BOOK ONE
CHAPTER I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI,
BOOK TWO
XII, XIII, XIV, XV, XVI, XVII, XVIII, XIX, XX, XXI,
BOOK THREE
XXII, XXIII, XXIV, XXV, XXVI, XXVII, XXVIII, XXIX, XXX.
TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE

HALF LOAVES
——————
MARGARET CULKIN BANNING

HALF LOAVES

BY
MARGARET CULKIN BANNING
AUTHOR OF “THIS MARRYING,” ETC.



NEW YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY


COPYRIGHT, 1921,
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA



TO
A. T. B.

BOOK ONE

CHAPTER I

The life of a woman in the world who did not marry—the life of a woman of the world who married—the life of a nun. One must choose, though it seemed that eternal salvation was possible along any of these roads. The unmarried woman must devote her life to saving her soul and, because she had no cares of home or children, she had more time than other women to devote to the salvation of other souls. The affection and care which she did not give to a husband and children she might devote to the alleviation of suffering, to the work of a lay woman in the church, or the care of an aged parent. To Cecily it somehow did not sound alluring—these women sinking into respected, dutiful cares—it did not sound alluring. The life of a nun—Mother Fénelon came along the corridor, her hands held together under the loose panel of her black robe, her face half concealed by the stiff fluted ruff around it, her step noiseless in her felt slippers. She smiled at Cecily and Cecily, slipping respectfully to her feet, smiled back. She loved Mother Fénelon. It was true what the priest had said. Nuns were happy—it was a beautiful, peaceful, sure life—a life of blessing and fun too. Perhaps, thought Cecily, it is because I am not a Catholic that I would not want to be a nun. Yet even the Catholic girls—even the devout Agnes, who spent an extra half hour in prayer every day, kneeling with her long body bent in real and voluntary discomfort over the back of a pew—even Agnes did not want to be a nun. Cecily took out of her memory the other choice of the priest. He had not placed it last. The life of a nun, highest in his estimation, had come as the climax of choices. But Cecily felt differently. The life of a married woman in the world—the life of a married woman—a little quiver of excitement ran through her imagination—a married woman. Yet the priest had not made it attractive.

No, he had seemed to make it deliberately rather unattractive. Sacrifice, pain, endurance of pain—these the lot of the married woman. He pictured her with her children, teaching them the love of God and devotion to Him. He pictured her bearing troubles which the children brought. And he had said, “Marriage is a sacrament which has for its purpose the establishment of a home and the bringing up of children. There are those in the world who will try to make you believe not only that marriage is not a sacrament and that it may be dissolved at will, but that the bodies and souls of little children do not belong to it. Who listens to such counsels willingly, who allows them to prevail upon him is in a state of mortal sin.”

And he had not said one word about love, thought Cecily. Lover’s love, that is. Perhaps because he did not know about it, not ever having been married. Or perhaps he thought all such things were sinful. Cecily reflected on love and the little thrill ran through her again. Decidedly he could not have shown marriage at its best. There was love—being made love to—and of course he did not know, could not be expected to know about such things as engagements and weddings. He did not know.

The girls began to come into the chapel, and jumping up again from her window ledge, she took from her pocket the black net veil, without which none of the students might enter the chapel, and pinned it on her hair. Between the black folds, falling on either side of her head, her face looked out charmingly. She was eighteen, but if it had not been for her tallness she would have seemed younger, for her eyes were depths of unsophistication and her hair swept back in soft brown waves as simply arranged as a child’s.

In the chapel Mother Barante began to sing softly the first hymn of the Benediction. It was the most precious hour of the day to many of the nuns as well as to the students. Mother Barante’s voice was one of the chief prides of the cloister and the nuns told with gentle satisfaction of the triumphs Mother Barante had been promised professionally, of the cathedrals which had wanted her for soloist and how she had preferred to sing like this—here in this white chapel at Benediction. Cecily had often thought that perhaps, after all, the singer had chosen wisely. Here in this exquisite chapel where everything except the high oaken stalls of the nuns and the seats for the students was spotlessly white and polished, where there were always flowers on the altar and soft reverential lights before the shrines of the saints, was a perfect setting. People came from great distances to hear Mother Barante sing, and, worldly and ostentatious as some of the girls were, they all took pride in the fact that none of these visitors saw the singer—only heard her glorious voice from the organ loft above them, where she stood, her glance always on the statue of the Mother of God.

Chapel was over. The mission was over. It was suppertime, and the girls filed in two long rows to the refectory hall. And, with the relief which came after the concentration of the mission, they were very gay. The nun who presided over the hundred girls was unexacting and the laughter echoed from the head table, where the older girls sat, down to the table where the littlest girls giggled and chattered over their gingercookies and preserves. The enormously fat sister who waited on table smiled at the children and left them an extra plate of cookies. Sister Loretta liked the little ones best and they loved her for she was as happy as she was fat, and always ready to find a hungry child something to eat. Not having enough education to aspire ever to become a mother of the order, Sister Loretta was completely content in being allowed to serve the others.

Cecily looked interestedly at Sister Loretta as she piled the dishes on her tray. What had made Sister Loretta choose the life of a nun, she wondered? She wished that she could ask her. She was anxious to find out more about this matter of choice of life—more especially why all these women had deliberately given up the life of a married woman in the world. There must be something more—there must be some objection which she did not know.

“Why do they choose to be nuns?” she asked reflectively, leaning one elbow on the table in a most forbidden way.

Agnes, sitting beside her, made the orthodox reply.

“It’s the holiest life—and the safest.”

“Safest from what?”

“Oh, temptations, troubles, sorrows.”

“Then I don’t see,” said Cecily, “why we don’t all just be nuns and make an end to it.”

There was a silence and then a giggle.

“Have to enlarge the convent some.”

“Be pretty dull outside.”

