Half loaves

Mother Fénelon, meeting her as she had done before, had helped. She had stopped and kissed Cecily swiftly on each cheek and asked about Dick and her mother. Mother Fénelon had a way of reconciling the worldly and the divine. Then she looked at Cecily very steadily and asked, “Still afraid, Cecily?”

“A little, Mother.”

“That will pass, my dear. Experience will help you—and prayer to our Blessed Lady.”

That was all, but somehow Cecily felt that the nun understood the whole business and that she was right. She went out into the afternoon toned up a little.

CHAPTER IX

Its light is focused on Cecily now. Dick knows about his expected child and every quality in his manhood has leapt into eager response to this proof of his own continuity. He cannot be too tender; he is fearful lest somehow things go wrong, and yet immensely sure that everything will be successful. He assures himself that this is a common happening and carries within himself the proud knowledge of an event that is absolutely unique. He is very curious about the physiological marvel, as all men are who for the first time watch themselves so mysteriously reproduced. And with it all—all the pride that he feels in his coming child—Cecily remains his young wife as well as his child’s mother and he feels apologetic that this must hurt her—even endanger her—and he loves her beyond his pride and hope. Cecily’s mother knows and surrounds Cecily with every precaution and comfort, seeming to guard her a little jealously now, even from Dick. Cecily has given up dancing and most society, and society, noticing—ever on the qui vive for these domestic interludes and their reactions on the people concerned in them—accepts the situation with a sigh and a smile and a touch of sentiment. Young Mrs. Harrison is going to have a baby—“so soon.” Well, opinion divides here.

Matthew hears of it among the casual gossip, through some chance remark about Dick, and goes to call on Cecily again, as if her interest were enhanced for him. Cecily receives him gladly, feeling that she is making a permanent friend and he is one of the few constant visitors at the gray-shingled house. Another is Madeline Von Vlectenburg, now Madeline Ensign, who has married a Carrington man and come to Carrington to live and whose acquaintance is still so small that she clings to Cecily’s companionship; and another is Fliss Horton, who has become very assiduous and helpful in bringing Cecily gayety and Madeline useful gossip. Fliss has the freedom of Cecily’s house now and treats Ellen with a charming, friendly informality and Ellen is always glad apparently to set an extra place for Miss Horton at her employer’s request.

Ellen knows about the baby too and will let Cecily do nothing for herself if she can help it. She has a tremendous maiden excitement about all the preparations and in secret is knitting a pink afghan. In secret—for she never refers to the coming event except by the most modestly veiled of allusions.

Yet, with all this light focused upon her, with all this care and tenderness surrounding her, Cecily withdrew into herself, more like her mother than she had ever been before. Her fears had lessened with the sense of enveloping support and knowledge and the many preparations normalized the months, but there grew in her a consciousness of isolation like nothing she had ever known before. It would come upon her sometimes in the midst of her friends, listening to the idle talk of Madeline and Fliss—sometimes when she was with Dick. It was not at all lonely or unpleasant—only a feeling of being set apart. She tried to explain it to Dick.

“It’s like recognizing suddenly that you are part of a design—it’s strangely impersonal.”

And again——

“But I’m not worried, Dick, dear. I’m interested and happy. Just because I’m silent now and then you mustn’t think I’m sad. I can’t help feeling responsible.”

“It’s the first time I’ve ever felt really responsible, you see. I’ve always been guided; people have always taken me all the way. Once in the convent when the priest told us about marriage I got awfully afraid. I suppose I sensed then that you had to go part of the way alone.”

“Yes, I know. You’re all with me and will be, but you can’t go all the way, darling. I don’t mind and I’m not afraid. I’ve something to go after, something to get.”

“Being born,” she told him, more whimsically, “must be a terrific process. Perhaps that’s why it’s fixed so that we can’t remember it at all.”

Those were the more sober moments, but there was on the whole more gayety than sobriety about the impending birth. Even Fliss, who held strong views on motherhood and had more than once remarked that she did not mean to be ever “tied down,” enjoyed looking at the beautiful baby clothes and the elaborate equipment which were showered upon Cecily, and they all talked about it a great deal with a gay frankness and humor utterly unrestrained by the presence of the men of the intimate circle.

At dinners, at which Cecily, dressed in some lovely loose robe, presided, Fliss naturally fell to Matthew and every one but Matthew himself fostered the pairing. Fliss, playing her game and hating her home background more every day, waited for something to come of all this. While she waited she played with Dick and it often happened that Matthew drifted to Cecily’s side while the others amused themselves. And Fliss made a confidant of Dick and asked his advice, thereby establishing a bond, for not only did Dick enjoy giving the advice, but he was naturally curious to see whether Fliss would take it and if she did take it, whether it would work out well and prove him wise.

Fliss asked him if he didn’t think she ought to go to work. That was her temporary line of conversation, but Dick didn’t know that. He pondered it seriously.

“At what?”

“I’ve had no training and of course I’m not clever. I suppose I’d have to take up stenography and go into some one’s office.”

“Surely you can find something better than that.”

“What? I can’t teach and I wouldn’t want to, anyway. And what else is there for a girl who doesn’t know anything about anything and whose only cleverness is in trimming hats?”

“Start a hat shop.”

“You need money for that, Dick.”

“You need money for everything. You’ll have to face that, unless you marry it.”

“That, too, has been suggested. But it’s not so easy to find some one with money whom you can marry.”

Dick’s eyes strayed to the other end of the room.

“How about Matthew?”

“Matthew hasn’t asked me.”

“Shall I tell him to ask you?” teased Dick.

“If you like. But he won’t—even though I wouldn’t marry him if he did. I want something a little different from Matthew.”

“A shade more jazz.”

“A shade more jazz is right!”

“Matthew is ruled out.”

Matthew turned to call to them. “Who is taking my name in vain?”

Fliss crossed the room negligently. “We were discussing,” she told him with her engaging impudence, “the possibility of your marrying me.”

“Am I going to do it?”

“No. Rest easy. I’ve refused you in advance.”

“Because you haven’t enough jazz,” contributed Dick.

“Reason enough. But I wonder why I haven’t more of that peculiar quality. Of course it’s always existed under a variety of names so I can’t say I didn’t happen along in the right generation. I never did have it. Perhaps because I had to go to work too young.”

