THE SWING OF THE PENDULUM

Jean Norris came slowly down the Library steps, passed the Chemistry Building, and took the worn path across the campus to the brush-lined creek. The hot stubble burned through her white canvas shoes and fine, gray dust powdered the mortarboard and black graduating gown she carried over her arm. With one stride she crossed the trickle of water and scrambled up the opposite bank.

"Lord!" She drew a deep breath of the shaded coolness and, taking off the mortarboard, ran the tips of her fingers under the heavy plait of pale brown hair. "Thank God this day is nearly over." She dropped to the carpet of dead leaves under the scrub oak and, with her knees drawn up to her chin and her arms clasped about them, looked out through the lattice of green. With definite appraisal her gray eyes went slowly from one building to another, out across the parched campus, past the grateful green of the entrance oaks, to the strip of town beyond and the Bay, glittering in the hot May sun. A tolerant smile flicked the corners of her mouth.

It was over at last. The four long, interminable years had culminated in a series of fitting ceremonies. All day streams of students had flowed through the buildings, swept the campus, overflowed into the town. Well dressed parents from San Francisco and country parents, uncomfortable in their unusual clothes, had rushed helplessly about, harassed by the necessity of remembering many directions, of being in certain spots at certain moments, of not asking foolish questions and so disgracing their children. Flustered and important, the graduating class had appropriated the earth.

Through the throng, instructors and assistant professors had moved with weary, anxious faces as if, in the graduating of each class, they heard another hour strike in the clock of their lives. Committees, distinct with colored badges, exhausted with importance, had misread hours and locations, given directions in college vernacular so explicit that no stranger could understand them, overlapped, performed one another's duties, apologized, pretended it was all going smoothly. Everywhere well-bred, managed confusion had exuded like a fog.

Exactly at twelve, in a silence so intense that even the sun hung waiting in the zenith, the graduating class had wound its last solemn pilgrimage across the campus. First the aged president, bent, as if in scholastic humility, beneath the great weight of his Doctor's scarlet hood. Then the guests of honor, sleek and prosperous men, followed by the professors in order of their rank and departments, and finally five hundred students, two by two, awed by the seriousness of what lay before them.

To Jean it had seemed hours while the aged president piped of Life's ideals, the security of college, the pitfalls of the world. Each May, for twenty years, he had stood so, each year a little more bent, and piped of the world beyond. Parents had furtively wiped their eyes and students made heroic resolves.

Then, with a trembling gesture of his strengthless hands, he had offered the graduating class to Life. One by one they had filed up, received their diplomas and hurried back to their places under scattered puffs of applause from relatives. It had seemed to Jean that it would never end, but forever black gowned figures would be going forward to get slender rolls of white paper.

In the general confusion of congratulations that followed, Jean had caught sight of her mother, slipping unobtrusively away. She had not expected her mother to seek her out, but there was something so small, so self-effacing in the figure hurrying to take up again the endless round of duties which the graduation had momentarily interrupted, that Jean's eyes had filled with tears and she had escaped from the chattering crowds as quickly as possible.

Now it was all over. The deserted campus lay silent in the late afternoon sun, and the empty buildings rested from the ceaseless chatter. So alive was the Future, waiting for the signal to start, that when the clock, hidden in the woodbine of the Library tower, struck four, Jean jumped to her feet, shook her shoulders as if freeing them from the clutch of the years behind, and turned away.

"It may be peaceful—I suppose it is. But so's the grave."

As she came into the cool dimness of the Girls' Rest Hall, Patricia Farnsworth rose from a hammock.

"Well, for the love of Mike, where have you been? I looked everywhere, until I couldn't stand another minute."

"If you looked as violently as you appear to be doing this instant, I don't wonder you didn't find me. Library—off the main line of travel—only safe place to-day."

"Never thought of it. Gee, but I'm all in. I wouldn't graduate twice for a thousand dollars."

Jean threw her cap and gown on a couch and stretched beside them.

"Well, twice wouldn't be so bad, if you did it just for yourself. But when you insist on doing it for the whole class, Pat, of course——"

"Oh, shut up. Somebody's got to do the dirty work. Fond parents loose their moorings and drift worse than sheep."

"'Moored sheep drifting!' Patsy, how on earth did you ever make Hoppy's English?"

Pat giggled down to the depths of her stocky body. "'Moored sheep,' is going some, but honestly they were worse. I told one bewildered old party a dozen times if I told him once, that all exercises were scheduled for out of doors and nothing was taking place in the coal-cellar of North Hall. He had a perfect obsession on the cellar. Wandered into it every time I turned my back."

"Well? How was he to know that everything was being managed—'with an executive precision never before equaled in the handling of so large a class'?"

"Get out. It's all right for you to talk when you wouldn't be on a committee to oblige the President of the United States."

"I would not. Of all the piffling rubbish! If you all feel as badly as you pretend to do at getting out of the cage, why don't you just go and get your diplomas and sneak away to weep in private? And if you're not sorry to get out, and feel like this—this mess of jubilation, why don't you say so? Conventional sentimentality! It makes my tummy turn over."

"You ought to be all turned over and spanked, Jean. Some day you're going to be found frozen stiff in your own logic."

"Pat Farnsworth, I wouldn't mind beginning instanter. I never was so hot in my life. Me for tea. On a day like this my English grandparent bellows for his tea."

"Bellow on, George III. I'll get it. I've been cooling off for an hour." Pat started for the kitchen with the same vigorous efficiency that ran her many committees, paused, and with an almost shy smile at Jean, crossed to the front door and locked it. "We don't want any one butting in, do we?"

Jean had risen and now she put her arm about Pat's shoulder.

"Oh, Patsy," she whispered, "when you're gone——"

"Don't Jean. Don't. Something will turn up. It must."

Jean's lips trembled. "When you say it like that I feel sure myself for a minute. But——"

"Are Tom and Elsie going to stay all summer?"

"Yes. This is the supreme chance of mummy's life to make herself uncomfortable, and she won't lose it."

"Don't, Jeany. I hate you when you're bitter like that."

"I can't help whether you do or not. It's true."

Jean's arm dropped from Pat's shoulder and she stood frowning. "I have never been able to make you understand, but nobody who hasn't lived and breathed and petrified in Christian Duty for years could. It's the wickedest, most hellish misconception the brain of man ever conceived to make this rotten scheme of things rottener. It's done more harm in the world than the Seven Deadly Sins put together. It——"

"Don't, Jean."

"You were brought up where religion was a kind of entrée, but with mummy it's the whole meal from soup to fingerbowls. God lives right in the house with us, and interferes in everything we do. Think of it, Patsy. For thirty years, mummy hasn't eaten a meal she didn't cook herself. That translation I'm going to do for Renshaw would give us a couple of weeks somewhere. And are we going? No. Because Tom Morton, who was some distant relative of father's, who's been dead for eighteen years and whom mummy didn't love when he was alive, chooses to appear from nowhere and dump himself and his fool wife and disgusting baby on us, mummy conceives it her duty to stay all summer cooking for them, and waiting on that idiot Elsie because she's going to have another. It makes my soul shiver, it makes me so mad. And I know what will happen. You talk about my logic. It's mummy who has all the logic in our family. Because she's saddled with these she'll say she might just as well have others, and we'll have every slab-chested old maid who comes to summer-school and wants to get the best food in town for nothing. Mummy will roast all July and August and say they were very nice people as long as they don't turn her out of her own house."

"Can't you make her see that——"

"Make her see! What chance have I against God Almighty? You don't understand the basis of the whole business. 'Whom the Lord loveth, He chasteneth.' When He stops loving He stops chastening. So it's up to the believers to get all the chastening there is."

"Don't, Jean. There must be more in it than that." Jean dabbed at her eyes and crossing to the sink filled the kettle for tea.

"Well, maybe there is. But when you live with it you're too near to see it. It's either that, all summer long, waiting for something to turn up out of the blue, or going away to teach. Sometimes I don't know which is worse."

"Now, Jean, we've hashed that over and settled it a million times. It's ridiculous. After all you are rather like mummy, you know. There are millions of things to do when you've got ordinary intelligence, but just because you loathe teaching you've picked it out as the one thing that'll come your way. How about that translation? How do you know it won't lead to something else?"

"Because I want it to so terribly hard, Patsy. I know, Pat, I suppose I do rant, but I guess I've got what Dr. Harper calls 'The Imagination for Pain.' I do want things so hard that I just can't imagine getting them."

"Doesn't say much for your imagination, no matter what Harper calls it. But it isn't that. It's just conceit, not another thing. You're so proud of that analytic brain of yours that you work it on everything. The minute you get a glimpse of some happiness you drag it into that mental laboratory and tear off its flesh, and you never stop until you've busted the poor old skeleton to bits. Why can't you let things go about with their clothes on?"

"I do."

"No, you don't. And when you do get it stripped it isn't any more of a truth than it was with its clothes on."

Pat's color deepened and she looked away in genuine embarrassment, for in the emotional reticence of their friendship they were oddly like two men. At long intervals Pat's love and admiration forced her to try and make Jean see things simply and clearly as she saw them herself.

"And it's such a lonely job, sitting there by yourself prying the barnacles off every old oyster that's been struggling to hold its clothes on ever since the world began."

The mixture of figures was too much for even Jean's very genuine mood.

"Oh, Patsy, you are the joy of my life. But I can't help it if I prefer my oysters without their clothes on."

"Yes, you can. And I hate to think of you not getting every scrap of joy there is in life. Sometimes it seems to me you just won't take things when they're right under your nose. Sometimes, you make me feel like a demented ant running about in a circle, and then again I know I'm right. While you sit round waiting for Life, it's being lived all round you. And yet, when you talk that way you make me feel as if you were sitting away off on a cloud somewhere, playing on a golden flute, while I'm down below leading a circus parade—beating a drum in a cloud of dust."

Jean sputtered into her cup and put it down for safety.

Pat grinned. "Well, the figure may be mixed, but that is precisely the way I feel. And I don't want you to sit up there always."

"But I will do things as soon as I get them to do. I can't pretend a doll's alive when I know it isn't."

"But they'll always be dolls if you go at them like that."

"No, they won't, Patsy. There must be some real live things in the world. And I'm going to get them. Even if I have to fall off my cloud and break my golden flute."

Jean bent and for a moment Pat's arms clasped her. Then they stood apart, smiling.

"All right. Go to it, old girl. Only yell in time so that I can get out from under. I never expect to have more than one drum in my life and I don't want it busted. You're no fairy."

When the dishes were finished they locked up, hung the key on its nail outside among the wistaria, and went. At the corner of the street, Pat turned toward the town, while Jean continued straight on toward the foot of the hills.

From his comfortable rocker on the porch, Tom Morton looked up from the evening paper.

"A great day, wasn't it?" His broad face beamed with unintelligent good humor as he put down the paper preparatory to a chat. "You look terribly important in that rig, Jean. Makes me feel like I don't know how to write my name."

"Well, you won't feel like that much longer. It's the hottest rig ever invented."

"You all did look kind of red round the gills. I say, Jean, who was that girl that got the gold medal? Didn't look to me like she was terrible smart."

"She stood higher than anybody else."

"Wasn't you due for something extra? Seems to me a girl that gets a job helping a professor at his own work must be some bright."

"It's not really much of a job, just a few weeks."

"Graft, them medals, I guess, like everything else. There isn't a field in this country to-day——"

But Jean had disappeared.

In the hall she almost collided with Elsie, trailing wearily from the kitchen with a great bowl of salad. Elsie put down the bowl and caught at her.

"Oh, Jeany! It was too wonderful. I never was so thrilled in my life! I don't believe I ever realized what college could mean before. If I only had had the chance! When I heard that darling old man talking about life—oh, Tommykins has just got to go when he grows up, if we starve to put him through."

"Can't be done without food, Elsie." By a supreme effort Jean succeeded in speaking lightly, but when Elsie showed signs of being about to kiss her, Jean escaped to the kitchen.

As she entered, Martha Norris emptied the creamed celery into a blue willow dish, and wiped her damp forehead with her apron. Her mouth drooped with fatigue but she smiled. Jean crossed the room quickly and took her mother in her arms.

"Mummy, you're not going to have a bad headache?" She framed the small face in both hands and looked down into her mother's faded eyes.

"Why, no, dear. It's just the heat and the excitement. It's been a big day for me, Jean. Then I got a little late and that always flurries me."

Jean drew her mother closer. "I'm not going to let you work like this any more. You're going to take things easier now I'm through, whether you want to or not."

"Now, Jeany, you know I'd be perfectly miserable idle."

"There's a lot of difference between idleness and this." Jean's hand swept the hot kitchen and the stove covered with pans. "You slave and what for? They don't even thank you."

Martha Norris laid her work-scarred hand on Jean's arm.

"You forget, dear—'Whatever ye do, do it all to the glory of God.' And it means everything, just as it says, even washing pots and pans."

Jean's arms dropped and it seemed to her that the rigid little body within stepped back almost with a sense of release. It was as if her mother had stood so long alone, that any other expression must always be a slight strain.

"Shall I serve the beef, mummy?" Jean picked up an oven cloth and moved to the stove.

"No, dear. It'll spatter and your dress is as clean as when you put it on. If you'll just cube up the cheese—I am getting behind and it's almost six now."

As Jean had predicted, the summer was a hard one. Martha Norris insisted on taking summer students to board, closing every argument against it with gentle insistence on her own preference.

"If you really want me to be happy, Jean, let me manage the house as long as I can."

That she might some day be physically dependent on others was the one fear that her deepest prayers had not been able to out-root. So Jean yielded.

All summer the house was crowded. The long, hot days were followed by long, monotonous evenings, filled with the complacent mediocrity of the fat Tom, the whinings of the ill-trained Tommykins, the nagging of Elsie.

The boarders ate hurriedly and had no topics of conversation except the schools from which they came and the courses they were taking. For the most part they were women past middle age, all driven by necessity of one kind or another, always striving to get as much for as little as possible. They seemed to Jean to have been cheated of something and to be resentful, some fiercely and some in a timid way that was pitiful. Most of them thoroughly hated their work, which they defended in high-sounding phrases against the attacks of outsiders, and tore to pieces among themselves.

When Jean hoped she would never have to teach, they looked at her venomously and said it was a wonderful work for which few were naturally fitted. They were like wax-works, most of them, rather scarred and worn, wound up and kept going by the fear of a younger generation, a newer output from the educational factories, who might usurp their places.

The only bright spot was the translation with Professor Renshaw. Jean buried herself for hours in the library and even succeeded sometimes in escaping dinner on the ground that it was too far to go home and back again in the evening.

But as the weeks passed and the work neared completion, she found it difficult to keep the hope that every letter from Pat held out:

"Something will happen. It must. You see, Horace will rescue you yet."

"Tell him to hurry," Jean wrote back toward the end of August. "I feel the walls of an ungraded country school closing about me."

With her mother, Jean never discussed the subject, for she knew that every night, to the long list of blessings Martha enumerated and the few favors she asked of Heaven, was added a petition that "a way would be opened up to Jean." It made Jean furious to be prayed over and sometimes she felt that having to teach would be almost compensated by proving the inefficacy of prayer.

But when the release came, Jean forgot her anger, swooped down upon Martha in the kitchen, took the paring knife from her hands, and waltzed her mother about the room.

"Now, mummy, you've simply got to stop. I cannot divulge the greatest news of the age while you pick worms out of an apple."

"There aren't any worms in these. I made Joe take those others back and change them. It was robbery. Well, dear, what is it?"

"Mummy, you've got to promise to be excited. I'm just about ready to go up in smoke."

"I wouldn't do that if I were you. I'd tell the person I wanted to excite what it was about. Did Dr. Renshaw double the check?"

"Better. Heaps."

"He's got more translation. I knew——"

"Oceans better than that."

"Well, I'm sure——" The clock struck five. Martha removed Jean's arms gently but firmly from her shoulders and turned back to the table.

Jean laughed. "I suppose I shall have to let you enjoy it in your own way. Go on and finish. Then wash your hands and sit down on the hardest, most uncomfortable chair and I'll tell you."

"Don't be silly, dear. It doesn't matter what it is, I shall have to have dinner on time to-night, won't I?"

"Yes, I suppose the animals would have to be fed even if the ark was sinking."

Jean sat on the edge of the table and watched her mother trim the pie edges, with sure, quick strokes and her whole attention. When Martha closed the oven door, she glanced at the clock to be sure of the moment. Before the astonishing news that Jean was about to divulge, the pies might be forgotten. Jean laughed aloud.

"Now." Martha smiled as she took the chair Jean indicated. "The court is in session."

"Well," began Jean, "I took that last lot up and he looked it through in that dead-fish fashion of his without a word. He always does, sits there and goggles as if he were just going to pounce on a mistake, and all the time I know it's all right. I didn't expect him to say anything nice, but I thought he might give me an opening and I had my little speech all ready. 'If this has been satisfactory,' et cetera, but I knew if he didn't say anything at all I could never get started. He freezes me clear through."

"The world wasn't made in a day, Jean."

"I know that. But I never could see why. If I could do a miracle at all, I'd have done a whopper."

Her mother's eyes filled with tears and Jean jumped down and knelt beside her.

"I'm sorry, mummy. I didn't mean to hurt you. It was cheap. Only that was such an endless ten minutes until he took a bundle of letters out of his pocket. He said he had something he thought I might be interested in, and then that human fossil actually pawed over those papers three distinct times and grunted and shook his head and wondered whether he'd lost it and began all over again while I stood wondering."

"That seems the usual method of announcing news among scholars." A sly smile twinkled in Martha's eyes.

"But honestly I nearly died. I was trembling like a leaf."

"Jean!"

"Worse. Shaking with ague. Then right out of the bundle he'd looked through a million times, he drew a letter and handed it over. The Mercantile Library in San Francisco wants a cataloguer and asks him if he knows one. The head librarian is a friend of his and he's recommended me. Do you hear, mummy Norris? I've got a job, got a job."

For a moment Martha did not answer. She sat with her head bent and her tired hands at rest in her lap. Then she looked up and smiled.

"When do you begin?"

"I'm going over to see about it to-morrow."

"You're not absolutely sure?"

"Yes, I am. I'm going to be sure to-night even if I never get it."

"Now, Jean. You——"

"Don't, mummy, please don't. Don't tell me any more about patience and the right thing coming. I've got to get this or I'll die."

"It takes a lot to kill." Martha spoke quietly, and getting up, went over to the oven.

Jean felt as if a spring inside her had cracked and wondered why it was always so when she tried to talk to her mother. Outwardly Martha Norris was the least emotional person in the world but she managed to extract a lot of it from those near her. The most casual conversation usually ended in a tensity out of all proportion to its importance and left Jean with a sense of the futility of trying to make things different.

It was with a distinct effort that Jean put her arms again about her mother.

"Now, mummy, I am going to get it. What's more, I'm going to move you over to the city, into a place that won't be big enough for you to have any duty to any relative of anybody's. So there. Now kiss me, like a nice, obedient mother should."

Martha smiled, and standing on her tiptoes kissed her big daughter. Jean went whistling from the room.

When she had gone Martha Norris closed her eyes for a moment and a look of perfect faith and devotion flooded her. In such moments she was beautiful, like some frail saint, glowing with the fire of self-surrender, strengthened beyond the power of human understanding. But no human being had ever seen Martha alone with her God.

The next morning Jean left the house early. The sun touched the Bay to millions of glittering points, and beyond it, wrapped in a haze of smoke and coming heat, the waiting city sprawled on her hills. Jean could feel it, a magnet drawing her and all these strangers massed together on the sunny deck.

As the boat neared the dock she went and stood in the stern and looked back at the little town, a mere spot at the base of the Berkeley hills. In her very definite sense of escape there was a touch of sadness. She was like a person who, having escaped from a terrible catastrophe, looks back from a point of safety and mingles with his sincere gratitude, a regret for some small souvenir he has been unable to take with him. She thought of Elsie in her dragging kimono waiting on Tom at breakfast; of the dead, habitual kiss they would exchange when he started to look for the job he never found; of Tommykins, bewildered in his disordered world of alternate slapping and petting. And of her mother, trotting about in her endless routine. She was sorry for them all.

Waiting in the outer office of the Chief Librarian, Jean felt the Future coming towards her, stepping swiftly through the stillness, a stillness vibrant with accomplished purpose, the secure accomplishment of many thousands of books. So sharp was the feeling that, when at last footsteps moved behind the door marked "Private," Jean rose as if about to face a mysterious force, made suddenly material for her understanding.

"This is Miss Norris?"

The Chief Librarian stood before her. He was tall and thin and gray, with long bony hands that looked as if they would always be cold. He was like a new chisel, straight and narrow and sharp-edged. He waved Jean back to her seat and took one himself. Then he sat, staring beyond her, as if his progress through the silent realms of spirit had been rudely halted by this collision with a corporeal body.

"You've done library work before?" The question came so unexpectedly that Jean started.

"No." The monosyllable reverberated through the ordered stillness. She felt as if she had thrown a stone at the Chief Librarian.

"Um." In the mental isolation of his daily life, this misfortune arrested his pity. "I believe you did some Latin translation for Dr. Renshaw?"

"Yes, the Odes of Horace."

"Promising—quite. But of course Horace is not library work." The tone conveyed that this was not Horace's fault, however. "Still, in this work you will find, Miss Norris, that every scrap of human knowledge is profitable. I might almost say necessary. It is its wonderful variety, roots in all fields, that makes our work so interesting."

"It must."

"Exactly. Now the question is, Miss Norris, would you be willing to begin at the bottom, sorting? Cataloguing comes next, and then——" But as if fearing that he was being carried away in an excess of enthusiasm, he qualified. "Of course that is if we find it mutually satisfactory."

"I should be willing to begin anywhere. And I have done a little sorting and cataloguing. The library I used for Horace was in something of a mess, and I had to straighten it out before I could begin."

"Exactly. But you will understand, Miss Norris, that no part of our library is in a mess." The shadow of a smile touched his lips and was gone. It was as if a cosmic joke, millions of miles off, had been softly whispered to him. "And now, as I have a very busy morning, I will hand you over to my assistant, Miss MacFarland."

He touched an electric button in the wall. With no preliminary sound the outer door opened.

"Miss MacFarland, this is Miss Norris, recommended by Dr. Renshaw. She will help at first with the new consignment."

His tone admitted Miss MacFarland to the depths of his official being. She nodded.

"Will you come with me?"

Without waiting for Jean to answer she began moving noiselessly away on her broad, rubber-soled shoes. She was very slight and gave an effect of deep brownness. She wore a brown serge skirt and a brown silk waist with a brown Scotch pebble pin. She had brown eyes that looked muddy through the thick, myopic glasses, and a braid of dank, brown hair framed her narrow face.

Through the big reading room, empty at this hour, Jean followed, down a rear stairway, along a narrow cemented hall into a storeroom, dim with a ground-glass window protected by an iron grating. Miss MacFarland indicated the great number of packing cases by a nod as she wound her way among them to a farther door. She might have been a guide in the underworld leading the latest spirit to its appointed task. She opened a door, and a sudden glare of morning sunshine filled the place.

"This is the room you will use for the present."

There were two large windows open now on a tiny strip of lawn that ran along this side of the building. A redwood table and bench took up one end of the room. There was nothing else in it except six huge packing cases.

"I'll send you down an apron and sleeve protectors and have Timothy unpack the cases."

She looked about to make sure she had forgotten nothing, and moved toward the door.

"Is there any special rotation you want the cases opened in?"

Jean asked it to pretend experience more than from any idea of its mattering. But she saw by the expression behind the thick glasses that it did make a difference and that Miss MacFarland had forgotten to tell her.

"I was going to tell Timothy, but perhaps I had better mark them."

From the pocket of her black apron she drew a piece of red chalk.

"The political economies are needed in a hurry and they are in this crate. Then the histories, natural science, miscellaneous, fiction and poetry. If you get into difficulties you can telephone up."

When she had gone Jean stood for a moment just where she was.

"Oh Patsy, a corpse has a sense of humor compared to a librarian! But it's nine a week."

Every morning at eight Jean crossed the Bay and every night at six she returned. The trains and the boats were always crowded, and very shortly Jean came to know certain faces and to watch for them. She liked to speculate as to what these people did, how long they had been doing it and whether they liked it. When she had made up her mind about a man or woman it always disappointed her to have to readjust her deductions by catching scraps of conversation that upset her theories. She often had to do this, however, because she was always making sweeping generalizations based on tenuous details. There were certain groups that came and went together, and although they seemed to have no connection beyond this short trip twice a day, they always looked eagerly for each other as if in dread of having to make the journey alone. They resented ever having to sit anywhere except in their usual places, and each group surrounded itself with a barrier of self-centered interest that separated it from every other self-centered group.

At first Jean ate lunch with Miss MacFarland and two other women workers, but, as she wrote to Pat, it made her feel "like a mouse nibbling at the edges of a book," and as soon as she could, broke the arrangement, and took her lunch to a nearby park. Here in the seclusion of a thick hedge, little birds came for crumbs and beyond the hedge, unseen people crunched the gravel and Jean caught scraps of their talk, unconnected bits, like scraps of patchwork.

She liked to tell Miss MacFarland about these unseen people, draw pictures of the comedies and tragedies beyond the hedge, because Miss MacFarland always listened so politely and looked so puzzled. Her thick brown eyes searched vaguely for the point of the story, and Jean knew it was only because the cataloguing was well done, that Miss MacFarland did not consider her a lunatic.

But as the weeks passed and the newness of the work dulled to a routine of writing the names of books on cards and putting numbers after them, Jean began to wonder whether in time, she, too, might not come to look vaguely for the point of a story, and prefer to drink strong tea in a stuffy room. At first the idea amused her and she elaborated it in a whimsical letter to Pat, but with the coming of the winter rains, the whimsy died, and the vision of herself in broad-toed shoes and black silesia sleeve protectors, began to follow her home every night. Now the crowds on the boat were damp and peevish and, when the boat docked, each scuttled for his own shelter, indifferent to the others.

But it was on wet Sundays that Miss MacFarland persisted beyond Jean's power to dislodge. Then Tom lounged all day in smoking jacket and slippers, dropping into brief slumber in his chair, while Tommykins cut up the colored supplement of the day's paper on the floor. Martha prepared elaborate meals and went to St. Jude's in the early morning, at four in the afternoon and eight at night. Between cooking and church, she read the lives of Anglican saints, alone in her room.

With the lighting of the street lamps on these wet Sunday nights, the town sank into the stillness of death. Only once, during the evening, did the silence ever part, to let the worshipers from evening service slip through. With soft padding of rubbered feet, a few figures slipped by the window, stealthily, as if afraid of desecrating the holiness of the Sabbath by any motion of their bodies.

At exactly five minutes before ten, Martha came cool-skinned from the dampness. If Jean was in bed, Martha always sat for a few moments on the edge. They never had anything particular to talk about, because nothing ever happened in the interim of her absence. But in these visits, Martha would strip bits of the sermon from their religious setting and offer them off-hand to Jean's intelligence. She never urged Jean to go to service, but Jean knew that in this simulated comradeship on the bed, her mother was trying to keep her in touch with "holy things," to counteract in a small part the godlessness of her days. And sometimes it made her want to cry; the little figure, carefully stripping away the phrases that annoyed, and trying to link up some old, dead form with the rush of life, was so alone in all that meant most to it. Alone with God and unaware of loneliness. So content with nothing.

It was after a particularly depressing Sunday in January that Jean came back to work on Monday morning with so fixed a certainty of becoming in the end like Miss MacFarland, that not even the relief of an unexpected blue sky after days of rain, and respite of lunch in the park had been able to dispel it. Now, in mid-afternoon, she stood by the open window, waiting for Timothy with a fresh supply of books. It was one of those perfect days between rains when sunshine filters clean air, and cool little breezes lurk in the shade. The narrow strip of lawn below the window sent up a spicy sweetness that made Jean resent the walls about her, three more hours of cataloguing and all the restrictions that hemmed one in against one's will. The air had a livingness in it that mocked any gratitude for these few moments she was free to enjoy it. Looking up at the fleecy tufts of white clouds drifting in the blue, Jean felt as a very poor person feels watching the wasteful extravagance of the rich. Something in her called to the perfect freedom of the little clouds, the inexhaustible blueness in the sky, the tingle in the air. She felt stifled, held by something she could not see, kept from something she had never had.

Jean was decidedly cross. She wondered whether, if she told Miss MacFarland she was ill and wanted to leave earlier, because it was such a lovely day, the thick brown eyes would bore into the truth, and what would happen if they did? Would Miss MacFarland ever forgive an assistant who wanted to stop working because there were little white clouds in the sky?

"Oh Lord!" Jean leaned out the window, drawing deep sniffs of the damp earth.

"Miss Norris."

Jean jerked back quickly and the blood flooded under her fair skin at the sight of the Chief Librarian standing beside her.

"Miss Norris, this is Mr. Herrick. Franklin Herrick of the Sunday Times."

He beckoned to some one still in the shadow of the storeroom and the next moment a tall man with a young face and thick fair hair stood looking at Jean. Jean never knew afterwards whether it was her own embarrassment or not, but in that first glance at Franklin Herrick she had a strange impression of receiving a very distinct picture of something naturally indistinct. He gave a feeling of great physical strength and yet looked as if he would always be too lazy to use it. His eyes were clear, deep blue and far apart, as if he went through life seeing very clearly. But the lower part of his face was heavy and his mouth contradicted his eyes. It was soft and full and not at all hidden under a small, close-cropped mustache. There was something large and curved and whitish about this tall man standing before her, with the faintest touch of amusement in his eyes, that made Jean think of the big gulls that circled over the ferryboat night and morning. She bowed slightly and wished she could stop blushing.

"Mr. Herrick is doing some special work and will need Division Z 21, which I understand is not yet catalogued. If you have no objection he might work down here, as Miss MacFarland tells me you are on Z 21 now and it would save him time."

The Chief Librarian spoke in a dry, thirsty tone and with fixed pauses, so that one got the impression of hearing the punctuation. And although he asked permission, his tone conveyed that Franklin Herrick would work in the basement whether it were convenient to Jean or not.

"That will be all right. I began Z 21 Saturday." Jean felt compelled to say something and at the same time the uselessness of saying it. "There's a small table in the storeroom. I'll have Timothy bring it in."

"Oh, no, please don't do that. It's not necessary—unless you prefer it."

Franklin Herrick spoke rapidly in a high, thin voice. It caught and held Jean's attention as the tinkle of a small bell would have done, if unconsciously she had been expecting a gong. She raised her eyes and looked at him, her own embarrassment gone. Herrick understood. Extraordinarily sensitive to the impression he made, especially on women, he knew that the thin quality of his voice had destroyed his first impression of strength. The feminine timbre of his voice was a trial to Herrick and always made him feel at the mercy of the person who noticed it. He had tried for years to deepen the tone and usually made a conscious effort at a first meeting. But for some reason, coming on this big, fair woman sniffing the air, had made him feel as though he knew her, linked them in mutual understanding against the Chief Librarian and made them seem like old acquaintances. The little incident annoyed him intensely.

He crossed to the table and appropriated one end by pushing back the books in a business-like fashion.

"I do not need much space and this will do. I shall probably be through in a day or two."

At the same instant Timothy appeared whistling, with a truckload of books. At sight of the Chief Librarian he checked the whistle, just as Jean had stopped sniffing, so suddenly that even the Chief Librarian turned and looked curiously.

Jean's eyes met Herrick's, and they smiled. When Herrick smiled at a woman he seemed to include her in something very intimate, something fine and delicate, a little beyond words. In some way it shamed Jean for the surprise she had felt at the quality of his voice. It was as if she had shown surprise at some physical defect.

"If there is anything that Miss Norris cannot do for you, if you will just ring that bell." The Chief Librarian looked vaguely about, lost in a world not his own, and went.

Separated by the length of the table, Jean and Herrick stood looking after him. Then, simultaneously, they looked at each other.

Jean laughed.

"He made me feel as if I were doing something disgraceful."