“Never get me to agree to that. Besides, there are reasons——”

Some of the reasons occurred to Cecily. She blushed a little and let the subject pass in a chorus of inconsequent and flippant comment. But later, in a corner of the recreation hall Agnes herself revived it. There were four of them—Agatha Ward, Madeline von Vlectenburg, Agnes Hearding and Cecily. They drew together in an earnest little group around the green shaded lamp by the divan and discussed it. For no one of them wanted that supreme choice of the Jesuit priest’s for a woman’s life—no one of them wanted to be a nun. Their faces were vivid with interest and excitement. Madeline, plump and blond and glowing, had already a personal interest in a man. She would see him when she got home again, and now that she was through school—she paused thrillingly. And Agnes began to talk of love with all the ardor that she threw sometimes into her sensuous enjoyment of religion. If she really loved a man, said Agnes——. Agatha was not so sure of love. She knew a woman who wrote and who had a flat of her own and who deliberately had not married. A life-work was sometimes better than marriage and more interesting. The girls listened seriously, for Mother Benedict herself had said that there was great talent in Agatha’s verses.

But Cecily contributed nothing. Deeper than the easy talk of the girls ran the message of the priest, and deeper still ran that strange adventurous wonder as to the solution of it all. The girls were choosing for themselves. They were not telling why one chose as one did.

Graduation week was busy. One had no time to think. The orderly days were crammed full and the life of the convent centered protectingly, admiringly, lovingly about the fifteen girls who were leaving it for the world. The simple parties, the award of the medal for composition, the medal for oratory, the coming of the parents, the special music for the last Mass, the unpacking of graduation dresses sent from home, the gentle flurry of the convent world absorbed the girls. It was only on the last night—the night before the final exercises—that Mother Fénelon, alone in the study room, looked up to see Cecily standing before her. Cecily’s eyes were frightened and fearful and excited and the nun drew the girl down upon a chair beside the desk, holding the nervous hands in the hollow of her own.

“It’s hard to go, Mother Fénelon, and I thought it would be easy. I thought, not being a Catholic, that so much of it wouldn’t matter. But it is hard. And I feel so afraid—and lost.”

“We keep you here in our hearts, dear—and you take us with you.” The old words, never tiresome, because always real.

“I know.”

“Is there anything especially bothering you, Cecily?”

“Yes,” said Cecily bravely, “the choice.”

“The choice?”

“You know. Of course I shan’t be a nun, but to marry—or not to marry.”

The nun did not smile. She had been cloistered in the convent many years and, perhaps because she had time to reflect upon them, was wise in the ways of the world. And she knew the reality of even the adolescent struggle.

“Cecily, dear, Father Aloysius called it your choice. It is yours. But only ultimately. Events, happenings which we cannot foresee but which come to us under the guidance of God, affect our choice in most matters. Do you see, dear—you can’t decide that now? You must wait and let events shape themselves—and only pray that your vision may be clear and your heart pure.”

A look of relief came over Cecily’s face. She nodded. But Mother Fénelon still held her hand.

“You are a pretty girl, Cecily,” she went on, “and the world rates prettiness very highly. There are people—there are men—who think it is all that matters—that pleasure is all that matters. Don’t believe them, dear.”

“What matters most—pain?”

“Neither pleasure nor pain.” The old nun transcended her philosophy in a phrase, “Life matters.”

CHAPTER II

THE Convent of the Sacred Heart was a curiously cloistral structure, situated in a manner quite unanticipated by its founders, in the spreading outskirts of the city itself. It was old as age went in Carrington—its wooden turrets and wasteful curves testified to that—and it had been built at a time when no one dreamed that the fields and pastures and wooded stretches which lay around the convent’s site would be filled within thirty years by prosperous looking residences, sleek lawns and neat hedges. But so it was. As the red brick of the convent walls grew tawny brown with age, the city crept up around them and only the great expanse of its own grounds and that five-foot wall remained to keep the peace of the cloister. But the wall was high and the pine trees within it thickly green in both winter and summer, and the convent, growing richer every year as its property increased in value, gave as little recognition as possible to the modernity outside its gates. It had abandoned its huge windmill for modern plumbing, gradually gas had supplanted lamps and electric wiring supplanted gas—but there the obvious changes stopped. The parlor was still the severe old Victorian parlor of its first furnishing, the study hall still had desks with lid tops and the stone flagging of the corridors was hollowed with the footsteps of thirty-five years. Its shabby permanency gave it peace and aristocracy and this atmosphere was breathed by the nuns themselves, for they, like the place, were cloistered. There were those among them who had been in the convent precincts for thirty years—those whose only voyage outside had been the most inconspicuous and hurried progress from one convent to another, when the Order had transferred them. There were those who came from France, where, until the exile of priests and nuns, they had taught the children of the aristocracy in high walled convents like this one; those who had come from England; and those who in the early part of their lives must have been simple American children. But no matter where they had come from, they were bound together by the same experiences and qualities now—tremendous religious devotion, a gentle love of seclusion and a fine, faint flavor of aristocracy of birth and education, for the order was no common order. It demanded a background of breeding and learning in its novices, and indeed a substantial dowry for them. All this because it devoted itself to the bringing up of ladies and could not risk the wrong kind of instruction for them.

The city, in a worldly, not too serious, way, was proud of its convent. It was proud of its cloistral bearing, of its aristocratic refusal to market even the smallest of its lots, as a tightfisted money maker may respect and be fond of some unworldly old lady who refuses to measure the world by his measure of dollars and cents. The esteem in which the convent was held was regardless of creed. Catholic and Protestant alike with pride pointed out the walled domain to visitors—and Catholics and Protestants alike tried to enter their daughters into its limited classes, if they or the daughters had a taste for that sort of education.

