Half loaves

“But I thought you were preaching economy for the nation.”

“I am. And I mean it. But I’d like to do this.”

She took her cue, though the droop in her voice belied the gayety of her words.

“All right, darling. Hang me with diamonds and watch me sparkle.”

CHAPTER XXIV

It was not new talk, but it was a determined angle and he looked very fine and ready for trouble as he spoke. Even his political opponents apparently were glad to wish him luck. He was appealing to the sense of fight which in all men is stronger than the tendency to complain, and they responded.

“Good stuff,” said Dick.

“Old stuff, but it gets them because they’ve forgotten it in all the talk about the new stuff. There’s a shoddy kind of fatalism settling down over too many people. If we’re going to the dogs, let’s go—let’s have a good time while we’re going. Let each one of us get all the pleasure we can out of things with the least work and above all let’s have no sacrifices. It’s shoddy—more so than the old type of greed when men piled up fortunes for the sake of excitement and spent their money in gorgeous ways. Fortunes now go for gasoline and head waiters and jazz.”

Dick looked at him a bit oddly.

“Is this a national or a personal indictment?”

“National absolutely, except in so far as every individual contributes to the composite temper of the nation. And anyway it’s not an indictment. It’s an attempt at analysis. The condition may not be our fault at all and if it is our fault it’s hard to find the initial sin. It’s probably an inevitable condition. Blame it on the war if you like. Its shoulders are broad.”

“They need to be. When are you getting off? Saturday or Monday?”

“Monday, if you’ll come out into the woods with me over Saturday and Sunday. Otherwise Saturday.”

“Where to?”

“Anywhere. I’d like to cool my brain before I go away and I’d like a couple of days with you. We could go to Lake Carmine and spend the night at my cabin.”

“Sure, I’ll go.”

The still woods charmed them both. They drew off a thousand worries. The fishing was poor and the lake too cold for more than a quick swim, but there were the woods and the quiet and the long walks that were so peacefully reflective and talks about everything that mattered. Out in the midst of the forest it did not embarrass either of them to unload their deepest and most philosophic meditations. Yet it was not until the afternoon of the second day had waned that either of them mentioned Cecily. They were smoking on the little wharf which edged the lake watching the sun fall behind the hills.

“Cecily would like this,” said Matthew quietly.

“Um——” said Dick.

“By the way, I went to see her the other night. I wanted to tell you that I did.”

“She well?”

“Seems to be. Pretty lonely, I guess. I wish I could do something for you two.”

“That’s all right. We’ve closed that chapter, Mat.”

“I suggested to Cecily that she open a new one with me. She declined very promptly and fittingly. I was too excited for a moment to see straight.”

Dick, who had turned angrily at the first words, grinned suddenly.

“Well, you are a cool old duck. What was the idea? What was going to happen to Fliss and the Senatorial career?”

“Temporarily I forgot even Fliss, to say nothing of the latter factor. I’m awfully fond of Cecily, you know.”

“So she turned you down, did she?”

“It’s not funny to me, particularly. Amazing as it is, I was in earnest. What I bring the thing up for is to say simply that you can’t get away with this separation stuff, Dick. Cecily is a young, beautiful woman and I’m not going to be the only person to make that proposition to her. And she is a very lonely woman and her judgments may falter.”

“You mean we should be divorced?”

“I don’t suggest any solutions, Dick. I only want you to realize the situation to the fullest extent. And of course you realize that my rather caddish treatment of Fliss will not be repeated. Fliss gets me and everything I’ve got from now on, just as she always has. Fliss plays awfully fair, you know.”

“Yes, that’s what I like about her. Now Cecily can’t see it. She used to like Fliss, but she turned completely—for no reason.”

“Good reason. Fliss became Anti-Christ to Cecily’s philosophy.”

“Cecily’s philosophy became very narrow in the past year.”

“Narrow, but deep. If it ever broadens now she will be a wonderful person.”

Dick smoked thoughtfully. “Queer how hard I am about that mess. I feel as if I’d been let in for something and then let down. I wanted to do my best for the family, but I had to have a little mental relaxation. I couldn’t merge with Cecily absolutely and she wouldn’t take anything else. She wouldn’t expand at all. She’s right in her point of view, of course, but that very rightness gradually killed all tenderness in me. It was so exclusive. It seemed to me sometimes as if I was shut up in a room which was too orderly for comfort.”

He stopped from sheer embarrassment and added one sentence that meant more than all the rest.

“I got so I couldn’t laugh naturally.”

“Neither of you can laugh much just now. But you’ll get over that.”

“The hell of it is,” said Dick, “in feeling that you’ve married a girl and she’s got a bunch of babies and then you can’t put it across. I wrecked her chances of getting you for a husband for example, and now she’s stranded.”

“She’s got the children.”

“I know. I know.”

“Well, don’t get hard, old man, and you’ll be able to see it through, I’m sure. Think straight on it if you can. I tell you, if you’d seen Cecily the other night mention your name——”

Dick sprang up. “Let’s cut it out, Mat. There are some things I don’t think about these days. If I did I’d run back to Cecily to-morrow. And I’m telling you that that wouldn’t help. We’d have a wonderful time—for a little while—but after that it would be the same old story over again with the same old conclusion, if not a more tragic one.”