"Worse. Something not quite nice." Franklin Herrick chuckled. When Herrick laughed his voice was higher and thinner than when he spoke, but when he chuckled there was something warm and young about it. Herrick had discovered this very early in life and rarely laughed aloud. When women first heard Franklin Herrick chuckle they usually had an impulse to touch him, which impulse they called maternal or were afraid of according to their past experience. Jean, however, had no impulse to touch him, but she noticed the chuckle and liked it.

As she took her place at the table and watched Herrick cross the room for a chair, she felt that the set of his shoulders, the texture of his clothes, the very motions of his body as he lifted the chair, were not external, but expressed something within the man, just as the deft motions of Martha's hands expressed her indefatigable obedience to the drudgery of small things. And Jean liked the thing they expressed. Without defining it in words, she felt that it was something indestructibly young and buoyant and clean. It belonged with his eyes and not at all with the rather heavy lines of his chin and throat.

With a smile, Herrick drew forward a pile of books, and in a moment was hard at work. But only the surface of his brain was concerned with his notes. He knew that, from time to time, Jean glanced at him, and that, for some reason, she had changed her first estimate of him. Vibrant to any criticism, Herrick resented the implication that there had been a readjustment, and yet delighted in the result. For Jean looked as if she usually made up her mind instantly from trifles and seldom changed. She looked stronger and spiritually simpler than any woman he had ever met, as if she had been born and raised in wide spaces and carried the standards of the mountains with her. He could not picture her large, white hands ever trembling, nor her clear, gray eyes clouding with indecision, but he was sure that if he let the least hint of this sureness into his eyes, her fair skin would flush.

It was almost five when Herrick slipped the notes into his pocket and pushed back his chair.

"Through?" The brusqueness of Jean's tone annoyed him, for he had decided to stay and talk for a few moments, and the indifference in her question made him feel that Jean had shut a door he was about to push a little open.

"Yes. For the present. But I shall have to put in some licks to-night." He picked up a volume and looked inquiringly at her. "I don't suppose there would be any objection to taking this out, even if it isn't ready for circulation yet?"

"I don't know. It is against the rules."

"Perfectly good reason for taking it then."

"Just let me have it a moment. I'll make out a slip and number it."

He returned it with the look of one submitting to a foolish respect for childish rules and Jean felt like Miss MacFarland as she wrote Herrick's name and the name of the book on a pink slip. Herrick put it into his pocket.

"Thanks. It will help a lot having this. You can picture me digging my way through it in the small, wee hours, Miss Norris," he added as he took his hat and this time turned to the door.

The assumption that she would think of him at all annoyed her, and kept him in her memory almost constantly for the next two days. Jean laid this to the interruption of the usual routine. Having the mechanical intervals of Timothy's appearance broken by the unexpected advent of a newspaper man, who turned the rules of the library about, gave her several contradictory impressions of himself and ended by making her feel like a child, naturally stood out sharply in her day's work. So for two days Jean continued to think about Herrick and to be annoyed because she did.

On Thursday Herrick appeared suddenly about noon. He was in a great hurry. He returned the book, and took another, which he handed to Jean to note as she had done before. He seemed preoccupied and made no effort at conversation. It was evidently an afterthought that he turned on the threshold and called back:

"Paper goes to press to-day. Haven't time to breathe."

Jean had wondered at his altered manner, but his explanation seemed to accuse her of having shown it. She gave the slightest possible nod to acknowledge that she had heard him and went on with her work.

On Friday Herrick did not come. Jean wondered whether he was through with his work now that the paper had gone to press, and just what special duties going to press involved. It sounded interesting and much more vital than anything connected with a library. An incongruous picture of the Chief Librarian rushing something to press tickled her fancy.

On Saturday, Herrick appeared directly after lunch.

"Well, back again." Something in the tone, the look that accompanied them, showed that he had missed coming, and now entered again into a congenial atmosphere. It seemed to throw them a long way forward in mutual understanding.

"Going to press must be a ferocious business." Jean smiled across the table and made no effort to pretend work. When Jean smiled, something cold in her face melted.

"It is. I always feel as if I had been caught in a cyclone, carried violently round in a circle and deposited in the spot I started from. You see there's the same pother every week, and we're always caught in the same rush. Newspaper work's a rotten grind, anyhow."

"To outsiders it always sounds nerve-racking excitement. What on earth would you do if you had to catalogue books all day?"

"That is pretty bad." Herrick's eyes softened as they always did when he was making a woman understand his understanding.

Jean felt that without meaning to she had told this stranger a great deal about herself. Almost as if she had told him of her mother, of Tom and Elsie and Tommykins and the long, interminable Sundays. She flushed. Instantly the understanding vanished from Herrick's eyes and he shrugged indifferently.

"I suppose anything we have to stick at feels the same way."

"Did you get your work done the other night?" Jean asked it after a pause in which she wondered what she could say that wouldn't sound as if she had been thinking about him.

"Oh yes, indeed. But it was a hard pull. If you knew me better, Miss Norris, you would congratulate me on that achievement." He looked like a mischievous boy expecting to be punished.

Jean smiled in sympathy. "What on? Sticking to a disagreeable job till it's done?"

"Well, put that way, it does sound rather bald. But you see The Bunch was having a blow-out and little Franklin had to stay in his attic and work. Maybe if you knew what The Bunch can do in the way of highjinks, even you'd be sorry for me."

"Maybe I would. Are they such terribly enticing affairs?"

"Oh, sometimes we get a bit rowdy, but usually we're perfectly harmless—just conversation and music and food and meeting each other. We're congenial and interested in the same things, and keep each other from getting into a rut. Sometimes when one of us goes away or comes back, or sells a picture or an article, we have an extra celebration. That's all."

"It sounds—awfully interesting."

Herrick leaned across the table and said in a boyish, hesitating fashion:

"We do have some pretty good times. If you think you'd care for it, I'd like immensely to bring you round some evening."

"I'd love to." Jean was a trifle breathless.

"Some of us have made good and some of us are—popularly nobodies. There's Matthews and Harcourt, landscape, and Fletcher has done some fine things in bronze. Tolletson's in drama production and Freeman, Gerald Freeman, is going to be heard of with short stories. Maybe you know his stuff. He had a story in Scribner's last month. Then there are the girls, none of them are exactly famous yet; and the rest of us just jog along."

But Jean had stopped listening at Gerald Freeman's name. She had read the story and sent it to Pat. Its delicate subtlety had haunted her for days. And now she was being asked to meet him and others like him. She was being asked as if it were a favor to the big man with the kind eyes, sitting across the table. Jean tried to keep the excitement out of her voice as she answered.

"Yes, I read that story. It was so very—perfect."

"Yes. His things are that, those half elusive, dream things. They always make me think of small, finely carved ivories."

"I should like to meet him very much."

"Well, Freeman himself isn't here now. He's getting too famous to stay long in one spot, but—there's the rest of us."

Jean felt that she had been rude in her special interest and added quickly: "I'd be just as pleased meeting 'the rest of us.'"

"Then we'll settle it right now. Saturday's the best night. The unfortunates don't have to get up early, and we generally have more hilarity than just the usual nightly dinner. Could you come to-night?"

"I'm afraid I can't to-night."

Jean had never wanted to do anything so much in her life, but she could not picture herself ringing up her mother and saying that she would not be home to dinner.

"It is rather short notice. How about next Saturday? Have you that free?" Herrick saw that she wanted to come and wondered why she couldn't.

Under her pleasure that the invitation had not been postponed indefinitely, Jean had an almost irresistible desire to laugh at the idea of her having any night that was not free.

"Yes. Next Saturday's all right."

"Then I'll call for you about seven?"

"I don't live on this side."

The difficulties of meeting some one at seven, when she would be through by half past five, occurred to her, and she wondered where girls met men and how she could pretend this was not as new and exciting a situation as it was.

"Great. You get through about five, don't you? I'll call here and we'll find some way to kill the time between."

"Fine." Jean made the monosyllable as comradely as she could, and flattered herself that she had carried it off very well.

Herrick turned to the books and in a few moments was hard at work.

Jean's confusion had delighted him, and destroyed the slight annoyance he had felt at being carried away by such a foolish impulse as to ask her at all. It would be delicious to watch the reactions of this shy woman in the sophisticated world of The Bunch. He decided to say nothing about her beforehand, and enjoy to the full their surprise when he appeared,—a little late, he would see to that—with Jean in tow.

"She'll hit them like a blast of north wind. I shouldn't wonder if Kitten doesn't actually shiver."

The prospect of watching The Kitten shiver pleased Herrick immensely.

Exactly at half past five Herrick came. The thick hair had been freshly cut, and he wore a suit that Jean had not seen before. He looked young and very happy and full of joy in life. As they came down the library steps and joined the after-matinée crowds, it seemed to Jean that Herrick stood out from other men, bigger, cleaner, stronger. There was something in him, burning below the flesh, that whitened and sharpened him, so that the lines which were sometimes dull and heavy when he bent intently over the books across the table, were now finely cut. He walked beside her as if he were walking lightly on springy ground, and the memory came back to Jean how, the first time she had seen him, she had thought of a gull, a strong, white gull, poised in flight. It was impossible to believe that it was only two weeks ago, and that she had seen him, in all, not more than seven or eight times.

Herrick made no effort at conversation as they threaded their way through the crowds. He was not at all sure of his ground with Jean, for his first interest had deepened in the two weeks to an intensity that surprised him. To be interested in a woman who was not obviously pretty, whose life lay well within the circle that The Bunch called the Outland, who made no effort to attract him, who never, by the slightest feminine trick, tried to rouse his interest, a woman who had been through college and was earning her own living and yet had something cloistered about her. She piqued Herrick's curiosity. One by one he had seen his small efforts drop like spent arrows against the wall of her sincere but unemotional interest.

"She's either the most subtle thing that God ever made, or else——" Herrick did not know what else. But he would find out.

When they had left the more crowded streets behind, Herrick stopped and looked at his watch.

"It's only six, and it's not much good getting to Giuseppe's before seven. What shall we do? Go round to Chinatown and have tea, or would you like to go up to Flop's studio? He's the father of The Bunch, you know, and maybe you'd feel as if you knew him better if you saw some of his stuff first."

He stood looking down at her with a smile that consulted only her preference, and showed none of his own eagerness that she should choose the latter. When Franklin Herrick was trying to break through the reserves of a woman, he looked like Sir Galahad going to battle. It always filled the woman with a rush of tenderness, and a longing to stand for something fine and real in his life.

"Besides, I'd like to show you some of Flop's stuff for its own sake, and we won't get a chance after dinner, when the whole Bunch is there. We are a noisy lot, Miss Norris. You must be prepared for anything."

"Oh, I can make a lot of noise myself. And I'd like awfully to see the pictures."

"This way, then. We'll go down through The Coast, if you don't mind. It's quicker."

His tone apologized for the street into which he turned, in a way that made Jean want to laugh at the idea of her needing protection, and at the same time delighted her. She had never been in this part of the city before, and she looked about her with interest.

Skirting the edge of Chinatown, beyond the boundaries of the big bazaars, they touched the poorer fringe of the Latin quarter, where dirty black-eyed babies tumbled in dark doorways, and tired women with bundles of food under their shawls hurried by, dragging hungry, screaming children by the hand. Here the narrow streets struggled up steep hillsides, as if in a forlorn hope of reaching quiet above. Everywhere was dust and noise and the harsh voices of men screaming at each other in the rough Sicilian dialect.

Then down through the sordid section that lies between the White World and the Yellow, where mean, gray houses cling hopelessly together, like the poor for comfort and outcasts for respectability. Where the tides of Barbary Coast wash the world beyond, Herrick paused. Then he plunged in.

It was early and The Coast had not yet come to life, but to Jean it was filled with the rumblings of the swelling tide. A drunken sailor lurched from a dance-hall. A mechanical piano ground out a popular rag. A painted woman with sodden, indifferent eyes looked from a window and laughed shrilly. Other women, powdered to a deathly whiteness, turned to stare after Jean and Herrick. Their eyes were sometimes scornful, sometimes curious. When they brushed close to Jean she felt herself turn a little cold and sick.

Once when she was a small child, while playing in the garden Jean had accidentally plunged her foot through the planking of an unused well and had felt the cold blackness sucking up. For months after she had had a terror of that end of the garden, and could feel the bottomless blackness drawing her. Now the same feeling reached out from these painted women, and Jean drew a little closer to Herrick. There was something horrible and black and hidden, the same black oozing mud that lay at the bottom of the old well. These men and women who moved and talked like herself and Herrick were down there, crawling about. She drew nearer still to Herrick. For the first time he touched her, slipping his hand under her elbow.

"We'll soon be out of it."

Then he began to talk of his work at the library. He had another week of it before he would be through.

"And I'll be glad of it in many ways. If I had to go on much longer digging that dry rot out of books I'd quit my job."

"But in a way you put life in it, rearrange it, make it your own."

Herrick laughed. Like the echo of a memory Jean's repugnance to that high, thin laugh returned. But it seemed trivial now that she really knew him.

"There's nothing to make one's own in the whole business. It hasn't any permanence. Not a scrap of reality. It is not my work."

Herrick had said this so often that he believed it, and his voice was bitter with reproach. "You see it's not so bad so long as you don't want with your whole soul to do something else. It's the knowing and not being able to get at it that's hell."

Jean remembered her hatred of teaching and the misery of that last college year. And she had only known what she hated and not at all what she wanted. What was it that this man wanted so much that the thought of it changed his voice and made him seem suddenly older? She longed to ask, but felt that he had expected her to understand and she did not want to fail him. The next moment he answered it himself.

"Several years ago I mapped out a novel and I've never had time to start it. I can't work sneaking moments. I'd have to have a straight sweep—and so I don't start it. But it gnaws there just the same."

"'Gnaws.' That's exactly what things do when they have no outlet."

He turned quickly. "Do you write, too?"

"No."

"But there's something you want to do. You couldn't understand if there weren't."

Jean shook her head. "It's mostly concerned with not wanting to do things. I have no special talent."

"How do you know? Have you tried anything?"

The irritation at her modesty was flattering. Jean flushed.

"No. But I have no faith in hidden genius. I'm twenty-four, you know, and it would have showed before this."

Herrick felt that she would have confessed to thirty-four just as readily. Her frankness repelled him.

"I don't know about that. I don't believe that we all instinctively know what we want to do. Most of us have to live some time and be hurt a lot before we find out very much about ourselves."

"I suppose we do," she said humbly.

Herrick thrilled at the note in Jean's voice. But he went on in the same serious way as if he were being forced almost against his judgment to let Jean into his confidence.

"For years the longing to get things down on paper haunted me, but I only knew that I was miserable and felt stifled. It wasn't till I came to the city, here, that the puzzle suddenly fitted into place." He stopped and made a quick sweeping gesture with both hands. "Wouldn't it be great to get all this, all the heat and noise and mud and life, to get the whole hot, seething pain on paper! God, what a picture!"

Something came into Jean's throat and hurt.

"It would be glorious." She felt that Herrick had been granted a fineness of spiritual vision she could never hope for. It coarsened her that she had seen only the dirt and squalor of the vice, while the man beside her had grasped something beneath that linked it up with reality even as they both knew it, a kind of cosmic unity too finely toned for her ears.

"You must do it. You must. Don't let an impulse like that die. It's worth any sacrifice, anything. Can't you really get at it?"

Herrick looked quickly away. "Perhaps," he said shortly, "some day, if the conditions are right, I may."

He did not take Jean's arm again and in a few moments they came to an old loft building with a dark, yawning entry.

"Here we are." They turned into the blackness, and Jean felt it close about them.

"It's a rickety old hole, but Flop would suffocate any place else. Perhaps I'd better take your hand. The stairs aren't all they might be and you don't know where the broken places are."

Jean gave him her hand and they went up through the blackness together. At the bottom of the last short flight they stopped.

"Flop usually lights the lantern. He must have forgotten. Just wait a moment." He left her and ran lightly up ahead. Jean could not see him, but she could feel him looming above her on the landing, and hear the low rustle of his clothes as he felt hurriedly through them for a match. She had never before been so alone with a man.

"Oh, shucks!"

The word dropped on the tensity of Jean's mood like a drop of ice water. She wished he had said "damn." It was like hearing a lion say "Tut!"

"I guess I'll have to lead you. I haven't a match and there are none on the ledge. Flop must be out."

They went up the few remaining steps, along a narrow hall to a door at the end of a passage. Herrick turned the handle and stepped back to let Jean enter. But Jean did not move.

"Oh," she cried softly. And again: "Oh."

"I'm glad you like it," he whispered after a moment, and drew her gently across the threshold and closed the door.

Every cent that Flop had made for the last three years, and much that he had borrowed, had gone to the fitting of this room. The walls were of gray, satin-smooth eucalyptus. Soft, worn rugs lay before great couches piled with pillows. Along the west wall, wide windows ran the length of the room, from the rough stone fireplace to the glass door that opened on a tiny iron balcony. All the windows were shaded now with heavy green curtains run on silken ropes. The afterglow of a scarlet sunset came in rose and pale gold through the curtain openings, and lay in pools of light on the dull rugs.

Herrick's hand took Jean's without pressure, so that it seemed part of the quiet beauty of the room, and they crossed to the window. The hills beyond the Bay etched themselves in faint purple and amethyst on the paling sky. They stood silent, looking out across the low roofs, to the Bay, with its wall of hills and the white ferryboats moving majestically in the dignity of distance.

At last Jean turned back to the room.

"One could do great things here," she said slowly as if thinking aloud, unconscious of Herrick's presence.

"Yes. One could do great things, if one were happy."

The emphasis drew her attention and she looked at him.

"Isn't he happy? It doesn't seem possible, quite, to live in a room like this and not be happy."

"Flop? I don't know. As happy or unhappy as every one else, I suppose."

Herrick's eyes sought the Bay again. She was impossible as a grown woman. She was more like a boy, with her annoying way of looking straight into his eyes, and her silly, impersonal interpretations. No doubt she thought that all Flop needed was a room like this, and twenty-four hours a day, to paint masterpieces. And Herrick thought of all the love and hate, the reckless joy and pain that had been born and killed among the soft rugs and old tapestries and small, pure marbles.

"I don't know that it matters so much, after all, whether we are happy or not, as long as we are alive."

Jean spoke with difficulty, for Herrick's sudden turning away made her feel that she had really known him only two weeks, and knew nothing whatever of his life. In the shadow of the green curtains, his face looked whiter and the soft curve of his lips hard, as if he were remembering something that hurt very much. A tremendous necessity to comfort him swept Jean into speech, to make him see that nothing mattered except being alive as he must be, not hampered and swaddled with the crowding of uncongenial personalities. She contrasted Herrick with his ability and definite ambition and friends, with the long, dead evenings and the killing Sundays with Tom and Elsie and her mother.

"'To see Life clearly and see it whole,'" quoted Jean, and her voice shook slightly with the force of her own conviction.

The blood rushed into Franklin Herrick's eyes, and he shook his head as if to clear them from the mist. Again he felt that Jean was eluding him, slipping away from the niche in which he had just placed her. But this time she was flitting ahead of him, tantalizing in her promised capacity to feel. He wanted to put his hands on her strong shoulders and force something into those clear gray eyes, filled now with confusion at her own unusual enthusiasm.

"We'll straighten out all the philosophy of the world some other night," he said abruptly. "But now I want to show you Flop's latest. And, whether he's happy or not, it's great stuff."

Herrick brought the canvas from the easel, propped it on a table and lit a small bronze sconce, which he held so that the light fell on the picture and on Jean's head.

From the shadow of a dusky, smudged wood, the nude figure of a woman stood out with startling whiteness. At her feet a little brook ran over white pebbles. There was a feeling of moonlight among the trees, as if somewhere a full moon were shining in the warm night. But the little brook, deep in the heart of the wood, was cold, and the woman longed and at the same time dreaded to enter it. The warm blackness of the trees held her, like the embrace of an unseen lover. But the cool voice of the brook called steadily and one felt sure that in the end she would go. She was bent a little forward as if listening to the brook, so that the curves of her slim body, the small, white breasts, partly veiled in the red-gold hair that fell about her shoulders, leaned into the darkness.

"She's alive," Herrick whispered, and going to the canvas passed his hand lightly from the red-gold hair to the small, white feet deep in the damp grass.

The blood flooded Jean's face. Instantly Herrick was angry with himself, but the call had been too strong. He covered his anger with surprise as he looked quietly at Jean.

"Come. I want to show you the rest of the things, too."

Holding the sconce high, he moved about the room, pointing out his favorites among Flop's work.

Jean followed, making flat comments on the things he showed her. She wanted desperately to go back to the first picture, and discuss it in a rational manner, for there was nothing in it to shock or repel. It was too perfect for that. Again she felt that she had been crude and childish, just as she had been about the painted women and the sordid ugliness of The Coast, and that she had fallen short of Herrick's estimate and disappointed him. She wanted to say something, but did not know in what words to open the subject nor how to make Herrick understand without. Slowly they made the rounds of the studio and came again to the glass door opening on the balcony. Herrick put out the light.

"It's only a quarter to and it won't take five minutes to get there. Shall we stay here or go and wait for the rest in the restaurant?"

"I'd rather wait here."

Jean hoped that some opportunity would offer to correct what must be Herrick's impression of her, but none came. Herrick sat silent.

As she rested against the pile of cushions Herrick had arranged, and watched the quick western twilight blot the world to night, Jean felt as if for the twenty-four years of her life she must have been fast asleep. All about her men and women had been loving and hating and misunderstanding and hurting each other, and she had been studying books like a child. She had used up much energy and bitterness longing for the moment when she would get out into life and earn her own living, make one of the army that fought its way back and forth each morning and night on the boats. And all the time the real thing was not that at all. The real thing was human relationship, the relations between men, and between women, and between women and men. There were thousands of sensations and cross currents and impressions. There was ambition, not vague ambition like hers, but a focused force like Freeman's and Harcourt's and Herrick's. There was struggle and disappointment and the pain that so evidently Herrick had known, and Flop too, not the petty annoyance of Elsie's whining, but sweeping pain that left one bigger. There was loneliness even in a glorious room like this and pleasant interludes of chance meetings with kindred souls.

The wonderful romance of friendship gripped Jean. From the ends of the earth two people, of different tradition, it might be of different race, met accidentally and their lives forever after were different. From the silent dark streets below, all the personalities of all the thousands she had never seen, came close and touched her, so that she felt that in some hidden way she was being influenced by every one of them. There was nothing in life insignificant, nothing unimportant, nothing unrelated to the whole.

Every one was bound to every one else by achievement and encouragement and understanding. Each of these was a definite thing, like a thread, made up of millions of minute strands, passing glances, chance handclasps, too fine to be caught and held in words and yet each so strong that it could bear the weight of many disappointments.

And there was the web of the whole with its radiating threads of the bigger social relationships, made from these fine, thin filaments of everyday occurrences.

She thought of herself and of Pat, of Tom and Elsie and her mother, each weaving his own pattern. Pat wove carelessly with whatever thread came to hand, singing as she wove, while Tom and Elsie fought over the threads that broke under their ceaseless nagging and left the pattern torn and frayed. And Martha, so sharply did the figure of a weaver present itself to Jean, that she saw as clearly as if her mother had been there, the patient figure sitting before its loom, weaving only the dark gray threads, gently thrusting aside with small, tired hands the golds and reds. And so vital did the need come to Jean of choosing the best threads, weaving the most glorious pattern she could, that she clenched her hands and whispered aloud:

"I will do it. I will."

"Do what?" Herrick bent to her and took both hands in his.

Jean laughed. "Did I really say it aloud?"

"You certainly did, whatever it was that you will. What is it?"

"I'm afraid I couldn't put it into words. It was just the feel of being up here above all those dark streets and—and——"

"'And all about with wings the darkness stirred.' Was that it?"

"I expect it was."

Herrick jumped to his feet and swung her to the floor beside him.

"My, but you're strong!"

They stood smiling for a moment. Then he moved to the door.

"We'll be late after all. But I guess I was dreaming too."

Through the crowd waiting for tables, Herrick pushed his way and Jean followed closely. Greasy waiters rushed about with great platters of spaghetti, increasing the noise and confusion by their violent gestures and frantic efforts to serve every one at once. As Jean and Herrick made their way among the small tables that took up three-quarters of the long room, people looked at them and made comments which came to Jean in broken sentences of no meaning. Suddenly the air of the Marseillaise rose above the din. Instantly the crowd waiting about the door pushed forward, and those already seated got on chairs and craned their necks toward the end of the room.

Herrick bent to Jean. "Don't be frightened. We're really not a bit dangerous."

Jean did not have time to answer before they passed through the outer rim of the crowd and came into a cleared space before a long table, from which the deafening din arose. Mounted on a chair, a fat man, in a khaki hunting suit and an enormous Windsor tie of peacock blue satin, was bellowing a song set to the tune of the Marseillaise. The burden of the song was, "Bring on the Food! Bring on the Food!" A girl in a dull green crêpe dress that hung from the shoulders like a kimono, stood in the center of the table and carried the air high above the rest in a shrill soprano. The men and women about the table beat time with forks and spoons.

As Herrick and Jean came forward the man in khaki saw them, stopped, appraised Jean in a glance, and silenced his chorus with a wave of his fat hand.

"I hereby fine him, Franklin Herrick, twenty-five cents for tardiness, said fine to be paid in United States silver coin, not later than ten o'clock this evening, and to be used for the sole purpose of aiding the complete debauch of The Bunch."

He jumped down and came forward with both hands outstretched in generous welcome. He appropriated Jean, separated her from Herrick and swept her into the empty chair between a pudgy woman in a black skirt and soiled white waist, and a heavy-browed young man who did not move or glance at Jean as she took the place. With a wave that included the entire table, Flop announced:

"Jean, Jean Norris, and on with the dance!" He seemed to find this funny, and laughed immoderately. A tall, very thin man next to the pudgy woman bent forward, leered at Jean for a second in maudlin earnestness, and then yelled:

"We want Jean! We want Jean!"

The table took it up, and all down the length, glasses were raised and they drank to Jean in the sour, red wine. Across the table, from what was evidently his accustomed place next to the girl in the green crêpe, Herrick smiled reassuringly. The girl had come down from the table at Flop's introduction of Jean and sat with her elbows on the cloth and her chin in her palms, staring at Jean, with no acknowledgment of the latter's existence in her eyes. Now that she looked at her more closely, Jean saw that the woman was not really young, only her smallness made her seem so. Her blue eyes were netted with fine wrinkles and the skin of her hands was faintly withered. The youngest thing about her was her neck, beautifully modeled, and her black hair which was thin but wavy. Jean was just wondering whether the woman was expressing a genuine mood, or resenting a stranger, when the pudgy woman said in a reassuring tone:

"You mustn't be afraid of us. We say and do anything that pleases us, but really we're not the least bit dangerous."

"But I'm not. Not the least bit. Do I look so—so green, that I need protection?" Jean smiled, but this insistence that there was nothing to fear, annoyed her.

The woman thrust her face close to Jean's and scrutinized her carefully. "An azalea! That's it, an azalea! Listen, listen, all ye present, I've got it. Azalea, that's her Bunch name."

"Azalea! Azalea!" Above the noise, Flop's bass bellowed and he beat the table in a frenzy of approval, as if he could not have endured another moment without knowing the right name for Jean. Through the uproar, Herrick's smile reached like a cool touch. They drank Jean's baptism in the sour, red wine and the next moment the interrupted arguments were going on more violently than before. The name was adopted with voracious enthusiasm and complete indifference.

Rather exhausted by the suddenness of the proceeding, Jean drew back and tried to separate the mass before her into its elements. She wondered which were Harcourt and Tolletson and whether they had been "baptized" in wine. She scanned the faces along the opposite side, where Herrick was now listening with a frown to the girl in green; and then, as no one claimed her attention, leaned a little forward. There was a heavy-set young man with a swarthy skin, who talked with an Oxford accent and made Jewish gestures: a middle-aged man, with sleek hair and a Van Dyke, which he was continually stroking with a very white hand. He seemed to carry on his side of the argument with the swarthy person, in a series of grunts and inner explosions, as if his opinions were so violent that they erupted before he could bind them in words. There was also a woman with gray hair framing a young face and sad, kind brown eyes. She seemed interested, but said little, and Jean liked her. And there was a pale, tall girl, with black eyes and hair, who smoked cigarettes faster than the two men beside her could roll them, and who stared in smoldering hate at these men when she had to wait, as if they had mortally injured her. Jean laughed quietly to herself, but instantly the woman beside her turned.

"I'm not so sure 'Azalea' was right. You sound exactly like a dove when you do that, a deep-breasted, soft, blue dove—Paloma. I believe that's it! I say——"

"Oh, no, please don't. I like the other one better. But I do want to know something. Which is Mr. Harcourt and which is Mr. Tolletson?"

"Harcourt and Tolletson? My dear, they never come, that is, hardly ever. Harcourt lives in London and Tolletson spends most of his time in Paris. Mathews lives in bourgeoise respectability in the country with a legal wife and baby. They were Bunchers somewhere in the Dark Ages. Some of us wouldn't know them if we met them on the street, only down underneath, you know, we're kind of proud of them, and keep their names alive. Then, they have been known to come within the memory of man. Makes 'em feel more successful to measure the distance they've got away, I suppose."

"Oh!" Jean felt as if the woman had stripped something from her rudely, but that she must cover this rudeness from some deeper need to herself. After all, Herrick had not promised that these men would be there. She had jumped to that conclusion herself.

"But the rest of us do something every now and then, in a small way," the other went on, with an understanding glint in her eyes that made Jean flush. "Oh, never mind, it wasn't rude, not a bit. Most every one who comes first, expects to see them, and it's rather funny watching the efforts not to ask point blank. Not many are as frank as you. Do you see that black and white thing, smoking like a chimney, and looking as lively as a mummy? That's The Tiger—mad about Flop for the last six weeks, frightful length of time for either of them. He's disciplining her with Magnolia, that big, sleepy porpoise he's kissing. The Tiger and Magnolia write poetry, damned good, too, some of it, but they never bother printing it. Magnolia'd like to, but it's the only trick The Tiger's got—pretending she doesn't care for money or fame, and 'Nolia has to live up to the standard. The human skeleton next to me's Vicky Sergeant; he has no Bunch name because we couldn't find a fruit or animal he looked like. That girl in green next to Franklin is Vicky's wife. We call her The Kitten—for various reasons. And of course you know Franklin's Boy Blue."

"Why Boy Blue?"

The woman laughed. "Don't ask me. Ask The Kitten. She named him long ago. I think it has something to do with always losing sheep."

At this moment, the now almost drunken Vicky claimed her and Jean looked up, to find The Kitten's eyes just turning away, and a scowl of anger on Herrick's face. The fingers crumbling his bread tightened and then he said something to The Kitten that made her drop the match, with which she was about to light her cigarette, and stare at him. After a moment she began to laugh as if the full force of the thing had come to her gradually. With a shrug, Herrick left his place and wedged a chair between Jean and the dumpy woman.

"I'm afraid we didn't get a very good night. They're all rather keyed up. They are sometimes."

The impersonal criticism in his voice linked him with the charter members who never came, separated him from The Kitten and the noisy enthusiasm that glittered like veneer over what Jean instinctively felt was real boredom and disillusion. It drew her to him and she said in a low tone:

"Who's The Kitten?"

He hesitated, and then answered in the same low tone:

"An unhappy woman with claws that tear herself and every one else who gets too near, and she's in the devil of a mood to-night. Poor Kitten, she will never learn."

Jean looked across the table with more pity in her eyes than she realized, until The Kitten's laughter ceased suddenly, and leaning to Jean, she said:

"Don't be too sweet to Boy Blue, Azalea. He can't stand azaleas. I saw him get disgustingly drunk once, just because the room was hot and there was a big bunch of azaleas in it. Don't you remember, Boy?"

"I can't say that I do, Kitten," Franklin answered quietly. "But you remember such a lot of things."

"Dozens, Boy, dozens."