But the classes were limited and the work, after all, not college preparatory, so the convent did not compete seriously with the smart High School displaying itself, a quarter of a mile away, in the middle of its well kept lawns and two tennis courts (supported by private subscription). The High School did not consider the convent at all a competitor any more than the convent would have considered itself one. The flavor of the convent was lost in the general breeziness and bustle of the High School. From October until June its halls and classrooms swarmed with life, with restlessness, with innovations in everything from hair dressing to pedagogy. Its daily six hour-periods were jammed with the efforts of teachers and supervisors and the propagandists of some cause or other, and distinguished visitors and class leaders came, too, to impress facts and emotions upon eight hundred boys and girls. From Monday until Friday it seethed with excitement, and on Saturday the basket ball games in the perfectly equipped gymnasium or the crowds cheering the football games in the field at the back, and the parties in the evenings kept the school humming.

One period of the academic year, of course, transcended all others in interest and in holiday excitement. That was the week before Commencement, when the festivities attendant on that event threw the whole building into confusion and anticipation. Commencement week had the evil habit of being preceded by a week of “exams”—a rather nerve-racking time for all the classes, for a great deal of information had to be investigated in the bright and facile young minds under the High School’s control. Study became very real for a week or so, scholarship took on new dignity, and the amazing cleverness of both teachers and students showed through the blur of distractions. In spite of all their other interests, the students seemed to have learned a great deal about very definite subjects and they wrote, for the most part, very creditable examination papers and took due pride in them. Then the week passed and the spirit changed. The academic standard fell by the wayside among the things that counted not. What counted was to be pretty, to be attractive, to be a football hero (or at least on a class team), to be a good dancer, to have had the greatest number of “bids” to the Commencement dance or to the dance the Juniors gave to the Seniors, or to have a part in the class play.

On the night when Mother Fénelon talked to Cecily and soothed her vague nervousness about marriage, the great High School building, half a mile away, was ablaze with light. It was the occasion of occasions in the school social year—the Senior dance. On the wide macadam street automobiles were parked in long lines and through the open windows of the second floor gymnasium an orchestra was playing indefatigably. Young girls in gay taffeta dance frocks, made scrupulously like the fashionable evening dresses of older women, and boys in well brushed and pressed clothes were dancing, and dancing well, with a spirit and abandonment to enjoyment lacking in many an older party. Yet, in the midst of all the color and gayety a few of these adolescents struck a higher note of brilliance than the rest, and the most conspicuous was a girl in a cerise frock. Her dress was cut a little lower than the others, and her hair, bunched low over her ears like most of the rest, managed to make itself individual by being drawn tightly across her pretty forehead, accentuating its whiteness and height. She had one other triumph of individuality. She had a feather fan, as cerise as her gown, and completely out of keeping as it was, it still made her an irresistible picture. The mammoth fan, the short, brilliant little skirt, the restless feet and ankles and great bunches of black hair made her a model for a poster. She seemed fully conscious of her effect and of her overcrowded program of dances, for it was as if her laugh and vivacity led the others by natural right. It was one of her moments of triumph and she never wasted them.

Florence Horton, commonly known as “Fliss,” had gone through High School on sheer strength of wit. She was the only child of rather inconsequent parents whom she ruled completely. They had given her no social position so, in her early teens, she had set about making one for herself. And so far she had done it. “Fliss” went everywhere with the girls of her age who came from wealthy and exclusive families, used their automobiles, dined at their homes, was a favorite with their fathers and mothers, and called their servants and chauffeurs by their first names. She did it by sheer virtue of the color in her which, like the color in the cerise dress, was outrageous, unsuitable and immensely stimulating.

In her academic work she was invariably in difficulties. There was not a teacher who was not perfectly aware that Fliss studied practically not at all. She “bluffed” continually. But her bluff was so skillful and sometimes approximated so closely to real intelligence on the subject involved that it was impossible to drop her altogether. Now and then she failed in an examination, tutored frantically and made the work up again, and here she was, graduating with the rest, though there had been some dubious hours in this last week when it had taken several consultations between the chemistry teacher and his assistant to decide to give her passing credits. She was through with school. College was an impossibility from the standpoint of work, even if she could have afforded to go, and the only thing which might have allured her—a year at some fashionable Hudson River boarding school—was quite out of her range as being even more expensive than college. So Fliss made the best of it and declared that she was glad to be through with books forever, and that she meant for the rest of her life to have a good time.

It appeared that there would be plenty of people to give it to her. She had already managed to get the attention of several young men who were well past the High School age, and, though she danced and coquetted with the younger boys too, she was more interested in those slightly older than herself. Old and young, and brilliant, she was a perfect type of the woman who matures early and ages so imperceptibly that her reign is long.

She was out in the hall now with Gordon Ames and they sat on the top of the oiled stairs in semi-darkness. The music had started but Gordon ignored Fliss’s impatient little toe tapping on the step beneath her.

“I wish I didn’t have to go to college,” he grumbled.

“Why?”

“Because you’ll stay here and flirt with every boy in town.”

“Aren’t you horrid, Gordon Ames!” Fliss pouted with great pleasure.

“You know you will—and then some day somebody’ll marry you and there I’ll be off at college.”

“I might have something to say about that,” said Fliss, “and I haven’t any intention of getting married. I don’t want to marry. I’m going to stay home, and after a while, maybe I’ll do something—or go on the stage.”

“You’d better keep away from that,” said Gordon with much meaning and manly wisdom in his voice.

“I think I’d like it maybe.”

“Yes, you would.” He changed the subject impatiently. “Fliss, will you wear my frat pin?”

Fliss patted her knee with the ostrich fan, and regarded the pin. It was set with pearls in the most extravagant manner that a fraternity pin could be. But she hesitated.

“You know what that always means to everybody—all the girls laugh and talk——”

“That’s what I’d like it to mean—that we’re engaged.”

“Oh, I don’t want to be engaged.”