They got their supper in the little cabin and drove back to town in the moonlight, each drawing into his own thoughts. At Matthew’s house Fliss hailed them with delight, but Dick stopped only for a few minutes and then went back to the club.

There were a few men in the lounge, hidden behind papers; a few men in the card-room, which was blue with smoke and close and distasteful after the open air of the country. He found his room gloomy and himself restless. His loneliness was turning to bitterness to-night. Changing his rough clothes for others he went out again.

Dick had lived in Carrington too long not to know where every sort of person sought his diversions. In twenty minutes he had found the group whose usual form of amusement he felt might fill the night for him. They were gathered, as he had guessed they would be, in the room of one of the men, with plenty of liquor and plenty of cards and a welcome for him. It was some years since he had joined this crowd, but once in it he felt natural enough, and the depression which had been bothering him was gone before long.

CHAPTER XXV

WINTER came early that year. Even in November the cold was steady and relentless. Cecily felt her isolation more as she was shut up with her children in the house, except for their periods of exercise. She dreaded the winter, especially the approach of Christmas, and the long winter evenings, which seemed so endless after the children were abed, dragged wearily—reading and reading, learning things, thinking things which her limited activities gave her no chance to put into practice. She had passed the point where she was in agony about her own troubles. Every book, every newspaper told her of tragedies much worse. And resolutely she tried not to think of Dick, although the news of him filtered through to her now and then. Some one had sent her a marked newspaper, the kind of paper to which she had no ordinary access, reeking with gossip and scandal. She did not want to read it, but of course she did, and in the smirking, veiled allusions, all nameless, she gathered that her story had filtered through to the public. She heard through Della that Dick was “going a pace.” She knew from the daily papers that he must be having trouble in the mining country. The winter had come early there, too, and the price of food and fuel had soared, fanning into a flame of irritation the discontents which were always smoldering. There were petty strikes already, with the threat of a big one hanging fire all the time. Cecily wondered how Dick was going to tackle all these problems with Matthew away, especially if he were not living well. It surprised her to find that the personal rancor at the intimations of Dick’s wildness did not arise. What she felt was rather this vague uninformed worry about his ability to handle these big affairs if he were in bad shape. She knew that he and Matthew were rich themselves, but that they had no great standing in comparison with the great financiers of the country who had tied up enormous sums of money in these mining ranges. Her stepfather told her that Dick had his hands full. She hated to ask further, telling herself that she had deliberately made it none of her business. But she searched the papers for news, none the less.

Allenby, the little town named for Matthew, where Dorothea had been born, seemed to be one source of trouble. She wondered sometimes if Dick went there often and if, when he passed Mrs. Olson’s gaunt little house, he remembered the time she had spent there. That reminded her of Fliss again.

Her father and Della had asked her to spend Christmas with them, but she could not make up her mind to do that. The children were to have a Christmas with the kind of spirit she wanted, even if it would revive all sorts of painful memories for her. She had decided that and Della had shrugged her pretty shoulders and regretted and said that she and Walter would be sorry, for Gerald was going to a house party and wouldn’t be home and that they wouldn’t bother with a tree if Cecily wasn’t coming and that she thought that she would give Walter a bathrobe and that she thought further that Walter was going to get her a platinum wrist watch, which she knew he couldn’t afford but which she wanted “awfully.” Cecily thought he probably would. Little use as she had for Della’s methods she was reluctantly and truthfully admitting that Della had a way of keeping Walter happy. It reminded her of Fliss’s way with Matthew. Both of them put their husbands in the foreground, flattered them, coaxed them, played with them. And as Matthew had been amused and relaxed by such treatment, Walter was amused and impassioned. He quarreled with Della. That Cecily knew. But they could quarrel one hour and be absolutely and publicly enamored of each other during the next. The catastrophe of Walter’s marriage had somehow not come to pass. And the bitterest drop in Cecily’s cup was that she, who held marriage in deeper respect than either Della or Fliss, had been the only one of the three whose husband was left desolate and alone. Walter was working hard to make money for his Della. In spite of late hours and concentrated excitement he was making good in his father’s business. While Fliss was in Washington sending back or having sent back little items to adorn the social pages of Carrington’s newspapers already. “Senator and Mrs. Allenby were in attendance at” this and that function. Odd how Cecily could miss none of those little items, no matter how she tried to ignore them.

On the first of December after looking over a horde of frightening bills, Cecily went to see her stepfather at his office. She chose the office as affording a chance for a less intimate meeting than one at her house. The array of clerks and stenographers and glazed doors made her feel very impersonal and keyed her up until she found herself confronting her stepfather over a glass-topped table and looked straight into his grave keen eyes.

“What is it, Cecily? Do you need some money?”

“I can’t get along on what I have. That house won’t run on two hundred and fifty dollars a month.”

“Of course you can’t. I could have told you that. Do you know how much it costs to run mine? Well, I won’t tell you. I’ll place a check to your credit to-day, my dear. And it will make me very happy.”