“Well, I should have gone to work young, and I always had it,” said Fliss.

Cecily was following them amusedly. “And I never had to work at all and I haven’t it.”

“Convent training.”

“No, look at Madeline. She’s full of the same spirit Fliss is full of.”

“And Dick?”

“Dick’s a jazzer thrown into high company,” mocked Fliss.

“Dick’s a jazzer—reformed.” Dick put his arm about his wife’s shoulders and drew her close to him. “You’re all wrong. Jazzing or whatever you call it is purely a matter of age. When you draw near thirty you get over it, just as the average man gets over tennis.”

“But I’m not thirty.”

“No,” said Dick, looking down at her tenderly, “but you’ve other fish to fry. Besides you can’t be classified.”

“French model, one only.” Fliss could always be counted on to remain flippant. The others caught her note with amusement.

It was one of their many idle, undeveloped, cross-purposed conversations, which in spite of its lightness had a kind of function in bringing them nearer together, teaching them what to expect from each other, revealing their quality to each other. The weeks slipped along, each one important and interesting in its relation to the coming of Cecily’s child, bringing that great anticipation closer to them. And the lives of all of them clung to their own little orbits in the midst of a storm already world devastating, though there were many moments when they all shivered as some great tragedy, dulled by distance, came over the wires and through the papers to them. Cecily, of course, dated all things by the fifteenth of May, and as the winter changed into spring and the whole world opened happily under the warming sun, she was more and more eager to bring her waiting to a close. Dick was impatient, she knew, and that made her more so. She was catching some of Dick’s quality as she lived with him. She was trying to learn how to frost the depths of the spiritual isolation which was absorbing her with a surface companionship during hours which demanded lightness. There was some sacrifice in learning this new lightness, but she had a vague feeling that it would make Dick happy if she were not only happy, but gay.

The wonder of Cecily was that she was twenty, as yet unbigoted, and that her personality was still vague in its outlines. The convent was of course mainly responsible for this—in leaving so much to God. The implied educational method of most schools and colleges is that you have to work things out “on your own” as definitely as possible—work out God, too, when you get to it—but the convent method was not so. When things became tangled or overerudite, or too introspective, or embarrassing and indelicate, the gentle nuns turned the solutions over to God and left them there without asking for an accounting. Working with material like Cecily they took care to perfect her English and her French, even if they totally neglected economics, gave her a cultural knowledge of science and a knowledge of history, which was colored by faith in the church, and sent her out with a clean mind. There were plenty of fine fresh minds coming out of women’s colleges every day, but their freshness was like the antiseptic freshness of a laboratory after corruption has been studied and its traces scoured away; Cecily’s was the freshness of the out-of-doors, which is different. Mental and emotional qualities were still to develop and, stepping as she did into marriage so quickly, she had all of psychology, all of philosophy, to learn. The bag of women’s tricks, already so thoroughly ransacked by Fliss, was quite unknown to Cecily.

While Dick was teaching her love and some gayeties as well, she was learning other things. It was absurd to say that Matthew had set himself to the forming of her mind—what he did was too intangible for him to have had a definite purpose—but still, he did try to help Cecily to think. Undoubtedly it was at first for the pure pleasure of seeing the effect that much discussed themes would have upon a mind as inexperienced as hers that Matthew introduced many of his conversations. Her ready response led him further. He lent her books, catching up the broken thread of a conversation about some problem by sending her relevant printed thought; he stimulated her mind constantly. And the mind, which must have been a reproduction in part at least of Allgate Moore’s mind, the part which was responsible for the fact that people called him “genius,” began to grow. Such a year for Cecily! There were many nights when she sat listening to the men talking about the affairs which were absorbing almost all thinking people’s minds—the sinking of ships at sea, the slaughters of war, the advances and retreats of the hostile armies, the surmises as to new alliances—all of it deepening in Cecily her natural sense of the gravity of the world’s affairs and of the world’s dangers. Then when they stopped—and they would stop when her comments or queries became too intense, too worried—she always marveled at the way they, and Dick especially, could spring back to lightness of thought and word.

It was at Matthew’s suggestion that they went to Allenby. Allenby, as well as being Matthew’s surname, was the name given in his honor to a little village at the mouth of one of the mines in which Matthew had large interests. Dick had been offered the stock which one of the directors was relinquishing and expressed a curiosity to see the place. Matthew said he would drive him down if he would take a day off.

“I can’t leave Cecily very well,” said Dick.

“Bring Cecily.”

“Now?”

“It won’t hurt her. The roads are fine; state roads—no frost holes. We can get across to Judith for the night. There’s a very decent inn there where we could stop.”

“Yes, I know the place. I’ll ask Cecily. Maybe she’d like it.”

It was the second week in April. Mrs. Warner did not especially approve of the trip, but Cecily had set her heart on it.

“Well,” compromised her mother, “if they drive slowly it probably won’t hurt you. Don’t go down any mines. And it’s still cold; take plenty of rugs.”

To balance the party they had asked Fliss, though, as Fliss said, she was not sure whether she was chaperoning Cecily or Cecily her, and they started off early on a Saturday morning, Matthew and Dick proving that it was a business trip by sitting together in the front seat. Lunch from thermos bottles and a picnic basket hardly halted them and they reached Allenby in the middle of the afternoon.

It was, as Matthew said, hardly a village. There was a railway station and about it were grouped houses and cheap stores flanking the side of brief indefinite streets of rutted red clay. Its newness was ugly, but, looking at it, one knew its age would be worse. It had no possibility of growing to charm and dignity from such beginnings. It was a necessity—nothing more. Their comments as they looked at it were characteristic. Fliss had the first word.

“So this is where your money comes from.”

Matthew and Dick both laughed. “It’s quite a settlement, isn’t it?” said Dick. “I’d no idea the place was so big. You must have a thousand people in the village.”

“And more squatted around the mine itself. You’ll see later.” Matthew turned to Cecily. “What do you think of my namesake?”

“It seems a desolate place for people to live—a miserable place. I should think you could make it a little more attractive.”

“That’s not good sociology; that’s charity.”

They left their car at the railroad station and wandered about the village, Dick growing enthusiastic over things which seemed pathetic to Cecily, and Fliss amusing herself with comments and trying to dazzle the people she saw. She insisted that they should have a soda at the store and over that she was very merry and mocking. Matthew dragged them away.