Herrick refused to continue the conversation and, with a remark that included Jean, entered the discussion going on at the end of the table. While she tried to catch the drift of the talk, Jean felt The Kitten's eyes on her and knew that the woman saw her effort to pretend unconsciousness of them. This lasted only a few moments, for, with an elaborate yawn, The Kitten left the table. No one made any comment on her going and Vicky was lost in assumed jealousy of the dumpy woman who was flirting clumsily with Flop.

The argument was a technical one and soon beyond Jean's depth, for she knew nothing at all of painting or artists. But from time to time Herrick appealed to her on a point about which the rankest layman would have an opinion, so that Jean felt in him a keener social sense and greater natural kindliness than any of the others seemed to possess.

When the argument became too intricate for even Herrick to include her, she leaned back, now much more at ease, and sensing a faint, possible charm, which had at first been quite lost under the gaucherie of manner.

The Outlanders, as The Bunch called the rest of the world, had thinned a little, but there were still many tables filled with starers toward the big table in the center. It was evidently the attraction of this rather dirty restaurant, and Jean judged that the proprietor would rather feed The Bunch for nothing than have them transfer their patronage. And for this freedom, this effortful emancipation from the social code that passed as originality and genius, he charged The Outlanders high. This too they appreciated. It gave value to the thing they bought.

"After all," Jean decided, "I suppose I do look like a baby let out alone without its nurse. I've never met any people worth while knowing in my life, or any one out of the beaten track. And because these tie their neckties across instead of down and make a lot of noise, I feel superior. I've certainly never painted a picture or written a poem and I didn't know there was anything the matter with Maeterlinck at all. Jean Norris, you're a cocky fool."

She was recalled from this philosophizing by Herrick's touch upon her shoulder.

"Dreaming again?" His voice was wistful, not this time as if he wished to share her dreams, but as if he envied her the power to dream. Jean thought that his eyes were very tired and his face rather pale, as she looked up. "Well?" he smiled down at her. "Were you really so far away? Come back, won't you, please?"

It was a sincere request, and as Jean followed to the street, she felt that Herrick was often alone among these people and she thought she understood now why he had not tried to do the novel.

On the sidewalk Flop stood in the center of the group debating what to do with the rest of the night. When Herrick and Jean joined, Flop turned to her with his manner of having just been struck by an illuminating thought.

"We'll leave it to Azalea. Which would you rather do, go down to Ramon's and drink mescal, he's just got some from Mexico, or do the Coast? There's a dancer at Frank's worth seeing."

"I'm afraid I can't do either. The next boat won't get me home till after one, as it is."

"Nonsense. Nobody ever goes home while there's anything else to do. 'We won't go home till morning!'"

The others took it up, and the silence of the empty street echoed to the old song. Jean wondered whether Flop was always singing his wants like this, and glanced at Herrick.

"Let's beat it, if you really want to," he whispered, and almost before she knew it, they had turned down a side street. For a block the voices of The Bunch followed. They did not know that Jean and Herrick had slipped away.

"If there's anything more dull than drinking mescal, it's going to Frank's. I don't see what on earth Flop finds in it."

Jean liked his annoyance. Again she felt that they were linked in understanding against the others. She had meant to ask him about Harcourt and Mathews, but now it seemed unnecessary.

They walked in almost total silence through the dark streets lined with closed warehouses that sent out a mingled odor of fruits and vegetables exotic to Jean in its newness. Often the black bulk of empty crates forced them into the cobble paved road-bed, thick with dust and fruit rinds and withered greens. Once, in common consent they stopped to listen to hundreds of crated pigeons, cooing softly behind closed doors.

"You are like a dove. She was right for once. A big, calm dove," he said, and they went on silent as before.

On the boat they chose the forward deck and watched the dark hills come closer. The great paddle-wheel churned a rhythm to Jean's thoughts, pictures of the day, from the time she had met Herrick and had walked through the crowded streets, to the present cool emptiness of the upper deck with the night wind touching her face and thousands of stars above. To Jean it had been the fullest day she had ever lived.

Gently Herrick's hand claimed hers and she did not withdraw it. The contact seemed only a finer communication, a surer speech than the clumsiness of words.

Soon after the first dinner with The Bunch, Herrick finished the series of articles and no longer came to the library. But often Jean found him waiting at the closing hour and they walked to the Ferry. Several times they had lunch in a little Mexican restaurant with a sanded floor and strings of red peppers hanging like stalactites from the ceiling. Jean always came from this place with the feeling of having been to another world and touched another life. And there was always the feeling of having shared this happy strangeness with Herrick.

On Sundays, sometimes Herrick called at the house for her, and sometimes she met him at the Ferry, and they went to Flop's. Martha made no comment, but Jean knew that after she had left the house, her mother cried, and because she never mentioned Herrick, Jean knew that Martha disliked him. In the studio Jean made a great effort to enter the spirit, for although she felt more and more strongly that Herrick, too, was bored, she clung to the belief that there must be some charm her own narrow training could not discover.

There was always the same enthusiasm about the same things. Whenever interest flagged they wound it up with the thin, red wine and with more and more cigarettes which they threw away partially smoked. Men and women made open love to each other and there was much kissing and imitation jealousy. Their insatiable need to be different had become a scourge, which drove them along the road of personal eccentricity. In the more or less worthy rebellion of their youth they had adopted Windsor ties and become Bohemians for life.

Through the remaining winter and early spring, Jean and Herrick continued to go less and less often, and in April stopped altogether. Now, on Sundays, they took long walks over the hills. They built driftwood fires in lonely coves and raced like children across the dunes. And always, Jean led the talk to Herrick's novel and the things he would write, so that these vague dreams took form between them. It was as if Jean, reaching down among the qualities he believed he had thrown away, found a small, discarded jewel. Together they polished it.

Jean's attitude hurt and flattered Herrick and the combination was fast binding him against his will. Remembering the hours he was alone with Jean on empty beaches and among silent trees, the knowledge that he had never kissed her made him hot with shame. Away from her, he marveled at his own control. But with her, a genuine peace for the most part held him, so that the control was not so great as it afterward appeared. In some strange way she herself stilled the storm she raised.

It was June, but a high fog had covered the sky all day. They had been walking since morning and now, in the late afternoon, came out through the trail that wound between the hills to the cliffs that edged the sea. Up from below long white arms tore at the cliffs, dropped, reached higher in new effort. While, farther out, the inexhaustible army of waves rushed in, line after line, flung themselves on the cliffs, sank back, rushed in again. Over it all the gray sky shut as if to keep the din from the ears of God. The world was strangely alone, shut in by itself, like a madman locked in his cell. Driven from infinity, rushing on to infinity, the wind tore by them on its ceaseless quest.

Herrick took her hand and they began to run to a little beach wedged between the cliffs. As they ran Jean was filled with a deep sureness, as if she could run so forever, swifter and swifter, never halting or stumbling, borne up by a strength within; a strength that was beating out against the whole surface of her body, in an effort to join the main current of all life, that touched her on every side.

At the foot of the bluff, Jean dropped to the floor of the cove, and for a moment Herrick stood above her. Deliberately he enjoyed the feeling of physical power it gave him to stand so, to feel his greater strength, to know that in spite of her superb body he could bend, lift and throw this woman into the sea. He could see her breast rise and fall under the thin waist, and the base of her throat throb with the breath that still came quickly after their swift run. For a moment, all the artist in Herrick rose in appreciation of the picture, the unity that bound Jean's body, the silent power of the gray cliffs yielding so little to the centuries of rage tearing at them, to the eternal, ever-changing sameness of the sea. There was much of them in Jean, so that, as he looked, he felt tired and worn. He went and sat down a little behind her, and drawing his knees to his chin, circled them with his arms.

It was almost eighteen months since he had first brought The Kitten here. They had raced down the hill too, but at the foot he had swung her to the circle of his arms and kissed her madly. She had returned his kisses, until, both a little exhausted, they lay on the sand, his head in her lap, and her fingers had wandered in his hair, coming, every few minutes, to rest hotly on his lips.

Herrick looked at Jean and wondered. She had never kissed a man as The Kitten had kissed him. Would she ever? What was she thinking of, smiling out over the gray sea? In that passionate, throbbing emptiness she seemed as unconscious of him as if he were one of the gray cliffs. She was as far away and impersonal as the wind sweeping indifferently over the friendly little grasses.

In obedience to his unspoken wish, Jean turned.

"It's the sounds," she said, as if Herrick must have been following her thoughts. "If there weren't any sounds in Nature, pagans would never have invented a God. It's so impossible to imagine a silent Force creating a world where the wind shrieks and the sea roars and you can almost hear the earth breathe. It seems as if there must be a personal god somewhere, a huge, powerful man who needs these voices to talk with."

She had been thinking about God!

Herrick, without answering, drew farther back into the cove. He turned from Jean to the open grayness, and a terror of its immensity forced through every effort to keep it out. In the whole world there was nothing but loneliness, an actual, positive, palpable loneliness, as gray and chill as the sea, as all pervading as the boom of the surf far out on the rocky bar.

"Did you write that?"

For a moment Herrick stared and then he laughed. She would always do it, make him feel old and spotted, and then whirl him up to the heights by a belief in his power.

"It's absolutely perfect. God,—weaving worlds because He is lonely."

"No. It's not mine, I'd give a good deal to be able to claim it, but it belongs to one Arthur Symons. Do you know his stuff?"

"No. Is it all like that?—'Weaving worlds out of loneliness.'"

"Not all. But he saw rather far into the heart of things." Without further comment Herrick began to quote—whole poems, fragments, single lines. It was all sad and beautiful and sensuous, filled with the hunger of soul and body.

His voice took on a depth it did not have in usual speech. It fitted perfectly with the sad booming of the surf and the whimper of the little waves that ran in terror among the rocks. For the first time in her life Jean felt the ache of physical beauty. She wanted to cry.

Toward sundown the wind died, the high fog parted and the sun sank in a wine-red sea. Out on the ledge Jean and Herrick watched it dip over the edge of the world.

When the coming night had stolen the last thread of color from the sky they went back to the cove. Herrick piled brush and covered it with great logs of driftwood. At the touch of a match, crackling flames ran out and instantly the savage loneliness of the sea was shut away and the cove became a home.

While they ate the sandwiches they had brought from the ranch-house where they had stopped for dinner, they talked of everything and of nothing. From time to time Herrick went after another log and Jean was left alone, conscious of his absence, of the blackness beyond the fire and the warm security of the rock walls, lit by the firelight. Each time he returned Jean felt that she knew him better.

Stretched on the sand, his head on Jean's spread skirt, Herrick told her of his boyhood and his passionate longing, even as a little child, for the warmth and beauty he had no reason to believe existed.

"We had one of the poorest farms in Connecticut, and if you don't know Connecticut you can't know what that means. There were just a few bleak fields, enclosed by fences of stones that my father had picked from the earth. We grew a little corn and some potatoes, but whenever the crop was good there was no demand, and when prices were high something always killed the crops. We had a few lean cows which I could never believe had been calves. I could never imagine that anything on the place had ever been young. Even my father and my mother. It seemed to me as if they must have always been old and lived in the rickety house, in the bare fields, with the lean cows and the failing crops.

"On each side of us the farms had been deserted before I was born. Sometimes I used to wish there were other boys in them to play with, but for the most part I accepted it just as I accepted the whining complaints of mother, dad's stooped shoulders and the feeling of never having all that I could possibly eat at one time.

"But one day a strange man drove up. He was fat, with a red face and a gold watch-chain. He came in and clapped father on the back, and began to talk faster and laugh more than any one I had ever heard. Even dad and mother smiled as they listened. When mother told me he was going to stay all night I went out in the barn and cried."

Herrick stopped and looked into the fire. He forgot Jean, everything but the memories called to life by his own words. His face was hard with hatred against that starved childhood and against his parents, for always Herrick's hatred was deep against the thing that hurt him. There were shadows about his lips, and his hands clenched until the cords rose on his wrist.

"You poor, lonely, little boy," Jean whispered.

"I was. For you see, until that night, when Ed Pierce came back, I didn't know there was anything else. I used to feel those stone fences closing in like a grave. I didn't know but that the whole world was flat and bare and stony. I thought that the Pierces and Thompsons had just died under the strain, and that some day father and mother would die too, and then I would be left alone.

"After dinner we sat round the fire. They had done all the gossiping and Ed Pierce began to tell of the Far West. You must say it just like that—The Far West!

"I can't tell you what it meant to me. It was a mixture of Heaven and pirate expeditions in tropic seas and gold mines. But the thing that stunned me was that we could go. It was on this earth and we could get there! We could have it all, if father would only go and take it. I can hear Pierce's big voice now: 'Take a chance, Bill. Don't be scared. You're young enough yet. You'll make good with a quarter of the strength you'll waste on this hole.'

"And my father sat there with his head sunk and his shoulders bent, shaking his head!

"I crawled over to his chair and got hold of his knees. I begged him to go. I believe I screamed. Father loosened my hands and told me to shut up. But Pierce said:

"'Listen to him, Bill, the kid's got more sense than you. You've stuck here so long you're plumb scared to move.'

"I got hold of his knees again and begged him not to be scared. At last he took me by the arm and dragged me to the door and locked me into the cold hall. I never forgave him. In the morning Ed Pierce was gone. For a few days they mentioned him. Then they stopped talking about him. There was nothing left but the stones and the hope of The Far West. And all the weary years till I could get there."

"And you got here."

"Yes. I got here." There was no triumph in Herrick's tone.

Jean held out her hands to him suddenly. "You see, you can do what you want."

It was the first physical response Jean had ever offered. Herrick took both hands in his and laid his cheek on them. Then, without a word, he got to his feet and helped Jean up.

From the top of the hill they looked back. The fire glowed a deep red hummock on the black beach. The white crescent of a new moon hung in a rift of cloud and touched to silver the crests of the long swells. Herrick walked ahead along the narrow trail and they scarcely spoke.

But at the gate, under shadow of the acacia that drooped its long yellow blooms close to them, Herrick put his arms about Jean, pressed his lips fiercely to hers, and hurried away.

Jean lay awake a long time, feeling the hot pressure of Herrick's soft mouth and wishing that he had not kissed her.

Herrick was happier than he had been for a long time as he sat bareheaded on the upper deck and thought back over the day with Jean and of how she had looked as he kissed her. It excited him and made him tender to remember the look in her eyes, and the faint smile deepened as he wondered what she was thinking now. Her lips had not responded in the least, but she had seemed neither angry nor frightened. She had accepted it as she would have accepted a leaf falling from the acacia above. And yet he was sure that she had not often, if ever, been kissed by a man. In some ways she was strangely primitive and in others she seemed to have lived through and left behind in ages past the ordinary emotional reactions. Herrick's brain was on fire with expectation and curiosity. The memory of the kiss quickened his mind more than his body, and his own reaction thrilled him with a new sensation.

He was happy. So happy that he could not go quietly to bed. Nor could he walk alone in the empty streets. His nerves wanted the relaxation of companionship. The perfect day wanted a touch of contrast to finish its perfection. He needed to frame the memory of Jean's cool lips, possess it alone in another setting.

A few moments later he crossed the studio amid the shrieks and catcalls of The Bunch, straight to the couch where The Kitten was curled alone.

"So you thought you'd come and see whether we were alive. It's awfully good of you! But you know we're hard to kill. Skin's so thick the little stings and arrows don't get through, somehow."

The Kitten drawled between puffs of her cigarette and did not move to make room for Herrick.

He lifted her, deposited her farther back among the cushions and tried to take her hand. She was so furious and making such a ridiculous pretense, just as she used to, that Herrick's feel of youth and well-being increased. It was as if the memory of these old tricks, now powerless to hurt, gave him back three years of time. At thirty-three, Herrick wanted the past.

"But claws do, Kittycat."

"If we'd known you were going to honor us," persisted The Kitten, "we'd have ordered champagne. As it is, we only had the same old ink, and that's gone."

"A cigarette, a jug of ink and thou!"

"You—you——" Then, fearing she was going to cry, she stopped.

Across the room a tall girl with flat, red hair and small red-rimmed eyes like glowing embers in the white ash of her face, broke off a sentence in the middle.

"Who's that man over there, just come in, with The Kitten?"

Flop glared at this interest on the part of his newest inspiration.

"Franklin Herrick, alias Boy Blue. He used to be the real thing, but he hasn't been round for ages."

The girl still stared. "I'd like to model him," she said slowly. "He walks like a panther, has the forehead of a saint and the mouth of a gutter rat."

"Great! Why don't you tell him? He'd be furious inside and look as if he were going to kiss you."

"Maybe I will—if I get a chance."

"You won't. The Kitten's been sharpening her claws for months."

On the couch Herrick was holding The Kitten's hands, stroking them softly.

"Who's the other woman?"

Flop's laugh bellowed above the noise. "You female Conan Doyle." His voice dropped. "A serious impossibility—bromide to the limit—but she has a good skin."

"Brains?"

"Oh, don't ask me."

"What's he see in her?"

"What are you so interested for? How do I know what any man sees in a woman? You're all alike. I suppose when Herrick tries to kiss her she screams, and that'd be enough to interest him."

The girl smiled. When she smiled the corners of her lips turned up over small, uneven teeth. With a shrug of indifference she slipped her hand into Flop's and they turned toward an excited group at the other end. Here a slight man in a brown flannel shirt and red tie, with gestures preserved from his student days in Paris, was arguing a technical point in Verlaine. But as none of his listeners understood French, he was finding it hard to maintain the requisite heat. When he caught sight of the girl he appealed to her excitedly in a French whose studied correctness made her laugh. She answered in a flood of rapid patois incomprehensible to him. A smile ran round the group. Instantly the girl's mood changed.

"Listen. It is impossible to translate. But listen. You will hear his heart beating, throb, throb, in the French."

Her arms dropped to her sides. The heavy white lids lowered over the red eyes. For a moment she stood so, artificial and decadent. Then she began in a low, sweet voice that seemed to have nothing to do with her body.

Her voice flowed in waves across the great room and melted into the shadows. Flop listened with his hands before his face. The strutting of the man in the brown shirt ceased. The Kitten hid her face on Herrick's shoulder and his arms closed about her.

The girl went on, poem after poem. Herrick's eyes filled with tears and his hold tightened on The Kitten. She shivered, pressed her lips deeper into his neck, and kissed him with sudden, sharp kisses that bit like hot coals. For half an hour the voice continued. It burned away the memory of the day behind, of the sea, of the exacting faith in Jean's gray eyes. This was the reality, this passion that throbbed in the poet's words, the girl's voice, the scorching kisses of the small, quivering figure in his arms. To feel and feel and feel.

The voice stopped as suddenly as it had begun. With the shudder of a medium coming from a trance, the girl opened her eyes. Instantly the purity of the listening silence was spotted with exaggerated exclamations of delight. They crowded about her. Flop brought a glass of wine, and sitting on his knee she sipped it, while her eyes wandered to the corner where Herrick had sat and stroked The Kitten's hands. The corner was empty. She grinned, and at Flop's request kissed him lightly on the lips.

As they walked along, choosing the darker streets, neither The Kitten nor Herrick spoke. Her fingers locked tight on his and Herrick walked as if in a dream toward a fixed point. At the corner of the street where Vicky and The Kitten had a small flat, Herrick stopped.

"Is Vicky home?"

"No. He went to Tulare a month ago."

The room was dark except for a long, white bar across the floor from a street lamp outside. Beside the Morris chair Herrick knelt and put his arms about The Kitten.

All the miniature independence was gone. She clung to him sobbing:

"I can't stand it any more. I love you and you're cruel, terribly cruel."

There was all the old abandon, the absolute surrender in the figure trembling at his touch. Of all the women he had known The Kitten had loved most passionately, most recklessly, finding no flaw, asking no change, holding him to no path. She loved him absolutely, utterly, as he was. And it had bored him.

"I know, Boy, you only did it to hurt me. You don't love her. You know you don't. You can't. Boy Blue," she whispered, her lips against his cheek, "promise your Kittycat you'll never see her again. Then I'll forget all the hurt—every single teeny bit."

With his arms about her, Herrick looked into the dark and saw Jean as he had left her, only a short time before, under the acacia, part of the clean night. In the gray fog by the sea, made more vital by the immense sadness and beauty of it. The generous giving of her hands to the lonely little boy, such a small, pitiful and generous gift. Jean with her unshakable faith, her courage and her coldness. He felt suddenly old, and afraid of his own fear.

"Are you satisfied now, Boy Blue? You've hurt me enough—till I've made a fool of myself. But I don't care. Silly, silly Boy, he ran away, and then he came back. He will always come back, always."

Sure of him, she laughed while she held his shoulders and made pretense of shaking him.

"But it was funny sometimes, only very few sometimes, it was like a baby going out with a little spade against a granite cliff. That's what she's like, Boy, a cold, hard, granite cliff. Maybe he bruised his head a little bit against the nasty, bad cliff. Well, never mind, mummy will make it well."

The Kitten drew his head against her breast. "There, there. Now it's all better. Nobody could beat down the cliff, so he mustn't feel bad, but just come——"

The Kitten bent forward from the shadows and, full in the bar of light, smiled at him. The last four months had made deep lines about her scarlet mouth. In the bar of white light she was ugly, with the ugliness of the small and withering. Herrick stepped back.

"You're ranting, Kitten. You don't know what you're talking about."

She blinked stupidly. She was almost hideous in her hungry fear.

"You don't understand. You can't understand women like Jean."

The Kitten got slowly to her feet.

"But she doesn't love you. You couldn't make a woman like that care."

Herrick's face reddened.

"Love! Why, Kitten, you don't know what the word means. When women like that love, it's like a prairie fire. A white fire that sweeps everything clean."

"'A white fire that sweeps everything clean!' A white prairie fire," muttered The Kitten. "You fool! You poor, blind fool. Do you think I'm going to stand by and never say a word? Do you think 'the white prairie fire'—oh, Lord, what a figure!—would love you if she knew? Why, she wouldn't even kiss you if she thought you'd held another woman in your arms—the great pink-and-yellow baby! And Vicky knows. He has always known. They all know. Vicky will let me go. I am willing. I am not ashamed. I——" She felt blindly before her as if she were picking the words from air.

Herrick moved beyond reach. "Listen to me. There is no question of whether people know or don't know. You're talking like a lunatic. There never was a question of whether Vicky would free you or not. We loved each other once and now it's over. That's all there is to it."

Herrick was thankful for the fine wrinkles, for all the small dried ugliness that made it easy.

The Kitten swayed, steadied herself, and said quietly:

"You will have to marry her." She stated it as a simple fact that Herrick might have forgotten. The inference of its judgment infuriated him.

"From women like Jean one does not ask, does not want, anything less."

Long afterwards he envied The Kitten her moment's strength.

"Will you go?" she said.

The next day The Kitten joined Vicky in the country.

Twice in the next three Herrick went to the phone to call Jean, and hung up in the very act of asking for the number.

"You can never make her care...." The Kitten knew him as no woman had ever known him, and he hated her for this knowledge.

He went nowhere and saw no one. Through the lonely dinners, and long evenings in the studio, Herrick worked himself into a fury that urged him on and held him back. His anger spread from The Kitten to Jean, to all women. He was sick of them, weary of the power they had always had over him. He loathed the women who had yielded to him and the women who had not. He hated his own inability to live his life independent of them. If no woman had ever crossed his life, interfering in its plan, destroying the dreams he had dreamed in those last years of the Connecticut farm, he would long ago have written something worth while. He would have succeeded as Freeman and Harcourt and the others had done. He would be free of The Bunch in their hectic fight for forgetfulness. His life would be ordered with calm poise. He had it in him. Jean felt it. Could she even yet make him what he might have been? Like an intermittent fever the conflict raged. Then, through sheer exhaustion, it dropped away. Herrick wondered what it had all been about and went again to call for Jean at the closing hour. She was not there. Two weeks before Jean had lost her place.

The next day they walked again in the hills. Jean was whiter and quieter than he had ever seen her. The two weeks had tried her nerves almost beyond control. The last to come on the library staff, a reduced appropriation demanded that Jean be the first to go. And, although she had taken no joy in the work itself, she had been happy in the security of having work to do. Now, after two weeks of following every advertisement to its end, only to discover she had none of the experience they all demanded, the old horror of teaching had come back, and Jean was almost ill. The new baby cried incessantly and the house was more cluttered than ever. Tom had at last been forced into a job at a ridiculous salary and from morning till night Elsie predicted starvation for herself and her "two helpless little ones." Through it all Martha Norris moved, armored by prayer to gentle acceptance of these petty annoyances that Jean felt closing about her forever.

Her independence weakened by fear for the future, Jean was another person and Herrick thrilled at the new Jean, this unsure, rather desperate Jean. She felt his strength and experience, so much greater than her own, and his understanding and sympathy seemed to relieve her from the necessity of maintaining the silence she had mapped out as a shield against the atmosphere of her home. For the first time she told him something of that atmosphere, of her childhood, not as poor and bare as his, but filled with the same rebellion for something whose name she did not know. Much of what Jean sketched in bare outline, Herrick could fill in. It told him much that had puzzled him. He knew her better than she knew herself.

As Jean sat, throwing pebbles into the almost dry creek at their feet, he knew her eyes were full of tears. He took her hands in his and forced her to look up.

"Don't, Jean. It hurts me terribly to see you unhappy. Something will turn up. It always does. I've been there too, you know."

Jean smiled through her tears. "I know I'm an idiot. But I do loathe the idea of teaching and yet it's the only thing I suppose I'm fitted for. I mean I have a diploma, an actual proof on paper, that I've been through the preparatory mill and I can wave it in their faces. I shall kill the next person who asks me if I've had experience."

"Well, don't begin with me, please. You're positively glaring."

Jean answered his laugh and felt better.

"Because if you do you'll eliminate my valuable assistance, and I think maybe I see light. How would you like to go on a paper?"

"What!"

"Oh, I'm not suggesting that you edit one, but there are several things of lesser importance, things that don't need more than an ability to write good English. If you have a sense of color, so much the better. I think perhaps you have. You'd rather like it in some ways, especially at first, but I don't think you'd ever be a howling success. You're not what they call 'a born newspaper woman.'"

"I don't believe I'm a born anything." Jean made no effort to still the quavering of her voice. She felt as if she had been struggling along a hard road by herself and some one had suddenly picked her up and carried her to a safe spot.

"Nonsense. Of course you are. Only it takes some of us a long time to find out. Would you really like to try it?"

"I should like it more than anything I can think of. How do I go about it? Just walk in and say: 'I'm not a born newspaper woman, but please give me a job'?"

"Hardly, though it might not be such a bad way. Anything that startles an editor looks like ability to him. But we'll be less original than that. Thompson of the Chronicle is going to start a new Sunday section and he's looking for some one. He wants some one with 'a new angle,' 'fresh viewpoint,' 'punch,' etc. These things to a real editor are like the golden calf to the ancient peoples. He grovels before them. His life is spent in a mad search for them."

"But I have no newspaper angle and no viewpoint at all."

"Patience, neophyte. That's only another name for a perfect greenhorn, with intelligence and an ability to manufacture, enthusiasm for the editor's pet schemes. Do you think you can do that, Jean?"

"I could drown in enthusiasm, genuine, hysterical enthusiasm over anything that would save me from school teaching. If it gave me enough salary to move mummy to the city and make it an eternal impossibility for her ever to ask Tom and Elsie to stay five minutes, I'd drop dead of sheer exuberance."

"Under that condition I may not speak to Thompson. But if you promise to continue in this life I'll see him the first thing in the morning and let you know by afternoon. I'm not sure what it is. You may have to do Household Hints or Beauty articles or Society notes. You may develop into the greatest Lady Teazle of the United States and have the New York papers sending for you."

"Then, when my biography is written you'll be mentioned as having given me my 'first chance.'"

"Is that the only capacity in which I figure in your life?" Under the banter Herrick's eyes looked deep into hers. Jean blushed.

Again, when he left her, Herrick kissed her. This time her repulsion was less. Jean was poignantly ashamed that it was there at all. To the dead black and white of Jean's logic there was something wrong in feeling as near as she felt to Herrick, and at the same time sensing that slight inner revulsion at the touch of his lips on hers.

Thompson of the Chronicle was a large, fat man who had cultivated what he considered the proper editorial manner so that even in ordinary conversation he snapped out his sentences as if he were ordering a cub reporter to a fire. He prided himself on being able to do a dozen things at once and his fetish was concentration. One gathered that he could write a better article in a power house than in a library. When Jean entered he was scanning the proofs of the week's edition, making notes on a pad, smoking, and calling three numbers on the telephone. Jean's nerves had worn her almost to the point of interrupting the great man, before he glanced at her.

"I'm going to run a new feature. I want a series of interviews with leading people who are doing things. I don't give a whoop what they do so long as it's for the general good, 'our city,' 'civic betterment,' etc. But I don't want slush. No sob-sister rot. Civic pride and that dope. Herrick says you can do it. The first will be with Dr. Mary Mac Lean. We've run her regularly about every six months since Settlements got popular. You're to get a new angle. When you get the hang of it, you'll have to find your own interviews."

He almost snarled the last word, glared at Jean as if she had taken his time on a personal matter, and attacked his cigar as if he hadn't had one for fifty years. Jean had never heard of Dr. Mary Mac Lean and had no very clear idea of what a Settlement was, but she did not ask. When she had gone, the Managing Editor made a hieroglyphic in his memorandum, favorable to Jean.

As she sat waiting for Dr. Mary, Jean's courage came back. At the worst the doctor could only refuse to talk to her, in which case she would have to do the best she could.

"And an interview where the interviewed refuses to say anything doesn't leave much room for slush."

Steps sounded in the hall and a stocky woman, in a walking skirt that made her appear even shorter, with quantities of fluffy white hair piled on a large head, stood in the doorway, peering nearsightedly through gold pince-nez. She looked like a large, good-natured and freshly washed puppy picking up a scent. Jean went forward.

"Dr. Mary Mac Lean? I am Jean Norris. I 'phoned you about an interview."

The pince-nez flew off as if Dr. Mary had pressed a button somewhere about her plump person, and Jean smiled. Dr. Mary returned the smile. Without the thick lenses of the glasses her eyes were small but very bright. They were like two little searchlights, ready to be turned on any fact. When she smiled, the corners crinkled into wrinkles.

"Well, go right on. I suppose you're primed to the hilt." Dr. Mary took a deep chair and motioned Jean to another. "What's it going to be this time? Poverty, sin, crime, religion, the Social Evil, the plague, red or white, suffrage, minimum wage, I.W.W.-ism, organized labor, inefficiency of the workingman, college education, or How I Went Into the Work?"

"I don't know. You see," Jean answered in a sudden resolve to take the doctor into her confidence, "I'm very specially at sea. I don't know a thing about any of those things, not even enough to ask for enlightenment. I never heard of you up till an hour ago and would hate to be put on a stand to tell what a Settlement was. I know you do wonderful things with the poor, but I don't know whether you pay their rent, or make them send their children to school. It's because I don't know anything about you that they sent me. They want something new that won't drivel."

Dr. Mary laughed till the tears stood in her twinkling blue eyes.

"My dear, that's the most adequate explanation I ever got from an interviewer, and the Lord knows I've sampled them all. So they're after something new that won't drivel." She bent forward with exaggerated caution. "Do you know, Miss Norris, I have imperiled my immortal soul and ruined my vocabulary, reading those interviews with myself. They've called me everything from Feminine Tolstoy to All Womanhood's Sister. Now, would you like to be called All Womanhood's Sister because you installed three washtubs in an outhouse for some poor women?"

"I should loathe being called All Womanhood's Sister for any reason. But is there anything they haven't asked you?"

Dr. Mary cocked her head to one side like a badly proportioned bird and nodded:

"Yes. Nobody has ever had sense enough yet to ask me if there isn't something I want to tell them. They always come with their ammunition ready and it amuses me to watch them shoot wild."

"Then I qualify for 'the new angle,' for I haven't a bullet with me. Will you tell me, Dr. Mac Lean, if there's anything you want to say?"

Dr. Mary's face sobered. "Perhaps I can better show you. Come."