“That wasn’t what I came about, but it’s what I knew you’d suggest,” she said, smiling at him. “I want to mortgage my house.’

“Why? Mortgage? You’ll do nothing of the sort”

“Well, I could sell it, but I’d like to live there during the winter, you see. Then I could sell it later. I thought of a mortgage in bed last night. I don’t quite know how to do it, but I’m sure that would be a way out. You’ll help me, won’t you?”

The old man got up and walked about the office angrily.

“You’re making me very angry, Cecily. Very angry.”

“I don’t mean to. I don’t want to. But I’ve got to do this the fair way. I can’t take money under these circumstances.”

“You’re obsessed,” said Mr. Warner. “Now, look here, Cecily, I’m your father, you know.”

“I know you are—and you’re more than most fathers ever could be, and so you must see that——”

“I’ve a right to support my own grandchildren.”

“If they were in need,” said Cecily, slowly, “it would be different. But they aren’t. They could live on my money easily if we had a flat or a little house. I’d sooner have a little house than a flat. But to keep that big house running on your money—I can’t do it. Don’t you see that the children are my job—all I have left! I want them to be mine, and I can’t feel that they are unless I do it.”

Mr. Warner looked at her with his brows knit.

“How much is the house worth? Fifty thousand?”

“Forty-five, wasn’t it?”

“I’ll see about your mortgage, Cecily, but you must promise not to sell it or do anything further without consulting me.”

She thanked him and promised and left the office, conscious as she was nowadays that a buzz of comment and gossip followed her. Mr. Warner, watching from the window, saw that she was not driving a car, saw her cross the street on foot.

“Steel underneath,” he said aloud.

At noon he met Dick at the club and called him. “Do you know Cecily is mortgaging her house?”

“Hell! And I deposited money to her credit last month.”

“She won’t touch it, Dick.”

“One of those ridiculous notions. The money isn’t important. I argued about that, Mr. Warner. I did my level best. It makes me feel a fool, you know.”

“You haven’t argued any more than I have. But I guess she’s got an idea back of it all. She wants to feel that it’s she who looks after the kids.”

A dull flush crept up into Dick’s cheeks.

“She looks after them, anyway, no matter whether I pay a bill here and there or not, doesn’t she? And it puts me in a rotten position.”

Mr. Warner laid a comradely arm over Dick’s shoulders.

“You are in a rotten position,” he agreed, “and you got yourself into it—wanting to have everything in the world. Cecily is worth sacrificing some things for, my boy.”

“It wasn’t that I wasn’t willing to give up anything,” Dick shrugged away. “What’s the use of going over it? The thing’s threadbare.”

“How are things with you now, Dick?”

“Hell to pay on the ranges. Matthew wants me to spend part of the winter there and I think I may. It was well enough to keep your hand on from here in the old days, but things are different now. It’s going to take brains to handle that yapping crowd of Slovaks up there.”

“How can you handle it on the ground?”

“Watch things. Let them know you’re there. Be a bit more friendly. They like the idea of the city men being on the ground, you know. And I could keep an eye on some of these raw superintendents. There’s a good deal of mishandling, you know.”

“Well, I’m telling you, Dick, that if things get any worse we’ll have a time handling every one.”

Dick nodded and went away. He was in a nasty temper. He was becoming increasingly resourceless out of actual working hours. While he was at work he was all right. It was after six o’clock that things wore out. He plowed through diversions too quickly, try as he might to make them last. The crowd he had been “traveling with,” he told himself, were becoming very tiresome. He knew exactly when they would do everything they did—at what stage of the evening each one of them would change his temper or his way of talking, and it was all boring. He drifted into cafés, but the acquaintances whom he met there all knew about him and Cecily, and though plenty of groups tried to attach him, and would gladly have done so, he had an irritated sense of the comments about him that kept him from wanting to draw down the fire of more of them.

It irritated him, too, to know that his gayety was becoming more and more perfunctory and that he was not getting fun out of things which should have been fun. Several deliberate efforts to amuse himself had failed completely, ending with reaction and disgust. He had tried, in company with some men who were used to that sort of thing, to pick up some girls at a public dance hall—and long before the expected end of the evening, found himself so let down and bored that he left the crowd, with the flimsiest excuse. He had tried a bit of joyriding, but the seductions of that experience with the almost professional joyriding girl who knew just how to curve into the arm of the man at the wheel of the car had left him not only cold, but amused in a kind of sarcastic, unsmiling way. There were times when he felt that he had lost his youth and his power to be amused—his ability to enjoy things. Cecily had taken the verve out of the very things which had been contested points and for the right to enjoy which he had so stubbornly contended.

Also Christmas was approaching and the nervous effort to banish all thought of the holiday from his mind was wearing. With problems all day and little relaxation anywhere, Dick was beginning to show baggy pouches under his eyes and little lines trailed down from the corners of his mouth. In his office that afternoon he was so exacting that his exasperated stenographer, escaping finally from his criticism, told her friend in the next office that she “didn’t wonder Mr. Harrison’s wife wouldn’t live with him. He’s got a terrible temper—fierce.”