“I suppose it would have to be awfully indefinite. But it doesn’t have to mean that we’re engaged, just to wear my pin. Lots of girls wear them when they don’t mean a single thing. Please.”

She took the pin from him yieldingly, with a graceful little smile of pleasure and gratitude playing about her mouth. The boy was watching her closely and his face flushed suddenly at her smile.

“And because it’s our last night,” he whispered awkwardly, “you’ll let me kiss you——”

But he did not wait for permission. Most of the boys did not with Fliss. Fliss might not give you the kiss you wanted when you wanted it, but she could be kissed and they knew it. Usually they were silly enough, little giggling kisses, but to-night there was a new quality in Gordon. Fliss felt it and pulled herself away, a little abashed. But most of all Gordon seemed to feel it himself, for he released her and stood up suddenly, flushed and silent.

“I think this is what it is to be in love—really,” he said, soberly.

But she had recovered her gay little self.

“If you act like that another time, I’ll stop speaking to you, Gordon,” she said, “and I’m going down to dance.”

They went down into the crowded hall, but the boy did not dance again. Going home later, he crowded into the back of a big touring car with Fliss and three other couples of boys and girls, all excited and laughing, sitting on each other’s laps and indulging in foolish little caresses and rebuffs. He did not touch Fliss.

And Fliss, still later, sat on the edge of the bed in the room of a friend where she was spending the night. It was a rather luxurious room and the two girls made a lovely picture against its background. They discussed the dance and the boys.

“Oh, they are just boys,” said Fliss, somewhat slightingly. “You’ll see a different type in the men who come to college dances, I suppose. Real men.”

“I wish you were coming to college, Fliss.”

“Too much work.”

“But if you stay on here you’ll probably just marry——”

Fliss grew suddenly angry. “That’s the second time I’ve been told that to-night and it is perfectly absurd. Why should I marry just because I don’t go to college?”

Her friend ruminated a little. She was a pretty girl herself and a thoughtful one.

“I thought you might like to,” she answered simply. “And when there’s nothing much else to do, the girls all seem to——”

“Because they are stupid,” flashed Fliss, “of course they do. Like Dorothy Maynard. And then they have babies and get fat and stop dancing and don’t care about anything except babies and food. If I get married I won’t do that sort of thing anyhow. I won’t get married unless I’m sure I won’t have to. Anyway who could I marry?”

“You’d probably find some one.” The other girl slipped into her bed. “My feet are tired,” she added, “but I wish I could dance to that orchestra forever.”

Fliss did not answer. She sat, watching her image in the pier glass opposite her. It was a strangely young image for one possessed of such crowding thoughts.

CHAPTER III

The debts were settled as scrupulously as they could be and there were several relatives and friends who opened their doors to Mrs. Moore with a real sincerity in their wish that she would make her home with them. But that, it seemed, was impossible to her. With her baby Cecily, she did a little visiting in various cities at first, but, wearying of that, took a small apartment in Carrington and managed somehow to pay her rent, satisfy her dressmaker, and tide over the three years during which she was rejecting proposals of marriage. She probably had more than the usual pretty widow because she had seemed to come so unscathed through the business of marriage once. To look at her cool, unlined face and watch the graceful slimness of her movements was to doubt that harassing affair of Allgate Moore entirely. But it must to some extent have made Mrs. Moore afraid, for she refused several offers of homes and fortunes which almost any woman might have felt too valuable to lose. Or perhaps she was more tired than any one knew or than she confessed even to herself. When she did decide to marry again she chose as complete a contrast to her first husband as could have been found. Allgate Moore had been the handsomest man of his group. Tall, dark, magnetic, he could ride, dance, or convince a stupid woman that the plans he had made for building her a mansion were perfection, with equal ease. He had flashes of brilliance in his work as an architect, but with his brilliance went an unscrupulousness, a readiness to cheapen himself by passing off inferior work, which had kept him from going very far. The man his widow chose as his successor was so deliberate a contrast to him as to be almost a repudiation of his memory unless it showed simply the versatility of her affection. She married Leslie Warner, a successful business man of forty who had distinguished himself by indefatigable work and unerring business judgment. He had in addition a keen sense of humor, a real kindliness of spirit and of manner, and a leaning towards fine solidity in his possessions. Why he married Mrs. Moore after forty years of bachelorhood was a puzzle to many people, but his emotions were as inscrutable as hers and certainly gave the public a chance for nothing more than conjecture. They built a spacious imitation Colonial house shortly after they were married and Mrs. Warner furnished its large halls and sunny rooms with quiet luxury, utterly disregarding the bizarre colorings and furnishings which had characterized her first home. Subsequently the Warners had two children, both boys.

Cecily admired her mother more than she found it easy to say and was as fond of her stepfather as he deserved. But perhaps, because she had come ready-made into the big white Colonial house, or perhaps because that curious characteristic aloofness had descended to her from her mother, there was something more than the difference in Cecily’s surname to remind people that she was the child of Mrs. Warner’s first marriage. She was four years old when her mother married Leslie Warner. When she was ten her mother, at a loss for proper schooling for her, dissatisfied with a succession of inefficient governesses and unwilling to let Cecily go to public school, had decided to try the Convent of the Sacred Heart. There were no Catholics in the family, but it was apparent to Mrs. Warner that these well-bred nuns would make no effort to proselytize her daughter and with confidence she intrusted Cecily to them as a boarding pupil, that being the only way they would take students. And so it was the convent rather than her home which had made the deepest impress on Cecily during the years of her adolescence. To be sure, she had come home for vacations, but the sense of permanency had always been connected with her life in the convent—with the going back to the quiet halls and definite routine rather than with the vacationing which had so kindly but so deliberately been made pleasant for her. She wondered what she was going to do with all her time at home. Perhaps her mother had been wondering too, for after the few first days of Cecily’s return, she came into the girl’s room one night and somewhat uncertainly seemed to settle herself for a talk. Mrs. Warner was still a very lovely woman, not quite forty, and Cecily looked at her with the irrepressible admiration she always felt.