“It gets dark early and we must see the mine yet.”

The road to the mine was rough and led through a waste of ugly fields, covered with discolored vegetation. It was growing colder and the dead bushes shook in the wind. The girls huddled themselves in rugs and began to think of dinner and the Inn. The mine was interesting, but——

Dick and Matthew, however, had grown absorbed by this time. They were deep in statistics; they looked interestedly and speculatively over the barren fields and with real admiration at a group of one story huts grouped together near the great red pit which was the mine.

“Some of the people have to live close for various reasons,” explained Matthew over his shoulder. “In case of a blizzard we have to keep a force fairly close. There are about a hundred men who live here. A few have their families, but most of them are unmarried and live in bunk houses.”

A number of children bore witness to the existence of the families. They were very dirty children—stolid little Scandinavians, most of them. The automobile awoke their interest. They measured its difference from the half-dozen begrimed Fords which were casually lined up on one side of the mine office.

“Want to go down, Fliss? Cecily mustn’t.”

“Love it,” said Fliss.

“We’ll just go down to the first level,” Matthew decided, “to give Fliss an idea. You must put on overalls though. Come in the office and they’ll fix you out. I’ve had lots of women here. It’s all right.”

Cecily watched them from the depths of the car as they disappeared over the edge of the mine, walking on a kind of circular path—Fliss looking like an extremely rakish boy in her overalls. Then she settled herself to wonder again how these people lived and how it was worth living without any beauty or any comfort—or love. She wondered if women loved these rough, unpleasant-looking men now emerging in little groups. They all went to the office. It was Saturday night and they were getting their pay. They stared at Cecily and the car, some stolidly, some hostile in their glances. Vaguely she wished Dick would come back.

Suddenly a man paused beside the car. He was obviously angry. She had seen him leave the office, slamming the door with an oath that carried to her ears, and as he came down the road and she knew he must pass the car, she felt his hostility even before he spoke. He did not shout, but he came to a pause and his voice was low and menacing and his face full of hate.

“Sit there, damn you, and grin. They fired me—and they’ll pay for it. You’ll all pay for it, you damned blood suckers. You——”

Then he called Cecily a name which she had never heard before, but which was utterly clear in its implication, even to her, and went swiftly down the road, lost in the increasing crowd of homegoing men. Cecily had gone dead white. She became conscious of crowds of men pouring past her now and she felt every face ferocious. She did not want to look at them and yet she could not help it. She felt suddenly that she was affronting them. This car, her furs, her luxury of robes, their shacks! And Dick did not come. Where was he? Why did he not come? Had they caught him and Matthew down in the mine? Had something happened? She tried to reassure herself, but her shocked mind went tearing on into confusion. Then in the midst of it came a pain, a tearing pain like nothing she had felt ever before. Dick, coming up beside Fliss and Matthew, all three laughing and talking to one of those men who had so terrified Cecily, saw his wife, white-faced—staring.

They were all immensely frightened and too inexperienced to be sure what steps were best to take. Even Cecily was not sure that her hour had really begun, but before they got back to the little village there was not much room for doubt. Dick and Matthew looked at each other in utter consternation. They were four hours away from all the elaborate preparations for the advent of Cecily’s child; they both had heard of accidents. The ride back home was not to be attempted, but here, in this forlorn little mining town——

In those first hours it was Cecily herself who took the initiative. In an interval between the pains she lifted her head from Dick’s shoulder with an actual smile.

“Apparently I’m going to spoil the party; and I can’t get back home. Find me a place to stay over night, Dick—the cleanest house there is. And telephone Dr. Wilson. In the meantime get hold of the doctor here.”

They did as she said. The little frame house of the mine superintendent was made ready and the superintendent’s wife, a Swedish woman of forty, after her first bewilderment took command of the situation and Cecily with stolid sympathy. Cecily, in a strange hummocky bed, wearing a coarse cotton flannel nightgown, soon lost the connection between reality and nightmares. Nothing was real about her—the face of the Swede woman with her guttural reassurances, the bearded man who they said was the doctor, but who seemed unable to relieve her torture—but through it all her mind pounded along on a steady track of fear and determination. She might lose her baby—she would not lose her baby—they must take care. She kept giving directions, pathetic directions, about that.

Matthew had found the doctor and after a look at Cecily he told them that they would have no time to send for their own physician. He did not seem much concerned about it all and was inclined to take it all very easily. He was a middle-aged man—Swedish also—with a blond beard and abstracted blue eyes.

“But,” said Dick, “there’s not even a nurse!”

The doctor smiled. “Fifty babies in six months in this village,” he said, “and no nurse for any of them. This lady (pointing to Fliss) and Mrs. Olson will help me—and you, if I need you.”

But it seemed none the less terrible. Matthew and Dick pooled their knowledge of such events. Fliss stayed by Cecily, remarkably calm, helping Mrs. Olson in her meager preparations, but white to her lips. And each half hour the cloud of pain and worry thickened over the little house. It was a cold night. Mrs. Olson had sent her children to a neighbor’s house. Dick and Matthew, in the kitchen, tried to conceal their fears.

“Why was I such a damned fool as to bring her?” cried Dick.

“I wish I hadn’t suggested it, but we did and we’re here. We’ll have to see it through, Dick. The chances are ninety to one that it will come out all right, old man.” But he, too, was white and his hand shook a little as he poked at the fire in the stove.

Fliss came in and stood leaning against the door. They jumped up. She gave them a few directions.

“Hunt through the drug store yourself,” she finished. “We must be sure the things are right. I’ll watch.”

“Do you think you can, Fliss?” Dick sounded doubtful and Fliss, leaning against the door, did not look too competent. Her skirt was too short and her hair too elaborate.

“I’ve got to,” she answered. “I don’t know much, but I’ve heard things—enough to know what to avoid.”

They had reached Carrington by telephone and knew that Cecily’s mother, Cecily’s nurse and Cecily’s doctor were now on their way to Allenby, but it would be three or four hours before they could arrive even with the greatest of speed. The local doctor had assured them that it would be over before that. The two men could hear strange sounds that did not seem natural—cries that hurt almost unbearably to hear. The footsteps overhead were hurried.

“Do you think—already?” asked Dick.