Poor Dick, when the office was empty and he had to leave it, strolling back to the club to a choice of chicken casserole or English muttonchop, without enthusiasm, trying not to notice that the shop windows were hung with tinsel and gaudy with that gaudiness which is so beautiful at Christmas time, swinging past the toyshops with carelessness, and then turning back to look into the window of one of them.

Then came the day before the holiday with one of those fine pictorial snowstorms to make it all the more festive, with the unavoidable truce with work and struggle which pervaded even the world of business, with the greeting on every one’s lips. It seemed to Dick that he could not turn around without stirring up some memory of his home. He could see it so clearly, decorated for Christmas with a green English holly wreath below the brass knocker on the white door, poinsettias in the hall, the tree in its corner of the long living-room and the fire blazing; Dorothea’s little mind aflame like her cheeks with excitement; Leslie walking stumblingly among his presents; the baby walking now, too, probably. He would catch himself wondering what new words Leslie had learned. He wondered if Cecily would have a Christmas celebration this year. Yes, she would. It was like her to uphold things for the children even if her own fun were shattered. But she must be short of money. At that thought the glimmer of tenderness in his heart went out. It was bad enough not to see the children, but not to be allowed to support them! To be treated as a criminal outcast! Well, he’d left of his own free will, he reminded himself, and went on to the embittering thought that he’d tried to solve things without a break. They couldn’t have gone on—silent evenings, the constant sense that he wasn’t pleasing his wife, that she felt he was deteriorating, the slight that her rigorous standards, single track virtues put upon him. He wasn’t happy; she wasn’t happy. It couldn’t go on. Matthew had said it couldn’t go on as it was. Probably not. Probably end in a divorce. That would be a nasty business; no worse than lots of other people went through, but Cecily would hate it. Poor Cecily! And in its endless track his mind pondered again whose was the fault and where the remedy.

He had a stupid supper at the almost deserted club, fancying sensitively that the few men sitting at nearby tables were pitying him. Then, following instinct rather than intention as he started out for his usual walk, he found himself headed in the direction of his former home. It was several miles, but he walked them quickly. In the familiar street which he had avoided since he had left Cecily, he felt a desire to escape notice. But he would not yield to that and kept his head up as he went along the side of the street opposite his own house.

There were lights in the house. That made him feel a little queer. He’d known of course that the place was inhabited, that life was going on there as usual, but the sight of the lights made it so much more real. The wrought iron porch lanterns brought out the holly on the door. It was not a wreath this year. A sprig of green tied to the knocker.

With the strangest clandestine feeling, Dick crossed the street and stood beside the gate. Three months and more since he had opened that high iron gate whose beautiful workmanship had made him so proud. He opened it now softly and went up the side of the brick walk, in the shadow cast by the great fir trees. There, under the living-room windows, he saw them all—Ellen holding the baby, Dorothea and Leslie on the floor beside the tree and Cecily in the corner of the big couch. As he saw, he knew what he had been hoping. There was no one else there.

The children had grown so unbelievably in three months!

Cecily heard the door open. She and Ellen turned their heads simultaneously, and then at a swift movement of Cecily’s, Ellen sat still and let Cecily go through the hall.

“Dropped in to see the tree,” said Dick, trying to be jocular.

Then he held out his arms and Cecily crept into them, both of them too glad for the blessed relief which had come to their starved emotions to question the right or safety of such an end to their separation. It was such sheer joy to be together again, to see each other, to deliberately forget all issues in the hour of delight. Dick had not let himself think of his hunger for the children. But to hold them now, play the old games with them, hear them laugh, try their toys——

“I wasn’t sure you’d let me in,” he said apologetically, “or I’d have brought some presents for all of you.”

The tears in her eyes and the joy of her smile were consolation for that.

Because the children were so small and ready to accept all events and because Ellen’s eyes never pried, it was very easy for them. After a while the children had to go to bed and Dick and Cecily took them up together in a riot of fun. It was all as it had been, thought Dick. He drew the familiar blue blanket up over Leslie, who was too tired to struggle and resent being put to bed. And Dorothea put her arms around his neck in that same baby way.

When they went down again they found that Ellen had spread a cloth on a little table before the fire and left supper there for them. She went out. They heard the back door close and her firm heavy footsteps crunch through the snow. And embarrassment settled over the man and the woman sitting in such apparent comfort there. They were paying already for that leap to emotional conclusions. Each of them asking fearfully what all this meant and what was passing in the mind of the other, each trying to avoid subjects which might hurt the other and conscious of the multitude of dangerous subjects. The supper gave them something more to do, but that, too, came to an end and Dick carried the little table out through the dining-room to the kitchen. Cecily tried to busy herself with something, unsettling things that she might settle them again. It was horrible, she told herself, that she should be so afraid of Dick’s presence. Why did he have that air of half-apology, of intrusion?

He did not help her when he came back, but stood, looking curiously about the room.

“Same place,” said Cecily, trying pathetically to be light.

“Did you mind my coming?”

“It was a dreadful evening until you came,” she answered.

