” he asked. Doromea’s curly head was bent very low. “Don’t you think you might like to cook, and sew, and trim hats sometimes?”
His voice was so wistful that Doromea wiped her eyes quite frankly this time. “I—I am perfectly wild to trim hats,” she burst out, laughing between her sobs. “Oh, Timothy, I am so sick—sick—sickof trying to be clever and think up things! I am really the dullest, plainest woman in the world.”
“I hope so,” said Timothy, gravely, taking the unskilful little hands. “I need a heroine most awfully. You see”—turning her about to face the library windows—“Michael has found his.” For Michael was standing by, while Anne lit the lamp and undid a heavy pile of manuscript.
“Anne—just a plain woman——” Doromea’s voicecaught—but with a yearning desire. “Even Gladys-Marie had the sense to tell me that she had the Duchess heroines beat by a lope! Do you suppose, Timothy”—her hands crept to his shoulders pleadingly—“do you suppose that I can ever learn to be as clever as Anne?”
Patsythumped Timothy’s fattest yellow cushion viciously. “It’s all very well for you to sit there and smile,” she scolded her pretty stepmother. “Dad was always perfect to you, and Timmie—if he is my brother—is a joy to keep house for. You’ve never known what it is to live with a man from Boston!—oh, how I hate him, how I’d like to make him fairly eat slang! The idea—my own husband saying I was r-rowdy, and—and tomboy,” Patsy’s head went down into the yellow cushion, “and before my own mother-in-law, too, just because I slid down the banisters! Ugh!”
The stepmother looked at Patsy’s lovely rebellious little head. Then she looked at the ridiculous scrap of a frock she was making. “I suppose he thought of the Angel,” she murmured.
“And why?” Instantly Patsy sat bolt upright. “The Angel’s my child, of course—every bit as much as he is Warren’s—but why I shouldn’t slide down the banisters when I want to, just because I happen to have a baby—one might think it was my grandchild!” The disgust that tilted the small impudent nose made the stepmother bite her under lip hard. “Anyway, it’s all over now. I’ve left Warren for good, and when he gets back from Washington and finds nobody in the house he’ll realize that I’m sufficiently capable of action, though I can’t talk like a Macaulay essay. When he finds not only me but the Angel gone——” she listened suddenly—a faint cry came down from some place upstairs.
“I expect the house will seem still and—and strange.” The stepmother’s soft voice had a little ache in it as she listened too.
Patsy got up and walked to the window of the bright morning-room with a defiant shrug that was meant also to be quite indifferent. “He deserves it,” she defended. “Every bit of it. He behaved likea brute—a perfectly gentlemanly good-form Prince Albert brute; and when he has to go to Congress and give dinners and things without any wife, he’ll be sorry he was so abominable. He’ll remember that I could be grown-up and dignified when I want to. As for me, I can toddle on my own——”
“H’m?” The stepmother looked up inquiringly.
“Get along by myself, I mean, and take care of the Angel quite—quite as well as though I had a husband. I dare say Timothy won’t mind my staying here for a bit?” Patsy’s hauteur melted into an appealing wistfulness.
“Of course he won’t mind,” returned the stepmother, warmly. “He has some news——”
“And then,” went on Patsy, unheeding, “I can take—steps.” The vague importance of the decision seemed to reassure her; for she came back to her old place on the sofa and plumped down into the cushions almost cheerfully.
“I—before you take—er—steps,” suggested the stepmother, tentatively, “why not consult Timothy?”
“ConsultTimothy?” Timothy’s sister faced about amazed. “W-what on earth could Timothy know about it—about leaving one’s husband? He’s the dearest boy in the world—a ripping good sport and all that—but, after all, Claire, he’s only a writer. He doesn’t know anything about things thathappen.”
The stepmother sewed for a few minutes in silence. Then, “Nobody else knows that—that it’s happened yet, do they?” she asked, rather anxiously.