“I wish you’d show me how to do my hair like yours, so that I’d know always which way it was going to wave,” said the girl.

Mrs. Warner smiled. “It’s much prettier to see yours as it is,” she answered. “Cecily, I’ve been thinking about you a good deal. Now that you are through school we must arrange things so that you will be happy. Later on we may travel, but this year your father is tied down in Carrington for most of the year, so I can’t see much ahead except a few weeks in New York with me this fall, a month in the South in the spring and after we get back from New York I thought I had better give a rather large party for you so you could meet people and become an orthodox débutante. Would you like that?”

Cecily looked a little perturbed, but what fear there was seemed to be overlaid with delight.

“I think I’d like it,” she said, “but, mother—you know I don’t dance very well—or know a thing about society.”

“The dancing we shall arrange and the other is no drawback.”

Cecily’s mother came over to lay her slim white hands on her daughter’s shoulders. “Were you happy in the convent?”

“So happy.”

“I want you to be happy outside of it, too. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t be. And I want you to be rather close to me until you marry, Cecily. I want you to marry the right sort of man, one who will care for you and protect you.”

“I’ve been thinking about marrying,” said Cecily ingenuously.

Her mother looked at her aghast. “Marrying whom?”

“Oh, just marrying.”

“You mustn’t think about it at all, dear. I want you to marry some time. But put it out of your mind until the time comes. Just be happy and then, when the time comes when you want to choose a man, let me know him a little first.”

“Of course,” Cecily became judicious, “I may never marry at all.”

Mrs. Warner smiled and closed the conversation rather rapidly.

“We can let that rest, dear.”

She lingered to look over Cecily’s wardrobe, criticizing with severity the frocks which Cecily put before her. Heretofore there always had been three new black Peter Thompson suits, a blue mohair and a white net dress each year. Now it seemed all the standards were to be changed. Even Cecily’s loved blue sweater was cast into the discard. She was to have new things, an appalling amount.

She lay wide awake, too happy to sleep, while her mother went into the library and sat down before her husband with a gesture of mock despair.

“Cecily frightens me to death,” she declared. “Here she is, all grown-up and absolutely terrifying. She is full of a kind of wiseness which I suppose reflects the nuns. Imagine, she has just been talking about marriage. Said she had been thinking about it.”

Mr. Warner reflected her own dismay and question. “But where did she meet any men?”

“That’s just it—she hasn’t. She thinks about marriage in general. I didn’t encourage the subject. Imagine, at eighteen, coolly contemplating it without a giggle.”

“Cecily doesn’t giggle much. I wonder if she has a sense of humor.”

“She doesn’t giggle at all. But I think she has humor. She’s not stupid. She’s puzzling.”

Mr. Warner smiled in a kind, wise fashion of his own. It was interesting to hear his wife reflect on herself as exemplified in her daughter—and funny—and pathetic.

“You were puzzling too, my dear—you are puzzling.”

She did not share his smile.

“She is like me—and I won’t be able to get close to her because she is. I tell you that she frightens me, Leslie. If I thought she had to go through some things——”

“She won’t, my dear. We’ll take jolly good care of that. She shall be cared for.”

He rose a little heavily. “What we shall have to do now is to knock some of the sanctity out and replace it with gayety. I think I’ll teach her to smoke and play poker.”

So Cecily’s secular education began; with her stepfather’s wonderful and surprising gift of a saddlehorse which she must learn to ride at once to please him; with her mother’s new and fascinating interest in her clothes and her own awakening interest in them too; with dancing lessons which made her quickly forget the two-step and Virginia reel of the convent; with a new kind of world to watch and explore and adjust to. She startled herself. In her mirror she saw not the girl in black sailor suits, to whom she was accustomed, but a new figure, a slim, lovely, dark haired girl, with wondering eyes and glowing cheeks, to whom every new frock seemed the most becoming. She was not alone in being startled. Her mother had much the same sensation, having not realized Cecily’s possibilities until recently. She seemed very proud to take her daughter about with her. So Cecily was initiated into a new routine. Instead of rising in the chilly dormitory and hurrying down to a breakfast of oatmeal porridge, toast and milk and then to an early class in French, she still rose early, but to go horseback riding with her stepfather and come back to a sunny breakfast-room where, over shining silver dishes and a great bowl of fruit, she and her mother planned the course of the day. Perhaps they would shop in the morning or sometimes attend some morning lecture which was attracting attention from society and lunch with friends at a city tearoom or go to a more formal luncheon to be followed by a matinée. This in place of lessons or basketball in the convent garden or chapel attendance. It was not a riotously gay life to which Mrs. Warner introduced her daughter. She had far too good taste for that. It was wholesome and the hours were as pleasantly regular as they had been in the convent. Cecily felt it the gayest of existences and it was not until much later that she discovered from how much cheapness and excitement her mother had shielded her at first, or how carefully chosen her pleasures had been. But Mrs. Warner saw to it that the city became conscious of Cecily as a new star on the social horizon, and that she was kept remote only added to her prestige.