Then they both heard it.

Fliss came in again. Her hair was disordered and her face as pale as before. She faced them with startled, angry eyes.

“So that’s what women have to go through,” she said, “and you never get a taste of it! My Lord, but it’s fierce!”

Dick had pushed past her, upstairs. It seemed as if Matthew were about to follow, and restrained himself.

“Is something wrong?” he asked hoarsely. “Is she——”

Fliss actually laughed. All the primitive sex antagonism in her had seemed to leap out suddenly. She was angrily on guard, fiercely angry at all men, so free of this agony—quite at her best as she stood there in her wrath.

“Oh, no, nothing’s wrong. It’s bad enough when it’s right. Dick’s got his baby all right.”

She sat down at table with her face in her hands. Matthew’s face relaxed a little and he patted Fliss clumsily on the shoulders.

“You’re a brick, Fliss.”

She recovered herself quickly and looked up, brushing her hair back, her burst of anger seeming quite spent, a wan humor asserting itself.

“There was much the same situation when I was born,” she said reflectively. “Do you suppose that child will have the same sentiments towards me that I have towards Mrs. Ellis? I forgot to tell you—it’s a girl.”

CHAPTER X

Matthew was to take Fliss back to Carrington in the afternoon, for Dick refused to stir for another twenty-four hours. Sleeping in the kitchen with Mr. Olson meant nothing to him, he declared. So he stayed. The nurse was keeping Cecily very quiet, but she let the departing adventurers in for a few moments. Matthew saw first the big clothes basket on a chair by the window and then Cecily, with her hair braided tightly back and dark circles under her eyes. For an instant he looked from one to the other, obviously unable to speak.

“Take a look at my daughter,” said Cecily.

Matthew obeyed. Then he came over to the bedside and looked at Cecily, laying a nervous, strangely hot hand on hers.

“It’s a shame I got you into all this.”

“It’s worked out all right and it wasn’t your fault at all. I insisted on coming. The baby’s healthy and I’m strong—and the experience! You’ve told me I lacked experience and that my life was cushioned. Well, this wasn’t cushioned.”

“God knows it wasn’t.”

The girls looked at each other and Cecily suddenly felt her eyes fill with tears.

“I’ll never forget your seeing me through, Fliss. Never.”

Fliss bent over her and kissed her. She had passed the stage of her first emotion and was ready to recognize what a lucky incident the whole thing had been for her. Mrs. Warner had said the same thing that Cecily had just said. She was established in that family and she knew it. Now that Cecily was comfortable, that she was out of peril and surrounded by American Beauty roses, down comforters and in her own silk nightdress, Fliss could afford to take account of stock and see how her own had risen.

“Good-by, Cecily. When you get back to town I’ll be around to see you.”

“As soon as I get back,” Cecily pledged her.

“Take care of my foster daughter.”

There was an interesting moment—as Fliss crossed to the improvised cradle and stood looking down at the baby, an expression on her face which could mask no ulterior motive. The queer little thing that she had seen come into the world, struggling, seemed to make her feel shaken.

“Come on, Matthew, Cecily’s tired and we must hurry.”

It was a strange convalescence and perhaps an unusually healthy one, for there was no excitement and a great deal of quiet. The brunt of the inconvenience now fell on the nurse and Cecily had only to lie for long, silent hours, thinking over the whole wonderful event. She listened to the voices of the children outside her window, marveling that they had been born just as her child was born, and the roots of that solidarity of motherhood which all mothers feel for each other began to grow in her. She had come to that stage in marriage when the mysteries are shared, not with one other individual, but with a whole sex. Dimly the great expansiveness of motherhood began to dawn upon her mind.

All this expressed itself not only in her dreaming, but in her curiosity. She plied the nurse with questions. Physiology and psychology of other mothers fascinated her. The cases of the nurse, in so far as she would talk about them, were an endless source of interest. Dick joined her in her interest. Step by step they went over the story of the birth again and again. But then Dick left it and went to town, carrying with him the consciousness of his fatherhood, to be sure, but temporarily overlaying that interest with business and masculine contact. Cecily lay in bed and thought and talked on about women and mothers. She had not the slightest intention of playing upon her illness. She was quick to feel her energy coming back and rejoiced in it. There was not a suggestion of querulousness in her manner. That she took the luxury and the petting which surrounded her as things natural to her was not to be wondered at.

But there was a great deal of praising and petting, and while Dick was triumphant he was also surrounded by an atmosphere that made him feel vaguely apologetic for having to undergo so little inconvenience himself. He was ready enough to admit the apparent unfairness of the situation. Not that it had ever struck him before. If he had considered it at all before his marriage he would have said that women had to have children, but men had to rustle to support them and called it fair enough. In the face of his personal situation it seemed different. Cecily, frail and pitiable, seemed indeed to be bearing the heavy end.

It was Fliss who got a real sociological slant on the situation. She visited Cecily’s house before Cecily returned to Carrington, ostensibly to return a scarf which she had borrowed of Cecily for the eventful ride, but really to see and have a gossip with Ellen. Ellen was scrupulous. She would not join Fliss in the living-room and Fliss was compelled to sit in Cecily’s room while Ellen polished the furniture. Ellen was very much excited about all that had happened—a little disappointed at not having been nearer the center of action herself, but determined to make up for that by making Cecily’s homecoming as comfortable as possible. The baby having been born, the pink afghan had been hastened to completion and now lay in state on the foot of the crib.

“Poor Mrs. Harrison,” said Ellen, “she’s been through a lot, hasn’t she?”

Fliss shrugged her shoulders in impatience. “You all make me sick,” she said; “she hasn’t been through more than any other woman, has she?”

But she gave Ellen no chance to answer.

“She had a bad time for twenty-four hours—no, about twelve hours. And for that the whole town sits back and gasps with pity, because it’s Cecily—Cecily who’s been used to ‘everything.’ What got on my nerves was to see what all women had to suffer. But I don’t see that Cecily hasn’t got it so much easier than most people that she doesn’t need my pity or any one else’s. Nurses and doctors and silk quilts and embroidered layettes take a good deal of sting out of having babies, I should think. And Dick acting as if he ought to grovel in the earth because his wife presented him with a baby! I dropped in to see May Robinson on the way here to-day. She’s expecting another and doing her own housework. And her husband is on the road and only gets home for week ends. May isn’t being so darn coddled. She’s worried sick about how they’re going to afford the new one. I can’t say that I’m especially sorry for Cecily.”