“No,” said Patsy, shortly. “I told the maids I was coming over to stay a few days with my brother, that’s all. Of course, Laura Hastings was spending the week-end with me when we had the scene—when Warren and his mother came in from Boston, I mean, and found me—Patricia—— Oh, yes,” with a wry face, “she calls me that, Warren’s mother! As I was saying, Laura was there, sliding down too, as it happened, and you know, Claire, Laura’s the worst gossip in New York. She has told it all over, I suppose, that Warren simplyorderedme to get down—anybody might know such a good-looking man would be a tyrant!—but she can’t say a word about me, for I was the sweetest thing possible all the time she was there. I wouldn’t condescend to quarrel, you may be sure, even afterward, when only Warren and his mother were there.”
“They went on to Washington that same night, you said——” the stepmother creased a tuck thoughtfully.
“Yes—Warren had some business. His mother”—Patsy’s scorn pelted her words out—“went to a convention of the Women Militant, if you know what that is. Warren’s coming back to-day. Well”—she straightened her collar belligerently—“he’ll find a note on the pincushion that will explain a few things.”
“Ahem!” The stepmother coughed deprecatingly. “He’s been taking some rather tiresome trips lately, Warren, hasn’t he?”
“Oh, of course he has—but what difference does that make?” Patsy’s guilty compassion stirred itself to impatience. “Nobody wanted him to go to Congress except his mother—though of course I wasglad he got the election,” she admitted, grudgingly. “But it’s meant running back and forth from New York to Boston and from Boston to Washington all the fall. This last Sunday simply capped the climax of everybody’s endurance. Why the goodness his mother had to come down with him, just that time when he was going to find me on the banisters——” She shook her pretty head despairingly.
“Hello!” whistled somebody. “So the Plain Little Sister has come to congratulate me—what? Didn’t I see a—er—perambulator-rocking-chair-crib, folded compactly as in the advertisement, out there in the hall?”
“Yes.” Patsy kissed her brother with characteristic vehemence. “It is the Angel’s. We’ve come to stay.”
“Oh,” said Timothy, curling his spare shortness into a huge chair, “how disappointing! I mean, that is, I thought you had come to congratulate me, you know.”
“Congratulate you?” Patsy flew at him. “On what?”
“Why, on Doromea, of course. I’ve got her to marry me.”
Patsy regarded the stepmother reproachfully. “And you never told me a word,” she said, with an air of deep injury. “I’ve been here two hours!”
“There was a good deal to talk about,” demurred the stepmother, soberly. “You were telling me, you know.”
“Yes—yes, of course.” Patsy’s injury transferred its object to the primary interest. “Timothy, I’ve left Warren.”
“That was nice of you,” commented Timothy. “Stay as long as you can.” He looked at his sister’s pretty hair contentedly; it curled over the ears like Doromea’s.
“But you don’t understand——” Patsy was seldom impatient with Timothy; she tried to remember that he was a writer. Then, too, they had been chums together always. “You don’t understand. I’ve left him forever. I’m not going to Washingtonwith him. He—he insulted me; he called me a——”
Timothy uncurled himself in his interest. “Yes,” he encouraged. “What did he call you?”
“A—a t-tomboy!” Patsy’s lips quivered past control. “And his mother was there and Laura Hastings, a girl who was staying with me—and a perfectly horrid gossip, Timothy! Oh, he was a beast, that’s all. I’m sure,” tearfully, “I can’t think what you all ever let me marry him for!”
Timothy glanced over the auburn head at the stepmother. The stepmother glanced at Timothy. But neither of them smiled.
“I have never had anything against marriage,” said Timothy, mildly. “I have even persuaded one person to get over her prejudice against it. Perhaps I am wrong—if so, you can win the eternal credit of convincing me. And meanwhile, why not come with me to select an engagement present? We can argue as we go along, you know.”
It was not an unattractive proposition. Patsy brightened. “You must wait for me to change,” she warned, jumping up. “This frock’s a wreck. But I brought five trunks. I thought,” doubtfully, “that as long as I was leaving for good, I had better take everything with me.”