The next was a wonderful hour to Jean. She felt as if the doctor were going before her, tearing down walls, opening worlds she had never glimpsed. At the door of the last room, Dr. Mary paused.

"I want you to meet one of our girls. In some ways she combines all the problems we have—economic, social, educational. And there are many like her."

The doctor turned the handle and they entered a large, well-lighted room, fitted with sewing machines. A dozen dark women were busy sewing, and their laughter mingled with the whir of the machines. They all smiled and gave greetings in strange broken phrases of English, as Dr. Mary, followed by Jean, crossed to the farthest corner where a girl of nineteen was sewing furiously. She stopped and looked up, smiling.

"Well, Carmen, how's Jaime to-day?"

"Oh, so well! He get fat." The soft voice blurred the words to a single low note as the girl reached over to the wicker basket on the chair beside her. She lifted the baby and turned with radiant face to the doctor.

"See. Hees legs—so fat."

She turned back the coarse little dress and showed with pride the small shriveled legs. The doctor bent over the baby, so fragile and withered that it seemed something not new-born but something older than time, and gave a few directions in Spanish. The girl nodded and, as the baby began to whimper, buried her face in the wrinkled neck and crooned to him. Over her bowed head, the doctor's lips motioned to Jean: "Blind, but she doesn't know it yet."

Jean's throat tightened and she felt sick with the sadness of it; the girl-mother and the baby, so old, so weak, so resigned, as if it had accepted its burden far back down the ages. The girl put the baby, quieted now, into its basket. It lay for a moment staring with its great, empty black eyes, and then closed them wearily. The girl covered him with a bit of mosquito netting and sat down to her work again. Before they were out of the room, she was sewing furiously again.

Jean looked at the doctor.

"Carmen Gonsalez, but I call her to myself, Mater Dolorosa. She has never been to school, although she was born right here in San Francisco and has wanted all her life to read. She is just turned nineteen. Before she was fourteen she went to work in a tamale factory and learned first hand the existence of all the evil she did not already know from her own home. At sixteen she left the tamale factory because the foreman gave her no peace, and went to work in an American overall factory. She thought American men 'were different.'

"They are different. A Mexican of the same caliber makes no bones about his desires, but Mr. George Farrel crept to his goal like a snake. She loves him yet. She believes he will come back, although she has not heard of him for months. Only once have I ever seen her angry—I never want to see it again. It was like the crushing force of a glacier. She was whiter than paper and so still. Some one had told her that George had married a Gringo. It is true. Once I thought I might tell her after the baby was born. But it was born blind. 'The sins of the fathers upon the children, yea, even to the third and fourth generation.'"

"I should think," Jean cried passionately, "that you would hate the whole human race."

"No. You see, I have been very many years in this work and that first rage has worn off. We all have it. Sometimes I think it is what brings us unto it at all. We see the crime and sin and sorrow and we are filled with a blind passion to straighten it out. It's as instinctive, at the base, as emotional an act as jumping into a river to save some one. And then, after a time, long or short according to one's temperament, you learn what I sometimes think is the only thing in the world worth knowing—The Colonel's Lady and Judy O'Grady are sisters under their skin. Then you don't get angry any more at social injustice, or very sad, not unless you happen to have indigestion or try to burn the candle at both ends. You just go along and believe."

"In what?"

Dr. Mary laughed. "Sometimes I don't know. Often I think believing is just a general state of being, like feeling well. It's not belief in a personal God and it's not unshakable faith in man and most surely it's not a belief in the tremendous importance of one's job. Belief in what? I think in this—That the Colonel's Lady and Judy go round in cycles, hand in hand at that, and each cycle is a needed cycle, because in the end—it's going to make a spiral. At least that's as near as I can word it, Miss Norris, and I try to believe it most of the time, the spiral part, I mean."

She walked with Jean to the street door, but stood for a moment before opening it.

"Now you know what it is I want to say and if you can put it into words you can do better than I. But that's your business. I want to make these people happier because I have lived. And I want to be happier because they have lived. I want to take the blind passion of the Carmens and hitch it to the aridity of the rich ladies who come in their limousines to our committees. I want to beat some of the primitive vengeance of a Sicilian fisherman into the George Farrels. I want to teach the women not to make the sign of the Evil Eye when somebody stops them on the street and looks at the baby, and I want the person who stops them on the street not to have spasms because the baby is swaddled in a fashion they have never seen. Personally, it makes me sick to see flies buzzing over a baby, but no sicker than it does to hear some of the comments of the people who come to visit us. Not half so sick. Come to think of it, I'd rather have a baby swaddled to death and eaten by flies than talk ten minutes to the flyspecked souls and swaddled brains of some of our visitors. And if you can get it through the heads of the public, Miss Norris, you will be doing a good thing. In a way, a place like this is public and we don't want to keep people out. But whenever a review of any kind appears we are always swamped as if we were a sideshow. It wouldn't be worth while paying any attention to, except that it does show a serious side of the whole attitude. For it reflects very really what the Colonel's Lady thinks of Judy O'Grady and it's bad for them both."

The telephone rang. Dr. Mary held out her hand. "It may sound vague, but we're in earnest."

"It sounds anything but that. I feel as if you'd turned a white searchlight on Society for me, and——"

"All right. So long as you don't call the article that. 'Gropings' would be nearer the mark. But if you're really interested come and see me sometimes. We're pretty busy all the week, but I usually have Sunday afternoons to myself. It's the only time I have for my personal friends. I want you to come."

"I certainly shall, and thank you."

Waiting in a drugstore at the foot of the hill, Herrick saw Jean before she saw him. She was walking quickly, her head back, her eyes glowing.

"Good Lord, what's happened? She looks like a modern Joan of Arc."

Herrick stepped out and joined her. "I suppose you would have walked right over me and not known it. You look as if you were just about to step off the edge of the world into eternal joy. What happened?"

"She's the most wonderful person that ever lived!" Jean's enthusiasm rayed from her in a physical current. Herrick smiled.

"No wonder the rest of us dry up and grow old. People like you and Dr. Mary have cornered all the energy and belief in the universe."

"Don't mention me in the same breath. My enthusiasms and beliefs are like—like specks of dust on a diamond compared to hers. I feel like a puling infant beside King Solomon. Just think of it—to go on never giving up, never weakening, always believing. To feel that you mean something. Not that you just fit in, but that you have a place that nobody else can take! To do things. To take human beings and make them into something!"

"Do they have to be poor and dirty and foreign, Jean? Wouldn't just plain needing be enough?"

The voice was wistful and Jean laughed rather uncertainly. "No, I don't suppose they would have to be dirty."

"Just so long as they were miserable and weak and dependent enough?"

"Yes. I guess that would do. I suppose all women like to be needed. It flatters our vanity and makes up for all the big things in the world we can't get at."

Herrick gave Jean's hand a quick pressure and let it go. "Kind of indirect action. Well, did this wonderful person come through with an interview?"

"Yes. I suppose she did, if you call shooting a perfect ignoramus into a new world, an interview. I felt as if I were out with a little kite to gather all the electricity in the heavens. Just think of trying to get that personality into three thousand words and hand it in to-morrow."

"It'll look more possible after dinner, a large, soggy dinner. Nothing like it for dragging the soul down within reach."

Whenever Jean looked back on that night she could remember every detail of the dinner, everything that had been said, almost the order of its saying. Thrilled by the happiness and vitality of Jean and of the emotional response Dr. Mary had waked in her, Herrick let himself go in the delight of answering completely to her mood. Something of the sensation of flying entered them both, as if they were skimming all discord, all the petty misunderstanding of ordinary intercourse. Long after, Jean smiled as she remembered how strongly this feeling had held her and how sure she had been of it.

It was a gay dinner and they sat on in the little restaurant until almost nine. Whenever Jean found a good phrase or Herrick had an illuminating idea on the structure of the article they jotted it down. When they finished there was quite a sheaf of these notes.

"It's a shame to let them cool off. We ought to whip the thing into final shape to-night, lock it up forever in typing. Besides, if you're not used to working in a racket, you may not be able to do it in the office to-morrow. And if you put it over you've got the job cinched."

"I know. I'll sit up all night, I suppose, and it can't be so bad just to have to copy it in the office."

"I'll tell you a better scheme than that. We'll go up to my place and type it now."

Jean had never been to Herrick's rooms and for a moment she hesitated. Then the absurdity of her convention struck her. She had been alone in Flop's when she scarcely knew Herrick at all, and for hours in the hills.

"Fine."

Herrick paid the sleepy waiter and tipped him so generously that he woke with the suddenness of a marionette. They departed, laughing under his effusive thanks.

Like Flop's, Herrick's room was the top floor of a dilapidated building that had once been a place of business but was now filled with cheap studios. It was large and barely furnished, with a long table, a desk, a couch and a few chairs. There were no curtains at the windows, and a tall office building, like a back-drop, cut into the night sky. It had never occurred to Herrick to think about the bareness of his room until he saw Jean's look of approval.

"A real workroom, in which we are going to write the hit of the Sunday edition."

He uncovered his typewriter and pulled the drop-light over the desk.

As Jean laid her things on the couch and took the chair Herrick drew up for her at the table, she thought: "It's like a large cell. In another age he might have been a monk."

They worked rapidly and well together. Jean dictated and Herrick typed. When it was done he read it aloud.

"That's great stuff. I'll see that Thompson stands me a drink for finding him such a prodigy."

"But it isn't all mine. I could never have done it alone. I should probably have blurbed all over the place but for your restraining influence, or become disgusted and given it up."

"You see, it's not easy to do things alone, even when we're very full of them and want to very much. Is it?"

He looked up suddenly and Jean saw the loneliness that she had glimpsed so often below Herrick's moods. The loneliness of the small boy in the bare fields and of the grown man with The Bunch.

"No—I don't suppose it is."

There was a long silence and then Herrick said, as if they had often spoken of it before:

"Do you know, sometimes I have felt that you think I am weak or that I don't want to do the novel very much, and it hurts to have you think that. I suppose if I were a genius, or had the will of I don't know what, I would sit up here and write and write and write. But I'm not made that way. To go week after week, month after month, alone, believing in yourself, fighting through those horrible moods of depression when all your work seems piffling and insincere, beginning again—ugh." Herrick shivered as if his own words had opened a window through which blew a cold blast of memory. "I don't doubt there are people who could. But I can't."

"I don't think I ever thought you were weak, or that you didn't want to do it, but I have wished often that you would."

Jean forced her eyes to meet Herrick's. She felt that she owed him something and that words were not enough. The color ran under her smooth skin and her eyes were shy. Herrick came nearer but he did not touch her. The lines of his face were clean and sharply chiseled and his eyes burned. He spoke simply, making no personal demand, even for sympathy.

"I do want to do it, Jean, very, very much. More perhaps than I can make you understand. But if it is ever written, it will be because some one believes in me."

"You have friends—and they believe."

"Do 'they'? Maybe they do. But I can't imagine Flop, or any of them, stopping long enough from their own affairs to listen to a single chapter. Besides I don't believe it's the kind of thing they would like. It's not 'strong.' I doubt it's even the 'real stuff.'"

Jean held down the unreasoning joy rising in her. Calmly and naturally Herrick was justifying her faith in him.

"Perhaps you're not quite fair. If you've never tried them you can't be sure. Sometimes I've thought that The Kitten, in some moods, was awfully tired of it, the noise and heat and—and——" Jean broke off in her clumsy effort to be perfectly just, for Herrick was looking at her in a strange, piercing way and she felt that again she was falling below the standard of honesty he had set for her. Her eyes dropped. Herrick laid both hands upon her shoulders and she could feel their cold grip on her skin.

"If the novel is ever written, Jean, it will be because some one cares for me and believes because of caring. With a woman like——"

"Don't," Jean whispered.

"It's so lonely, so damned cold and lonely and hideous," Herrick went on, as if he were not speaking to Jean at all. "We're like a lot of lost shades, each locked in the isolation of his own personality, wandering about in a fog. We never really meet or touch, but grope about blindly, never finding because there's nothing really to find."

"Don't. It's too cruel, and it can't be true. There must be something, somewhere."

"Where?"

Jean thought of her own groping and of her mother, the tense little figure praying to her God.

"I don't know."

"There is nothing. Free will? That's only the power to choose between one dead deed and another."

Jean thought of Dr. Mary.

"It isn't true," she cried eagerly. "We are not locked in alone. We're bound tight to every other living soul on earth. We're not blind or lost in a fog. There's nothing so ugly in the whole world that we can't make beautiful if we want to."

Herrick drew her a little closer. "Can we, Jean? Maybe. But not alone. I know. I have been alone all my life—until I met you."

His voice vibrated with the passion that was carrying him beyond his control. He was like a man borne on a swift current past familiar banks, unable to stop. And on the bank stood all the women he had ever known, mocking, hating, amused. Plainest of all was The Kitten. Her eyes were calm, and he heard her say quietly: "You will have to marry her."

"That's why I have done nothing, Jean, because I have been always alone. Will you help me, Jean?"

"Yes." Jean spoke gravely. "I will help you as much as I can."

"Will you marry me?" he asked quietly. "I need you so."

"Yes." She said simply. "We will help each other."

Herrick thrilled with her power and for a moment rose to it.

"You wonderful big, white woman! We will love and work together."

The color burned Jean's face. Laughing, Herrick's arms closed about her.

"Kiss me, Jeany."

Jean turned her head and laid her cool lips on his cheek. Herrick's hold tightened.

"Jean, I believe you're a flirt. That's no kind of a kiss. I want a real one."

Jean laughed a little tremulously. "That was a real one."

The edge of Herrick's joy dulled. Did she mean it? Was that a kiss to her?

"All right, dear. It is—if you mean it that way." He tried to smile but Jean felt that in some way she had hurt him.

Very dimly she sensed depths in the relationship of men and women of which she knew nothing.

"So you are going to marry him." Martha picked up the toast that had burned while Jean talked and threw it on the fire.

In the bright sunshine she looked old. Her flesh was pale and flaccid, like the flesh of overworked people, or of the aged who have gone without sleep. Her hair was twisted in a tight knot, but stray, gray wisps escaped. Her throat was stringy and the chin muscles sagged.

Jean tried not to look at the discolored neck and the thin, worn hands. They stood for all that her mother had missed in life. It roused something in her sharper than pity, a kind of anger. With an effort she went round the table.

"Mummy, don't look like that." Jean knelt and put her arms about the rigid figure.

Martha did not move. It had come so suddenly, before she had found strength to meet it. She had disliked Franklin Herrick on sight and even this morning, at early service, had knelt long after the close of mass and prayed that he might be taken out of Jean's life.

And now Jean was going to marry him. To take him for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, till death parted them. She heard herself saying the words that had bound her for life to Jean's father. She had tried to do her duty, but death had come as a great release. She had done her best and had had the sacraments of the Church and prayer to help her. Jean had nothing. She was plunging blindly into this state, the greatest personal martyrdom ordained by God. And with Franklin Herrick. Martha could see no plan, no purpose in this thing and battled to hold firm her faith.

"Mummy dear, don't. Please don't look like that, as if something terrible had happened."

"Something terrible has happened, Jean. You are going to yoke yourself for life, think of it, for all the years God may demand you live on this earth, with a man who has no higher conception of life than an animal."

Jean's arms dropped to her sides and she pressed her lips tightly together.

"And he will lead you farther and farther away, Jean. He has a power over you that I would never have believed, never. Ever since you have known him you have been different. You're ready at his beck and call. Have you ever refused to go anywhere when he has asked you? Long ago you gave up church, but, still, you spent the day with some kind of respect. But now, how do you spend the day that God Himself put aside for His worship?"

"In the hills that He made." Jean almost prayed for strength to be patient.

"And your friends? Infidels and wasters and adulterers, by your own story. Oh, Jeany, Jeany, my baby."

Martha laid her head on the table and sobbed.

Jean rose. In spite of all her effort to do otherwise she could not help it. She felt a physical nausea at the sight of her mother's emotion. She tried to go nearer and could not. She could not comfort or touch that quivering figure.

"Let's not talk any more about it, mother. It will only make us both unhappy."

Martha struggled with her feeling as with an enemy and conquered. She rose, too, and for a moment they stood facing each other.

"There is some good purpose in it all, there must be and He will show me. Perhaps I have loved you too much and He has chosen this instead of death. You must have patience with me, Jean. He will show me. Till then I can only say blindly—Thy will be done."

Before the tremendous egotism of her mother's humility, Jean went slowly back to the table and sat down.

"When are you going to be married?" Martha dried her eyes and, crossing to the stove, brought the hot coffee and filled both their cups.

"Very soon," Jean answered wearily. "There's no reason to wait, and Franklin wants to get settled at some work."

Martha winced at the name.

The next moment the door opened and Tom and Elsie and Tommykins came in. Tom was even fatter and redder than usual and more offensively good-natured. He insisted on guessing what had happened, until Jean stopped the flow of his ridiculous suppositions with a brief:

"I am going to be married."

Elsie hugged her, and Jean gathered from the cataract of congratulations that Elsie had never expected her to marry, that marriage was the only thing in a woman's life, that it was one long martyrdom. You were to be pitied if you did and pitied if you didn't. Then Elsie dabbed at her eyes and they all sat down to the late Sunday morning breakfast.

Tom made broad jokes about some people's luck and "turning new leaves." He kept appealing for corroboration to Tommykins and going into spasms of laughter at his son's stare. He wanted to know whether Jean would be able to stand the family now that she was going to marry a highbrow and whether she and Herrick talked in prose or blank verse. He tried with genuine kindness and unfathomable stupidity to fill the silences that settled more and more heavily as breakfast drew to a close.

As soon as it was over and the things cleared away, Martha went upstairs for her Sunday rest. With all her heart Jean wished that she had not told Herrick not to come. She had meant to give this Sunday entirely to her mother, even to go to afternoon service with her. She had known that her marriage would be a blow and had sincerely wanted to ease it as much as possible. But Martha's reception of the news had frozen the suggestion on her lips. Now Jean faced a hot afternoon alone. Upstairs Elsie scolded at Tommykins who refused to be dressed in his Sunday clothes and the new baby helped her brother's efforts by wailing at the top of her lungs. From the hammock under the pine, where he was trying to read the papers, Tom called rough directions for managing the children and finally banged into the house to see that they were executed.

Jean put on her hat, took some paper on which to write to Pat and left the house. In the canyon back of the college grounds it was cool, and Jean lay on her back in a tangle of green, her hands clasped under her head, and wondered just where she would begin. She had so much to say, and yet when she focused it all, it came simply to this:

"I am going to marry Franklin Herrick whom I mentioned to you once. I have known him less than six months and will be married in three weeks."

Put that way, it sounded unreal, and she could hardly believe it herself. She said it aloud and still it seemed strange, as if she were speaking of some one else, not of herself. She wondered whether all women felt that way, and whether her mother had felt like that when she had married her father. What had her mother felt? Looking back, Jean wondered.

What had been the relationship between her father and mother? Certainly there had been no feeling of nearness between them, none of that spiritual contact so strong between herself and Herrick; that thing that made long hours of silence closer than words; that sense of knowing what he felt.

Jean thought of the first time Herrick had kissed her in the spicy darkness of the acacia and of the physical repulsion that had frightened her. And of the other night, when he had pleaded, "A real one, Jeany," and she had wondered what he meant.

How had her mother felt the first time her father had kissed her? Had she known what a "real kiss" was? When she thought about it directly, as she was doing now, she had no memories of her father's kissing her mother, or of their ever sitting hand in hand as she and Herrick sat often, watching the sun drop into the sea. She seemed to have no special memories of them together at all.

Suddenly Jean sat up. She had one. It came to her with the clarity of a photograph. She could see the streak of sunlight across the bare, scrubbed floor, the brightly polished stove, the box of geraniums in the window. She could smell the clean smell of the place and feel again the stillness.

It had been a Sunday, a warm, blue day, like to-day. All afternoon she had been in the garden trying to amuse herself and not succeeding. She could recall, so sharply that it made her smile, the desperate effort, and her final relinquishment of it. It was so useless to battle against Sunday. Besides the monotony of her own home, Jean had always felt the burden of the whole world, locked into the petrifying inaction of the Blessed Sabbath, and struggling to rest and enjoy it therein. This particular Sunday had been almost paralyzing in its peace, and Jean could see herself, a small figure in a checked dress and pebble-goat shoes, come shuffling along the gravel walk, scuffing her toes because she had always been told not to. But the unusual sound, at that hour in the afternoon, of her father's voice in the kitchen, stopped her at the door, and she stood peering through the wire screening. She saw her father come slowly across to her mother, who stood shrinking between the table and the sink. For months after that, Jean had smelled the dust in the screen and felt the rusty wire pressing the tip of her nose, whenever she thought of it. Her father had come close to her mother and stopped. His face was white and his lips trembled and Jean had been afraid he was going to cry.

"Marty, can't you forgive? Aren't you human at all?"

The words had bitten into Jean's memory because it was her father who was saying them in a queer voice and with a strange white face. Then he had come closer and tried to put his arms about her mother, but she had shrunk back with a sob that brought Jean at a bound into the kitchen. Her father's arms had dropped to his sides. The blood rushed into his face and for a moment he had stood with his mouth open. Then with a shrug he turned away and said in his natural voice:

"You'd better ask that God of yours for a little common sense."

At that Martha had unclasped Jean's protecting arms and gone quietly out of the room. A few moments later Jean heard the front door slam. For the first time in her life her father did not come back to supper. But, mixed with the tragedy of her mother's red eyelids and the silent supper, was a tingling excitement that something had happened on Sunday. It gave an elasticity to the rigid Sunday routine that for months had filled Jean with a pleasant sense of possibility.

Shortly after that her father had died. Strange relatives had appeared with an extraordinary attitude toward her mother, as if Martha had suddenly become unable to think for herself. They had bustled about whispering, and had tried to take direction of the funeral. But their efforts fell useless before Martha's quiet determination. A step-brother of the dead man's had become rather violent in his objection to a church-service. But the long brown coffin had been carried into the church nevertheless, and the priest had intoned the mass and incensed the coffin in spicy smoke that had made Jean cough. And afterwards, she and her mother had stood at the open grave, and when the priest said, "Dust to dust," and all the relatives Jean had never before seen sniveled or sobbed openly, Martha had held her hand tightly and Jean had heard her whisper, "Father, forgive."

For a year Jean and her mother had gone early every Sunday morning to church and Jean had prayed fervently that her father be forgiven. For what, exactly, she did not know, but she remembered now that she had linked it up to the Sunday that her mother had cried and her father had not come home to supper; and that she had not felt quite honest praying for her father to be forgiven. Living, he had never said a prayer nor gone to church with them. But dead, they had him at their mercy.

What had he done? Why had they prayed so earnestly that he be forgiven? Why did these two memories alone frame her father, when she tried to think what life had been to him and to her mother? What difference would it have made in her own life if there had been other memories?

In the quiet warmth of the brush, Jean shivered. It was wrong, wicked to bring children up like that. What did it matter that she had always had enough to eat and to wear and had gone to school, when the deepest memory she had of her parents was her mother shrinking from her father's touch, and the long brown coffin in the church to which her father had never gone of his own will. It seemed to Jean that she had been cheated and deprived of something that could never now be hers.

She pushed the hair back from her eyes.

"If I ever have children——"

Jean stopped. She could feel the blood creep up from her toes, scorching her. If she had a child it would be Herrick's. It might have Herrick's changing eyes and soft, full lips and the high, thin laugh. Jean had not thought of Herrick's thin voice for months.

She jumped up. She did not want children. She wanted to do her work in the world, and to help Herrick do his. There were too many people in the world already. She thought of Dr. Mary and the problems she struggled with, of Carmen and the puny, blind baby.

As Jean came into the kitchen Martha was getting supper. She looked rested and Jean knew that she had been praying. Jean's anger of the morning was gone, and as she looked at the small figure moving quickly about, rather envied her. Had there ever been an emotional crisis in her mother's life that had not been eased by preparing food for some one?

"Mummy," she asked suddenly, "do you remember once my coming into the kitchen, when we lived in the old Webster Street house, one Sunday and finding father trying to put his arms round you and—you wouldn't let him?"

As Jean asked it, she turned to take an apron from its peg and stood so, for her mother had stopped in the act of lighting the gas stove, let the match burn to her fingertips, scorch them, and go out.

"Yes—I remember," Martha answered after a long pause.

Jean waited.

"I think, dear, I'll warm the cold meat with a brown gravy. It makes it go farther."

And Martha Norris lit another match.

Three weeks later Jean and Herrick were married. They were married in church to please Martha and for the same reason made a pretense of eating afterwards the elaborate meal she had prepared. Tom was heavier and cruder than ever and Elsie more vapid. The new baby cried incessantly and Tommykins took occasion to outdo himself as a general nuisance. Jean was thoroughly glad that Pat had not been able to come, and always remembered her wedding dinner as the worst meal through which she had ever sat.

From the chaos of chance emotions, pleasure snatched at random, Herrick settled down into the calm order of a life directed by a fixed purpose. He was going to write the novel. It was all mapped out. He and Jean had settled it through the long, peaceful afternoons of their two-weeks' honeymoon at the Portuguese ranch in the Marin Hills. Spurred by Jean's interest, Herrick had seen the thing clearly and they had worked up an excitement about it that had given Herrick an exquisite sense of power, youth, achievement. Her belief filled him with the conviction that it was all he had ever needed.

The cool little kiss that had so disappointed Herrick on the night he had asked Jean to marry him, delighted him now that he realized the almost incredible depths of Jean's shy purity and ignorance. She was like no woman he had ever known. Herrick was surprised at himself and grateful to Jean for this surprise. The most precious thing, in Herrick's scheme of life, was a new sensation and that he now had.

For the present he was content to have Jean's eyes light as he worked out some intricate detail of his hero's life, or spoke with firm purpose of the thing he meant to do next, as soon as this one "that had haunted him for years" was out of the way. The breathless way she would say: "That's great. Now go and get it down before you forget it," made him want to take her in his arms and crush her until he hurt even her strong body. But deeper than the delight of doing it, was the sensuous delight in his own restraint. He asked none of the passionate response of other women. This almost frightened surrender was enough. The other would come, and of its own accord. The light in Jean's eyes and the quick catch that came into her voice when they talked of the full years ahead, was a promise. No fire could burn on the surface like that. Secure in his untried strength, Herrick was very gentle and tender. He was going to write many fine books and he was going to tend that spark in the calm gray eyes of his wife until it blazed at his will.

Watching him, Jean was happy too. She had justified her own faith. Looking back after almost two months of marriage, Jean saw what a blind faith it had been. She had known nothing whatever of him. She had found him among people she despised. Her mother had mistrusted. She remembered the Sunday she had sat under the scrub oak and recalled her mother shrinking from her father's touch, and farther back than that the hot shame that had held her at the hungry groping of Herrick's first kiss. There was nothing of that in his touch now. He liked to draw her to the arm of his chair as she passed and rub his cheek softly against her shoulder, and when he kissed her Jean always felt that it was somehow a little rite that something very pure and deep in him was offering to her.

Jean had not given up her work on the paper, because she did not wish to be a dead weight on Herrick and had definite ideas about the economic independence of women, and because she knew that housekeeping, as she and Herrick were content to live, would take up very little of her time. They had made few changes in the studio except to transform a rubbish closet into a kitchenette and to make an extra bedroom of the storeroom at the end. Otherwise it was as bare and "monk-like" as in the days when Herrick had lived alone. Shortly after they were married, Jean had told him how like a monk's cell she had thought it, the night they wrote her first interview. Herrick had laughed, but suddenly his eyes had misted and he had drawn Jean close and held her so for a moment.

Martha Norris disliked the studio almost as much as she did the haphazard order of their lives, and for this she blamed Jean. Deep in her heart she liked Herrick no better than she ever had, nor could she yet see the Divine purpose in making him Jean's husband. But, since he was her husband, it was Jean's duty to weave about him those iron bands that Martha called "making a home." Instead, more than half the time they ate in restaurants. Jean called at the office for Herrick, or they met somewhere and ate strange food in not overclean places. Once in a while they brought chops or steaks in with them and fried these over the gas. Martha made many indirect inquiries, but she never heard of a meal that took more than fifteen minutes to cook. To buy cheap underclothes and throw them away when they wore out, as Jean now did, as well as Herrick, savored to Martha of license. It reached beyond economics and touched morality. It was not far removed from their decision not to have children. On this subject Martha and Jean had talked only once, but Martha had prayed half the night about it.

The whole manner of this life was hectic and a little illicit, but she made no comment. In the hours of lonely agony that she had spent on Jean's wedding day, she had laid out her plan, and even finding that it was the worst possible would not have swerved her a hair's breadth from it. Nothing should ever come between her and Jean. She would accept Herrick and try to like him, and this she did to the best of her ability. She listened with interest when Jean told her of the work Herrick was planning to do, and cooked all day Saturday getting the dinners she served with so little apparent effort every fourth Sunday. Jean understood and was filled with a softer love and truer sympathy for her mother than the other guessed.

Martha only knew that, as weeks slipped by, this marriage of Jean's was not weaning her big daughter away as she had expected and feared so terribly. On the contrary, it seemed to draw them more closely together in many ways. Jean often stole an hour from work and dropped in unexpectedly. Then they had tea, and if there were any of the little tea cakes that Jean loved, she always took some home for Herrick.

As for The Bunch, they seemed to have passed quite out of Jean's life. Sometimes she met one of them by accident, and twice she and Herrick had gone, at Flop's insistence, to an extra "blow-out." But Herrick had been as bored as she, and they had not gone again.

When they had been married a little over three months, Herrick began the novel. It was to be the life story of a man who had beaten his way up from just such beginnings as Herrick's, and who finally achieved fame and fortune as a great engineer. The man's name was Robert, and Jean and Herrick spoke of him as of some one who lived with them.

Every night they hurried back from dinner to "keep the appointment with Robert." From eight until ten Herrick wrote. He insisted that he could not write a line unless Jean was curled up in her favorite place on the couch. From time to time he would stop, and as soon as she became conscious that the machine was no longer clicking, Jean would look up and smile. Herrick liked to make Jean look up and smile.

Watching Herrick at work evening after evening, Jean felt that life was a very simple matter if one used one's common sense and went straight ahead doing the thing that was best and right. If people spoiled their lives and got less than they might have had, it was because they were either like The Bunch, grabbing feverishly at every passing illusion, afraid that they might miss something; or else they were like Martha, refusing and denying, which, after all, was only another kind of fear. In these days of greater nearness to her mother, Jean sometimes wondered whether Martha had not really wanted happiness so much that she had been afraid to take it.

Jean spent many happy hours listening to the click of Herrick's machine and laying down the laws of life. Fear was the thing to be afraid of. She was very clear and definite in her own mind about this. Fear was the great paralysis. But there was no need for any one to be paralyzed unless he wanted to be. Of these speculations and certainties she wrote to Pat, and Pat wrote back asking the color of Herrick's eyes and saying she was too busy to philosophize about fear or anything else and would "save all that" until she saw Jean, if that happy day ever came, now that Jean was so busy leading her double life. Pat always insisted on referring to Jean's newspaper work as one life and her "man job" as another life.

Herrick liked this and used to stop work sometimes to come and sit close to Jean on the couch and demand:

"Am I your 'man job,' Jean?"

When Jean said he was, Herrick insisted that she put the stamp of her workmanship on it, which meant that Jean was to kiss him. When she had kissed him he would go back to the machine and work steadily. He was always making up little games like that, and after Jean had gotten over the first sense of foolishness, she had come to like them.

Jean was quite honest with herself and with Herrick when she said that he was her real work. She had no delusions about the newspaper. It was much better than the library and infinitely better than teaching, but she was not a born newspaper woman. She had not again found a Dr. Mary or any one who approached her. It was only because her personal life was full in those first months that some of the interest overflowed into her routine, and Jean was able to interview dull people and whip their mediocre purpose into some kind of life. The atmosphere of the office she loathed, with its terrific rush and confusion, and was never able to work up a proper respect for the wonderful concentration of Mr. Thompson.