Ellen gave the dressing table a last flourishing polish and took refuge in her usual philosophy.

“Well, that’s how things are,” she said. “Some people have more than others. But that’s no reason why you can’t be sorry for a pretty young girl like Mrs. Harrison having a thing like that happen when she’s miles away from home and help and all.”

“She had me,” grinned Fliss, and went on with a brief recital of what she and Mrs. Olson had done. Ellen listened with interest, although with some embarrassment.

“It was certainly fine of you, Fliss.”

“Fine nothing. It was the luckiest thing that ever came my way.”

Ellen looked her question.

“Don’t you see how solid it makes me with the Harrisons? It gives me a real connection. Cecily never will forget a single thing that happened, and among other things she probably won’t forget that I was the first person to hold her baby. Yes—the greatest luck I ever had, for there’s more than that to it. Matthew Allenby knows I’m on earth at last. Of course, it’s Cecily he’s gone on, but because he thinks I was useful for once—especially to the angelic Cecily—he actually noticed me as if I were more than a mechanical toy. And he’s quite a person, Ellen!”

Ellen did not answer and Fliss began to wander around the room looking at things. She opened Cecily’s wardrobe and pushed dress after dress along the sliding rod in envious review.

“Lord, what it must be to be rich,” she sighed, “what fun—what fun!”

“Come,” said Ellen, “come out in the kitchen and I’ll fix you a bit of lunch. You need it,” she added sagely. “You’re always sort of longing when you’re hungry.”

Fliss laughed and caught her cousin around the waist, waltzing her about ecstatically.

“You old darling—wait till I am rich and see what I’ll do for you.”

“Look out—Mrs. Harrison’s rugs,” cautioned Ellen.

CHAPTER XI

“The baby is six months old, now. You and Dick ought to go away for a vacation. I’ll stay here and get a trained nurse for the baby.”

Cecily did not take her up, but she watched Dick that night at dinner. They did not seem to talk as much as they used to—except about Dorothea. She crossed over to his place and put her hand softly under his chin.

“Do I neglect you, Dick, dear—for the baby?”

“Do I look neglected?” countered Dick. “Nonsense. Don’t talk like a problem play. Besides, how could you neglect me for Dorothea? She’s me, isn’t she?” And he smiled engagingly as only Dick could smile. “If I catch you neglecting me, you’ll hear from me. Who brought this on? Who’ve you been talking to?”

“Nobody. Mother just suggested that I might be a bit too concentrated. She wanted me to go away and leave her in charge.”

“Good idea. I think I could do it next month—if we aren’t going to war.”

“We must wait until after Christmas,” demurred Cecily.

But after Christmas they did not go at once. In January Cecily paid a secret visit to her doctor. When she came home she sat down in her straightest living-room chair and looked about her a little queerly. She was still sitting there half an hour later when Dick came home.

“Well,” said Dick, “how’s my family?”

Cecily made a feeble little joke, which showed considerable progress in adjustment.

“Increasing,” she said, with a catch in her voice.

Dick wheeled around.

“Why, Cecily,—why, you don’t mean we’re going to have another!”

She nodded at him, a medley of expressions on her face, all of them overlaid with that wondering question as to how he would take it.

“You’re sure?”

“Quite.”

They sat down and held each other rather tightly. Responsibilities, more than toys, more than novelties, spread before them. Then like a clear ray of light the same thought came to both of them.

“They’ll be great companions for each other.”

“I was thinking about that.”

Fliss came in that night. There was more than usual radiance in her face. She dashed up for a visit to the nursery, down again to show Dick a new dance step and Cecily felt a little wistful as she watched her. Waiting—illness—the stretch looked very long. She wondered what Fliss would say if she knew.

But Fliss was full of herself and in no mood to inspire confidences. “Why the million-dollar mood?” asked Dick.

Fliss laughed and flushed a little. “I’ve had something happen to me—something nice.”

“Secret? Tell us,” begged Cecily. “I want to hear something pleasant.”

“It’s a real thrill. I’m engaged to be married. I’m to be married next month.”

“Who?”

Fliss had never looked more charming, more provocative. She dangled a gay little slipper from her toes and looked at them half teasingly.

“You’d never guess. A real high-brow. What he’ll ever do with me I don’t know. But he can’t get away now.” And then, worked up to her climax, “I told him I was going to tell you when he wasn’t around—I wanted the fun. It’s Matthew.”

“Well, isn’t that great!” said Dick, with the sincerest congratulation for Fliss and a more than faint wonder in his tone. But Fliss, if she analyzed his tone at all, was not disturbed. She was looking at Cecily.

Over Cecily’s first shock of surprise there clouded a sense of relinquishment, unacknowledged. Deliberately she made herself pleased.

“It’s wonderful.” And, more courteous than Dick, she added, “I’m awfully glad for Matthew.”

Possibly she was not quite quick enough to say it. A little flash lit up Fliss’s brilliant face and she countered with quick frankness. “I get a lot more out of it than Matthew, but he’ll get something, according to my lights, and I may make him happier than people will expect. And,” most laughingly, “we can’t all be perfect Cecilys. And you were taken.”

If Cecily thought the remark based on more than flippancy she gave no sign. When Matthew and Fliss came to see them a few days later and he was alone with Cecily for a few moments she was all congratulation.

“She’ll keep you young, Matthew. She’s always so gay. I can see Dick brighten up whenever she comes in until I’m almost jealous. All men like her.”

“Is that a recommendation for a wife?” he asked a little gravely.

“Don’t be foolish. You know that I mean you’ll be very happy.”

“I will be happy,” he answered. “I am happy.” He paused and looked at her intently. “I am glad that I am going to be married to Fliss and I am glad that you are alive. We take what we can get of happiness.”

When he had gone she did not analyze his words. She did not want to. She put the thought of them aside, her thoughts turning to the things that were always in her mind now. The new baby, and was there going to be a war?