“A sound precaution,” commended Timothy, going over to the window.
“And you’ll look after the Angel?” Patsy stopped by the stepmother’s chair. “It may divert me to go out for a bit,” she added, plaintively. “Of course the poor boy—Timmie—can’t understand all I’m going through. He’s a regular brick, but in love, poor thing; and then how could he understand? He’s only a writer.”
“Only a writer,” repeated the stepmother, with an odd little smile. “A writer about Plain People and their Problems. Yes, dear, run along. As you say, it may divert you. If the Angel cries I’ll—I’ll give it smelling-salts. I dare say I sha’n’t kill it.”
“Oh, no,” Patsy called back, pleasantly. “You couldn’t. It has Warren’s obstinacy. But it’s adarling, just the same.” She flew up-stairs as a lusty squall blew down to them.
“She hasn’t congratulated you yet,” murmured the stepmother, gazing at Timothy with quite an unstepmotherly gaze.
“No—but she will to-morrow,” prophesied Timothy, with only a writer’s intuition.
The two short, blue-coated figures moved off briskly down the street toward the Avenue. From the window, the stepmother smiled at the identical cut of their shoulders, the boyish, easy swing of their same stride; it seemed such a very little while since she had watched them start off every day to school together—the blue coats had lengthened such a little bit—and now—— Timothy engaged, and Patsy married—married and half divorced; the stepmother’s nose wrinkled in a funny smile. Ah, well! There are poignant foolish heartaches for stepmothers as well as other people, but—just then the Angel cried. The stepmother caught up thefrilly frock and hurried upstairs; where there is an angel——!
“For the Angel’s sake, I mean to have only a separation,” Patsy was explaining to Timothy. “Besides, it—it will serve Warren Adams only right not to be able to—t-to marry again. A Congressman without a wife! Imagine it!”
“There have been instances”—Timothy was knocking leaves with his stick—“isolated instances, I grant you,” he added, hastily, catching his sister’s eye. “I think myself such Congressmen are to be felt for. I suppose”—reflectively—“when Warren is sworn in, there will be nobody there except his mother.”
“I suppose not,” returned Patsy, shortly; and ramming her stout-gloved little hands into her mannish pockets, she began to whistle.
Timothy poked more leaves. They were scarcely at the corner of Madison Avenue. “When one can whistle like that,” he observed to a silent sparrow on the curb, “there is some point in letting the world know about it.”
Patsy stopped whistling at once. “I always want to whistle when Warren’s mother is about—even when it’s only in conversation. See here, Timmie,” the small hand clutched her brother’s arm confidentially, “don’t you—haven’t you always thought Warren’s mother was a bit of a muff?”
Timothy paused, over his glasses. “Muff?” he repeated—stupidly, Patsy thought. “Muff—that was a pretty one she sent the Angel, wasn’t it? All white and soft and fuzzy. She——”
“Oh, never mind, then,” Patsy cut him off impatiently. “If you’re not going to agree with me, where’s the use of arguing?Icouldn’t help it if she did send the Angel a muff—anyway, he sha’n’t carry it!” she added, vindictively, under her breath. “Convention, tradition, what people will say—booh! How sick I am of it all—wish I could make every one of those words waltz themselves out of the big dic. forever!”
“Ah—about this present for Doromea——” When Timothy said that name, Patsy looked up quickly; there was no earthly reason why a lumpshould rise in her throat, but—“Doromea,” Timothy repeated, as though for very spite. “It must be a very nice present, you know.”
“Then we’ll go to ——,” said Patsy, swallowing emphatically. “Everybody goes there; my—my ring came from there, and Claire’s, and all our family have always bought things there. It’s a sort of——”
“Habit?” supplied Timothy, kindly.
“Yes, habit.” Patsy gave a sigh of relief. If Timothy should have guessed that she hadalmostsaid tradition! “Certainly, habit—and, well, we’re right there now, Timothy. It must be a ring, I suppose?”
Timothy’s gray eyes darkened to absorption. “I should say a ring might do,” he deliberated.