She often thought of Dr. Mary and her promise to go to the Hill House. Twice she asked Herrick to go with her on a Sunday afternoon, but Herrick had begged off.

"We work hard all the week, Jeany, and taking tea and settling the affairs of nations strikes me as too strenuous for our one day of rest. And, besides, I want you all to myself."

Jean was disappointed but said nothing. She decided to go and see the little doctor the first chance she had. But, somehow, the chance did not come, and finally, when six months had gone by, she was ashamed to go.

In the middle of November, Herrick struck a snag in his work. The first five chapters had gone well. He had brought Robert up from the farm, taken him through college and plunged him into a big mining scheme in South America. He had drawn well the narrowness of Robert's home and the longing for opportunity.

But now Robert balked. He sat down in the Brazilian jungle to which Herrick had led him and refused to move. Hour after hour Herrick struggled and honestly tried to wake him from the permanent sleep into which he had fallen without warning. But Robert would not wake. Herrick's nerves tightened. He wanted and did not want to consult Jean. He had never asked her advice about the psychology of his people, only about the arrangement of incidents, or the vividness with which he had succeeded in portraying them. To ask help in this was a confession of his inability and Herrick's vanity refused.

And deep in Herrick's consciousness, beyond the point of self-acknowledgment, was the fear that Robert was not asleep. Robert was dead, dead beyond the power of revivifying. Until now Robert's reactions had been Herrick's own. But from now on Robert must be himself, and Herrick could not flesh the skeleton of this strenuous young engineer, toiling away alone in his jungle, with no nearer stimulus than a board of directors fifteen thousand miles away.

Evening after evening Herrick sat at the machine and covered pages with useless words. His fingers moved mechanically, although he tried to focus his attention on Robert. But the thoughts running at the back of his brain pushed Robert further and further beyond the border of his interest, and, finally, one evening in the middle of November, Robert dropped over the horizon altogether and Herrick knew that he had finished with him forever. His fingers lay idle on the keys and he stared into space.

In the dressing-room Jean was changing into a house-dress. Herrick did not like her to curl up on the couch in her working clothes and she always changed to please him. In a few moments she would come through the door quietly, take a book and make herself comfortable among the pillows. She had done this for four months now. Every evening they had sat so, Jean beyond touch across the room, but where he could look up and see her. Every evening for four months he had sat almost the whole distance of the room away from this big, calm, gray-eyed woman. Herrick smiled. Soon the real winter would set in. The rain would beat on the attic roof and the wood-fire crackle in the grate. There would be long Sundays impossible out of doors. Would Jean expect him to sit through these too, driving that mummy forward in his senseless progress? Herrick's smile deepened.

Coming through the door, Jean caught the smile, and answered it. Then, passing the work-table without speaking, she took a book and dropped among the pillows. It was Hunter's "Poverty." She did not open it immediately, but lay back against the cushions and closed her eyes, stretching her arms above her head in a way she had when she was tired. Completely relaxed she lay there, her throat and bare arms white on the dark blue background of the cushions. The smile withered on Herrick's face, and his fingers closed tightly, but he did not move. At last Jean drew a long breath that swelled the deep breast, stretched, and reached for her book. Herrick rose, ripped the paper from the machine, tore it into fragments and threw them in the waste-basket. Then he covered the typewriter and came towards the couch. Jean sat up.

"Why, Begee, what's the matter?"

It was the name that they had evolved from one of Herrick's little games. It stood for a contraction of baby and genius. Jean had hit on it accidentally and Herrick had insisted on keeping it.

He came over to the couch and sat down. He did not sit very near Jean, because in a little while Jean was going to move of her own accord. Now that he had so suddenly murdered his pretense he knew exactly what he wanted.

"Jean, we're all wrong about Robert. He isn't a man at all. He's a machine."

Jean laughed. "He is not. He's nothing of the kind. He's not the least bit mechanical. You've fleshed and blooded him beautifully."

"Maybe I have since I've given him my own. But he's an ass, just the same."

"He isn't and I won't have you abuse him. He's a real man and a particular friend of mine."

"Well, I can't say much for your taste, then. I'd like to punch his head. He'd bore me to death in ten minutes. Maybe, if you're so keen about him, you'll accompany him on that neat little stunt he's about to pull off. I have no desire to go to Peru with the creature."

"I'd love to, but you know perfectly well that I can't put a thing together except the ambitions of ladies who rescue cats. Getting Robert through the next six months of his life wouldn't bore me. It would overwhelm me."

"It'll swamp me—if I try."

"Begee!"

"Absolutely. He's behaved pretty well up to now because I understand him. But I don't understand how it feels to tramp through a jungle with nobody but natives you can't talk to, and sit all alone in a tent, through wonderful moonlight nights, smoking pipes and being happy. I never sat alone in a tent under tropic moonlight and I don't want to, with nothing but a pipe. I'd go raving mad."

"Nonsense. If you'd wanted to build bridges instead of write novels, you'd have done just the same."

"But I didn't want to build bridges. What's the good of them anyhow, messing up a perfectly good jungle? It's a fool point of view, that everlasting conquering difficulties and improving things."

"You know you don't mean that." Jean was looking at him now, with the smile gone from her eyes. No more than Martha did she like to hear the things she cared for derided. Instantly Herrick saw that he had gone too quickly to his goal.

"I tell you what, Jeany, if we get that bridge built we'll have to give Robert some incentive. We'll let him meet Dora before he does it instead of after. It'll make her better, too, eliminate any possibility of her loving him for anything but himself. How does that strike you? She can't fall in love with his achievements, if he hasn't any."

"But that isn't the way we've mapped it out. Robert was going to get it all done and offer it to her. It's just what he would do. If you go and change it round you make him another kind of man. Maybe that other kind of man wouldn't get the bridge——" Jean broke off suddenly.

"The bridge built at all. Is that what you mean?" Herrick finished for her.

"Yes, I suppose I do. You see——" Jean frowned in her effort to get exactly the right words. It seemed somehow very important that she should get them just right, "The way we have it fixed now, Robert is one kind of man and Dora is one kind of girl, and they're going to be awfully happy. But if you change him she wouldn't be happy with that kind of man. He'd be just the kind that would want to trail her through the jungle after him. You will have to change her, too."

"Rubbish, Jean. That's the psychology of a girl of sixteen. Do you suppose love depends on whether a man builds a bridge or not?"

"That isn't the point, Begee, and it's not the same thing at all. Whether he built the bridge or not, under those difficult conditions, depends on the man he is."

"Oh, Jean, you're a baby. Carrying out that logic then, if I never finish the novel, I am another man. And you'll have to get made all over yourself. Would I be a different man to you?"

Jean looked down at her hands clasped in her lap. Then she raised her eyes to Herrick's:

"Yes. You would be different."

"Why? Why would not finishing the novel make me any different?"

"Because, if you had never wanted to do it and never started, or couldn't do it, that would be different. But you have always wanted to, for years and years it's been haunting you. You can do it and you have started it. So, if you stopped now, because you've got into a hard place, it would mean that you hadn't the grit to go on. It would be just plain cowardly. You'll be afraid of the pain and trouble of the effort."

"Well, what of that? What's so specially fine in not being afraid of pain? What's so horrible in being a coward? A coward is often a man who sees values more clearly than the mob. What's so noble in beating after something that won't make you any happier when you've got it? That's all courage is, striving after something difficult or impossible to get."

Herrick came closer and laid both hands on Jean's shoulders.

"It's just a lot of words, Jean, handed down till we swallow them whole, this babble about courage and strength and getting the best of things. Words, words, that's all. The measure of all this courage is a measure of effort, not of accomplishment. According to that theory, a baby that beats its head against a stone wall is brave."

Jean sat silent, held by the same terrible necessity of getting the right words.

"No, it is not just blind fighting. It isn't beating after something that you think's going to make you happy. It's seeing clearly and not being afraid of being unhappy."

"Not being afraid of being unhappy? What else is there to be afraid of? What else matters?"

"Being the best self you have, the very, very best."

"Is it?" His hold on her shoulders tightened, and he said, more to keep that look on her face than for any further interest he had in the subject:

"And this best? There is never any doubt about it? It is always perfectly clear what it is?"

"Of course it's always clear—if we're honest."

"And every one knows what this wonderful 'best' in himself is and goes trotting on alone and grabs it?"

"Extremist! No one trots right along and grabs anything. You know what I mean, Begee. Life's like a story or an editorial. You don't go on blindly putting down words without knowing what you're aiming at. You know the points you want to make and you make them. You have your climax before you begin."

"Good Lord! Do you believe that?"

"Yes. I think I do. I know it sounds terribly high-falutin but lots of things do when you really get them in words. Life isn't just a jumbled mess. It must make for something. If it isn't a road we build going along, what on earth is it?"

Herrick's hands dropped from Jean's shoulders.

"It's a pendulum. That's all it is, at the best. That's all, Jean. We swing through the arc, back and forth, from one higher point to another and through all the lowest points between. When we reach one end of the arc we are pushed back and do it all over again, and after a while the arc grows shorter, and we hang there at the will of—what? Fate or chance or our own limitations."

"Oh no, Begee, no. No. You're tired and you don't really believe it yourself. It's a corking good image and we'll get it into the novel somewhere, only Robert won't say it. But as philosophy, it doesn't swing. I'm not hung on a wire by Fate or anything else and when I get to the end of my arc I can go higher. Which may be bad mathematics or physics or whatever it is, but it's good sense and gets things done in this world."

Jean laughed as she laid hold of Herrick's shoulders and shook him gently.

"It's you who are the baby. That's what you are. A baby that gets a spiritual tummy-ache every time he strikes a snag."

Jean was very near now, smiling into his eyes, and Herrick could feel the cool, firm strength of her.

"Am I?"

"Certainly, not a doubt of it. A baby that can scarcely walk. But never mind, when he gets to the end of his arc, mother'll come and push him along. Mother's a grand pusher and she adores it."

"Is she?" Herrick's voice broke and he groped for Jean with trembling hands. "Prove it—prove it." His breath came hot against her cheek as he seized her in his arms and crushed her mouth against his.

"Wake up, wake up," he panted, and through the anger and nausea that seemed to be dragging her out of consciousness, Jean heard him. Years afterwards she could recall the feel of each word as if it were a stone that was hitting her, and the feel of Herrick's unshaven chin against hers.

With all her force she tried to push him away. But, blind with his long suppression, Herrick only held her closer. Not till the edge of his hunger dulled did his hold loosen. Taking Jean's chin in his hand, he turned her face up. Instantly his arms dropped.

For a moment Herrick refused to believe the look in her eyes. Then a wave of anger swept over him, flooding his face and neck to a deep red.

"Well, we're married, aren't we?"

"If that's marriage, no." Jean stepped back out of range of this thing that had taken every scrap of her self-respect and ripped it off as if it were a cloak, that had held her, against her will, at its own pleasure. "Don't you ever kiss me like that again—ever. Do you hear?"

Herrick said nothing. He went over to the window and leaned his forehead on the cold glass. He had acted like a brute, but it didn't matter. Nothing mattered. He had shocked Jean, but that didn't matter, either. It didn't matter whether she was shocked or needed shocking or didn't need it. Nothing in the whole world mattered at all.

Slowly Jean came and stood beside him.

"Please, Franklin," she said in a low hurried tone, "don't kiss me like that ever again. I hate it."

"All right." Herrick spoke from his folded arms without looking up.

Jean stood where she was for a moment and then went back to the couch. She took up her book and tried to read, but the words made no sense. Herrick still stood at the window and the typewriter was covered on the desk.

It was as if a murder had been committed in the room.

Late in December the rains set in. Heavy gray clouds hung low over the city's hills, pressing all the joy and color from life, flattening the world to a monotone of black umbrellas.

At New Year there was an interval of pleasant weather and then more rain, steady, deliberate, endless rain. The street cars were crowded with damp people, all trying to keep as far as possible from each other, all peevish and nervous under the strain. Gutters broke and streams of water ran everywhere. The streets were rivers of thick, black mud and buildings reeked with the odor of woolen clothing drying in steam heat. From the middle of January to the middle of February the world woke in the morning to rain and went to bed at night with the rain steadily pouring in long, gray lines from the leaden sky.

Against the background of the rain, Jean's days ran together in a blur. She created a false enthusiasm and, under this self-imposed stimulus, got so many words on paper. Sometimes she wondered how long she would be able to keep it up. She thought now more and more often of Pat steadily plodding in her mountain school, and of her mother, trotting through each day's task, every crevice of her life filled with the knowledge that she could do no more than she was doing, nor do it better. Most of all she thought of Dr. Mary, buoyant and vital among her people, holding to her purpose and working toward it surely. She wondered whether Dr. Mary would remember her if she went.

There had been no mention at all of the night that Herrick had stood long at the window with his face in his arms. The thing that had been killed had been decently buried, so decently buried that it might never have existed at all. Herrick worked spasmodically on a short story, but he rarely worked in the evenings. They often went to the theater, and at long intervals to Flop's. Once Jean had quite enjoyed herself and they had gone again the following Sunday, but the out-of-town visitors had gone away and it was duller, more noisy, less sincere than ever.

Through the four worst Sundays of rain Herrick wrote and when he had finished went over the result with Jean. They haggled each point with a desperate show of interest. When Jean said a scene did not ring true, she explained very elaborately and carefully and Herrick listened and argued and in the end usually agreed. Jean often thought of Robert as some one who had died far away in the jungle.

In March the fury of the rain lessened, wore itself out in a succession of damp, drizzling days almost harder to stand than the steady downpour. Then the hills stood out once more softly green and clear against the blue sky. With the coming of spring, Herrick gave up his pretense of winter. The unfinished short story went into the waste basket. Jean was glad and the tension of her nerves relaxed.

It was a lovely day in May, when Jean's work brought her close to home about one o'clock and she decided to do the writing in the studio instead of going back to the noisy office. As she opened the door she pushed back an envelope of the gray paper that Pat used. Jean pounced on it and without waiting to take off her things, tore it open. There were only a few sentences on a half sheet:

"Will be down on the sixteenth.

"Train gets in about three. Don't meet me or upset your day in any way.

"Leave the key where I can find it. I like doormats best."

Pat was coming.

For the moment Jean could grasp nothing else. Pat was coming. She would be here in that very room. They would talk. It was years since they had talked. No, not years. Not quite two yet, since she and Pat had sat together and swung their feet from the sink board of the Girls' Rest Hall, and she had been almost hysterical because there was nothing in the world but teaching. Jean's eyes filled with tears and she dabbed angrily at them.

"You old fool! What do you expect? To feel the same always? No doubt Pat feels older and has changed a lot too."

But the idea of Pat's having changed frightened Jean. Pat must not have changed. She must be just the same sane, practical, efficient Pat. She would be. And she was coming, coming on the sixteenth and the sixteenth was to-day.

The next moment Jean was pounding out her interview on the machine. It was done in a space of time unsurpassed even by the concentration of Mr. Thompson. Jean sent a messenger with it to the office and began cleaning the studio. By half past two the place was so clean that Jean could not find another thing to do, not even rearrange for the fourth time a vase of roses. She took a book to the window seat and sat down.

"Now you compose your mind and act like a rational human. She won't get here any sooner if you flutter about like a demented hen. 'Flutter like a demented hen'—it must be the effect of Pat's coming!"

By sheer will Jean succeeded in sitting still, but no effort could keep her attention on the print. Her thoughts got away from her and ran back down the months, fetching up in days she and Pat had spent together; in graduation day, that seemed so many years behind her; and courses they had taken together, that for some reason seemed closer now, than when she had taken them.

In the glow of Pat's coming, forgotten things became recent and clear, while recent things seemed unreal and far away. In this inversion, the past winter, with the strained atmosphere between herself and Herrick, blurred into a memory of some very disagreeable period she had lived through long ago. Perhaps that unobtrusive, ever present third presence that had moved so silently between them through the long weeks of rain, and against whom she was ever on her guard, was not so real as she had fancied. She had accepted the thing she did not want to believe and believed it for fear of being a coward in not facing it.

"I'm an idiot, and a conceited one at——"

"Haven't a doubt about it, old girl. Didn't I always say so?"

Jean tumbled from the window seat and Pat's arms closed about her.

"Oh Pat—Pat."

They stood so for a moment. Then they separated, Pat wiped her eyes and they grinned foolishly at each other.

"I knew I'd be glad. But I didn't know I'd be like this. I guess I've been suppressing all the way down in the train, in case you'd changed a lot, and you haven't changed a bit, not a single bit."

"What did you expect? After all it's only two years, even if it seems a million."

"I guess I was trying to do one of mummy's tricks, get all primed up just because I didn't want to. Jean, if you had changed, I'd have busted on the spot."

"Well, you can stay whole then because I haven't. Now get off those things. I feel as if you had dropped in for ten minutes."

"I haven't, so get rid of any such hopes. I am going to stay a week or more. I don't care whether it's convenient or not. During the day I shall be out on my deep and serious mission, but I expect the evenings. Oh Jeany, do tell me what he's like. I've been expiring for months. You never did describe him to me, you know, and I was too delicate to ask. He might have only one eye or be bald. Is he?"

"No. He's neither lame, halt nor blind and I won't tell you a thing until you get those things off and I make some tea."

When Jean had drawn the tea table close to the window that looked out across the tops of the roofs to the crown of the Berkeley Hills, Pat demanded:

"Now, go clear back to the beginning and tell me everything. Your letters on the subject were the most unsatisfactory things ever penned by the hand of man. Get out that mental searchlight and turn on the analysis. Why did you fall in love? How does it feel? Were you swept off your feet or did you just get dragged under? Begin."

"I don't know, Patsy. Honestly, I don't know."

"Good Heavens! If that isn't the most Jeanesque performance ever! Here you can spend years rooting about in your soul for the whys and the wherefores of some silly thing that doesn't have a why or a wherefore, and for a big thing like getting married, you don't know why you did it! It sounds to me as if you had fallen so head over heels into the sea of love that you blinded yourself."

"No, I don't think I did that." There was no answering laughter in Jean's eyes and the twinkle vanished from Pat's. "We had a lot in common and used to have such glorious days out of doors together and he wanted to write and I believed I could help him. He'd always been alone and no one had ever taken any interest in the things he cared most deeply about until we met, and it seemed to me, from the very first moment, as if I had known him always."

"That's a symptom, I've always heard." Pat's tone brought Jean from a path in which she seemed to be wandering by herself.

"I mean that I didn't lose my head and go around raving like Alma Perkins did when she was engaged to Porter. Do you remember the spectacle she made of herself? Of course, I loved Franklin. I wouldn't have married him if I hadn't, would I?"

"No, I don't suppose you would," Pat answered, after an imperceptible pause. "How did mummy take it?"

This time Jean laughed. "Pat, it really was funny. Mummy was divided between being grateful to Franklin for being a 'burden' and dislike of him personally."

"Doesn't she like him? Didn't she ever?"

"No. And you should have seen the wedding breakfast. Not even in the days when she wasn't sure whether you were 'a good influence' did you ever inspire such food."

"Why didn't she like him?"

"I don't believe she really knows. I was silly enough to describe the first evening I went out with him and the people I met. When she saw him, she said he had 'the flesh and the devil' written all over him. You know how she condemns people to death on a technicality?"

"Haven't you got a picture of It? I'll die before I see It."

"Oh no you won't. But I'll 'phone in a few moments and tell It to come home early. We usually eat out, but we won't to-night. I want to talk and talk and talk. Now, tell me what you've been doing and what you expect to do, for you haven't been so very explicit yourself."

"Well, in comparison to turning my life inside out as you have done, mine's very tame."

"Well, go on."

"Oh, there's nothing to tell, really. I've been trying to see if I couldn't raise the personal standards of some of the people in my mountain fastness. That's all. It's kind of hard to explain if you don't know the conditions. You see, most people think of the country and country children as I did when I first went up there. I expected them to be behind city children in some ways but I did not expect them to be ahead of them in the ways they are. Jean, there's more rubbish talked about the morality and health of the country than a million books on the subject could get rid of in a million years. The purity of the country is a myth! There are just as many underfed, subnormal, dead, inert objects of pity among my people, big as well as little, as there ever was in a congested city slum. Why, it took my breath away. I just wouldn't believe it at first. I was all filled up on this 'pure air' and 'God's out of doors' dope until I wasn't fit to teach a goat. But I got it banged into me at last. That's why I'm here."

"Elucidate. You've jumped a few steps that my 'logical mind' needs. Why does the immorality and stupidity of a mountain district school bring you to town?"

"Because I want to talk to a woman I've never seen, but from reading everything she ever wrote and every report she ever made before all the societies there are and aren't, I have come to feel that she knows everything on earth that's worth while knowing. She may have struggled with bovine intellects in a mountain district school or she may not, but I know she'll have something worth saying. Ergo, I come."

"Pat, as I have remarked many a time and oft, you are the joy of my soul. Now who on earth but you would be so unspeakably efficient as to come down here—I see I can't flatter myself that I had anything to do with it—in order to consult an ideal on something she probably doesn't know anything about? Idealism and efficiency go hand in hand."

"I don't care. Laugh if you like."

"Who is this prodigy? May I go and sit outside and listen to the pearls of wisdom?"

"'Listen to pearls of wisdom.' Not so bad! Well, the name of this remarkable woman is Dr. Mary Mac Lean."

"What?"

"Don't you like it? Sounds like a good, common-sense Scotch name to me. Not in the same class with Jean Norris or Patricia Farnsworth, but no doubt quite respectable in its way."

"Dr. Mary? My Dr. Mary!"

"Yours? What do you, married parasite, Bohemian newspaper woman, know about Dr. Mary?"

"More than you do."

And Jean related in detail her one visit to the Hill Neighborhood House.

"And you needn't think that you are going up there alone. I've been thinking about her and wanting to go terribly, but I let such a long time go by and then it seemed rather—oh, I don't know. I just haven't been."

"Well, we're going and we're going now. If I can't see Franklin right away, at least I can see her, and they're the two people I'm most excited about at the present moment. 'Phone your husband instantly and come along."

Jean got Herrick on the 'phone and astonished him more than he had been astonished for a long time by demanding that he come home to dinner and come early. She would give no reason but chuckled happily as he had not heard her chuckle for months.

Herrick went back and sat a long while at his desk without doing anything. Then he telephoned to Flop, whom he had met accidentally early in the afternoon, that he would not be able to help in the celebration of Magnolia's birthday, as he had promised. After which, he smiled and wrote five hundred words of very good editorial.

"I am certainly glad." Dr. Mary, as she came padding across the big living room, saw only Jean. "I thought you were a 'promiser,' and I loathe 'promisers,' almost as much as I do people who really forget me."

"No, indeed I did not forget you. I think it was because I remembered you so well that I didn't come. I got to thinking how busy you must be and—and——"

"You must have been rather busy yourself. The name they announced wasn't Norris. Is it you?"

For the first time she perceived Pat and looked inquiringly from her to Jean.

"Yes. The Herrick is for me. I was married shortly after I interviewed you. Did you read the interview? I didn't call you anything, although I assure you it was a temptation. You have Mr. Herrick to thank for that. He pruned down my finest flights."

"Sensible man. Oh yes, I read it. I thought of memorizing it, you worded it so much better than I ever did myself. But let's go into my den. I always like to have friendly chats in little rooms. Big places make me feel official."

"She's a dear," whispered Pat, as they followed the doctor to a small room at the end of the hall.

Deep in her leather chair, the doctor lit a cigarette and beamed at the two young women before her.

"Are you a newspaper woman too, Miss Farnsworth?"

"Nothing so exciting. A school teacher, and a country one at that."

"Let me congratulate and condole, may I, both at once?"

"You've taught, too!"

"Does that give me so completely away? Yes, I've taught, but it was many years ago, in an interim between college and medical when I was trying to earn money to put myself through."

"But you haven't forgotten."

"Not a thing. It makes me uncomfortable yet to think of some of the mistakes I made, the big opportunities I let get by. I suppose I did not have the right stuff in me for a teacher. I started so full of hope and plans, although I knew it was not to be my life work, but I let my enthusiasm die down. I let all kinds of small, personal things dull the edge."

"But it's so difficult to keep the edge sharp. Sometimes I think that living close to the earth and animals makes one like them."

"I don't know but that you're right. Only that never occurred to me then. Perhaps I went at things too violently, but when I couldn't wake them up, well—I just let them sleep."

"And they've been asleep ever since, at least mine have. I'm afraid I can never wake them up."

Pat's voice was grave with her deep interest and Jean glimpsed the scope of teaching as she had never before.

"Oh, yes, you can. Because you realize that there is something underneath; I didn't. I called it emptiness, when it was really desperate shyness and fear of new things, a kind of deep, perverted faithfulness to all they have ever known."

"I've thought that, sometimes—and then my light goes out again. I started a kind of library when I first went up, but all that the girls and women seem to care about—the men never read at all—are love stories, the sillier the better. Anything else is something going on away off in another world. It does not concern them and never will. Why, some of my people had, until recently, never even heard of suffrage or sex hygiene or minimum wages, and they don't care or understand when I try to explain. They accept their lives like the weather. To the men the crops are good or bad, and the women have good husbands or bad husbands and that's all. The boys and girls marry young and the babies begin coming right away. For a few years the children seem to be eager and interested and then, somehow, it leaks away. I've only been teaching two years but I can see it, as if I had been there a hundred. And I want to do something. I want to get those who come to me started right. Perhaps, even with little children of six or seven, if some of us could get the seed planted——"

Pat broke off, as if the physical strength for explanation had broken under the terrific weight of the indifference with which she was struggling. Jean looked at her and a coldness settled about her own heart. It was so real to Pat and so worth while, something into which she could pour the whole warmth of herself. Jean pictured the last woman whom she had interviewed, with a scheme for saving stray dogs; and Thompson's long harangue with the Art Department about the illustrations.

"You're right, absolutely right," Dr. Mary went on; "it is the century of the child. There's our biggest chance, especially for you younger women, and so few see it. But there's hope. After all, we are beginning to creep in this field. In the next ten years, I hope, we'll at least get on our knees. Maybe in twenty we'll be able to walk."

"It's so maddeningly slow."

"It's like creeping paralysis, only going the other way. We are not getting deader, but more alive, at the same speed. But if we hang on to our patience we'll get something done."

Pat leaned forward. "I wish you would speak at the next state institute. Maybe a few of us would get up on our knees a little sooner."

Dr. Mary laid her hand over Pat's. "Thank you. There's nothing that makes me feel so unworthy and humble and grateful as meaning something to other women. I love 'em, every one of them, the young, brave, fearless women. Society's been asleep for ages, but it's waking up. It needs us, in other ways than it thought it did, and we'll be there with the goods."

Jean drew deeper into her chair. At the motion Dr. Mary turned.

"I'm not even going to apologize, Mrs. Herrick, for absorbing all the conversation. You know what I am when I get started."

She grinned at Pat. "When Mrs. Herrick came to interview me, she didn't get a chance to say a thing. I talked all the time."

"It was the only real hour I've had in the whole newspaper business," Jean said slowly, "and I wish I had never come."

Pat started as if Jean had called to her for help and the little doctor said sharply:

"You don't like interviewing?"

"I despise it! It's the most futile, useless round of senseless rush that was ever invented to waste one's days. It means nothing at all to the one who does it or to any one else. It's just words, words, and more words."

For several moments Dr. Mary said nothing, but sat looking at Jean with an odd look in her small, bright eyes.

"If I am rude, you must pardon me, Mrs. Herrick, but why do you do it, if you feel that way?"

It was Jean now who was silent, but Pat knew that she was trying to find the right words for something that meant very much to her.

"Because," she said, at length, "I should go mad doing nothing at all."

Dr. Mary smoked her cigarette to the end in a silence that Pat recalled afterwards as one of the longest and tensest five minutes she had ever spent. Then the little doctor said in her brisk, off-hand fashion:

"If salary is no particular object to you, Mrs. Herrick, I could find a place for you here. We're starting so many things and are overworked as it is. We can't pay much, and as you have had no experience before, the committee may kick at giving anything. But I believe the laborer is worth his hire always, and have never found volunteer work satisfactory. If you would like to try for a couple of months—it's better all around to have it probationary—I can use you."

Twice Jean's lips opened but the words would not come.

"Well, since silence gives consent, I take it that you will try it."

"I shall be very glad."

"Then it's settled. Let me see; I suppose you'll have to give the paper some kind of notice?"

"No. The managing editor never recognizes any such obligation when the work isn't satisfactory. And it's only the other way round. I'd like to begin with you right away."

"You can if you want to. It's your own affair. We're in the throes of the summer camp and two of our regular workers will be away for the next three months attending to that. How about next Monday?"

"Perfect," Jean said, trying to keep her voice steady.

"Now we'll have some tea."

Dr. Mary touched the bell and a few moments later a maid brought in the tea things. The doctor had a fund of stories, humorous, pathetic, all human, and she told them well. It was almost six when she rang for the maid to take away the cups and then it was too late to show Pat over the building.

"Never mind. You'll come again and very soon, and I shall not let you escape without explaining every detail."

She dropped Pat's hand and turned to Jean.

"Monday, then?"

"Monday." They smiled quietly as if they were sealing a contract.

Out in the street Pat drew a deep breath.

"Well! If you ask me, I recommend that as about the quickest thing I ever saw pulled off. You go up to introduce me, and come out with a new life work. I believe you've got it at last, Jean."

"I think I have, Pat. I feel as if something had clicked into place inside."

She stopped and looked at Pat with real fear. "Pat, suppose you hadn't come! I wouldn't have gone. I'd left it too long. I feel as if you'd rescued me from something and—as if you'd come just in time."

"Little trick of mine," Pat answered lightly, but her eyes clouded and she slipped her hand into Jean's arm and held it there.

They did not speak again until they were almost at the studio door.

"We used to think we knew an awful lot, didn't we, Jean?"

Jean nodded.

Upstairs they found Herrick. Pat's first impression was very much what Jean's had been the day Herrick had walked into the library and found her sniffing the grass. Of a big man, strong but rather lazy, with something frank and winning and clean about him, and nice eyes. And the next was surprise that he was so different from what she had pictured he would be, and that never would she have picked him out as the man Jean would marry.

"This is Pat."

Herrick came forward and they shook hands heartily.

"I am awfully glad. I've heard of you, you know, until I was almost jealous. When did you get in?"

"About half an hour before I 'phoned you," Jean answered.

Herrick turned to Jean.

"I wondered what the wonderful surprise was. I never could have guessed it."

Pat felt something in him change, but before she could be sure, he was talking pleasantly again.

Herrick went out and brought in things for dinner and they all cooked together. Pat and Jean did most of the talking but Herrick seemed to enjoy their reminiscences. From time to time, however, Pat caught a heaviness in his eyes as they rested on Jean, and she decided that there had been some slight quarrel before her arrival and that Herrick had not been able to forget it. In spite of his gentle manner and kind eyes, he might bear a grudge a long while.

The dinner was a jolly one. Jean looked as Herrick had not seen her look since they raced hand in hand, against the wind, over the hills. Half way through, Herrick turned to Pat.

"I think you'll have to come and live with us, Pat. You're a regular tonic." Under the gayety of his tone, Pat felt the resentment. She wondered what it was they had quarreled about and whether Jean had altogether forgotten it. It wasn't like Jean to forget anything that really mattered or, remembering, to pretend she did not.

"Oh, I can't flatter myself that I am responsible." Pat made no pretense of not understanding. "It is——"

She glanced at Jean and Jean nodded. They had decided to say nothing about Jean's new work until the black coffee was reached. Then Pat was to spring the surprise in the form of a toast, but now at Jean's nod, she continued:

"It's not my influence at all. Jean has a new job."

Herrick turned quickly. "Have you left the paper?"

"Yes. Thompson doesn't know it yet, but he will by to-morrow. If he makes a great row I'll get him one more interview so he won't be behind, but on Monday I take a real job."

"Doing what?"

"I'm going to work with Dr. Mary."

"At the Hill House?"

"Yes. I feel as if a hand had reached out from the blue and rescued me. I'm going to work."