They were conscious that several hours lay before them. It was only half-past eight o’clock. And on both of them, afraid to begin to talk, hung those two hours for which they were so hungry and yet which were so oppressive. They sat down beside each other on the long davenport and talked of the children—anecdote after anecdote—but stories of them led to plans, and as plans began to be suggested in their minds they became wary again. Dick drew his wife’s head down against him finally, and for a long time they rested so. Odd, that the mere contact could give them such security. Farther and farther drifted their thoughts from discussion and analysis; back to memories of each other.

In the morning, while they were at breakfast with the children, the telephone rang.

“It’s father,” said Cecily, returning from answering it, “wanting to wish me a Merry Christmas. He was so upset because he couldn’t get here for the tree last night. He’s coming to get us for dinner. We’re dining with him. Della and Walter are going out. Will you come too, Dick?” The last a little hesitantly for, after all, Dick had not declared his plans.

“Did you tell him I was here?” countered Dick.

She flushed. “I didn’t like to tell over the telephone.”

Dick looked at her gravely. She realized as his eyes met hers that he looked older—and harder.

“I’ll tell grandfather for a surprise,” said Dorothea complacently.

They both winced. “We must talk things over this morning.”

“But it’s Christmas day,” protested Cecily.

He frowned that old familiar frown, the frown that always came when she had sought to lay down a rule as to when he should or should not do a thing.

“Better right away.”

In answer she rang for Ellen and asked her to take the children out.

“Take them for a walk before their naps, will you, since we’ll be out for dinner.”

Ellen nodded and hurried them out, all smiles. It was a true holiday for Ellen, appealing to all her romantic sense. The quarrel was over; the husband had come home.

They did not seek to leave the room. Dick wandered to the window and looked out at the children stumbling down the snowy path. Then he turned to Cecily, sitting so slim and erect in her breakfast place.

“I suppose it was silly to come back,” he blundered.

“Silly?”

There she was, tripping him over a triviality again.

“Well, perhaps not silly, but unwise.”

“Why? Didn’t you want to?”

“You know I wanted to. But we’ve settled nothing, dear.”

“Why did you come?” asked Cecily.

“I suppose I was called by the holiday,” answered Dick with simple truthfulness. “I came instinctively. I—couldn’t help it.”

“But you feel just the same?”

“The same as what?”

“As you did when you went.”

Dick seemed to search his memory. “Well, it never was very clear to me just what the issue was. If you mean that I feel terribly in the wrong now, terribly culpable for all those misunderstandings which broke us up, I don’t believe I do feel that. I still don’t know quite where I was wrong. I was stupid about things, little things, of course.”

“But, Dick, don’t you feel that—that this life is the best? With me, with the children? Don’t you see that the things I wanted to avoid had to be avoided?”

He scrutinized the dogmatism of her face carefully, painfully. It was such an exalted face. It seemed such a pity that he couldn’t put it at rest. All she wants, he thought, is a whale of an apology for sins I may not be conscious of, but which I may have committed.

“Can’t we be happy together—as we were last night—after this?”

He felt now that she was trying to pledge him. The fury of her ideals was pursuing him again.

“Do you mean spend every night sitting on the davenport together?” He meant to lighten it, but as usual he failed. Her face showed her shrinking.

“Don’t mock,” she said.

Dick took a restless turn or two around the room and came back to stand over his wife.

“Cecily, I was a fool to disturb you last night. I was worse. I was a robber. I robbed you of the peace that was beginning to come to you. I shan’t ask you to forgive me. It was because I couldn’t help it. But I won’t repeat it. I’ll not bother you again.”

“Are you going away again?”

“It’s better, I think. We aren’t closer—aren’t easy together—aren’t really happy. Isn’t it better that I go?”

There was pleading in his voice, but she was too hurt to hear it; pain, but she was deaf to that, too.

She could only see that he could go; that his going was an insult to her desire that he should stay.

She got up, clutching the edge of the table.

“Then, go—go quickly!”

Dick put his hands to his head. They’d done it again. Again. Well, this time she meant it. But to go without a caress—— He went towards her.

“Can’t I kiss you once before I go?”

And because she yearned for it, she taunted him.

“Your kisses aren’t love,” she said bitterly. “They’re desire!”

Ellen, returning with the children from the walk, found that Cecily was shut in with the baby. When she finally came from her room she was dressed to go out.

“Mr. Warner will be here any moment,” she said. “I’ll dress Dorothea. Put that white dress with the yellow embroidery on Leslie. Don’t forget to lock up the house when you go out, will you? And Ellen, don’t say anything to any one about Mr. Harrison’s having been here. He won’t be here again.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” said Ellen irrepressibly.

Dorothea, hearing her mother’s sentence, had set up a howl, and Leslie joined her for company.

“My father is gone again,” wailed Dorothea with spirit, making comedy out of tragedy, until Ellen, contrary to all discipline, presented her with an irrelevant chocolate cream which distracted her temporarily.

Ellen did not say anything more, but she kept her eyes on Cecily’s drooping figure and Cecily smiled at her rather pathetically.

“I suppose it’s all my fault, Ellen. Something’s gone wrong with the world and I’m tangled up in the machinery.”