BOOK TWO

CHAPTER XII

She had been busy. After her marriage, enforcedly quiet because it would never do to draw unnecessary attention to the social unimportance of her family, she and Matthew had gone traveling. They had had a good time. She hung on his arm and petted him; she begged for things and was enthusiastically grateful for them when he gave them to her. She kept him laughing and herself in constant good temper and in every fresh extravagance of silk or fur or velvet she was prettier than before. Matthew laughed at her and let her pet him and expanded. He called her a little crook and she admitted it, but he never had the bad taste to ask her if she would have married him if he had been poor. They were frank with each other, but never moved much below the easy surface of things. Never had Matthew really played before, and under her skillful leadership he learned a good deal about play. He learned the fun of extravagance. His mother had not been a person to accept money or presents easily. Fliss rose resplendent from a shower of them. And from the depths of her little savage heart she was grateful for presents, for relief from sordidness; and grateful most of all for the sheer content with the life he made possible.

“Don’t we have fun?” she would say in her strongest italics, every now and then, with a swift little caress that was perfectly honest in its affection as far as it went.

“We do,” he would acknowledge with smiling, amused understanding—more than that, with pleasure.

He had his second glimpse of his wife’s remarkable adaptability when they visited his mother. His mother had been duly written of his marriage, had duly written to say she expected to see them while they were on their wedding trip, and, moved by some impulse, Matthew had deliberately sandwiched a week in the little Indiana town between the more brilliant points on their itinerary. They arrived in Peachtree about nightfall, stepping from the jumpy local train to a station platform dripping with rain and lit only by the dingy glow from a quick lunch counter window. Fliss, well acclimated by this time to waiting red-caps and taxis, looked about her and then at Matthew with amusement.

“You are completely out of the picture,” said Matthew. “You look shockingly resplendent up against Peachtree. Don’t look about you for cabs; there are no cabs. No one needs cabs here.”

His mother rounded the corner of the station house, driving her umbrella before her. Matthew seemed to recognize her by the swish of her skirts in the rain. He took her umbrella and kissed her gravely.

“Good boy,” she said. “Is this Florence?”

Fliss reached half way up on Mrs. Allenby’s spare, tall form. She was silhouetted for a moment against the black dress of the older woman. Then Mrs. Allenby inspected the bags.

“Dave Johnson can bring up your grips. You can’t manage the four of them in this rain, even if it is only a step.”

They left the bags and Fliss, as they went along together, had a consciousness of wooden sidewalks in indifferent repair, of the stillness of a country village after the train has gone through, of a town gone to bed unreasonably early.

Up a little path which crunched under their feet, on a tiny porch where a rocking chair stood grotesquely upside down so that its seat might be protected from the rain, through a low door. Matthew struck a match and, moving familiarly in the darkness, lit a lamp. They were in the parlor.

Fliss had known poverty and shabbiness. This was different from anything she had ever known. It was the acme of thrift, of cleanliness, of economy and respectability, and pride. The very glow in the Franklin stove, coming through the isinglass, was stiff and correct. The furniture, the prideful Brussels rug with its over-pink central cluster of roses was clean to extremity. The tidies on the chair backs were straight. The Bible, flanked by an imposing parlor table volume, margined the white cover on the center table. The young Mrs. Allenby, standing in the midst of the intensity of order, felt as exotic and out of place as she looked. But her mother-in-law, quickly divested of coat and hat, was on her own ground. She gave Fliss a moment to gain her impression and then led her upstairs to a bedroom which carried out the spirit of the parlor. Fliss looked dubiously at the white crocheted bedspread so perfectly wrinkleless, at the smooth chair tidies and then at Matthew.

“If I should soil something!” she exclaimed in mock terror. “I shall die if I do, Matthew! Where did your mother keep you when you were home? Not in here?”

“No, I slept in the back room. Can you make yourself comfortable?”

“Well, I’m frightened.”

“Little liar! I want you to behave yourself.”

“Behave? I’m a model of decorum. But, oh, for a gingham dress! How long are we going to stay—how long will your mother keep me?”

“A week is about the shortest.”

“Well,” sighed Fliss, inspecting her face in the mirror, “this mirror makes humps in my face, but I’d do a lot for you, Matthew. If your mother can stand me—all right, down we go.”

The supper was laid in the tiny dining-room off the living-room. A polished china lamp in the middle of the table was the centerpiece, and the dishes and linen were as spotless as everything else. Matthew and his mother talked casually about local gossip and Fliss watched Matthew, totally unfamiliar in this aspect, in his pleasant interest in the lives of the grocer, the new druggist and the business of the church. Mrs. Allenby, it seemed, was religious. Fliss decided, as she listened to her mother-in-law, that Matthew’s business ability must have come from his mother. She faced a picture of Matthew’s father, hanging over the low door. It was an enlarged photograph, done in cruel colors, but even the glassy blue which the enlarger had given to the eyes of Mr. Allenby, senior, could not disguise the fact that their expression was mild and guileless. Perhaps he, too, had an undeveloped taste for French poetry.

“Have you furnished your house?” asked Mrs. Allenby.

“We aren’t going to take a house at once. There’s an apartment hotel where we shall live for a while.”

“Hotel?”

“It’s not a traveler’s hotel, mother,” said Matthew. “It is a place where the apartments are furnished and there is a common dining-room where you can take your meals if you like.”

“Later we can find a house,” supplied Fliss, “but rents are high.”

“I should think you’d buy a house, now that you’re well off, Matthew.” The sharp, questioning eyes of the old lady flashed from her son to his wife. “Don’t you like housekeeping, Florence?”

“I don’t know a thing about it,” said Fliss, with her usual frankness. She seemed to have hit the right note with Matthew’s mother.

“Well, most girls don’t until they marry. But after you’re married, it comes natural—like taking care of children.”

There was no embarrassment in the face of her daughter-in-law, only a trace of distaste. She was silent, and the older woman did not pursue the subject. They talked of the price of food and of Mrs. Allenby’s gooseberry jam. Then Matthew smoked in the little parlor and Fliss insisted, in the human way she could, upon swathing her broadcloth suit with one of Mrs. Allenby’s aprons and helping with the dishes. Mrs. Allenby eyed her a little grimly as Fliss stacked the dishes one on top of the other without scraping off the left-over food, and Fliss caught the look.

“I’m a shock as a daughter-in-law,” she said flippantly, and yet without impudence.