CHAPTER IV

THERE was a well-bred society in Carrington—new perhaps in the sense that Carrington itself was young, but though the aggregate society might be new, most of its members were not novices in the enjoyment of beautiful things or in the traditions of manners. They came from a great many places in the United States, settling in Carrington for the “business reasons” of their sons or husbands or sons-in-law, and they went back whence they had come, on visits, establishing valuable rapports between the cities of their genesis and the one of their habitation. The women went to New York to shop, if their incomes were large enough, and, also, Carrington had its spring colony in California and its winter colony in Florida. All these interchanges were useful. They made of the mid-western city a place less provincial and less conglomerate. Carrington could indeed bear its social head with more pride and real distinction than many a larger place, overrun by parvenus. Bluffing was difficult. A newcomer always found persons who knew people of consequence in his former city, persons from his college who would easily place him. Yet, for all that, where bluffing was not involved to the point of being obnoxious, Carrington was tolerant and allowed the newcomer every chance to make good; was not too cruel in its comments, too exacting as to previous records. It had the laxities of the great world and many of the fine distinctions of the smaller worlds which revolve around the life of old cities. On the whole, a gracious place—the kind of place that Europeans too rarely credit to the United States.

Cecily was high enough on the social ladder to be unconscious of any rungs to climb. And it had never been suggested at the Convent of the Sacred Heart that it was a modern and edifying pursuit to watch people swarming up from the ground and struggling to maintain a foothold on that ladder. So it never occurred to her that it meant a great deal to Fliss Horton to meet her, or that Fliss marked the day that she did meet her as a red-letter one of social success.

Cecily had been singing at a musicale at the home of one of her mother’s friends. She had sung two short songs in French and she had been both worried and diffident about her performance. Still she did it admirably and looked delightful, dressed in a soft silk velvet dress of black, with only a silver cord to set off the exquisite lines of the frock and of her slenderness. Fliss had been invited to the musicale. Invitations came with reasonable ease to these semi-charitable affairs and they could be made extremely useful. She listened to Cecily singing, but her heart was in her eyes instead of her ears, watching Cecily’s clothes and undoubtedly shrewdly guessing at their cost, for Fliss shopped much with her lips in places where she could not at all afford to buy. Later she met Cecily and told her how much she had enjoyed the singing. Cecily actually blushed with pleasure.

“I was frightfully nervous,” she said. “It was the first time I had ever sung anything in French without going over it with one of the French nuns, you see. You imagine you are sure of your French until you have to do something like that, absolutely on your own. Then you get so scared for fear some one who really knows French will be listening.”

“I don’t know much about it, but it certainly sounded beautiful and you didn’t seem the least bit frightened.”

Cecily smiled her thanks again and they moved off together, talking. There were more older than younger people at the musicale and Fliss was quick to seize on the other girl’s temporary lack of companionship. She herself was looking very pretty—less overdressed than usual—and though any of the older women might have criticized the high tan kid shoes and the tight, short tan suit-dress, Cecily only admired its effect and found herself interested in the new girl, who, it appeared, lived in town, not far from her own house, who was the friend of other girls she knew—as Fliss skillfully brought out—and who had an air of piquancy about her that was very interesting and even charming. What Fliss thought about did not matter. She was working hard to make an impression, to be remembered if an occasion should arise on which she would want Cecily to remember her. And there was a certain effectiveness in the conversation between herself and the beautifully dressed convent girl, of which Fliss was far too clever an artist to be unconscious. Cecily might make her suffer in a way by the contrast—but it would always be “in a way.”

It was late afternoon and a few men came in, most of them calling for their wives by previous arrangement, with two or three who recognized the occasion as a social one or had been called upon especially to come with their checkbooks and charitable consciences. Bachelors came, too—past the age of fearing such feminine social affairs, most of them—and then one who came unexpectedly, for no expressed reason. The older ladies beamed at the sight of him; the dark eyes of Fliss took on a more excited radiance; and the slow color crept up into Cecily’s cheeks as a tall figure singled itself out from the rest and Dick Harrison made his way—his popular, friendly way—across the room to her. He was good looking. Every one admitted that his brown hair, which would curl even at thirty, and his athletic figure were in his favor. But Cecily was beginning to see more than that. She had been meeting him for a month now at one place and at another—dances, dinners, theater parties. Dick was always an addition to any party, always desirable—she had quickly discovered that people thought that. Partly it was because he was wealthy and handsome; and because Carrington and Carrington’s affairs were closely identified with all his interests; he was truly a favorite son. No mother frowned upon any attentions he paid her daughter unless she felt they were over-slight, and few daughters were altogether indifferent. Dick was excused for dalliance with years of freedom, because as a bachelor he was so desirable.

As for Dick himself, he had a good time and believed in his business, which had to do with promotion of mining interests and the development of the city, and had fairly tolerant political views, and lived with his worldly-minded mother in a thoroughly pleasant house which seemed to him far pleasanter than any of the apartments of most of his married contemporaries. He had no desire to get married at all. That is, he had had no desire until he met Cecily. He met her one night at her mother’s house, and after that he sat back and let all the conventional things happen to him, enjoying each one of them extremely. He thought about her continually; he arrayed a new ideal of woman with all of her attributes; he freshened up all the old phrases about purity and love—about men not being fit for decent women. He could not keep his mind off possible scenes in which he and she participated alone and he blushed hotly and secretly at them—and recurred to them. He wanted to do all the things that men have ever done to win women, and to enjoy his winning of her.

So he had seen Cecily even oftener than she guessed and he had aroused a little whirlpool of comment around himself and her which he rather gloried in. In the eyes of the city there was no possible objection to any love-making which he might see fit to carry on, except a possible reservation that a girl of nineteen was very young for marriage. But with these two young people there was so much to make marriage easy that it was hard to make an objection out of youth, especially when Dick’s ten extra years were added to Cecily’s youth. Dick’s mother was highly in favor of seeing her son married. Even Cecily’s mother——.

Cecily’s mother said very little. She put Dick next to herself at dinner whenever he came to the house and talked to him about all kinds of subjects, always making him talk a little more than she herself. She did not mention him to Cecily except incidentally and not at all as a subject for discussion. Now, as she saw him cross the room to her daughter, she crossed too, most casually. That to the mixed glory and discomfiture of poor Fliss.