Ellen never spoke in metaphors.

“It’s not what should be with a loving couple like you and Mr. Harrison.”

There came to Mr. Warner’s house a few hours later an A. D. T. messenger, weighted with an immense box of flowers. In the depths of the layers of roses, so fragrant and cool, was Dick’s note. “Cecily dear, I had no right to come, no right surely when I had come, to hurt you so. Please try to forget it and me; and if you can’t quite do that think of me as having a heart full of gratitude and respect and affection which expresses itself badly, but as best it can. To-morrow I want to send the children some Christmas things. Please let me do that, and if there’s any way I can help you—anything you will let me do for you—it will make me happy. Merry Christmas! Dick.”

He wrote that, after many drafts of its wording, sitting in his room at the club, and he hunted all over the city for flowers, finding some at length in a hotel flower-shop. If Cecily could have seen him as he wrote, his big hand thoughtfully penning the words, his face drawn and set, she would have known that it was not she alone who was humiliated and outraged by the turn of things. When he had sent the flowers he wrote other letters, one of them to Matthew, telling him that he contemplated going at once into the mining towns.

“It’s necessary, gentlemen,” he told a certain group of men a few days later as he outlined his plans. “We’ve put roughnecks up there in charge; we’ve let the social workers in and paid their salaries; we’ve put young fellows out of college up there, and none of it has worked. There’s more trouble all the time. The only thing we haven’t tried is for one of us who really is responsible to go up himself. At the present moment I can see my way to spending some time there. I won’t bring about a reformation, you know. I don’t promise to stop all the strikes, or to clean out the I. W. W. But I can promise you accurate information after a few months as to what all the trouble is about, and if anything can be done about the situation other than let it go to pot and save what we can of our money. How about it?”

They listened to him with interest—all these men who had money and all the things dependent on money at stake; seeming not too serious, as is the usual way of men of big affairs, showing no great enthusiasm, no excitement.

They liked Dick because he was, compared to most of them, so young and yet so sane and so successful, and they knew he’d “had trouble” with his wife, L. A. Warner’s stepdaughter, and they were sorry for that because, though the age of romance was past for them and the word love had lost its magnetism, they knew that a domestic upset was a serious thing for a young man. “Might send him to the dogs,” they would have said.

“The point is that with the ‘Senator’ away (that was their jovial term for Matthew), we can’t really spare our other young man, can we? When Allenby went he assured us he was turning everything over to you to handle, and that you’d look out for us,” said old Mr. Cox, tilting his chair back and looking at Dick astutely.

“The more I look at the work there is to be done, the more I see that the machinery of distribution, which is here, is in such good shape that any one of three fellows in the office, whom I could mention, could look out for it. The big problem is the problem of production, and that needs to be investigated from the ground up—not on the basis of what things were ten years ago, or five years ago, or one year ago—but as they are now.”

“Let him do it,” said A. C. Miller, who spoke briefly.

“Some I. W. W.’ll put a bomb under him, and we can’t spare him.”

“Gentlemen,” said the chairman, with the ponderosity which had given him his position on so many boards, “may we have a motion?”

They were given a motion and Dick had his way. He heard the chairs scrape back, saw the discussion break up into fragments, saw the men go out, with their friendly, terse nods to each other and a wave of energy swept over him. Mare’s nest, chimera, windmills—whatever it was that he was going to find or to tilt with, at least he had a job that was fresh and that would take him out of town.

He scribbled on a telegraph blank, “Put it over all right,” and addressed it to Senator Matthew Allenby.

In his delight he wanted to do something for somebody, and his thoughts turned to Cecily.

He sought a florist’s again.

“Every morning,” he said, to the dapper young clerk who waited on him, “every morning I want you to make a selection of the flowers which you have which are suitable—suitable for the middle of a table, centerpiece, you know. Ever have an order like that?”

“Yes, sir,” said the omniscient clerk. “Several ladies have left standing orders for their tables.”

“Good line, that last. Well, you do as you do to them. This address for the flowers; that for the bills.”

“Any length of time, sir?”

“Oh, yes,” said Dick. “Always. As long as we both (you and I, my friend) shall live. Always. Why not? Sure.”

“Kind of a nut,” said the clerk, gratefully regarding the departing figure of the man who had given him the biggest order he’d ever booked. “Sweet on her now, you know. But he’ll get sick of that. Wait till he gets a bill or two.”

Dick went out and jumped into the roadster which stood by the curb, and started for the garage. He wouldn’t sell the car, but he would put it up. He couldn’t take it up to the range and play the game he wanted to play.