“Sure thing!” Patsy was standing near a person who looked like Warren’s mother, so she repeated, “Sure thing!” loudly and cheerfully. The person started. “Diamonds—eh, Timmie? But”—to the clerk—“not a solitaire. Solitaires”—feeling her own, under the heavy glove—“are so ordinary!”
“I rather fancy a solitaire,” protested Timothy, mildly. “Let’s see yours, Pats!”
With a sublime indifference Patsy took off her glove. “Itisrather a good solitaire,” she admitted, negligently.
“Would you take it off a minute, madam? I should like to compare——”
“Oh, no—that is, I mean”—Patsy blushed furiously—“I have never taken that ring off—I—but I suppose I might just as well, now,” she concluded, defiantly.
“Why not?” agreed Timothy—who was only a writer.
“I prefer not to take that ring off here,” said Patsy, with a colossal dignity. “I—we will look at what you have in circlets.”
“Certainly, madam.” The clerk’s sandy head sank into a blue plush show-drawer.
“There’s Laura Hastings!” cried Patsy, suddenly, “with a man—looking at rings. And she nevereven hinted——! Do wait, Timothy. I must speak to her a minute. Just like a gossipy person—never to tell one thing about themselves!”
“Yes,” coming back breathlessly. “It’s true. They’re engaged. Laura said”—Patsy’s breezy voice grew somewhat dry—“it was seeing me so happy in my lovely home that really decided her—of course on top of that I could hardly tell her—umm!” as the clerk reappeared. “Perhaps, after all, a solitaire would be better—Laura’s getting one, and people might say——” the minute the words were out, Patsy glanced fearfully at Timothy; but Timothy was deep in settings. “Her friends might think,” amended Patsy, “that you ought to have given Doromea one. Is Doromea as pretty as she used to be?” she added, irrelevantly.
“She may sometime have been as pretty as she is now,” Timothy meditated, “but it seems hardly probable. As a Plain Person—she wants you to show her about things next winter,” he branched off. “The house and that, you know. Anne and Michael are going to stay on in the country, so——”
“But I shall be in Washington,” blurted Patsy.“Oh, no—of course, I forgot.” The blue shoulders sagged a bit forlornly as they turned again to solitaires. “I shall be very glad to help Dorry all I can,” finished Patsy, stiffly. “What do you think of this platinum one, Timothy?”
Timothy straightened his glasses to a critical focus. “Very nice—the claws are so thin and fine—like those in the pin Warren gave you when the Angel was born. I was always fond of that pin.” Timothy was talking mostly to himself as he squinted closer at the solitaire. “I remember Warren’s face when he went in to give it to you—‘’Tisn’t half good enough,’ he said. And it didn’t seem to me then that it was, either.”
Patsy was staring at a case of watches—staring hard and with her back to Timothy. Surreptitiously she got out her handkerchief.
“Then you’ll lay that one aside,” she suggested, lightly, though still with her back turned. “And the flat one—Doromea might like that, it’s so—so awfully subtle, you know. And Dorry always——”
“But not now,” corrected Timothy, gently. “Shehas advanced to the infinite subtlety of forgetting that there is such a thing. I think we won’t consider the flat one. What are you looking at over there, Pats?”
“Rattles,” replied Patsy, in a strangled voice. “Warren promised to come in and get one with me for the Angel’s seventh birthday—seventh-month birthday, you know. We bought his six-months one—that’s next Sunday—three weeks ago!” The handkerchief went up to Patsy’s impudent little nose, and blew it hard. “If it only wasn’t for Warren’s mother—” she scolded,sotto voce, so that the clerk should not hear—“you know, Timothy, I—but there, what’s the use in telling you? You wouldn’t understand.”
“I might—though I do write things,” encouraged Timothy. “Why not try me? We can pretend to be comparing rings over by the window.”
“All right.” Patsy gave a deep sigh. “You see, this is the way it is. When—when I married Warren I was in love with him—I really was, Timothy.”