Again Herrick's face changed so that Pat wondered whether she had been quite right about him in either of her estimates. He looked older, heavier and rather bored.

"Yes," he said quietly, "I think that is your work."

For a moment Jean and Herrick looked at each other.

"I think it is and I expect to be very happy in it."

"I hope you will."

Herrick filled all three glasses and cried gayly:

"To the Poor, God bless 'em."

Pat stayed ten days. Sometimes she went with Jean on cases and sometimes she was out all day on work of her own. But every evening the three met for dinner in the studio and afterwards Jean and Pat talked social and educational reforms. At first Herrick listened, not quite grasping the vital import of these things to them; then, one night, he asked Jean, with a lurking smile that annoyed even Pat, whether she really expected to make over the world.

"No," Jean answered shortly, "I don't; but I'm going to patch at it as long as I have strength in my body."

"The leopard won't change his spots, you know, no matter how many kind ladies dab at him with their social paints."

"Then they will be cut out or burned out," Jean said in such a still voice that Pat stared. But Jean and Herrick were looking straight into each other's eyes and did not notice.

"Poor leopard, he'll die under such treatment."

"I don't know that that would be such a loss to the rest of the animals if he did."

"No. I don't suppose it would," Herrick said after a pause, in a voice controlled only by the need to maintain a pretense before Pat.

Pat picked up the table of statistics she and Jean had been discussing and studied it closely. For a moment there was not a sound. Then Herrick went over to the couch with a book and Jean took up the argument again.

Herrick never joined the conversation after that evening but it seemed to Pat that he was always listening and she felt that Jean felt it too.

One day in September when Jean had been working almost four months, Dr. Mary came to her with an open letter in her hand.

"Jean, I'm going to give you this case, because I feel in my backbone that it's out of the usual run, and that's saying a good deal, with some of those we've had lately, isn't it?"

"It certainly is. Perhaps I won't be able to handle it."

"I'll take a chance. It's because I believe you can, better than any one else, that I am turning it over. No one has done a thing on it yet. It's brand new."

Jean took the letter. It was written on ruled paper in a fairly good hand.

"Well, at least Amelia seems used to giving orders."

"No information furnished. No request made. I'd like to go myself if I had the time. I thought first of turning it over to the C.O.S. of that district but, somehow, the woman interests me. Do you want it?"

Jean was already putting on her hat. Mary smiled.

"I know, Mary, but I haven't gotten over that first rushed feeling yet, in spite of all your warning. I'm always sure that everything will go to pot if I don't get to a case the very minute I hear of it."

"I hope you never will, not really. When that goes I can't imagine a worse work than this to be in. You'd better take some money with you, she's likely to need most anything."

An hour later Jean rang the bell of a shabby, two-story house out on the Mission Road. The house stood a little back in a dusty, parched patch of ground, where a few wilting geraniums struggled against the dust-laden wind that blew always over the bare hills. A half-grown girl opened the door. She seemed parched by the ceaseless wind and her dry hair looked as if it had never been quite free of the dust.

"Does Mrs. Gorman live here?"

"Back room. She ain't Mrs." The girl stood staring while Jean knocked on a door at the end of the dark hall.

"Come in."

It was a small room and held only a single bed, a child's crib, a broken dresser and a chair. An emaciated woman sat up in bed and looked at Jean with the calmest look of appraisal that had ever summed her up.

"You're from the Hill House. It wouldn't be anybody else. Are you Dr. Mary MacLean?"

"No, I'm not Dr. McLean. She had to go out of town. My name is Herrick."

"Miss or Mrs.?"

"Mrs."

"I'm glad of that." The woman's voice was perfectly detached, as if something bigger than a personal desire in the matter directed her.

Jean drew the chair to the side of the bed and sat down.

"Have you any children?" the woman asked abruptly.

"No. I have no children."

"Do you want them?"

For some reason it was impossible to resent this woman's questioning. She did it so calmly, so deliberately, as if each question were the end of a long line of thought, important to her. Jean felt herself grow warm and uncomfortable.

"I don't—think very much about it."

There was another long pause, in which Jean listened to the wind and to some one moving in the room above. Suddenly a child's voice broke out in angry protest: "I won't!—I won't!" There was a mild scuffle, a door slammed, then silence. The woman continued to listen for a moment. She turned back again to Jean.

"I did," she said, in her odd way of continuing her own line of thought. "I wanted a child. That's him we just heard. Mamie don't mean to be mean but she ain't any brighter than she has to be and she don't understand. That's why I wrote to Dr. MacLean. I don't know whether you'll understand, seein' you never wanted one, but I'll have to tell you, since you was the one she sent and mebbe there won't be time to send another. I ain't always as strong as I am to-day, and there won't be many more days, weak or strong."

"You mustn't talk like that. You can't——"

The woman turned her dark eyes to Jean and a faint smile touched them.

"There ain't no call to talk that way to me. I don't want no cheerin' up. The time's past for that. I fought it all out here alone and now I got my plan ready. I didn't send for no one to tell me I ain't goin' to die, because I know I am. If it wasn't for Jimmie I'd be glad, laughin' glad to go. It's him I'm goin' to tell you about."

For a while she seemed to forget Jean altogether and then she began again, in a flat, even voice, choosing only the thread of her story, as if she were used to husbanding her small strength.

"Did you ever live in a room like this? Get up in the mornin' in it and go to bed at night in it, and sit all the evenin' in it, so that your thoughts soak into it and you can feel them rush out at you the minute you open the door? You can never get away. And there don't seem to be nothing in the whole wide world but yourself. It's a terrible thing.

"I used to lay in bed at night and feel myself shut up in my cell, and then I got to thinkin' about all the other people in the world shut up in their cells and none of us could get out or talk through to one another, millions of us locked up tight.

"Hundreds of times I said to myself, 'If that's all there is to it, why go on?' But I could never come round to the picture of killing myself. Once I tried but I didn't get very far. And then I begun wonderin' why it was that I didn't do the job straight through; wonderin' and wonderin', until one night, like an earthquake, it hit me sudden. It was all the people behind me, clear back to Adam and Eve, holdin' me here, all the men and women that had loved each other and hated each other and had children and kept things going. And if I killed myself—it would be like takin' one of the girl's jobs in the factory to finish so she could draw her pay and then not doin' it.

"Mebbe you won't understand, but you'll have to take it the way I say, for I saw it as clear as I see you in that chair. We was put here to keep things goin'. And I was goin' to stop 'em. There wouldn't be any me after I was dead and all them people back of me was goin' to drop out of things, just like I had killed 'em. Did you ever think like that?"

Jean shook her head. Before the fire of loneliness that had seared this woman, she could not speak.

"We're all different, I guess. But I got so I couldn't bear the thought of dyin' and bein' ended, without ever havin' had nothin' and leavin' nothin' and so—I had a baby."

Jean felt as if the wind outside had torn its way into the room.

"You decided, made up your mind to have a baby, and had one?"

"It seems kind of queer, mebbe, when you say it like that, but it was all simple after I'd been thinkin' about it. Lots of things are queer when you first think about 'em, but after a while you get used to 'em. It's like strangers you meet and get to know after a bit real well."

Jean looked away to the houses crouching on the windswept hill.

"He lived in the same house. He was the only man that ever asked me to go any place with him or tried to kiss me. You see I was twenty-seven then, almost twenty-eight. There was never no talk about marryin'. He went away before Jimmie was born, a long time before. I think he was afraid somebody'd find out. He was always kind of scared of people. He sent some money for awhile and then he stopped. I didn't care about the money. I can always get work, and as soon as Jimmie was old enough to leave, I got a job in another place."

From under the pillow she took a bit of folded newspaper and handed it to Jean. It was a clipping a month old, a condensed account of a political fight in a small town in the southern part of the state. It said that the fight had been won by the adherents of Mayor James H. Martin, who could always be relied on to stand on the side of law and order.

"He always said he was goin' to get into politics some day and he did. I wouldn't bother now, because he ain't had none of the joy of Jimmie, but I haven't more than a few weeks, days mebbe. It's cancer, like mother had and grandmother and Aunt Sarah, and I want to know that Jimmie won't have to go to an institution. He can't be so terrible poor if he's Mayor and he'll do something for Jimmie. Maybe he'll be kind of afraid at first but if you make him promise, he'll keep it. I'll give you some letters he wrote and Jimmie's picture. Will you go?"

Evidently she had used up all her strength, for she lay back now, wasted and white, with her eyes closed. Jean tried to speak and couldn't. It was all so tangled, so thwarted, so stark and bare. It was like the rickety house in which the woman lived, and the parched hills. Jean felt as if the thick dust was choking her. The woman opened her eyes.

"You don't understand very well, do you?"

"No, not very." Jean tried to say she did, but the naked honesty of the other compelled the same from her. "I can understand how you must have been lonely but——"

The woman shook her head. "No, that's just what you don't, or you would understand it all."

Her hands, white from illness, took Jean's. "But you're kind and it don't matter much. I wanted the Doctor because she was awfully good to one of the girls that worked with me once, and when I was thinking of somebody, I remembered her."

Jean forced back the sob in her throat. "I'll go to-night if there's a train."

The sick woman smiled gratefully. "You are kind," she said again. "And—there's not many that's kind when they don't understand."

Jean propped her note to Herrick on the desk where he would be sure to see it as soon as he came in, and caught the six-fifteen train.

When Herrick came at half past six he found the note, read it three times and tore it into bits.

It was eight before Herrick stopped pacing up and down the studio, took his hat and went out.

Giuseppe's was crowded. The air reeked with smoke and the heavy odor of highly seasoned food. Not a place at the long table was vacant. Flop was denouncing the low standards of American art, exemplified in the flat failure of a recent exhibit of his own, and the others pounded the table in the old way and shouted their approval. Flop caught sight of Herrick first, stopped in the middle of a sentence, and then, with a shout:

"Well, I'll be damned! Look who's here," got up and dragged Herrick forward as if the latter had been trying to get away.

"Boy Blue! Franklin! Herrick!"

The racket was deafening. The Outlanders jumped on chairs to see what was happening. Flop corraled a waiter hurrying by with a demijohn of wine and took it way from him.

"This is on the house, Pietro. We drink to the return of the lost sheep."

A waiter brought Herrick a chair. He took it, and walking deliberately about the table, placed it next to The Kitten's. There was much laughing and some quick looks interchanged and The Kitten shrugged as if the matter did not concern her in the least, and continued to talk to another man across Herrick's back. The enthusiasm, diverted for a moment from its channel, went back. The Kitten finished what she had been saying and was forced at last to meet Herrick's eyes. She tried to hold the contempt in them, but it was useless. The corners of her scarlet lips trembled. Herrick's hand took hers under the table.

"Don't be silly, Kittycat. We wouldn't keep it up, you know...."

Two hours later The Bunch went singing up the hill to Flop's. Herrick and The Kitten turned down a side street. Herrick walked with the light, springing step that had reminded Jean of the earth and wide spaces. The Kitten skimmed along beside him, clinging to his arm. At the foot of the stairs he lifted her, and carried her up. He put her in the Morris chair and knelt beside her. Every motion was a repetition of the last time he had knelt so. It was all exactly the same, even to the bar of light from the street lamp, and the fine, tired lines about The Kitten's mouth.

The Kitten bent and lifted his face from her knees.

"Why did you do it, Boy?"

"I don't know, Kitten."

She drew his head to her shoulder and stroked his hair quietly. There was no claim in her touch, no insistence, only peace. The Kitten was weary, too.

"Tell me about it," she said at last.

Herrick smiled. "She's straightening out all the misery and sin and ugliness in the world, Kittycat, and it keeps her rather busy."

They talked for a while of Jean and the little doctor and the futile, foolish tasks at which they labored.

"It makes me tired to think of so much energy." The Kitten yawned. "I'm glad I have no 'work.' I wouldn't 'improve' a single living human being, even if I could, not even you, Boy Blue."

"Most wise Kitty." Herrick drew her to him and kissed her passionately.

The next day they slipped away for the week-end to the cabin on the Portuguese ranch where he and Jean had spent their honeymoon.

"It was the first place we ever went, Boy, and I want to go there again," insisted The Kitten. After a moment's hesitation Herrick agreed.

The dairyman and his wife showed no surprise. They were as dark, as silent as ever. The woman wore the same bright red skirt and the same dirty white waist. She brought food to the cabin as she had brought it before, without a word. There was the same full, silver moonlight brimming the bowl of the little canyon, and the same quiet cows wandering over the hills.

They stayed two days and went back. Herrick wondered what he would say if Jean had already returned, and gravitated, according to his mood, from a lie he knew would not deceive her, to the truth.

But Jean had not come. Nor did she come the next day, nor the next. For the Mayor of Belgrave had a cold. Years afterwards, Herrick speculated sometimes, what his life would have been, if James Martin, Mayor of Belgrave, had not had a cold.

But the Mayor did have a cold, and not even Jean's most Machiavellian tricks succeeded in getting at him. In a small neat house, behind a small neat lawn, a small, neat wife guarded his civilian privacy and Jean was forced to wait until the fourth day, when protected by an overcoat and neck muffler, in spite of the glorious fall sunshine, Mayor Martin again took up his official duties. Almost as soon as the office was opened, Jean forced herself beyond the secretary and confronted the Mayor, small and neat like his wife and the baby Jean had seen being aired on the lawn.

In words as few and stark as Amelia Gorman's she presented the case.

"Now, what I suggest, Mr. Martin, is that you send to us monthly fifteen dollars, for which we can board your child in a respectable family. When he is fourteen, if he shows promise of making more than a grammar school education advisable, this amount to be increased to twenty. He can make up the rest himself until he graduates from some technical school. In the event of your dying before he has reached the earning age, this amount is to be continued. You can arrange it as a bequest to us and need not mention the child."

The little man sat staring at Jean. Behind his flat, frightened eyes, she could see the procession of his small hopes, running to their death. He would do as she asked because he could think of no way of escaping with the dignity that befitted his office. He would cover his terror under the cloak of his mayoralty and submit to supporting his child, as he might have contributed to the erection of a public library. But for all the rest of his life he would enjoy the memory of this morning. Once the danger of publicity was removed, he would come to regard himself as a bold, bad man of the world, and from the pinnacle of his knowledge of evil look down upon the sober, uninteresting members of his town and of the church, where he went every Sunday morning in a neat black hat.

"Well, Mr. Martin?"

Jean gathered up her gloves and handbag and rose. He reached out as if forcibly to detain her, almost as if he expected, should he refuse, that she would go through the town with a bell, proclaiming him in public.

"Of course, I wish you and your office, to understand that I do this through no legal, or, I may say, moral compulsion."

He was like a vicious terrier taking a last nip at some one's leg, before being dragged away on a rope. "I have many demands made on me, both public and private, and my income is not large."

"Fifteen is not much, Mr. Martin, for food and clothes and schooling. You will find later that your present baby will require all of that."

At the mention of the baby, the Mayor frowned.

"I never shirk an opportunity, Mrs. Herrick, to make another happy. I will remit the amount to you monthly by check. It is to be booked as a contribution to your work."

"Certainly, Mr. Martin."

The Mayor escorted Jean to the elevator, rang the bell for her and, as she stepped in, bowed elaborately. Jean chuckled. Already he was assuming the manners of the bold, bad man.

The train got in about eight. Jean went straight to the studio, after finding that Dr. Mary would not be back until the morning. It was dark, and when Jean turned on the light she saw that the dust was thick on everything. Herrick had evidently not straightened it out since she left. It looked forlorn and struck through the exhilaration of Jean's mood unpleasantly. As always, successful accomplishment gave Jean a sense of physical well-being that she enjoyed as deeply and as consciously as ever Martha did her moods of spiritual exaltation.

When she had put away her things, she turned off the light and stretched out on the couch. Through the open window she could see the stars, and their peace quieted the inner excitement that had held her ever since she left Mayor Martin's office. She had done a good piece of work with which Dr. Mary would be pleased and because of which Amelia Gorman would die happier. But beyond this, the thread of her action stretched down the years, binding together lives of which she knew nothing. At a moment's notice she had entered these lives, just as she might go to the window and call a stranger into the studio, and never would life be the same to these strangers as if she had not done the thing she had. The Mayor would grow old and die, a different man than he would have been if every month he had not sent fifteen dollars for the support of Amelia's child. And all the lives he touched would react to this secret check. Jimmie would grow up in some workman's family and their lives and his would be altered. She remembered how once she had thought of each person, weaving before his own loom, deliberately choosing or rejecting the threads that Life offered. Now she saw myriads upon myriads weaving before a high loom whose frame was lost in the immensity of time and distance.

She started as the door opened and Herrick entered. He did not see her, but came over to the empty fireplace and stood leaning his elbows on the mantel shelf. He looked tired and there were lines about his mouth. Compunction for she knew not what seized Jean and she rose quickly.

"Begee!"

Herrick whirled. Jean had been the last person in his mind.

"You!" he demanded stupidly, and instantly recognized that his tone gave the natural meeting the proportions of drama.

Jean laughed. "Sure. Who else?"

"Your note, you know, wasn't very illuminating. I didn't know whether you were going for a day or a month."

"I know. But I was so excited and I didn't know myself exactly."

Jean saw that her abrupt going had hurt Herrick and she tried to make up now. She came closer and laid a hand on his.

"I'll make some chocolate and then I'll tell you all about it. It would make a perfectly ripping story."

Herrick looked down on Jean's hand resting upon his and it seemed to him something disconnected from both of them. He wished she would take it away. To his jangled nerves it was a real weight, pressing heavily upon him. It was force, that strong, white hand, a mechanical force for pushing obstacles from her path. It would push him and her mother and all who did not see things as she saw them, all but the fat, mannish little doctor with her stupid generalities. With the merest touch of those firm, cool fingers it would push The Kitten into oblivion.

"A corking story?"

Jean resented Herrick's mechanical interest but tried not to show it. She had been wrong and had said so and it was trivial of him to let the memory rankle.

"Wait till you hear it. It's a regular Thomas Hardy novel. It ought to be set in the granite hills of Devon."

While they drank the chocolate, Jean told him of the woman propped on her pillows in the miserable room, with the wind blowing over the stony hills; of the frightened Mayor with his overwhelming respectability. Her eyes glowed and the strong, white hands moved in unusual gestures, as if from the slough of human weakness and suffering into which they were plunged, she was drawing quivering bodies and setting them on a stage. Herrick's bitterness saw none of the drama, only Jean's own safety from any suffering. There she sat, glowing with interest in her "case," a stupid, everyday matter of seduction. She could work up a tragedy about a scrubwoman overcome by physical desire. But for him, for his needs, for The Kitten, for Flop, for any one whose way of life was different, whose clothes did not please her, whose manner did not suit her, she had no sympathy and no understanding. Herrick laughed.

"It's a scream, simply a scream! A lot of women puttering about, fiddling with the forces of Nature and getting paid for it!"

Jean's face went white.

"I might have known," she said and sought for words that would hurt him most, "that you could not possibly grasp the spiritual significance."

Herrick's face flushed and his eyes were two black slits as he bent across the table.

"You're a fool, Jean, you and Dr. Mary and all the other dead, marble women she has trailing in her train."

It seemed afterwards to Herrick that they stood for hours looking at each other across the table, before Jean turned, and without a word went the length of the studio and closed and locked the bedroom door behind her.

In the months that followed there were whole weeks when Herrick despised Jean for her blindness; when he hated her for the calm, filled order of her days; when he wanted to go and lay his head in her lap and be comforted.

What would Jean do if he told her?

She would answer as she would to any cry of distress. In a scientific, impersonal way she would even be happy at her ability to help. For the time he would be her favorite "case." She would probe into his feeling for The Kitten and into The Kitten's and decide what was to be done. When she had analyzed it all, she would ask him what he wanted to do.

What did he want?

From considering the abstract possibility of his wife's action, Herrick came down to Jean herself. Picture after picture of her flashed before him. Jean in the Sundays before their marriage. Jean as she had looked in the moonlight, beside the driftwood fires. Jean on the Sunday mornings when they used to argue about the novel. Did she ever think of it now? It was months since they had even mentioned it. Had she forgotten this thing that had once seemed the motive of her days? Had her interest ever been real, or had it only filled an empty space? In the mazes of his own nature Herrick groped and could find no answer. After almost three years of marriage Herrick knew less of Jean than he had the first day in the library.

Would she go on forever as they were going now? They had never referred in any way to the night that Jean had come back from Belgrave. It might never have been, for all the outward difference it had made in their lives. Only Jean never again mentioned a case nor did she ever ask him to come on Sunday afternoons to The Hill House where she poured for the neighborhood teas that she and Dr. Mary had instituted for the winter.

On Sundays Herrick went to Flop's. Jean made no comment, except sometimes to inquire about various people, with a forced interest that exasperated Herrick. As for The Bunch, they never asked about Jean. Behind the banner of "personal freedom," Herrick and The Kitten marched unquestioned. As indifferent as the rest, Vicky had gone back to the country. The Kitten had refused to go with him.

The long rains ended and spring came again. The air was clean and soft, and fluffy white clouds sailed over the hills, once more cameo-clear against the blue. Herrick and Jean saw even less of each other than through the winter. They ate together in the mornings and then went their ways. The paper was changing hands and Herrick spoke of the new proprietor and the future policy. Dr. Mary and Jean were drawing up a pamphlet on the evil conditions resulting from bad housing, and now that the actual gathering of statistics was over, and the work had widened to include quarrels with political bosses, with the Board of Health and Building Commissions, Jean was in her glory. The breakfasts were calm meals, unruffled, impersonal and dead.

The darkest spot in this third summer of Jean's married life was Martha. The small face was thinner and whiter and, for the first time in Jean's memory, her mother moved slowly about the house. Jean went as often as she could and frequently found her sitting on the porch behind the screen of roses, her hands idle in her lap. Twice, tiptoeing in unexpectedly, Jean had found her mother lying down, her eyes closed in such utter weariness that Jean's heart had stopped beating for a moment in a terrible fear.

But each time Martha had insisted that it was only the heat and promised faithfully that she would take more rest.

"Mummy, it's really selfish of you not to let me help. I know half a dozen women who would be glad to come over and work for their home and a very small salary, and I could spare it so easily."

"Now, Jeany, don't be silly." At this point Martha always got up briskly and began preparing tea. "In all the years that I've kept house, I've never had a maid."

"Which is no reason at all," Jean insisted. "You know, Martha Norris, that once you see the error of your ways the trouble's over. You used to tell me that yourself when I was a little girl."

"Maybe I did. But the cases aren't the same."

"Why not?" It was the oldest form of dispute they had, Jean quoting her mother's own words and Martha insisting the cases were not the same. "It is the same, exactly. You're not well, or else you're getting lazy. Which is it? It must be one."

"Not at all. You're just talking to hear yourself, Jeany. You always were fond of that silly arguing that pins people down to a yes or no."

"Oh, mummy, you're such a fake. You get so terribly philosophic when you want to slip out of a thing. But now listen to me. I won't scold you any more. But I'm going to watch you precisely as if you were a 'case' and I'll give you till the tenth of July and not one day longer. If you look the way you do now you're going to the country, if I have to take you there by force. Do you hear?"

Martha smiled. "Yes, dear, I hear."

It was an afternoon at the end of June and Martha and Jean were in the clean, darkened kitchen, waiting for the kettle to boil. Bees buzzed in the garden outside and the old pine was sweetly fragrant in the warmth. There was something very positive and real about this peace and clean orderliness, so that Jean wondered whether, after all, this silent strength was an accident of her mother's nature, or whether the quiet little figure, trotting on its mechanical round of duty, had not achieved it, at perhaps a price no one guessed.

Jean watched her as she beat up a pan of the tea biscuits that no remonstrance of Jean's had been able to stop.

"I'd have to make something for supper and I might just as well make these."

And as always she had her way. Jean listened to the bees and watched the deft hands at their work. It was so precisely as it had always been and yet somehow it was different. Jean's mind wandered lazily about the problem. What was different? Why did it no longer annoy her? It had once.

She remembered the day of graduation when all her fine enthusiasm to fill her life with work and beauty had died at the sight of Martha dishing up the roast. And the day when she had heard of the library work and Martha had gone on making apple pies. And now she was making tea biscuits and pretending that nothing was the matter with her, when Jean could see that it was a strain to lift the heavy mixing bowl and that tiny drops of perspiration appeared at the corners of Martha's mouth. She was ill and no doubt she knew it.

Jean got up and took the mixing bowl away from her.

"Mummy, you're all in. You can scarcely stand. You've got to tell me what's the matter."

"Now, Jeany——" But Martha's eyes fell before her daughter's. "I don't feel quite so strong as usual, but it's the heat. It's the warmest June we've had for years."

"It's nothing of the kind. It's not a bit hotter than it always is. And if you feel like this now, what will you be in July? I don't believe I'll give you till the tenth. I have a good mind to cart you off to a doctor this very minute."

"Now, Jean daughter, I appreciate your interest and all the rest of it, but remember I am not a case. I won't be packed off to a doctor."

"I wish you were, I'd straighten you out in two minutes. You're really a very simple proposition. I'd close this place, send you to a nice quiet country house where you would have nothing to do but eat lovely food cooked by some one else, and get fat."

"I should hate to get fat and there's no place nicer or quieter than this."

"But, mummy, you need a change."

"Well," Martha took the bowl away from Jean and went on with her mixing, "I haven't said that I wouldn't take that, have I? You always were the most impatient child. I suppose you want me to put on my hat this minute and leap on a train."

"I certainly would, but I can't imagine you 'leaping' at anything unless it was particularly disagreeable. For the second time, listen to your daughter, who has had much experience managing many families and can surely manage one small mother. Next week Mary and I are going to locate a new summer camp for mothers. We're going to take the train and get off wherever it looks good to us and tramp and ride around till we find the exact spot. It's going to be glorious. I've been looking forward to it for months. I'd just bundle you along, too, but you wouldn't enjoy it, and besides it's going to be awfully strenuous. What you need is rest. But I won't budge a step unless you're fixed first, do you hear? If you don't go to a doctor and get some kind of tonic and promise to do exactly as he says, I'll stay right here and work without a day's vacation. There, now will you do as I say?"

"What's Franklin going to do, while you and Doctor traipse about?"

"I don't know. He said something about taking a vacation himself once, but he hasn't said anything very lately."

"Jean, I don't want to annoy you or interfere in any way with your life. You're a married woman and must manage your affairs. But, I've never seen any happiness come of a husband and wife having separate interests and not knowing what the other's going to do. Not that I've seen much happiness come of any married life. But if you do the best you can, you can't do any more and you can't have it on your conscience that the fault was yours."

Jean laughed. After all, if there was any change it must be in herself, for certainly Martha was the same as ever.

"Mummy, times have changed. No modern husband and wife clamp on each other's backs in the good old-fashioned way. Marriage isn't a pond in which you both drown, hanging madly to each other."

"What is it?"

"It's—it's a mutual arrangement. If you have the same interests and ambitions, you work them out together and if you haven't, why, each one works out his own."

Even as Jean spoke, she wondered when she had come to formulate this theory so decidedly. She remembered the night in the studio when she had promised to marry Herrick and life had seemed to her like a river in which they would both swim on together side by side. But the current had come between and now they were the width of the stream apart.

"You could always word things better than I, Jean, but sometimes it seems to me that that's all there is to them. They don't mean much when you get right down to the bottom of them. How can two people, 'whom God has joined together,' work out their lives apart? It's like the nonsense you and Pat used to talk, just as if you could do with life anything you happened to feel like. We weren't put in this world to follow every whim and there's no bigger whim-killer than the state of holy matrimony."

Martha stopped, cut the biscuits and laid each one carefully in the pan. When she had put them in the gas oven she began clearing up the table. Jean had gone back to her chair and sat looking absently into the garden.

"I don't believe, mummy," she said at last, "that anything that makes you feel smothered is right, no matter what holy state it belongs in. If that isn't 'wrapping your talent in a napkin,' then what is? Franklin doesn't care whether a hundred people live in a room or not. He doesn't think it matters whether people live like intelligent humans or like animals. He doesn't think that any one can change any one else or make the world a bit better."

A look of pain crossed Martha's face. "It's an awful way to believe, Jeany. I hate to think——"

"Then must I give up my beliefs and take things as they are?"

Martha wiped the last grain of flour from the table, washed out the cloth and hung it on the rack to dry.

"Some women should never marry."

Jean looked quickly at her mother and then away. After a moment she said gayly:

"All of which has nothing to do with the question in hand, Mummy Norris, and that is that you go to the doctor and get a tonic or I'll come and take you myself."

Martha agreed that she would go, and the subject of "holy matrimony" and "separate interests" was dropped.

But as Jean crossed back to the city she decided that she would ask Herrick what his vacation plans were and, if possible, arrange her own to meet them.

Herrick was leaving the studio as Jean entered. He stared in such surprise that Jean felt uncomfortable.

"I knocked off early this afternoon and went over to mummy's," she explained. "She hasn't been well and I've been worried. I thought maybe we might go to dinner somewhere, or we could have it here."

Herrick's first surprise gave way to amusement. After all, there was something amusing in Jean's self-centered density. For months they had come and gone without inquiring about each other's engagements and now, because the notion seized her, Jean assumed the possibility of acting as if they were in the habit of knowing each other's whereabouts every moment of the day. The amusement deepened as Jean stood without taking off her things, apparently waiting for him to decide.

Herrick had promised to take The Kitten to a Syrian restaurant that had just opened, and every moment that he delayed increased the possibility of The Kitten herself appearing. She often came for him if he were a little late, although Herrick had begged her not to. She liked the excitement of the risk she ran in meeting Jean, but she always claimed that she came because she loved the studio.

Herrick stood undecided. A meal with Jean would be a restful thing. There would be no emotional demands, no insistence. And The Kitten was getting very insistent. At first, the renewal of her little, cuddling pleas to be assured of his love had thrilled him and made him feel alive. Her fits of childish rage had amused him, just as in the old days. Besides, he could always bring her to time by leaving her for a while. The sense of power was pleasant. But the monotony of its exertion was beginning to weary him.

To-night she would be very insistent. From the first warm days of spring she had been begging him to go for a week to the Portuguese ranch and Herrick did not want to go. She had been through almost all her bag of tricks. She had been the petted, teasing child, the angry woman, the commanding mistress. There was one left. To-night she would be the alluring, giving-all, asking-nothing lover. For that reason she had chosen a new setting. In the isolation of the Syrian restaurant they would be alone. She would wear the dress he liked best, a thin, black clinging thing, and a hat that threw kind shadows on the small face. Against the background of sawdust floor, of strange, dark men who came to eat, she would stand out, fragile and completely his.

Jean saw the hesitation, the uncertainty in his eyes.

"Never mind, if you have another engagement. I'll go down to the delicatessen and get something. I don't suppose there's anything in the house to eat."

Jean smiled. She couldn't help thinking of Martha and what a heinous crime it would be to have a house and nothing to eat in it.

"We aren't very good housekeepers, are we?"

"No, there's nothing; but the shops aren't closed yet. It would be rather nice to eat here."

After all there was a touch of excitement in being invited to picnic unexpectedly with one's own wife.

"I was only going to eat with Crane. He's been taking the cure again and isn't quite sure of himself. He hates to eat alone. I'll 'phone him and bring some stuff up with me."

Herrick ran whistling down the stairs.

The Kitten was angry and Herrick was very tender. But it couldn't be helped. Crane was his boss and if he would have delirium tremens at inconvenient moments, there was nothing that Herrick could do about it. Herrick was patient. He called her soft love names and promised a week at the Portuguese ranch. The Kitten relented. She was reasonable. She understood. She said low, sweet things that came lightly across the wire and touched Herrick in a caress.