He skirted the main streets, for the traffic was heavy during this late afternoon hour. Just off one of the big commercial streets he turned down an avenue always of doubtful repute, even in these days of supposedly high city morals—a street of ramshackle buildings which were supposed to be apartments, but behind whose dingy lace curtains quack doctors and dentists had their lucrative offices, spiritualists held cheap séances and other money-making transients had their headquarters. Just in front of his car, held up by a confusion of trucks in front of it, Dick saw a singularly well-dressed woman whom he looked at with interest and then amazement as he recognized her. It was Della. No doubt of it. They had all criticized that short white fur coat when she bought it. She was going along slowly, close in to the walls which bordered the sidewalk, looking for something in some window. It struck Dick that she wanted to avoid detection. Then he turned to put on his brakes and when he looked up again she had gone—through one of those dingy wood framed doorways. Dick pulled up his car and waited farther down the street. It was growing darker now and he was worried. No place for a girl to be alone. What could she be up to? After half an hour he saw her again, the white fur coat starting out of the dusky street. He followed her with the car and hailed her when she was four or five blocks away from the place she had stopped.

“Hey, Della. Can I bring you home?”

She got in with an attempt at her usual hilarity, which struck him as very forced. He maneuvered until they stopped under an arc light and then shot a swift glance at her face. She had been crying, all right. Crying her eyes out.

“Where have you been all afternoon?” he asked her casually.

“Just shopping. I was late for dinner. Awfully nice of you to pick me up, Dick.”

So she didn’t mean to be communicative. Dick dropped her at her door and went on, pondering. Well, it might have been some obscure relative, some crazy notion to see a fortune-teller who told her she was going to die young. It wasn’t any love affair, anyhow. Not from the look of those eyes. She looked as if she’d been beaten. Dick decided to dismiss it from his mind. It wasn’t his business, after all.

CHAPTER XXVI

The flowers pleased Cecily. For once she had hardly thought of whether they were consistent with the separation between her and her husband or not. It had been sheer delight to have flowers. As she went down to put some little yellow pink rose deeper in water she heard an unfamiliar sound and straightened up suddenly. There was surely some one at the side door fumbling with the door-knob. She looked at the clock; quarter past nine only. It couldn’t be a burglar. Somebody drunk, perhaps. Pushing open the door to the pantry, she whistled softly and the big Airedale came rushing in. With him jumping beside her, she went towards the door.

This time the person, whoever it was, decided to ring. Cecily turned on all the lights and opened the door, prepared to threaten or command. But at sight of her visitor she stepped back in amazement, a restraining hand on the leaping dog.

“Why, Della! where did you drop from?”

Della, swathed in white fur, slipped inside the storm door and closed the inner one before she answered.

“I just came over,” she said, a little breathlessly. “I wanted to see you—you know, to talk to you.”

“I thought you were a burglar,” laughed Cecily. “I was going to let Bill fly at your throat. Why did you try the side door and where is Walter?”

“Walter——” Della was standing in the light now and Cecily could see that her little pink face so made for powder and smiles was streaked with tears and still distorted with some violent emotion. “Walter’s home, I guess. He doesn’t know I came here. I thought he wouldn’t know, so that’s why I came to you. He thinks I’m afraid of you and wouldn’t dare to come. But I showed him I did come here and he doesn’t know where I am and——”

“Hush,” said Cecily, “you’re hysterical, Della. Have you been walking in the snow in those slippers?” She looked down at the slim black satin slippers from which caked snow was already melting. “Come upstairs to my room and get dry. Then,” she rode over an immense impulse to refuse sanctuary to Della, “then you can tell me all about it.”

Della followed her. But she could not be silent.

“I came to you, Cecily, and I know you don’t like me very well, and I don’t know as I blame you, because you and I aren’t like each other at all, and I’ve always been scared to death of you, but what could I do, for I couldn’t go to any of the girls because they don’t know anything about things like this—at least, I hope they don’t, although perhaps the married ones have troubles of their own. It isn’t as if I were older and I thought, of course, Walter would be nice and sympathetic and he wasn’t at all, but he was so stern and cross and scolding—and I can’t be scolded and I won’t have it.”

She ran on, plunging through incoherent phrases and sentences, with the tears running down her foolish little cheeks. Cecily looked at her in amazement.

“Hush,” she said again, “you’ll make yourself ill. What is it, Della? Have you had a quarrel with Walter? Is that it?”

“That’s only a little bit of it,” sobbed Della, as the cause of her trouble rose again to bring her horror, “only a little of it. Although I thought he’d be nice to me! I thought he’d be nice to me; a girl gives up a lot when she marries a man, and it’s pretty hard to have him turn against her.”

Cecily had her upstairs now, sitting on her chaise longue, and she was forcing quilted slippers upon her.

“If you really want to tell me, Della, you must stop being hysterical and begin at the beginning. And you mustn’t be quite so noisy or you’ll wake the babies in the nursery.”

Della shuddered from head to foot.

“That’s it!” she cried, her eyes distended. “Babies! Cecily, Cecily, they say I’m going to have a baby and I won’t, I won’t! And Walter is so cruel about it.”

Cecily was no longer naïve about such things. She had heard many conversations which had told her unwilling ear much about involuntary motherhood. But never had she seen such horror as was Della’s. Mixed with her recoil from the violence and the ugly mood of the girl was a queer feeling of responsibility that was almost pride. Della had come to her.

“You’re going to have a baby, Della? Why, you silly girl, that’s the nicest thing that could happen to you. I’m awfully glad.”