Mrs. Warner smiled at Dick and the two girls and it became obvious that she did not know who Fliss was. If Fliss had been of the slightest consequence, Mrs. Warner would have known. As it was, she acknowledged her introduction with great graciousness.

“Have you, like Cecily, just finished school? Where have you been studying?”

It hurt Fliss to admit that sum total of High School, but she was far too wise not to be frank.

“I’ve just finished High School,” she answered. “There was no use sending me anywhere else. I wasn’t nearly clever enough.”

“She’s the infant prodigy when it comes to dancing, though,” said Dick lightly.

After all, it was a great moment for Fliss. She was part of an intimate group which was peerless socially—Cecily Warner, Mrs. Warner, Dick Harrison—and then the moment passed. With what was almost a gesture of dismissal, Mrs. Warner withdrew her daughter.

“We must hurry, dear. There are to be guests for dinner. Are you riding with me or walking? Did you get any exercise to-day?”

Dick cut in lightly, taking Cecily’s arm, “She hasn’t had any exercise, I’m sure. Let me walk her home, Mrs. Warner. And I’ll get her home in lots of time because I have to speed on and get dressed myself if I’m to get any of your dinner to-night.”

Fliss slipped out of the group a little awkwardly and, moving past the indifferent hand of her hostess, found herself in the street. The motors for the guests were gliding skillfully up and down before the house. Here and there, a group before the open door of a limousine were still gossiping, or three or four people turning away for a brisk walk home. The little tan figure, drawing a modish, unpaid-for fur about her trim little neck, stood for a moment on the steps, seeming to look on at the spectacle of her own social inconsequence. Then she too slipped into the shadows and on towards her own home.

A year ago she had prevailed upon her parents to take an apartment, for the old, brown-porched house in which she had been brought up had been almost intolerably shabby. It had seemed a very fine change to Fliss at first. She liked the nouveau art touches in the apartment living-room, the frescoed grapes in the dining-room, the mirrored door of the small, inconvenient bathroom. But the glamour had largely gone by this time. And to-night it was rather more faded than usual. To drive up to the apartment house door in some one’s limousine was not so bad. To walk down the stupid street by which she must approach the house was different. It was depressing. Fliss, who seldom knew depression, had the visible lines of it around her mouth as she pushed open the door of the tiny hall and smelled the frying grease of the lamb chops in the kitchen. She stood before the hall mirror, taking off her hat and putting it away carefully, hanging her suit coat up carefully too, with the fur draped over it. Her mother came in to watch her.

“Did you have a good time, dearie?”

“As good as I expected.” The girl’s tone was rather pathetically tired.

“Any one bring you home?”

“No, I walked—for exercise.”

Her mother heard no sarcasm. “It’s a nice night out,” she said. “I just came in myself. I went to the White Sale at Barney’s and then dropped in at the Majestic—Dorothy Danby in ‘Other Men’s Wives,’ you know. It wasn’t very good—not worth a quarter.”

Fliss must have had a swift vision of the women who did not go to see Dorothy Danby—of Mrs. Warner dealing at long range with her dinner parties. Her face was dark and bitter.

“I hate this not being anybody—why aren’t we somebody?” she broke out.

Her mother looked daunted. “I’m sure you go everywhere you want to—going to stay at the Spragues’ to-morrow night, out all this afternoon, and there’s that swell dance at the Mortons’ next week—I think you have a good time. It’s not my fault your father hasn’t more money.”

“It’s nobody’s fault—nothing is. But that doesn’t make it easier. A girl can’t do it all alone—she needs houses, automobiles, if she is to get anywhere.” She stopped and looked at the stupid figure in front of her, which could not seem to understand its own failure as a mother. “It’s just that I’m tired and I think I’m getting a cold and it’s so darn lonesome with all the girls away. That musicale was the deadest thing you ever saw.”

She went to the kitchen and watched the chops sizzling, drearily, but none the less with a certain interest. After all, the walk home had been exercise.

CHAPTER V

Dick found things made easy for him—opportunity easy, that is. His love-making was no easier for him than a man’s serious love-making ever is. He felt it was a time which harrowed his very soul, a time when a new character and a new psychology seemed to grow up in him, decrying everything he had ever done in his life—a time of strange humilities and reverences, soaring plans and queer discouragements. But the night came when he did ask Cecily to marry him and at the fright in her eyes regained his own courage.

Cecily did not answer him at once. He had laid his hope before her with a simplicity that surprised himself, for he had been full of fine phrases the day before. And then, when the moment came, he could only hold out his arms in helpless appeal and plead, “If you’ll marry me, Cecily, I’ll spend the rest of my life trying to make and keep you happy. I will—truly.”

Cecily only looked at him, drawing away a little from his eagerness. A moment before she had been all gayety. But the very word “marry” stirred depths in her which were frightening. And again she was in the convent, listening to the Jesuit priest, hearing him tell them of the choices before women. She was afraid and allured—and stirred. Those same choices pressing upon her—Dick no longer just a companion, just fun to be with, but Dick wanting to marry her! It was enough to make her spirit draw back as it did. Dick could get no answer. And he had grace enough not to press for one. But Cecily’s mother, seeing what had happened in the new awkwardness between Dick and her daughter, knew that the time for interference had come. She found Cecily sitting in her room, looking into space, much as Mother Fénelon had found her on the last day of the retreat. Cecily took her mother’s hand as she sat down beside her and held it, and the simple gesture affected Mrs. Warner greatly.

“Trouble, Cecily?”

“Dicks wants me to marry him,” said Cecily, without classifying.

“Dick loves you,” her mother answered.

“But—marrying—ought I to get married, mother?”

“Surely not unless you want to.”

“I don’t—not want to. And he—Dick makes it seem possible. But I don’t know anything about it, mother. I wouldn’t know how to be married.”

There were tears in her mother’s eyes now.