“I remember you were,” said Timothy, gravely.
“Yes. And of course I was awfully young—awfullyyoung; though, to be sure, I’m twenty-one now; I didn’t want to get married, you know——”
“No?” Timothy’s tone held only inquiry. He had the most tractable memory in the world.
“Certainly not. I was talked into it. Warren and Warren’s mother kept saying there was no sense in delaying the thing, and I supposed there wasn’t, as we’d have to get married some time, wouldn’t we, being in love and all?”
“Sometimes people don’t,” began Timothy. “In stories——”
“Oh, bother stories!” interrupted Patsy, rudely. “You promised to try to forget you were a writer. Quick, look at these silly rings—that woman’s listening. Well, so I married Warren, and for a while, you know, we didn’t get along so badly—the first year we were married we hadn’t but sevenseriousquarrels; of course there were little things, but you know yourself, Timmie, we managed very nicely.”
“It always seemed so to me,” Timothy came in promptly on his cue.
“That,” Patsy triumphed, “was because Warren was in love with me. He didn’t care then how much slang I used or if I wore boys’ boots; I could climb trees all day long when we were up at camp, and ride bareback all over the place. But now,” the piquant little face grew tragic, “it’s that same old thing—the glamour’s wearing off, and”—Patsy’s voice sounded unpleasantly older than twenty-one—“my husband’s tired of me, the real me. Now he wants me made to his order, to his mother’s order; now”—a big tear splashed on her engagement ring—“I’m just the mother of his child. I’m expected to be old and dull and mouse about in corners with a book or some sewing. Sewing! When I can sail a boat better than any one on Barnegat, and play hockey, and ride even the Blue Devil, that all the Club’s afraid of!Sewing!”
“Claire sews,” Timothy reflected.
“Of course she does,” snapped Patsy. “Claire was born amiable and womanly and all the sweetnormal things a woman ought to be. I wasn’t. I’ve never been anything but a harum-scarum r-r-rowdy, just as Warren called me, I——”
“You’ve been the mother of the Angel.” Timothy spoke softly, almost reverently. “Claire has only been allowed to be a stepmother.”
“That makes it just so much worse,” choked Patsy, flashing diamonds as though for her life. “I—can’t you see, I don’t deserve to—to be the Angel’s mother! Tha—that’s what Warren thinks.”
Timothy looked down at the trembling softened mouth, at the brimming tawny eyes of his Plain Little Sister. “Warren is going to Congress,” he said, letting Doromea’s ring slip on to his smallest finger. “I have heard that at such times—just before they go—they hardly know what they think. Everybody expects them to think something different, you see. I should not be surprised if they did not even know what they said—sometimes. There are stories——”
Patsy looked at him reproachfully. “You promised to leave out stories,” she murmured. “You were just beginning to be comforting.”
“Um-m! So I did—so I was, I mean. The fact is, I almost believe they forget what they have said, what they have thought, almost the minute they have said or thought it. They—they get tired, you see. They have to go off and make speeches, and their constituents keep dinning their importance at them, the importance of maintaining the dignity of their position, and that, you know; then they come home, a bit low and worn out with it, and—they’re just plain ordinary people, Congressmen—they lose their grip once in a while. They need——”
“Claire told you!” accused Patsy, though into her eyes had crept that same look as when she was singing the Angel to sleep. “You knew it was the day he came home from Boston, and went right away again.”
Timothy peered suddenly through his glasses at some one who was coming into the store. “I didhave an idea it was that day,” he confessed—“one of those days, that is.”
“And of course,” Patsy’s voice gathered injury, “of all days his mother had to choose that one to come along. And you know, Timmie, when Warren’s mother comes along, it isn’t any suit-case party. There are trunks to be checked and a maid to be hustled into the baggage-car, or wherever it is they put ’em; and there’s a dog to be fought about—Warren’s mother simply shrieks if they suggest puttingTotoin the baggage-car—and half a dozen smaller parcels to be lost and found a few times. Oh, I know!”—grimly. “I’ve had to play leading understudy in the scream; and there was Warren, tired to a frazzle—you know hewastired, Timothy——”
“I dare say he was,” Timothy was now the party of admission, “probably very tired.”