“Well,” answered Mrs. Allenby, “I might not have picked you out for Matthew, but he might have done a lot worse. You’re pretty and a man likes a pretty woman. I always wished I’d been prettier. Matthew’s father was a gentleman, but he did like pretty things. And then you’re honest with my boy.”

“I am honest; I’ll always be honest. I promise you, Mrs. Allenby. I’m silly and I haven’t much brains and I suppose you can see that in most ways I’m not in Matthew’s class, but I’m going to try to give him a good time and I’m honest with him.”

She meant more than that, but it was hard to say and, after all, unnecessary. Mrs. Allenby gave her a little approbative tap on the shoulder.

“Good girl,” she said. “Don’t you worry. I can see things. It isn’t always the useful woman a man likes. I can see you aren’t much for housekeeping—and babies. Some women aren’t. But just so as you make him happy”—she paused and finished on a beautifully soft note—“he’s a lovely boy.”

It was rarely that Fliss felt that some one understood her. She felt it now. But both of them being very practical and unsentimental, they carried the discussion no further. Mrs. Allenby cloaked herself in her sharp efficiency and Fliss airily polished the plates. She told Matthew that night that she was going to get on well with his mother. It was then that he told her that she was adaptable.

“I shall never forget how you acted that night Cecily’s baby was born. That was the first time I guessed how adaptable you were.”

“That was a funny time,” said Fliss, somewhat coldly.

They stayed a week with Mrs. Allenby and by the time they left Fliss had begun to be very jocose and free with her mother-in-law. She showed her how she was teaching Matthew to dance, she rendered popular vaudeville songs on the wheezy old piano, she exhibited all her trousseau lingerie to the old lady with a running fire of absurd comment, and tried to bestow a lace trimmed boudoir cap upon her.

Then they left Peachtree for Chicago and spent a few weeks there, Matthew doing business while Fliss soaked her pagan soul in the luxury of hotels. Fliss loved hotels, their over-deep porcelain baths and the little breakfast tables with shiny silvered dishes and wasteful expanses of white linen, always immaculate. She liked having nothing to do with the machinery of her comfort, to have a telephone at her bedside which could whisk servitors out of space to do her bidding. And she liked the great hotel lounges and parlors, with their heavy commercialized luxury of velvet and gilt, their desks with low lights at which one might sit and write letters while engaging the attention of any good-looking men who might be passing. Padded corridors, handsome men and luxurious women, dining-rooms pompous with elaborate service, the ceaseless flow of people who might be coming from anything and going anywhere—it all completely captured that roving spirit of excitement which was Fliss’s imagination. She watched with ecstasy, copying here, adapting there, learning every minute.

The nervousness of buying which always accompanies a small, overworked purse, had disappeared. Fliss had money and she bought with glory, with a certain amount of dignity and restraint too. She passed, as cheap and tawdry, things which she had formerly coveted, but she penetrated the French millinery shops, the dressmaking establishments with a new air, head held high, demanding service like a barbaric princess. It seemed to her that all she had needed to give her complete content was a husband and money. She had no discontents now. She sparkled and glowed and enjoyed from morning until night.

The glow was at its best when they returned to Carrington, hurried by the long-pending declaration of war with Germany. From the apartment hotel, where Matthew had rented a friend’s suite temporarily, Fliss dashed up to see her mother. She knew exactly how she meant to deal with her mother. Mrs. Horton must not obtrude or be tedious, and if she were not she would share in Fliss’s good fortune. She entered the dreary little flat, infinitely more dreary after the glories of the wedding trip. Her mother came to meet her, kissing her affectionately and admiringly.

“I would have come to the train if you hadn’t especially said you didn’t want me to, Flissy.”

“We got in too late. It was nearly midnight and we were too tired to talk.”

Her mother surveyed her with an unconfident look as if not sure of the propriety of her own interest.

“Is everything going nicely, dearie?” she ventured.

“Of course. I had the time of my life. Such fun!” Her glance swept the tawdry walls and furnishings. “I never knew there were such lovely things in the world as I’ve seen.”

“And how is Matthew?”

“Matthew is a darling. He gives me everything, mother. Of course, he’s got it to give, but he’s such a dear about it. Oh, you just watch me make this town sit up and take notice. Mrs. Matthew Allenby! This fur alone cost Matthew a cool eight hundred. And you should see the things he bought me in Chicago.”

“Are you going to live in the hotel?”

“Just until I look around. I want a place of my own, but I don’t want to make any mistakes. There’s a lot to plan and you and father must come to see us. By the way”—and here she was for once a trifle shamefaced—“I want you to take this. Buy yourself a suit—no, I’ll come with you—and a fur (it should be mink, I think).”

“No, Flissy, you spend it on yourself.”

“I’ve gobs of money, mother, and it would help me if you fussed up a bit. I’ll want you and dad for dinner, and you see I want you to look nice.” So it was settled and the principle established. Fliss dressed her mother handsomely, and upon that rather protesting lay figure descended certain duties of chaperonage, occasional appearance with Fliss, so that no story could be started regarding Fliss’s neglect of her parents. She regulated her mother’s appearances, painted in a background. Mrs. Horton was obviously to the world a quiet woman of no social pretensions who had no worse fault than obscurity, and that was no doubt traceable to lack of money. Plain, but nice. In suppressing her parents Fliss would have done herself harm. Bringing them forward in her seemingly ingenuous, but actually deliberate way, she helped herself, and gave them a certain amount of uncomfortable pleasure.

But she gave her mother no intimacy. At first Mrs. Horton took advantage of her daughter’s married state to make several leading statements about men and matrimony and was even curious as to the possible plans for a baby. But Fliss repressed such attempts at intimacy ruthlessly. It became very apparent to her mother that as far as Fliss had planned it there were to be no grandchildren, and other domestic confidences were never made.

Fliss established herself and Matthew, after a few months in a hotel, in a house. There had been a few bad weeks when Matthew had told her he was going into the army and she had been compelled to look up the advantages of being left alone so soon after her marriage. But it had come out all right. Matthew was rejected on examination. Some leaky, treacherous valve in his heart cheated him out of his war service. That, coupled with his age, put him out of the running, and a little depressed, but quite controlled, he had accepted as his personal war service the chairmanship of the Carrington draft board. He cautioned Fliss about the propriety of economy, but he gave her her house. It was a very new house and its only sins were its newness and its rather elaborate interior decoration. Fliss had not quite learned the restraint of the inner circles of the wealthy. She could imitate them in lavishness, but to pin herself down, hold herself in—that took more careful discipline. Her house was a bit too complete and it showed that Fliss carried nothing over from the past. There was none of her mother’s furniture which Fliss could use and though she had coveted some of the things in Matthew’s rooms, she found to her dismay that she was not to be allowed to ransack his bachelor apartments. In regard to those Matthew told Fliss that he thought he would keep the furniture for his rooms on the third floor of the new house.