“A little of marriage I can tell you about, Cecily dear—but the rest you learn from your husband—the rest you and he learn together. And that’s why it’s hard to help you now, dear. If Dick is the person you want to learn with, you should marry him. But I can’t tell whether he is or not. If he isn’t, he mustn’t be your husband. As far as an outsider can tell—yes, even I must be an outsider here—he would be a good husband for you. But unless you want him, unless you want him badly, there’s no good in it.”

The reserved, the aloof Mrs. Warner had broken some barrier to talk like that. She seemed to feel the unaccustomed mood and changed quickly—again Cecily’s quiet, controlled mother.

“Go to bed now, Cecily,” she finished. “When you see more of Dick you can tell better. And I won’t let him hurry or worry you. And I want you to have a good rest.”

They all made it as easy as possible for Cecily. As easy as possible. Dick did not harass her. Her mother would have prevented that even if he had had the inclination. Mr. and Mrs. Warner took her away for a few weeks to New York, and, if she thought of the decision before her, she did it without their pressing it upon her. As a matter of fact she did think about it constantly. She found she missed Dick and in her deft, direct, mental way knew that meant a great deal. Then there was a memory which clung to her consciousness and would not be detached. It was the memory of Dick’s embrace the night he had asked her to marry him. It was a unique memory. When she thought about it it was not like recalling a single happening. It was like looking backward and forward over the whole of her life—as if all life had been leading up to this, as if all life would point back to it. But still the indefinable fear, the indefinable threat of the priest who had seemed to be deliberately making marriage hard, persisted. She thought a great deal in the gaps between shopping and theater-going in New York.

They came back to Carrington after three weeks and Dick came to see her at once. He looked a trifle thinner—a trifle more eager even—and he was obviously impatient of the presence of others. When he and Cecily were finally alone, a throbbing silence settled over them. Then Dick put out his hands and took hers.

“Have you thought about me at all, Cecily?”

“Almost all the time I thought.”

“And—you—how do you feel about it now? Not afraid any longer? Ready to trust me—to let me love you, Cecily—Cecily?”

She lifted her eyes to his and let him decide.

After that it became much different and nearly all joy. Suddenly all the ominousness, the queerness, the vague fears disappeared. It was partly knowing Dick so much better, of course; partly becoming used to the gay, adoring laugh he had for her and more than that, to the touch of his arms and the rapture in his voice when he and she were alone and he could make love to her; it was partly meeting the approbation of every one, seeing in the eyes of girls and of women that they thought she had something which they would like to have, and partly the gay excitement of plans and arrangements. Dick was impatient now. He wanted to be married at the first possible moment; he had all sorts of contradictory plans and suggestions for a home and he was full of enthusiasm which would scarcely bear restraining. But Cecily’s marriage would, under her mother’s guidance, have neither haste nor incongruity. There was Cecily’s wardrobe, Cecily’s house and the marriage itself to be attended to in due course. Dick might plan, but he had no deciding voice in any of these matters.

The marriage was to take place in the early summer, and then, too, the house would be ready for occupancy. The house itself was the gift of the Warners. It was not new and it was not at all the sort of place which most brides began with, for it was large and had much more space inside and out than the usual bridal apartment. Its red brick walks surrounded the long, gray shingled house and garage neatly, and there were flowers and shrubs and trees. When Cecily first saw the house, new sensations woke in her. She turned to Dick with a strange sense of proprietorship for the first time. It was as if suddenly she saw a responsibility of her own in marriage. Thereafter came interviews with decorators and painters and upholsterers and visits to furnishers’ shops. Happiest of all was Mrs. Warner. Cecily’s house was to be a radiant place, full of sunshine and happy color. Cecily’s bridal wardrobe was to be exquisite and simple and beautiful. Cecily’s wedding——

Cecily’s wedding fell upon one beautiful day in June. The sun had been shining all day so that the evening was permeated with a softness and clearness that seemed left over from the radiance of the day. In the church great banks of green set off the tall candles, burning with flames that went straight up, and faintly fragrant, yellow pink roses filled the niches in the walls. It was one of those esthetically religious weddings in which the religion depends largely on the success of the esthetic effect. Cecily visualized the place as a chapel and wished that she could have heard the cloistered nuns singing as she approached. But the wish was vague. The plans were very completely made and she must carry them out to the satisfaction of herself and everybody. Then, as she went down the aisle she saw Dick—strange, familiar, Dick crowding out every one else. She realized suddenly that she and Dick were responsible for the future; she remembered that she was going away with Dick to-night, and she had two immense, sudden desires in conflict—one to run out of the church and hide herself where she would never be found and one to get close to Dick for comfort. But her mind was telling her how to act. She was going down the aisle, catching a fleeting glimpse of her new mother-in-law, standing beside her stepfather, repeating words which she had memorized, hearing Dick repeat them too, though he sounded strangely far off. She was going out of the church now and forgetting to look up and smile as she had said she was going to. Almost at the back of the church she remembered. She looked up and her eyes met the curious, envying eyes of Fliss. Cecily smiled. She had asked her mother to ask Fliss to the wedding for she had seen her a few times after the musicale and always been interested. She smiled and passed on. Fliss drew a long breath and turned to the man beside her.

“Beautiful, wasn’t she? And she has everything in the world—everything ahead of her!”

Everything ahead of her. So Cecily felt in the dim confusion of the Pullman. Curtains swung from the berths already occupied when she and Dick finally boarded their train. The electric lights seemed strangely dull after the brightness of the house she had left. She was alone in their drawing-room waiting for the porter to bring in their bags. Their bags—Dick’s too, of course. She wished he would come—would stay away—would come.

He came in marshaling a smiling, well-tipped porter. Then the porter was gone again and her husband, with a strangely timorous look on his face, was standing by her. He lifted her hand to his lips and then, as their eyes met wonderingly, dropped to his knees with his curly head in her lap.