Herrick and Jean got supper together. The strangeness of doing this once familiar thing made them a little shy. They sought for things to say that would not show the realization of this strangeness. The sensation was new and exquisite to Herrick. It was pregnant with possibility. He mashed potatoes vigorously and sensed a possible new relationship waiting beyond the interlude of supper. What it might be he did not know. He did not want to know. He was tired of moods that he understood, reactions that he could bring about at a touch. To-night he had no wish to rouse Jean to the depths of physical passion that had been his aim in the old days when they had gotten supper together. It was not in her, and to-night he did not care. He was weary of storms, smothered at moments beyond endurance by the clinging of The Kitten's arms. He would leave everything to Jean. He would do nothing, lead nowhere, make no effort. He would follow, drugged to a sensuous peace by his own inaction.

When the things were cooked, Herrick laid the cloth at the end of the big table in the studio. He brought up a chair for Jean and with a flourish handed her to it. He was like a boy starting on a new trip, happy and excited. And, as always, Herrick looked the part. His whole body seemed keyed to a greater physical firmness. His eyes had the light that had been in them so often when they used to eat their sandwiches in the rock coves by the sea.

Jean saw and wondered and felt unsure. Was it her own blind, sweeping judgments that had stripped Herrick of all that of which she had once been so sure? To-night he looked and felt as he had on the night he had told her of his lonely boyhood and she had held out her hands to him. Hadn't she changed at all since the days when she and Pat had settled the questions of which they knew nothing? Did she still sit off on her cloud and play her golden flute while people struggled along in the dust below? Did she?

Jean talked of Crane, the pity of his wasted days, while the shuttle of analysis wove back and forth in memory, behind her words. Had she condemned as lack of purpose and sincerity what, after all, might well be a concomitant of that very sweetness and boyishness that had called to her? It was that which had called, Jean was very sure. And the claiming hands that were always trying to hold her, to touch her when she was near, the hunger of Herrick's kiss? It was the groping of a child that didn't want to be alone.

They ate slowly and sat on after the last drop of coffee was drained from the percolator. Herrick had asked Jean about the pamphlet and was helping her with details of publishing and distribution. With a paper and pencil he was making calculations, while Jean leaned across the table, her elbows on the cloth, her chin in her palms. She and Dr. Mary had gone over this ground but she saw instantly that Herrick knew much more about it than they did. It amused Jean, this new humility that met her at every turn to-night.

"I guess there are some things, just a few, that men can do best." And she chuckled in the old, childish way that had always delighted Herrick. It was such a ridiculous, delightful, childish chuckle for a woman of Jean's size. It had always given Herrick in the early days one of those double sensations, two contrasting emotions, that pricked his sense as a pungent spice pricks a jaded palate. It made Jean half woman and half imp.

The pencil quivered a little, but Herrick did not look up. Instinct warned him to go on with the serious business of calculation.

"There," he announced, "if you'll be content with just ordinary paper you ought to be able to get a thousand for——"

The door opened suddenly and The Kitten came in. She stood quite still, while Herrick sat motionless, the pencil poised over the paper, his lips parted on the word. Every drop of color left his face and then rushed back in a deep red that swelled the veins of his neck and congested his eyes. He rose heavily and the pencil rolled away under the table.

The Kitten closed the door and came toward the table. A few feet away she stopped. Jean noticed mechanically the scarlet of her mouth in the dead whiteness of her face. It was like a wound, and when she spoke her voice was high and cutting, like the crackling of tin that had torn the wound.

"So this is why you lied?" She looked at Herrick and Jean's eyes followed. His flushed face was heavy and ugly, and he looked unspeakably foolish, staring back with his lips parted. Jean thought of her father, standing in the bar of sunlight, and of her mother shrinking from him. In a strange, unreal calm, she thought how odd it was that she should have the same picture of her father and her husband.

She rose, with a detached feeling of not belonging here and at the same time of being called on to do something, perform some unpleasant social duty, that should have fallen to the lot of the hostess, who wasn't herself at all.

"We've just finished dinner," she said quietly, "and there's not a thing left. But I can make you some coffee."

The Kitten turned from Herrick and looked at her directly. The heavy lids lowered and her eyes went slowly from the crown of Jean's head to her feet, in a look that drew Jean's body after it into the mire.

Jean stepped back quickly. There was no pretense or misunderstanding now.

The Kitten grinned. "Didn't you know it, really? I was always sure you guessed. It's been such a long time before you—even."

Clearest of all the thoughts whirling in Jean's brain was the knowledge that she felt no anger, nor was she stunned. With no warning this thing had come upon her and there was no slightest doubt in her. Instead, there was a kind of relief, grotesque but real, and as if she had discovered at last the source of some annoyance that had long puzzled her. Her brain seemed to be running in layers, streams of thought all perfectly distinct. One layer was concerned with herself and Herrick, from the first night they had eaten with The Bunch and The Kitten had stared so rudely across the table. Her first vivid picture of The Kitten had been across a table and now she was seeing her again across a table. And another stream bore Herrick apart from The Bunch, alone with her in the days before their marriage, and the things she had believed and the things that had really been true. There was a stream for Herrick and herself running through the last eighteen months, with all sorts of landmarks coming to the surface. And there was the stream of her own present calm, with the feeling that it was impossible that she should feel this way, that it must be a false strength which would fail in a moment and leave her at the mercy of this woman with the white face and the scarlet mouth and the malicious eyes under their lowered lids.

"No," Jean said, "I didn't know." The calm was broken for a moment by a spark of cold anger at the insincerity of the question, or its implication.

The Kitten shrugged and turned to Herrick. She was trembling with anger now and it made her look like a fierce, small animal at bay.

Jean's calm was swept aside in a wave of physical nausea. She could not stand there and see them quarrel. She moved to Herrick.

"Will you go? Please go. Quick! Now!"

"If you wish." Grotesque in his consideration, pitiful in his relief, Herrick went. They heard his step echo and die in the silence below.

Jean and The Kitten stood looking at each other. Before Jean's calm, The Kitten's anger crumbled. Jean went slowly back to her place at the table and sat down again. Her brain seemed the only living thing about her. She had a problem to solve, but the problem concerned the woman before her more than it concerned herself. There was something she was going to do, but she couldn't do it until she had talked to The Kitten, and she didn't know just how to begin. She sat with her chin in her palms, as she had sat while Herrick made calculations about the cost of the pamphlet.

"Didn't you really know?" It was The Kitten who broke the silence at last. "He always said you didn't, but I never believed it."

"Did you think that I would have gone on just the same?"

"I didn't know. You never loved him. What difference would it make?" The Kitten waited a moment and added more kindly, as if she were making something very clear to a child. "Vicky has loved other women; he's always having an affair of some kind, and I don't say anything. You see, I don't love him."

Jean did not move. She sat rigid as if the least movement would precipitate her into the abyss The Kitten was opening before her.

"You thought I knew—and—would go on just the same?"

The thing rose, a barricade to further thought. Jean tried to get by it, push it aside, go on to the end, but somehow she could not get any further. She was living in a world, among people who believed things like that. Men and women lived that way. People she knew lived that way. Not "cases," but friends, people she had eaten with, to whose houses she had gone, people whom she had been anxious to meet once, friends of her husband, of the man she had married.

Jean closed her eyes. It made her sick, physically sick to look at the little figure across the table, the hungry, contemptuous eyes, the fine lines etched by unsatisfied desire in the smooth skin. They did not belong in the same world, they did not speak the same language, and there they sat in Jean's home, at Jean's table, and talked of Jean's husband.

"You needn't look at me like that." The Kitten leaned across the table, so near that Jean saw clearly the smooth texture of her skin and the flecks of black in her eyes. "I don't see that you have such a lot to be proud of. I loved Franklin, I have always loved him, long before you came into his life at all. I loved him and I gave. You don't love him; you never did, and yet you married him. You took. You sold yourself for what? So you wouldn't have to teach school, to get away from that bromide mother, the whole monotonous round! A great motive, wasn't it? Oh, he's told me all about it?"

She spoke in quick, panting breaths, as if the words were coming faster than she could utter them. Jean felt as if little pellets of mud were being flung in her face. She moved now, pushing her chair away.

The Kitten laughed. "Oh, don't mind me, you can go clear over to the end of the room if you like. You have always acted like that, you know. It amused us terribly at first. You were so funny! You tried so hard to be nice to me and The Tiger and the rest of us, but you couldn't quite make it, could you? We were so awfully muddy and you were so clean. Clean! Good God, you're not clean, you're empty. Why, I wouldn't be you, you cold, dead thing, not for all the pain it would save me. You——"

Jean rose. The mud no longer came in pellets; it flowed, a black, sticky stream.

"I think you have said enough. After all, there really is nothing to be said."

She came slowly about the table and stood before The Kitten. She could almost hear the beating of The Kitten's heart, under the stubby hands pressed so tightly over it.

"Well," demanded The Kitten, "what are you going to do?"

"Do?" echoed Jean blankly. "Why, I'm going away."

"You're going away! You're going to give him up, without any more fight than this! You're going to swallow every single thing I've said, without asking him? I say, how do you know it's the truth? How do you know it's not all a lie, except my loving him?"

"I don't know," but as she spoke Jean felt something drop from her eyes. With no warning this thing had come upon her and there was no doubt in her. Like the sucking blackness at the bottom of the well, it had always been there.

The Kitten smiled. "He must have had a hell of a time with you. Poor Boy Blue."

Mechanically Jean put on her things, the things she had thrown down when she came in and found Herrick just leaving. It was queer to put them on again, the things that had not changed at all, while she had been on such a long journey and come back. The Kitten was watching, fascinated into silence by the ordinary movements of Jean pinning on her hat, gathering up her gloves and handbag. When she was quite ready, Jean turned to The Kitten. She felt no anger or disgust now. Instead, she was sorry for the little thing, so eager, so avid, so unsure.

"You can tell him," she said slowly, "that I shall be at the Hill House. I don't want him to come. Please tell him that. But if there's anything to be discussed, he can write. I don't see what it can be, but I suppose he will want to."

"Oh, yes, he'll write."

Then, for no reason at all, the two women smiled faintly, as if they were speaking of a child. And, always afterward, Jean remembered The Kitten as she looked smiling above the greasy dishes.

Jean touched the electric button on her desk and Josephine Grimes appeared with notebook and pencil. She was a tall, spare woman, impelled through life by devotion to an invalid sister, to the Charity Organization Society of New York City, and to Jean. The three were somehow connected in Miss Grimes' mind and she never tried to separate them.

Jean handed her a pile of mail. "All the regular thing, except that one on top. That's very extra special. It's from Gregory Allen, the architect Selina Mitchell thinks might be interested in the tubercular tenements. He says he'd like to talk things over. So write him, conveying something between abject gratitude and decent self-respect, and make it to-morrow at 3.30."

Miss Grimes nodded and turned to the door. She never made any comment on these semi-personal confidences from Jean, but at night they were retailed verbatim to the invalid sister.

"And tell any one who rings up that I won't be back to-day, but, under pain of death, don't give them the house number. Except Rachael Cohen. But I don't think she will, because she knows I know about the meeting to-morrow night and I'll be there."

Again Miss Grimes nodded and disappeared. Jean sat on at the desk for a few moments, smiling into space. Then she locked the lid with a snap, put on her hat without looking into the glass, snatched her gloves and black leather wallet and left the office for the Grand Central Station.

The train was just pulling in, as Jean elbowed her way through the waiting crowd, pressed close to the iron grille. It seemed as if all the people in the world went by before she saw her, the same stout figure, the same eager peering through the gold pince-nez. Jean waved frantically. Mary stopped, stared for a reassuring second, dropped her grip and came at a trot, calling back over her shoulders to the bewildered red-cap to pick it up.

"Mary—oh—you——"

"Not a word or I shall weep. Lead me to the decent seclusion of a cab. I haven't wanted to cry for thirty years."

Safe in a taxi, they looked at each other and laughed.

"Mary, I haven't been able to do a thing since I got your wire. Why didn't you write me?"

"Didn't know it myself. I just woke up one morning with such a heavy feeling in the pit of my stomach when I looked at Lucy Phillips that I knew the hour had come. I took a leave of absence for a year and I may extend it. I'm going to absorb and study what the rest of the world's been doing. In short, I'm going to stay until I love Lucy Phillips. I was going to make my point of saturation Chicago, until I got to really visioning you. Then I wired. I couldn't very well before, could I?"

"Hardly." Jean hugged her. "Mary, it's been an age. I don't believe I've known, myself, how much and how often I've wanted you."

"I was thinking about it the other night. Almost seven years since you came walking into the clinic and told me The Kitten was up at the studio and you weren't going back."

"And mummy trotted over the next afternoon, and when she found we'd both gone to keep our engagement with that Building Trades man as if nothing had happened, she sat down and cried. Poor little mummy."

"How is mummy, Jean? I never could quite picture her here in New York. I could never make her fit."

"Fits like a glove. But, then, no one can ever tell what mummy is going to do. She not only likes it, but is happy, really happy, for the first time in her life. I believe she has learned the trick at last."

"Much incense and lace altar clothes and Jeany all to herself, I take it."

"Pretty near. But we have been happy, both of us, these six years here. Mummy still believes social service is connected, or ought to be, with religion, and she calls my very finest pieces of work 'the act divorced from the spirit', but she lets me send out all the laundry and have a woman in once a week—a maid she absolutely forbade—and there's a church run by Father Something-or-other a few blocks away, and I'd get fatty degeneration of the soul if it weren't for Pedloe. He gets six thousand a year and poses as a radical, but he has the imagination of a mouse. Some day he's going to fire me, if I don't do it first myself. I work ten hours a day, get more and more furious at the whole business, and come home every evening like a novice to her convent. Our chief excitement is having Pat bring the children over for the week-end, when her husband is out of town. She has two children and is going to have another, all in four years, exactly like an immigrant. She hasn't changed a bit, manages her family as if it were a college committee and her husband adores her. Once in a while she brings an uncle of Stephen's with her, a fat, good-natured creature about fifty, who, I sometimes think, is a fool and sometimes I'm sure he's a philosopher. Mummy likes him and makes all his pet dishes. Years ago he was married to an impossible creature in an Arizona mining camp and she ran away in six months. So you see he's had his 'sorrow' too."

"You don't mean that she still looks on Franklin as a 'sorrow'?"

"He's my 'lesson.' She never speaks of him, but I know she prays for him."

"Good Lord!"

And for the remaining few moments of the drive, Dr. Mary sat chuckling.

"Here we are." Jean led the way toward the cool marble entrance of a huge apartment house facing the Hudson. Young mothers in summer white sat on camp stools, doing embroidery in the shade of the high walls, under the trees that lined the Drive, and in the vacant lot across the street. They chatted and moved white perambulators with the tips of their white canvas shoes. Fat white babies slept under dainty white coverlets. Older children in white played in the earth.

Dr. Mary stopped in the vestibule. "It looks like miles of them. I've never seen so many baby buggies at once in my life."

"Mary, that sight has done more to inspire me with a love of work than any other thing I know. Whenever I feel like sneaking a day I just take one look out there and jump into my office clothes."

"I should think you might. Do they keep it up all day?"

"All day, every day, from spring till fall. They must sew miles of scallops. Wait till you see the last rites. About six the husbands come along; they're all young and rather slight, wear blue serge and straw hats. They all look exactly alike. Each one detaches his special piece of white property and off they go. Behold the female backbone of our nation!"

"It makes me homesick for my frowsy crab-fishers and those poor bowlegged mites that crawl over the hills alone."

As the key turned in the lock, Martha Norris rose from her chair by the window where she had been reading in the green-gold light that slanted up under the window awnings. Dr. Mary took the outstretched hand in hers.

"I suppose you were surprised, but not more than I was myself. When it came right down to it, I started at a moment's notice."

"I know. Jean was in the greatest state of excitement yesterday when she got your wire." Martha smiled and it made the small face, rested in the peace of the last six years, astonishingly young. But she could think of nothing else to say. There had always been something breathless about Dr. Mary's energy that made Martha feel inadequate. Something a little indecent, in an enthusiasm and exuberance that could carry a woman well over fifty across the continent, at a moment's notice, to study. It was almost as if she infringed on a younger generation, wore mental rouge and powder.

"It's a frightful journey, especially in this heat. You must be very tired."

Martha drew a chair to the window and Mary dropped gratefully into it.

"I'll just make a cup of tea and we'll have cold supper later."

She pattered out and Jean and Mary looked at each other and smiled.

When tea was ready they had it close to the window looking to the Palisades. Jean made valiant efforts to hold Martha in the talk but it kept drifting away from her, and soon she was sitting quietly to one side, as she always did, listening, while Jean and Mary talked and interrupted one another and made a thousand plans.

"I tell you, Jean, I was getting to be a big frog in a small puddle and that's not good for the soul. I'm not going to give a single scrap of advice to a living soul for three months at least."

Jean patted the plump shoulder. "Croak on, Mary, croak on. Why, you'll be taking the tenements out of my hands, if I don't step lively. Not to mention the garment strike and Rachael herself."

"Never. I wouldn't offer a suggestion for ten additional years of life. I'm going to sit to one side and watch."

"Mary MacLean, you'll sit to one side exactly as long as I'll let you—forty-eight hours perhaps to get rested. And then—Lord; I feel as if I had been asleep for years. Mary, this is going to be one glorious summer."

"I have a slight feeling that way myself, Jean."

Martha got up and began clearing the table.

Out in the kitchen, Martha filled the pan with hot soapy water and began washing the dishes. The voices went on. Once she stopped to listen.

"Now, Jean, not another word. Please. I appreciate the offer and all that, but I shouldn't do a thing but sit and stare at that river and overeat, and where would my serious study be then? No, to-morrow I find an apartment."

Jean laughed. "All right, go ahead, but you won't escape me that way."

There was a pause, and then Jean added softly: "Oh, Mary, this is going to be a glorious summer."

A few moments before three-thirty the next afternoon Jean tidied her desk, settled Miss Grimes with enough work for the rest of the day, and drew out some notes she had made for Gregory Allen.

At a quarter to four she laid the notes aside and looked at the clock. At four she verified the time by the big clock in the Metropolitan Tower.

"Rather rude, to say the least."

At four-thirty she rose impatiently, moved to the outer office, changed her mind and came back again to her desk.

"It costs a nickel and takes two minutes to 'phone. If he's that kind of a person, I don't want him mixed up in the thing at all. He needn't have answered my note if he isn't interested."

Jean looked over the notes again, and when she laid them aside for the second time it was almost five.

"Well, I'll be darned. If——"

The outer door opened, a man's voice asked for Mrs. Herrick and Josephine Grimes appeared. He stood close behind her. Without waiting to hear whether he was to be received, he stepped into the room.

"I'm afraid I've kept you waiting, but I hope it hasn't been too inconvenient." The tone implied, however, that it would not trouble him very much if it had.

Jean wanted to say that it had been very inconvenient, but in view of the fact that he had arrived, she said she was glad he had not been detained altogether and sat down again at the desk. Gregory Allen took the chair opposite and stretched out his feet, as if he were used to making himself as comfortable as he could. He was a tall man, about forty, with thick, dry, brown hair, full of reddish lights, and red-brown eyes. His face and neck and hands were tanned as if he were a great deal in the open, and the hands were long, bony and nervous. They seemed to express something hidden deep in the rather slouchy figure, under the ready-made suit that looked rumpled, although Jean saw that it was really quite new. His shoes were not well shined and his tie did not strike the note of the tanned skin and reddish hair.

He made no further explanation of why he had been detained and sat silent, waiting for Jean to begin. Jean wished he would say something to give her a better clew to his mental makeup, but as he didn't she plunged in.

"I don't know, Mr. Allen, how much you know about conditions among the poor, or whether you are specially interested in them. I think you would rather have to be, to take any joy in this work at all, there are so many restrictions."

Jean spoke as if she were handling an obstinate committee member, and Gregory Allen smiled behind his eyes. But the smile did not come through. Accustomed to classifying people in terms of architecture, he decided that Jean was like a tower, an old Roman tower, rugged, firm on its base, built for a purpose and for the accomplishment of it. Whatever charm there might be would come from perfect accord between form and purpose. He nodded.

"Not so much a restriction in finances," Jean went on, "but restrictions imposed by the condition of the tenants. You see, the plan is this: thousands of people, right here in Manhattan, die yearly for lack of air and sunlight. Literally thousands of incipient cases of tuberculosis, and those in the earlier stages, die because of their living conditions, die needlessly. There is all the sunlight and air in the universe right here. It is only a question of being able to get it."

Jean paused, but Gregory Allen said nothing. He did not know how many people died in New York for need of air and sun, but now that he thought of it, supposed quite a number. Jean seemed very positive about it, and he saw no reason to comment.

Jean felt like shaking him, and, turning slightly away, made aimless lines on the desk blotter as she continued.

"There is also a lot of vacant land, doing no good to anybody, just where we want it. The problem is to get it, but, of course, you would not be concerned with that, but only to put up a building for the sole use of families in which there is any one either with, or threatened with, tuberculosis. I don't want a contractor who thinks that anything is good enough for the poor. And I don't want an architect who doesn't grasp the spirit of it, either."

He might just as well get the situation straight to begin with.

Gregory Allen wondered whether Jean always enunciated her purposes so emphatically, rather as if she were firing small shot at a target. She was decidedly like a Roman tower, part of a fortification. Amplifying his own figure, he scarcely noticed Jean's pause for his comment, nor did he notice the frown as she continued.

"And in addition to this, the building must be as beautiful as it can be made, beautiful even to details that may seem finicky, in tone and line and tint. These people, besides being stricken in body, have been cramped in soul, too, most of them, until they don't know there is any beauty in the world. Or, worse, they don't believe that it is for them. As one woman told me, not long ago: 'there ain't no free beauty nowhere.' Well, we are going to give it to them, all we can possibly give. It will take a lot of time and there's not a cent in it. It will lead to nothing else. It is just a gift, the most beautiful gift you can make, within the bounds of our funds."

"What are the bounds?"

"I don't know yet."

A smile darted from Gregory Allen's eyes to his lips, and settled there. During his student days at the Beaux Arts, a grisette had told Gregory that his smile flitted like "un petit oiseau" over his face and then flew out of his mouth. Jean did not call it "a little bird" but she liked it.

"Of course we can't go ahead without rime or reason, but we don't have to stick too close to reason either. They are to be as beautiful as possible, allowing for reductions if we don't raise quite as much as we hope, and extension if we do. That's possible, isn't it?"

"Certainly. I take it there is to be a minimum of beauty below which you will not sink, but you're going to leave the roof off and soar as high as you can."

"Exactly." Jean laughed, and Gregory added a ray of sun slanting across the tower. There was a pause. Was he interested, or wasn't he?

"Well," she demanded at last, "does it appeal?"

Gregory Allen looked at her sharply. He wondered whether, sometimes, she did not pose a little. If he had not been interested by Jean's first note he would not have come, would not have answered the note, probably.

"Of course. That's why I came, to talk over the details. I made a hurried sketch after your note, just a ground floor plan, but I don't think now it will do." He drew a blue-print from his pocket and smoothed it on the desk. "This, followed out, would give plenty of light and sunshine, but there wouldn't be much beauty about it."

There she had sat wondering why he had come, and all the time he had this blue-print in his pocket!

"He's too simple to be out alone, or else a dyed-in-the-wool egotist who expects every one to read his thoughts."

Jean was still concerned with the problem as she bent over the plan, following the line of Gregory's pencil while he explained.

"You see, it's not much more than an improved tenement, this way, a well-ventilated, all-outside-rooms box." He tore the print across and threw the pieces into the waste-basket. "I'll work up something else and let you know as soon as——"

The door opened and Dr. Mary rushed in.

"Found it, the only place in New York worth living in. Got it, moved into it, maid goes with the furnishings, and dinner's almost ready. For Heaven's sake, hurry up!"

Then Gregory Allen came into range of the doctor's near-sighted eyes, and she stopped.

"Mary, let me present Gregory Allen, who is going to draw plans for the T.B.'s. Mr. Allen, Dr. MacLean."

Dr. Mary offered both hands. "One's for manners, the other for gratitude."

"Mary, you couldn't possibly have found an apartment in one day." Jean turned to Gregory. "Dr. MacLean only arrived from California yesterday. She has never lived in New York and didn't know what part of town she wanted."

"Can't be done. Impossible. I know. Once every three years my wife finds our apartment impossible and we house hunt."

Gregory smiled his petit oiseau smile and Dr. Mary accepted him on the spot.

"All right. Then I include you in this evening's dinner. Come and see for yourself. Can you?"

"I shall be delighted."

Dr. Mary in the lead, they left the office.

Gregory felt as if he were on a mischievous adventure.

In winter Gregory Allen always looked forward to summer, except for missing Puck, as a rest from the weary round of Margaret's enthusiasms, her uninteresting friends, and the boring parties to which he went because it was less trouble to go than to fuss about not going. During the winter he never made any close friends, but always thought he might do so in the summer. And then, after the first few weeks of freedom to come and go as he pleased, he began to miss Puck with her long, serious discussions of the doings of Lady Jane, and the well-managed house. In these moods he went to the club of Beaux Arts graduates, knowing beforehand that it would be no more interesting than either of the other two clubs to which he belonged. But he always felt that something interesting ought to develop, although it never did. The members who frequented it were men like himself, neither rich nor famous nor pushed out of the race, comfortable, moderately successful financially, with modest summer homes on Long Island, to which they sent their families from May to September. They had all adjusted their lives as he had, and beyond the round of their work, were as unmagnetic as the routine of their days. They all accepted each other as they were, and believed they were common-sense, practical men.

As for women, Gregory met very few in the course of his work; and, once relieved from his duty as Margaret's husband to the members of The Fortnightly, he could no more imagine looking any of them up during the summer, even if they had been in town, than he could have picked up a stray companion of the streets and spent a pleasant evening in some crowded dance-hall. He could no more imagine meeting Caroline Ainsworth or Mabel Dawson on the street and going home to dinner with them, than he could imagine doing something careless and impromptu with Margaret. Gregory smiled as he pictured himself walking off with Mabel Dawson or Caroline Ainsworth.

At Nineteenth Street the doctor turned east, crossed Gramercy Park and stopped before an old brownstone front on the north side.

"Here we are." They followed through a wide, cool hall, flagged in black and white marble, to a huge door on the right. Dr. Mary threw it open and swept them in with a flourish.

"There, you doubting Thomases. Not so bad, is it?"

Gregory and Jean looked at each other and laughed.

"Mary, I'm glad I didn't bet you that set of Dostoievsky. I would have been broke for a month."

"As long as you are repentant now, I won't crow. Dinner will be ready in a few minutes. I'll hurry it up."

Like the hall, the room was high, cool and dim. The heavy, tapestried furniture seemed built for the ample Dutch forms that had no doubt once inhabited it. It was impossible to imagine raucous voices or useless rush between these lofty walls.

"It's the only real bit of Old New York left," Gregory said, and with one accord they moved to the wide window looking down on the Park.

The rumble of the Third Avenue El, two blocks away, threw into sharp relief the spirit of the past, the old, unhurried past that hangs over Gramercy Park. Behind the scratched and rusted palings, the dusty trees stood aloof, superior to the hustle and roar of the great tide washing its borders; faithful to dead standards, tolerant of the rented keys that now open the gates, to the ever-changing stream of tenants that flows in and out of the brownstone fronts, once the stately homes of unhurrying men.

"It is a bit of the past, isn't it?"

"Yes. It always makes me think of an old French marquise, stiff, powdered, poor, but never forgetting. Here, like this."

He took a scrap of paper from his pocket and drew, with a few strokes, a marquise of the older days.

"But you see, she has to make some concessions, while she waits here, year after year, for the return of the Bourbons, and so——" Gregory clapped upon her head a hat, just a little bedraggled and over-trimmed. "The Spirit of the Present. She bought it at a bargain."

"Oh, Mary!"

"No. Don't, please." Gregory tore up the paper in such discomfort that Jean wanted to pat him on the shoulder and say: "There, there."

"What?" Mary peered in through the door.

"When is that food coming?"

"In a moment." Mary disappeared.

Gregory looked at Jean and they laughed again. "Thanks," he said.

Until dessert the talk was general, mostly of the great strike of garment workers, and of Rachael Cohen, the leader.

"She is literally like a flame. And her people follow her blindly. They will win or lose by Rachael."

"Why lose?"

"They won't. They can't. But, the man whom Rachael loves, hates her people, her power, everything about Ray that makes her what she is, and yesterday Tom Dillon gave her the choice of leading this thing—think of it, fifty thousand people—and winning, because Rachael will win, and a little house in the Bronx with some chickens and, I believe, a baby for good measure."

"Poor girl," Mary said sadly. "Jean, do you remember Carmen?"

Jean nodded. "Oh, Mary, it makes me sick clear through sometimes."

And then, for a little while, they talked of old times and people whom Gregory did not know, but he did not feel left out, only he wondered whether there were many women in the world like these two. Their interests were so varied and deep and they were so, almost exhaustingly, alive.

But with the coffee and cigarettes, they came again to the plans, and Gregory sketched his new idea. They all bent together over the table, suggested, disapproved, argued and contradicted each other, until Gregory forgot he was working with women at all.

It was half past nine when Jean pushed the plans away and stood up.

"Not another word, please," she begged, "or I'll begin on that sun-porch idea of mine and then I never will get to the meeting."

"Does every one's pet wrinkle get included in the general plan? Because I have a couple up my own sleeve," Gregory demanded, as he gathered up the sheets, disappointed that the evening was over.

"Certainly. Didn't I tell you the limit was an expanding quantity? You ought to have seen Mr. Allen's face, Mary, when I told him we didn't know how much we would have to spend."

"We may not know the amount but we know how we're going to get it. And now we've seen you, I think we will notch it up a few pegs, eh, Jean?"

Jean pretended to survey him critically. "Yes, I shouldn't wonder. Oh, Mary, they'll just eat it up, won't they?"

"Who? Me?" Gregory felt a little silly at this banter, but enjoyed it.

"No, the cake, which you will hand 'round."

"Never."

"Don't be alarmed. It won't be to-morrow. Not until winter. Right after the first blizzard we give a tea, very exclusive, only the rich invited. You've made a nice technical plan full of dotted lines and cross-sections, guaranteed to confuse any living female. Said plan hangs upon wall, real live architect, all dressed up, explains. Money pours in. By summer tenements are. Tenants move in. Q.E.D."

Gregory shook his head. "Plans until you're both dizzy with them, every female in the world sick with the blind staggers—but no tea."

"Oh, by that time, you'll be such a reformed character you'll beg to come."

Laughing, Jean moved to the door and Gregory followed. Dr. Mary came as far as the front door and watched them down the steps. On the sidewalk, Jean held out her hand.

"Good-night."

But Gregory Allen fell into step beside her. "Don't condemn me, please, to a roasting hot apartment alone or to a Broadway show. Mayn't I come? I'd like to see this Rachael."

"Of course, gladly, if you care to. But a lot of it will be in Yiddish and it will be fearfully hot and smelly. I want to talk with the committee and after the meeting is the best time."

Gregory did not answer but walked along beside her. She told him more of Rachael, banished by her family because of her love for the Gentile Tom; of the frightful conditions in the garment trade and the faith of her people in Rachael. Gregory Allen heard only stray phrases here and there. But he felt Jean's strength and belief as she swung along beside him, as unwearied as if the day were just beginning. When a woman was wonderful she was very wonderful indeed.

The hall was packed. From wall to wall a flat surface of women's dusky heads swayed like a dark sea, with here and there, like rocks rising above the surface, the hatted heads of men. From this sea rose a suppressed rumble, so that the walls seemed to vibrate with the throttled protest. As Gregory followed Jean to the seats instantly vacated for them, he felt as if he were dropping down far below the daily surface of his life. And as he took his seat it seemed to him that a trap literally closed above him, a trap of foul air, so thick it had the quality of iron, and of rebellion so unbreakable that it had the resistance of steel. A trap that, once having sprung, would never again rise above the imprisoned below. He looked to Jean. But Jean did not seem to be imprisoned in a foul subsurface. Her eyes glowed with excited interest and he realized that this was not a strange scene to her, but part of her daily interest.

"Do you think they will lose?" she asked, with a look that made Gregory feel as if her strong, white hands were drawing him gently with her into this seething mass, rumbling below the settled plane of his life with Margaret and Puck. But, before he could answer, the door at the rear of the platform opened, and a man and woman came out.