“Coming into his own house—— Oh, well,” Patsy straightened her sturdy shoulders and dabbed at one eye after the other. “It’s all over now. I’ve left him, and where’s the good of talking aboutwhat might have been? It’s only in stories that what might have been everis. In a story, now”—she arraigned the writer—“you’d have the hero and the hero’s mother appear out of nowhere and fall on the—er—pseudo-heroine’s neck, and offer a diamond necklace, while pseudo-heroine exchanged apologies; and the whole family would trip happily home on one another’s arms. Isn’t that so? Isn’t that just the sort of impossible thing you have happen in those Plain stories of yours?”
Timothy smiled, that same smile that had overcome Doromea’s prejudice against marriage. “If you were writing a Plain story, wouldn’t you have it end that way?” he asked, regarding diamonds unseeingly from behind his glasses.
“I—I never wrote a story,” began Patsy, fumbling with her veil.
Timothy looked at her. “You couldn’t help writing one,” he said, and his eyes were full of something that blinded Patsy’s. “At first, when there was just Claire and you and me, it was a story of adventure—of wild and thrilling dashes into thepreserve-closet, and raids upon the neighbors’ cherry trees; then”—his voice softened—“it was a fairy-story, the story of a wonderful new world, all dazzling and radiant with tender possibilities. Wasn’t it?” he insisted, gently. “Wasn’t it for a while a fairy-story, Little Sister?”
“For—for a while, yes,” acknowledged Patsy, very low, “but——”
“But the castles had to fall,” went on Timothy, gazing wistfully at Doromea’s gleaming ring, “the castles had to fall, and the Fairy Prince had to become just a Plain Husband, or he would never have fitted this Plain, Plain World; and the story had to become arealstory—ten times more wonderful than a fairy-story, if one reads it with an eye to life’s permanent values. Do you know”—Timothy took off his glasses and looked at them meditatively—“we people who write things—that is, you and I and all the world—are simply pestered to death by false climaxes? Silly midget episodes jump up and insist thatthey—one after one—are the great Turning Point of all our Plot. Pats, my dear”—he regarded her seriously—“I make it a point not to believe ’em. I do really; I say to myself: here, if you, the Big You, can’t recognize your own theme and its outworking as you’ve planned it, as you want it, then you aren’t much of a writer, that’s all. If you want your story to end a certain way, and can’t make it end that way, just on account of the interference of some puny bit of an incident, I say, well, after all, Tim, you ought never to have been allowed to write. And so”—the gray eyes smiled deeper—“just out of self-respect I have to make the end right, you see.”
Patsy glanced at him suspiciously. “That’sa story with a moral,” she asserted, though her voice was rather unsteady; “the most impossible kind of all.”
“It is,” confessed the writer, unabashed, “a story with a moral. But I refuse to admit it’s impossible. And if you will go back again to those rattles, I think you’ll refuse to admit it too. The——”
“Why”—Patsy had turned and walked a fewsteps back into the store—“why, it’s Warren! Warren, Timothy—and——”
“His mother is over looking at necklaces,” nodded Timothy, modestly. “Not diamond ones, but still——”
“She heard me say I wanted some pearls for my birthday,” Patsy murmured, guiltily. “She—she’s got her bag with her. They can’t have gone up to the house yet—— Timmie, Timmie dear—do you—do you suppose I might speak to Warren, just to tell him not to mind the pincushion note, you know—as long as he’s looking at rattles, Timmie——?”
“As long as he’s looking at rattles,” agreed Timothy, judiciously, “I should say you might speak to him—yes.”
And as Patsy flew across the aisle, he deliberately turned his back and bent his glasses once more on engagement rings. “So foolish to let oneself fear that a Plain Story won’t end well,” he mused to the ring with the fine platinum claws; after all, he was only a writer.