“Of course I have the office, but that is crowded and noisy and impossible to get to after the elevator stops running nights, unless I want to die of heart failure after the tenth flight of stairs. I think I’d like a place where I could study a bit by myself now and then. Let me have my sanctuary upstairs and then when you are entertaining people I don’t care about or too many of them I’ll sneak off there and not bother you.”

Fliss had that divine gift of being able to leave a man alone. She puckered her brow a bit, sized up the fact that his wish was very real, and agreed.

“You are a very satisfactory person to have married,” he finished.

“Do you like this place at all?” asked Fliss, looking around her breakfast-room with its old blue curtains, painted furniture and long windows at which two canaries sang charmingly.

“I like it a lot. I like to charm my eyes with it. It suits you exactly, but it’s young and there may be times when I’ll feel my age. Then the old furniture will rest me. Understand?”

“Yes,” said Fliss, quite truthfully.

So it was arranged. And sometimes when the crowd of people who flocked to Fliss’s house—an ever-increasing crowd, whether they came for Red Cross work or for amusement—were too noisy or too heterogeneous for Matthew’s taste, he undoubtedly found it sanctuary indeed. It kept him from getting tired of his home, too, kept him able to appreciate its color, its spirit, its accord with a gay, fashionable time. With all these things it was also always comfortable. Fliss could not cook, but she had discretion enough to hire a good cook, to spare no expense on her table, even though she conformed to war regulations outwardly, to have a housemaid who knew how to keep bedrooms fresh and clean and sweet smelling. Matthew’s home was orderly; he was subject to no discomforts and he had good food, as well as a wife who carried no flavor of the domestic side of living around with her. Matthew used to like to come into her room, morning or night, and see her, elaborate in negligees, always pretty, always light, always with a smile for him. He called her a good investment and he never criticized her expenditures.

Matthew came first. Fliss was thoroughly honest about that. She attended to his wants with ungrudging pleasure. Then came her next interest, the business that intrigued her greatly and aroused less kindliness and perhaps a slight feeling of revenge—establishing her position in Carrington society.

It was not nearly enough to be counted smart and fashionable by the public who read the society columns and sighed for them. Fliss could gain that end easily enough, but she wanted to be genuinely accepted by the inner circles as well—to have none of the finer lines of distinction drawn against her. She was armed with a thorough knowledge of the city. She knew who was merely rich and who combined riches with social standing approved not only in Carrington, but in New York, Florida, California. In those rather cruel years between her school and her marriage she had studied little else except the shadings of people’s importance. That was to stand her in good stead now, as was her consciousness of her own best weapons in any attack on social citadels—her frankness, her power of deference and her brilliance of manner.

She gave little parties that were very gay and bright and somehow different from other people’s little parties—probably because Fliss gave individual attention to each of her guests, in selection and entertainment. She struck the note between the amusing and the risqué and never wavered as she held it. People responded by forgetting that Fliss Allenby had anything to gain by playing her social game well, having too good a time in her company to keep recalling that her steps were premeditated.

To gain an end, she was willing to be bored indefinitely. She went to the war time charitable affairs of older women, if they were important enough, and made a bright spot of color in the company, always deferential to the elder ladies, a little simple in her talk (she avoided pretense of intellectuality like the plague and played up a certain ingenuousness of ignorance that aroused the protective, educative instinct in others). She gave Matthew’s money lavishly. She was backed by his real importance and the solidity of his war work. Also she was willing to spend any amount of time on planning her clothes. She was always different from every one else, never fading into the inconspicuous, but always managing to avoid being called cheap or tawdry, even when, like every one else, she made a fashion of economy.

In her own way she was soon unassailable. She became a figure on the social lists. She became important. Then, to crown her luck, just as the war was beginning to make Matthew always unsmiling, always worried; just as she was beginning to see that the world was veering shockingly towards pain and horror—the war was over suddenly. In the reaction from the seriousness, the reaction shared largely by people who had suffered from no strain, Fliss knew how to lead. She led. After more than two years of marriage she was still a person to brighten the public eye with interest. Matthew had taken her traveling several times and it had improved her confidence. She knew pretty largely now what people were talking about when they referred to things they had seen and places they had been outside of Carrington.

Forced out of the City Club one October day by an influx of visiting salesmen come to some convention, Dick Harrison met Fliss at the Lennox restaurant. It occurred to him as he nodded to her that he had not seen much of her lately and, taking a second look which was really due the green feathered turban which closed so piquantly down on her black fringe of hair, he saw that she was apparently alone and crossed at once to sit opposite her. She told him that she was alone and only down town at all because she had been delayed in her shopping.

“It’s an awfully busy week. There’s such a lot going on that if I don’t get my shopping done to-day I’ll not have another chance.”

“Is it awfully busy?”

“Don’t you really know, Dick?” She rattled off a list of functions to him. “Where are you and Cecily anyway these days? Aren’t you just a bit too domestic?”

“With three babies you’re apt to be a bit domestic. You haven’t any, have you, Fliss?”

Fliss laughed at his thrust. “Don’t be nasty, Dick. You know well I haven’t. You and Cecily have probably decided I’m a vicious wretch because I haven’t. People with children are always so much holier-than-thou to those who haven’t. They insist not only on the fun of having them, but on making the world unpleasant for the rest of us because we aren’t sharing the fun. Isn’t it a curious attitude?”

Fliss was decidedly more sophisticated.

“How’s Cecily?”

“Busy—struggling with servants.”

“Has she a lot of trouble?”

“Some. Of course we always have the faithful Ellen, but it isn’t nearly enough.”

“I remember Ellen,” said Fliss.

“She’s a regular member of the family now.”

He ordered his lunch and Fliss, eating hers slowly so that he could catch up, contemplated him gravely.