"He's the National Secretary of the Garment Workers. And she's Rose Kominsky——Ladies' Waist Makers. I wonder where Ray is."

The National Secretary was short and oily, with none of the dignity of his race. Western hustle was grafted upon Eastern servility. In the midst of bluster, he might suddenly cringe. He was a radical, but he appreciated the good job of being National Secretary, and if it had not been a tenet of his radicalism to despise insignia, he would have delighted in a gilt badge. He made a long speech, shouting and beating in his meaning with furious gestures of his fat hands. He amused and disgusted Gregory.

The local secretary followed, riding in on the wave of the other's emotion, with stated facts and proved data. As she flung her last bunch of clinching statistics to the ceiling, scattering it like confetti on the heads of the people, the rear door opened again, and a slip of a girl in black, with great black eyes in the dead whiteness of her face, came forward. The local secretary broke off her last sentence in the middle and sat down. The girl came to the very edge of the platform and waited quietly for the applause to cease. At last it died, and Rachael began to speak.

She spoke in Yiddish but Gregory felt that the terrible silence of the listening mass was a medium through which her words were registering in his consciousness. Jean was right. She was like a flame. Like an acetylene torch burning its way through all barriers of race difference, social strata and language. So fully did he feel that he knew what Rachael was saying that he scarcely noticed when at the end she swept into English.

"Wait," she cried, "wait in patience and in courage. For thousands of years our people have waited. For ages we workers have waited. And now the time is coming, each year a little nearer, with every battle, another inch. It is near, our freedom, near. Wait. Wait. And out of that waiting rises the thing we demand. It hears us calling. It is coming. It is there always, under the ashes of past hopes, never dead, always burning, a light. Keep heart. Keep faith. Do not kill the little spark. After all the years we have waited, can we not wait in faith a little longer?"

Before the roar of applause ceased, Jean and Gregory were out on the sidewalk. Here the heat was like a cool touch after the fetid heat of the hall.

"Whew."

Jean turned to him: "Did you get more than you bargained for?"

"Yes. In a way, I did," he answered slowly.

"I warned you."

He might have been a child who had disobeyed. Gregory frowned.

"I know you did," he said shortly, and then added, with a look that made Jean wonder what he meant, even after he was gone, "Thank you."

Did he mean for taking him? Or for the meeting itself?

"What are you doing, daddy?"

Gregory started, for Puck had come so lightly in her little rubber-soled sandals that he had not heard her.

"Making a house, Pucklets."

"Let me see." Puck spoke with Gregory's quiet determination, as if she always expected to have to hold out against some opposition. It sat oddly with her golden hair and the delicate oval of her face which were Margaret's.

"Well, look at it. See, that's the floor and these are the walls." Gregory moved so that Puck could come closer, but went on with his work.

"What's that?" A ridiculous duplicate of Margaret's forefinger pointed to a square separated from the main plan.

"That's a room."

"A room?"

"Surely. Look; there are the two windows and there's the door."

She made no comment and after a moment Gregory forgot her, standing so still, her chin just touching his shoulder.

"There isn't any top on that house," she announced suddenly. "It's a funny house. I don't like it."

At the same moment Margaret Allen appeared in the doorway.

"Why, Gregory, aren't you going to take her? It's after eleven now."

"Um." Gregory was making lines on a separate sheet and heard only the modulated run of the words. He rarely paid any conscious attention to Margaret's remarks in the making, because he could always come in on time at the end.

Puck looked from her father to her mother. Her under lip drew in as her mother's did when she was hurt, but it was with the man's straight look of facing a difficulty that she turned away.

"I guess daddy's too busy to play with Puck. The house hasn't got its roof on yet."

"Gregory! She's been looking forward to it so all week. Why, you're working!"

"What did you think I was doing?" Gregory looked up curiously; he so often felt as if she were the child and Puck the woman.

"I thought it was one of those water color things."

Gregory sometimes rested his eyes during these week-ends through the summer, sketching the woods and soft green fields. They were not bad sketches, but Margaret had no respect for them. Subconsciously she was jealous of them. They stood for something in Gregory that had escaped her. With more courage than any one gave her credit for, Margaret Allen had long ago buried her early belief in her husband's ability. She had been very sure when she married him, a year after his graduation from the Beaux Arts with honors, that he was going to be a rich and famous architect. Neither the fame nor the riches had come in spite of her early efforts to connect with people who could be of service. Nor later, when she had recognized the uselessness of trying to force Gregory along these paths, and turned her influence to taking a personal interest, which meant asking questions about technical details which she could not understand. The little water color sketches were like relics that Gregory had kept from the years before he knew her, and when he had gone back to the office on Monday mornings, and she came on a sketch among the scattered sheets of the Sunday paper, she felt almost as if it were the possession of some woman who had an illicit place in her husband's life.

Margaret bent over the plan.

"Greggy, did you get the Stevens house?"

Gregory watched her with a faint smile. She was very near, so that the same clean, sweet odor drifted to him as when he slipped his arm about Puck. The same little tendril, too slight to be a curl; brushed Margaret's neck just below her ear.

"But what on earth is that? Surely the Stevens aren't going to have a front like that?"

"Hardly. What's the good of making a fortune in five years if you don't write it all over the place?"

"What is it then?"

"Tubercular tenements."

"What?"

"It's a building where the poor, who either have or are going to have tuberculosis, can get as much air and light as the rich will let them."

"It sounds terribly socialistic."

"It's terribly individual."

Margaret straightened and locked down with a glance that reached him from the far citadel of pride to which she retreated when she was not sure whether he was making fun of her.

"Who's putting up the money? It's not just building itself, I suppose."

Gregory laughed outright, for he saw Dr. Mary and Jean and himself standing at the table, that first night six weeks ago.

"It's got to be raised yet."

"I don't see anything so amusing about that. It means that you're not sure of your fee, as far as I can see."

"Oh, I'm quite sure about that. There is no fee. I'm doing it for nothing."

"Well, I must say——" Margaret broke off. It was the one fixed principle of her relations with Gregory that they never had an open difference of opinion, especially before Puck. Above all things Margaret Allen was well bred and she could no more have cleared the atmosphere in a burst of anger than she could have struck some one. She never dynamited an obstacle with outspoken objection. She returned again and again and scratched at it.

"Is the contractor giving his time, and the laborers?"

Gregory was still looking off to the line of trees and smiling.

"It isn't started yet. But they may."

Margaret moved to the piazza rail and sat down. She was slight and so fair that she seemed part of the sunlight sifting through the thick green of the wistaria.

"Who's backing it? Somebody must be behind it all."

"Oh yes. There's some one very much behind it; in fact, two people."

It was impossible for Gregory to think of the plan without Dr. Mary—Dr. Mary and Jean and himself in Gramercy Park.

"There's Dr. Mary MacLean and Jean Herrick."

"What! Jean Herrick! The Charity Organization woman?"

"She works with the Charities. It's her scheme."

"Well!"

Words failed Margaret.

"Well what?"

"How long have you been working on them?"

"About six weeks. Yes, just about six weeks," he repeated, and went on with a detail of the entrance hall.

"Sometimes it seems to me that you do things to be deliberately annoying. Why didn't you say anything about it? You know I'm interested in public things like that, and besides The Fortnightly is going to take up housing and public dependents this winter. Mabel Dawson is down to get the first speaker, and we've talked over Jean Herrick a good deal."

"You have?" Gregory suddenly stopped working on the detail.

"She's becoming terribly popular, in the front line of everything, the last word in feminism and all that, you know. A lot of the most progressive clubs have her down for winter talks. But The Fortnightly has to be careful. We have a good many of the old families and we have to go slowly. Mrs. Herrick is extremely radical and speaks at labor meetings and strikes and all that kind of thing, you know. Besides, she's divorced."

Gregory's pencil jabbed a hole in the blue-print. "Is she?"

"Yes, one of the horrid kind." Margaret's tone separated divorces, tolerated some and excluded others. "Mabel wrote to a cousin in California to find out before we asked her. Goodness knows we're not straight-laced, but there are things one can't stand for officially. This Herrick was an artist, Mabel says, did futurist things before any one else heard of them and drank like a fish. He abused her shamefully, but she stood it as long as she could."

Gregory got up and pushed back his chair.

"But when he began to bring women right into the house, she left him. So of course it wasn't her fault. Mabel says she's a wonderful speaker, just a little masculine in her manner, but then such a life wouldn't make her specially clinging or gentle. We've about decided to have her."

Gregory closed the drawing board and Puck came hopefully to his side.

"You mustn't tease daddy, dear; he's busy."

Margaret moved toward the door and beckoned Puck. "Can you take her for just a little walk this afternoon, before the Dawsons come? They're going to bring Squdgy, you know." By raised eyebrows Margaret indicated the need of Puck's being perfectly happy before the arrival of Squdgy, whom she disliked and was apt to ignore completely.

Puck slipped her hand into her father's. The motion drew his notice.

"It's all right, Puckie, go and dress Lady Jane and I'll take you now."

"Do you really want us to take Lady Jane, daddy? I ought to take Matilda; Lady Jane went last week."

"Well, I'd rather have Lady Jane, because she knows the first half of the story already and I'd have to go all over it from the beginning for Matilda."

Puck sighed her relief and scampered off.

"Greg, don't tell her any of those terribly exciting things. You never seem to understand how highly strung she is. All last week she kept on giving the most terrible versions of that bear story to Lady Jane. You don't realize what an imagination she's got."

"Thank God," Gregory snapped, and wished that Margaret would sometimes give him an excuse to be as rude as he felt.

Out in the woods, with Puck trotting by his side, Gregory tried to push the picture Margaret had brought before him into the cool shade of the trees. But, in the shortest interludes of Puck's silence, it was there before him again, hot and glaring and tawdry: Jean Herrick, married to a libertine. A man who, in sottish sensuality, turned from one woman to another. And she had "stood it,"—that ghastly compromise of weak women—until it had passed beyond bounds.

It was impossible. And yet what did he know of women?

There had been that one grisette in Paris, who had embarrassed him so by calling his smile "un petit oiseau." A single month's mildest flirtation with a pretty stenographer, who was more like a mischievous boy than a girl. And Margaret. He had married Margaret because she was so different from the grisette and, yet, when he had put his arms round Margaret for the first time, and she turned her sweet, unresponsive lips to his, he had wanted to crush her, hurt her in some way, just as he had once wanted to choke the grisette. As Margaret wasn't a grisette, Gregory had believed the big love of his life had come. Afterwards the need of making his place in the world had claimed him. And, now, occasional moods he dispelled with extra work and Puck.

Margaret had always told him he was interested in nothing that he could not draw, and did not know what was going on in the world. Perhaps women were part of the "things going on." Perhaps he was old-fashioned. Perhaps it was a puritanical streak, this intense repulsion to thinking of Jean married to a drunken libertine. It would not have been a happy memory, but Gregory could imagine a dozen men he knew, himself even, living down such a memory, doing useful work in spite of an unfaithful, drunken wife put out of their lives. How did he know but that——

"Dad-dy, did the bears get the children?"

Gregory came back to a realization that Puck had been asking this for some time.

"No, the bears did not get them, Puck; not in the end, but they had a hard time of it."

Puck's eyes blackened with suppressed excitement. It had a startling effect, had excitement on Puck. It was like an acid that ate out all her resemblance to Margaret, obliterated the softness of outline, seemed to devour even the delicate tints of her coloring. Excitement brought Puck up the years to meet him, sent him racing backward to her.

"Oh, I was so frightened they'd get all eaten up and left out there without their mothers and daddies knowing where they was."

Her hand clutched Gregory's, and her other arm protected the beloved Lady Jane.

"Lady Jane's been terrible frightened, too. I couldn't get her to sleep last night, not for a long, long time."

"Dear me, that's too bad. I guess we'll have to settle the matter right now."

Gregory sat on the ground under a huge chestnut and filled his pipe. Puck curled close, cautioning Lady Jane to be "very, most perticular still," and Gregory began a rambling sequel to the tale of the Three Bears. Behind the Three Bears—Jean stood with Herrick.

They were late for luncheon, but Margaret made no comment. Puck did not look over-excited and Gregory was in one of his silent moods. Margaret wanted to ask him details about the Tubercular Tenements, and Gregory knew, by her mole-like burrowings about the subject, that she was pleased with his connection. In a way he could not unravel, it was connected with a new wing some millionaire friend of Mabel Dawson's had just donated to St. Luke's hospital in memory of a dead baby.

As soon as lunch was over, Margaret and Puck went to take a nap before the coming of the Dawsons, and Gregory took the detail his walk with Puck had interrupted, out to the hammock under the maple. But the lines grouped themselves to pictures of the last six weeks and he did nothing. Six weeks! For the first time, Gregory blocked the period out of the past and the incredible richness of it startled him.

Six weeks, forty-two days since he had come two hours late to his appointment with Mrs. Herrick of the C.O.S. and wondered whether she did not sometimes pose. Six weeks since he had gone with her to the meeting and heard the rumbling of the world below the safety of his own conventional social strata. Only six weeks since he had again begun to feel the stirring of the old dreams that he had believed dead. So that now, after he left Jean in the evenings, it was hard sometimes to remember that the plans they discussed were not things he was actually doing, instead of the things he had forgotten he had ever hoped to do.

At five the Dawsons came. Mabel and Margaret retired to the end of the piazza, Squdgy was unloaded upon Puck, who obediently took him off to the play-house, and Bill Dawson, fat, moist, as bored by Gregory as Gregory was by him, did his best to start a conversation. Gregory wished he could follow Puck's example with Squdgy and give Bill a picture book. He listened, however, as well as he could, to the perspiring stockbroker's denunciation of Socialism and all "this fashionable parlor radicalism," politely assisted him to a plank of personal reminiscence and prophecy, and, with a breath of relief, saw him presently fall off the plank into the stock exchange, where he let him wallow happily in his native medium.

He was still in it, when the maid wheeled out the tea-wagon and Margaret and Mabel came to join them. Gregory knew by the look in Mabel's eyes that this was the first time Margaret had ever come in under the wire first, and, by the new respect with which she treated him, that the tenements linked him favorably with the great civic achievements of The Fortnightly, Puck brought Squdgy, delivered him to his mother as if he were a sacrifice and climbed into Gregory's lap. Nor could any frowns or suggestions that "big girls sit in chairs" dislodge her.

At last tea was over and the Dawsons went, Bill leading with the now sleeping Squdgy in his arms, Mabel and Margaret sauntering behind. They passed down the lane and disappeared. The gold in the sky dissolved to palest yellow and faint green. Crickets chirped. The earth, freshened by the coming coolness, threw back to the world, in spicy sweetness, the garnered heat of the day. Puck slept in his arms.

In the kitchen the maid finished the dishes and went across the creeping dusk to the next house. Snatches of laughter came to him and he saw the two girls come out and sit on the back steps. In a few moments the chauffeur from the big house up the road joined them, and they all went off together.

Gregory carried Puck in and laid her on her bed. Then he went into the library and switched on the light. He spread the blue-print and began again on the delayed detail. It was the last touch to the plans, and he had promised to bring it with him to-morrow night. But the weight of the day just passed pressed down upon him, and ideas came slowly. Margaret had been long in bed, when he finally drew the last line and turned out the light.

"What on earth is the matter with you to-night? You look as if you had lost your last friend and been evicted for non-payment of rent." Jean was leaning back in her usual chair to the right of the window, drawn just far enough to keep in view the tops of the trees, beyond sight of the dry, trodden grass. Her chin tilted, she looked at him sidewise, laughing.

All day, at every interval not crowded with work, Gregory had been pushing the thought of Herrick away. The need to do this had filled him with a vague anger at Jean, and he had not intended coming to-night. But the evening had stretched so empty before him that he had come, and now he was angry that he had.

"Cheer up, it can't be as bad as all that," Jean bantered.

The words jarred and the tone annoyed him. "I beg your pardon. I didn't realize that I was so terribly glum."

He spoke with a stilted conventionality that made Jean glance at him quickly. The smile went out of her eyes. She wished she had not spoken.

A silence fell between them, unusual in its artificiality. Jean tried to think of something impersonal to say, but there had never been anything effortful in these hours with Gregory and the present need made her uncomfortable. After all, a thousand incidents of which she knew nothing might have happened to depress him. He had spent the week-end with his family. The hinterland of Gregory's life came close, and Jean felt that she had intruded.

The silence deepened. Jean wished that Mary would come. She thought of getting a book, of finishing a report that she had begun, of going into the kitchen. But she never picked up a book when she and Gregory were together, nor finished office details, nor looked after Mamie in the kitchen. And this feeling that she must move, get away from Gregory, break the silence, filled her with an almost physical uneasiness. This sudden need to move beyond the reach of some tangible element in the silence, frightened her. So that Gregory, turning unexpectedly, surprised a strange, unusual look on Jean's face, that made the conventional remark he had finally succeeded in capturing unnecessary. Jean, too, was in a new mood to-night.

The silence tingled with something that Gregory felt must always have been in it. Something was pushing into the foreground, from its seclusion in the carefree weeks behind. The need to know definitely about Herrick was there before him at last. He could admit Herrick or exclude him. For a moment he had the choice, and then Jean said:

"I am afraid Rachael is going to be ill. She looked like a ghost to-day."

"What?" Gregory leaned forward, peering through the words to Jean's purpose in uttering them.

"They are getting dissatisfied. Things are not moving fast enough. And Rachael is very tired."

Jean seized Rachael and dragged her forward, held her there between herself and Gregory.

Gregory slouched back in his chair.

"That's too bad. I suppose it's the heat."

"No, it's more than that. Tom is pestering her. If she gives up, the whole thing will go under."

There was a silence.

"Do you think it very much matters after all? It's a pretty big price you want her to pay."

The words brought a picture of Herrick on the night he had kissed her and she had locked the door of their room. Jean moved as if to get up, but her own motion drove back the memory, cleared her brain and forced Herrick's hot eyes into the past.

"When personal need reaches the depths it has in Rachael," Gregory said slowly, "it becomes cosmic."

"That sounds like fatalism."

Gregory looked at her quietly. What had been her own need, when she had married Herrick? What had been his, when he had married Margaret?

"It's all so unreal when it's over, but——"

And then Mary was in the doorway laughing.

"Well, of all the gloomy-looking objects!"

The words exploded in the narrowing space between them. Smiling, Jean dragged herself up from her chair. "We're so hungry we're perishing."

Why did she say that?

But Gregory too was glad Mary had come.

"We weren't gloomy. We were thinking—a process quite unknown to you, Doctor."

"Absolutely. Mine's action." Mary threw her things on the couch but did not sit down. Her eyes twinkled. Her whole plump person emanated mystery.

"Mary, what have you got up your sleeve? You're just about ready to burst with it."

"Well, it's not so bad, but it needs the accompaniment of food. Mamie!"

"Dinner's ready."

"Come on. I'll tell you when we reach the demitasses."

Nor could she be persuaded or trapped into a statement until the table was cleared for coffee and cigarettes. Then she said:

"Dr. Fenninger is in town."

"Mary! Not really!"

"Yes, he is. I met him to-night in the Subway."

"Who is Fenninger? The Great Poohbah?"

"Just about, as far as we are concerned. He prescribes bread pills for every exhausted society woman in town and diagnoses the indigestions of millionaires at a thousand per. Jean, do you think mummy would get up a dinner for him? He's going to be in town a week. We won't tell her how important he is, just that he is alone in town, family away, 'simple little home dinner, you know,' 'just ourselves in summer,' 'impromptu,' 'home atmosphere,' and so forth."

"I think she would. I'll ask her."

"But why does this man get asked to dinner because he prescribes bread pills for society women?"

"Have you forgotten that we have to raise funds for the T.B.'s? Now, does light glimmer?"

"Not a glimmer."

"It's this way," Jean explained. "We invite him to dinner, very expensive and elaborate and described as a simple little home affair. We make him very comfortable and mention the tenements. We go on eating and mentioning gradually. By the time we get to the black coffee he believes he thought up the whole thing; gives us a check—but that doesn't matter so much—is pledged by his own masculine conceit to prescribe an interest in raising funds to every bored patient he has. By the time The Tea comes off, there you are."

"Well! Of all the round-about, feminine methods of procedure, that takes the cake. Just explain to Mrs. Norris that there will be two extra guests. I wouldn't miss it for anything."

"Yes you will. Because you're not asked. Nothing like that. Home atmosphere to a man means himself. We'll tell you about it, but that's as near as he'll get, isn't it, Jean?"

Jean laughed. "I'm afraid it is. We may be able to work Fenninger in on mummy, but she's heard about you and thinks you're a frightfully important person. It would scare her stiff to have you to dinner."

"Give her another name, anything. I've got to be in at the death."

"Besides," Mary interposed, "we'll have it on Sunday—best set for lonely man in city without his family, dismal Sunday, etc."

"Well?" Gregory's eyes met Jean's for a second.

"You couldn't come on Sunday. You—won't be here."

There was an imperceptible pause, and then Gregory said quietly:

"No, in that case, I can't."

In a few moments they left the table and went back to the living-room. But Gregory did not sit down again. He moved restlessly about the room, reading bits out of magazines which he picked up at random under pretense of trying to find an article he had seen the week before.

A little after nine he said he was tired, and had work to do at the office. When he had gone Mary turned to Jean.

"Well, of all the extraordinary manifestations! What on earth is the matter with the man?"

"How should I know? Nothing, probably."

"Rubbish. He got all fussed up and peevish about something. Do you suppose he was really hurt that we wouldn't let him in on the dinner?"

"No, of course not. Besides, how could he come? He always goes home over the week-end."

"I know. But there was something. I never saw him act like that before."

"Oh, men are likely to do anything. They're—they're so inconsequent."

Jean wondered what she meant, as she lit a cigarette and took the chair facing out to the tree tops.

But later in the evening, when they were not talking of Gregory at all, Mary said suddenly.

"Jean, do you suppose we'd better make it some other day? Sunday is the best, but I wouldn't like Gregory to be really hurt."

"Nonsense, Mary. Of course Sunday is the best day. No. Let's leave it that way."

But she too left earlier than usual.

As Gregory Allen walked slowly uptown in the hot night, he was aware that something decisive had happened. Some thread, carried over from the moments alone with Jean before dinner had snapped, when Jean said:

"You couldn't come on Sunday."

All through these summer weeks, he had felt alone with Jean. But the conditions of his life, his home, his wife, his child, his obligations, which had entered not at all into his consciousness, must have been present to her all the time. She did not think of him as a separate human unit, in the way he thought of her. He was married. He had obligations. He conformed to the conventional social usage. Married men went home over the week-ends. Therefore it was impossible for him to be present at the dinner. Jean had not for a moment seriously considered the possibility of his doing it. And he would have, gladly. He would have broken the habit of years. He would have stayed the two stifling days in town. He would have done this thing if Jean had not said:

"You won't be here."

Why would he have done it? Why did he want so much to go?

Again and again Gregory cut through the tangle of false explanations and reached this point. But beyond it he would not go.

"Oh, the devil!" Gregory turned at Forty-Second, passed the Subway station and continued on to his office.

The elevator had stopped running and he walked the three flights. The last mail lay on his desk as the office boy had stacked it. On the top, anchored by a paper weight so that he would be sure to see it instantly, was a telegram. Gregory tore it open. It was from Amos Palmer, asking him to come at once. The Palmers were hastening their departure for Europe and wanted some changes made in the plans.

For weeks the Palmer place had been a joke with him and Jean and Dr. Mary. They had taken turns in designing terrible ornamentations which would advertize for miles Palmer's success in the leather trade. Dr. Mary had insisted on a golden shoe for a weather-cock on the ten thousand dollar barn, and Jean had suggested carving cattle all over a turret. Gregory smiled as he recalled Jean's painful efforts with the cow.

It was the biggest job he had had for years. But—the remaining month of summer shut up with Amos and his wife and the ten-thousand-dollar barn.

"I'll be damned if I——"

Gregory stopped, sat down at his desk and lit his pipe. He smoked one pipe and lit another. Again and again he filled his pipe, lit, and smoked slowly.

It was very late when he took down the 'phone and sent an affirmative telegram to Amos Palmer.

Then he looked up trains. There was one at eight in the morning. Gregory wrote a note of explanation to Margaret and laid it on the mail to be sent out first in the morning. Then he took a sheet of paper, started a note to Jean, tore it and began one to Dr. Mary. When he read it over it sounded as if he were apologizing for going at all. He tore this and tried again. Now he seemed to be asking permission. This followed the others to the waste-basket and Gregory locked his desk. There was really no need to write at all. They would understand that he had been called away, and anyhow the plans were finished. When he returned, things would be different. Summer would be over. Gregory whistled as he packed the Palmer plans, and all the way down the three flights to the street.

It was after one, but the crowds still moved in four streams, two up, two down. Gregory wondered why so many people walked in the night, as if the city, like a nervous woman, must never be left alone.

The Fenninger dinner was a success, and Jean waited all the next morning for Gregory to 'phone. She so thoroughly expected him to, and waited so impatiently, enjoying in anticipation certain shadings which she knew would delight him, that, late in the afternoon, when the alternative of calling him occurred to her, Jean could not do it. She did not like to feel this way, and told herself that her own interest had colored her perspective. There was no need for Gregory to rush to the 'phone as soon as he came back from his week-end with his family, when she would surely see him in the evening. Nevertheless, that night at dinner, when Mary asked her if she had heard from Gregory, Jean felt a relief out of all proportion to the explanation she had forced on her own logic.

"Funny, he didn't ring up."

Jean cracked a walnut with great deliberation. "I suppose he's extra busy."

"Not so busy as all that. Jean, you can say what you like, but he was angry. I imagine, in some moods; he would be awfully touchy, and evidently he was in one that night. But he'll never be able to resist long."

Jean picked the meat carefully from the shell and ate it slowly.

"Let's string him a bit first," Mary continued, "pretend we couldn't work Fenninger and then spring it on him. He'll smile, then gurgle and finally explode like a small boy."

Jean reached for another nut. "He is like a small boy, very often."

There was a silence, while Mary chose a bunch of raisins from the nut dish and ate them thoughtfully.

"It's a damn shame," she said suddenly, apropos of nothing.

Jean rose and pushed back her chair.

"Oh, lots of things are a shame," she returned flippantly, and they went into the living-room.

But when a week had passed without hearing anything from Gregory, Mary rang up his office. He was out of town. No, they did not know when he would be back, exactly, certainly not for another three weeks. He was at the Palmer place.

"Well I'll be darned!" Dr. Mary apostrophized the tip of her cigarette, and in acquiescence, the little ash-head fell off. "That's not like him one single bit. Not even if he was called away in a hurry. I wonder what——"

She did not see Jean for two days, but when she did, asked abruptly:

"Have you heard from Gregory yet?"

"No. Have you?"

"I rang up the office. He's gone to the Palmer place, will be gone for a month."

Under pretext of laying aside her things, Jean turned away.

"I suppose they rushed things at the end, one of the whims of the idle rich."

"That's no reason for his acting like a boor."

"Of course it isn't. But then he has."

"I don't believe it. There was something——"

"Didn't I tell you men were queer?" Jean spoke without turning. "They—they don't have reasons, not good ones, for everything they do. They——"

"Fiddlesticks! Maybe they don't know their own reasons, but they have 'em. Nobody, not even a man, switches round like that without some cause. Why, he's been coming here three and four times a week, and he's enjoyed it, too. I feel as if he belonged somehow, don't you?"

Jean was looking into the Park, to the trees, a sickly green with their coating of summer dust under the arc lights. But she could see Gregory lounging in the empty chair at the other end of the window, could see him very distinctly, his nervous hands on the dark tapestry of the arms, his head tilted back.

"Yes. He does seem to go with the place."

"Are you sure you didn't do anything? He looked awfully glum that night when I came in."

"I don't know. Maybe I did, but I can't think of anything." Jean continued to stare at the dusty trees. "Anyhow, if he's the reasonable being you insist he is, he'll get over being huffy, and then we'll know."

Mary laughed. "Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings. But I'll confess that it annoys me. Doesn't it you?"

Jean faced into the room. "No. But then I have real annoyances to contend with."

"You've been at it again with Pedloe!"

"I certainly have. He's having a fit because I'm on the committee for arranging strike relief. Of course, personally, Mrs. Herrick, my sympathies are all for the strikers, but you understand that officially——' Round and round he goes like a frightened squirrel. Honestly, it's pitiful. He can't come out openly on either side. He's just as shackled by that $6000 a year salary as a convict with a ball and chain. What do you think he told me?"

Jean forced aside the figure of Gregory and put Dr. Pedloe in his place. Holding the head of the Charity Organization firmly before her eyes, she began walking up and down.

"Almost anything, from the way you look."

"He said that this strike, it's got fifty thousand women now and it may become sympathetic before it's over and take in hundreds, was essentially a struggle of Jewish workers. That the Hebrew Relief should supplement strike benefits. And that in the cases of others, Christians, well, he did not know just what they could do, but he was very sure that the Organization could do nothing. Why? Because the roots of the thing ramify so that some of our very heaviest subscribers are in the tangle, and he doesn't dare go against them."

"What's he want you to do? Resign from the committee?"

"Yes. He hinted around for an hour, hoping I'd help him out, I suppose, but I just sat and let him fidget. So in the end he came out flat and told me he could not stand for having me officially mixed up in it and I told him that I was not officially mixed up, that it was purely a question of personal belief,—you ought to have seen him at that,—and friendship for Rachael Cohen. He got off the strike then, quick, and began to hint that in other ways I did not measure up to Organized ethics. I always knew he was furious at those talks I gave last winter, but he never said anything before. He was quite worked up to-day, however, and finally put it just about as plainly as Tom did to Rachael. You know he gave her the choice between him, a decent home in the Bronx—and her people."

"Do I understand that Dr. Pedloe——"

"Scarcely. But he did intimate that in future he would be grateful if I would attend to my duties as per Organization and nothing else. I told him I would think it over and he almost fell out of his chair. He simply can't conceive of any one throwing up a perfectly good job 'with a certain position in this community, Mrs. Herrick.'"

"Are you going to?"

Jean walked the length of the room and back without answering. Then she came and stood before the doctor.

"Mary, I'm getting pretty sick of the whole thing. It's just one tangled mass of red tape. Here we are, literally hundreds, right here in New York—and think of the whole country—intelligent men and women, doing what? We feed a huge machine with our strength and brains, and what comes out of it? What are we doing? What evils are we curing? What are we constructing? Nothing! Absolutely nothing. We are an obsolete institution. We are of no more use than the rudimentary fifth toe of a horse. And we're not even honest about it. That's the greatest danger. We pretend to ourselves and to society, that's too lazy to look into it, that we are tremendously important. We get out reports that look as if we were safeguarding humanity from all kinds of evil and imposture, and spend thousands in keeping alive the fact that Mrs. Jones got half a ton of coal last month. If we'd only be honest about it! But we pretend we're doing good. The whole business is a pitiful survival of the days when a kind lady went round in a pony cart and gave away red flannel."

"I know it. But most of us can only go on plodding in the road that's already made. We do what we can to broaden it or make it straighter, and then we die. But if you see another, Jean, get down on your knees, like mummy, and thank God."

"I have been thinking a lot lately about something I would like to try. I suppose you and the T.B.'s have stirred some sleeping ambitions. I don't know that in the end it would set the world on fire, but at least it would have the vigor of honesty. It won't be going round in a rut worn a mile deep by others. I want—hold tight, Mary—to gather together all the strength going to waste in women's clubs and harness it."

"Good Lord! Women's Clubs!"

"Go right on, Mary; there isn't a thing you can say that I haven't thought of. I know all about the fiddling little sections for doing fiddling, unnecessary things. I know all about the bickerings and miniature storms, every drawback to getting efficient action out of our sex. But—this is our century. It is our first real chance in history, and I don't know but what we're measuring up pretty well. I suppose there are a dozen bigger things one could do, but for some reason I want to get in on the ground floor of this."