“Don’t! I thought you’d help me! I know it’s all right for you to have children, Cecily—you’re the domestic type—but I’m not. I won’t, I won’t, I tell you! I won’t lose my figure and have to give up dancing and get old and ugly and repulsive and listen to babies all the night and die!”

Cecily sat down beside her and took hold of one clenched little hand. “Tell me all about it, Della,” she said quietly. “When did you find out all this?”

“Last week.”

“Did you see Dr. Norton?”

“Not him. He was horrid to me once. I wouldn’t go to see him.”

“But how do you know?”

“I saw another doctor.” She had stopped crying. “I hunted one out on Eighth Street where no one would know me or begin to talk about it or tell anybody.”

“Eighth Street! Why, Della, that’s no street for decent doctors!”

“Lots of doctors advertise in the windows along there,” said Della sullenly. “Anyway, I wasn’t going to Dr. Norton.”

“And this other doctor told you what?”

Della shuddered convulsively. “He was horrible—horrible. Such an awful place with dreadful looking women around in the waiting room. And a man tried to flirt with me and the doctor patted me on the arm and told me that he could tell me more about it and that he’d have to see a hundred dollars first. And I didn’t know what to do, Cecily, so I hurried out of there and it’s lucky I wasn’t murdered or didn’t have my gold purse stolen.”

“What happened then?”

“I’ve been worrying till I was almost dead. Walter knew I wasn’t myself—my skin was all dead looking! Look at me, Cecily. I’m a perfect fright! So to-night he found me crying and he asked me what the matter was, and I told him, and he was glad, he said. Glad! Glad that I was going to die!”

“Nonsense, Della. Why shouldn’t he be glad?”

“He said he thought it would mature me and that we’d both be happier and that he’d try to make it easy—as if it could be easy! I’d die; I’m the type that always dies, leaving a baby, and the man marries again. And I told Walter he’d marry again; no, I told him I wouldn’t have it, I wouldn’t, and I won’t!”

“But there’s nothing to do about it.”

“There must be things. There must be. Walter said that same thing—nothing to do. But I’ll kill myself! I’ll show you all! I’ll show him!”

For a few minutes Cecily let her storm. She was collecting her thoughts. The mad ignorance, the uncontrolled violence of this girl in the face of one responsibility horrified her. And astonished her, too. She had not dreamed Della was so ignorant.

“But, Della, dear,” she found herself pleading, “you must have known that was one of the things that happen to people when they marry—babies.”

Della shrugged her shoulders in angry impatience.

“Don’t be silly, Cecily. You know lots of girls don’t have them and don’t ever intend to have them. Once in a while a girl makes a mistake.”

At her full height Cecily looked down on Della in disgust. The things she was instinctively fighting against, for which she had endured so much, all seemed epitomized in this hysteric figure of inconsequence which was so helpless up against a fact of life—a fact demanding personal sacrifice. “Incapable,” she thought, feeling strong as never before. And then there came through her scorn that pride again that Della had come to her, and a real anxiety for Della and the child which might be hers.

“If this is true,” she said, “you know you ought not to be letting yourself get wrought up. It’s bad for you and bad for the baby,” she finished tactlessly.

A shiver went over the crouching girl.

“Don’t! Don’t!” she moaned. “I won’t have it, I tell you. I wish I’d never seen Walter. He’s let me in for this now, just as he let me in for marrying him after that mess at college. I wish I never had married him in spite of all their silly talk. Anybody could have known I wasn’t a tough girl. I didn’t stay out all night because I wanted to. I couldn’t help it if the silly car froze up and we had to go to the nearest place to keep from freezing ourselves. But he was so fussy that he got me all worked up, too, and I married him. And now, after all I’ve done for him, he was so cruel to-night. He didn’t care about my feelings. He just wanted the horrible——”

“Hush, Della.”

“I thought you’d help me. You’ve been married a long while. You——”

“Della, if you mean what I suppose you mean by ‘helping’ you, I wouldn’t have the faintest idea of how to help you in that way. And of course I wouldn’t anyway. It’s not only wicked to consider such a thing; it’s the worst kind of wickedness. It’s dreadful, awful, criminal.”

Her words seemed to dry Della’s tears. She got up, wrapping her coat around her.

“Well, I can kill myself,” she said, her blurred blue eyes full of childish drama. There was something in this pure childishness that went home to Cecily’s heart. There were only three or four years between her age and Della’s, but she felt decades older and wiser. It came to her suddenly that this was no figure of evil before her. It was just a frightened little girl, uttering angry threats in the face of her fear—ignorant of all things that might stand her in stead in a crisis, equipped only to meet gayety and enjoyment. Cecily had the heavier equipment and she longed to lend it, to bolster up this frail little soul. She took her by both shoulders.

“You won’t do any such ridiculous thing. Sit down and let me tell you a few things. Let me tell you,” she went on to Della, reluctant beside her, “what a joy it is, what wonderful happiness it really is, in spite of all the pain and trouble, to have a baby of your own, something living that you really created and made strong. Why, it’s most beautiful.”

But Della’s face was hard and drawn and sullen.

“That’s if you like that sort of thing. I don’t, that’s all. I’m not the type,” she repeated.

The motion picture phrase struck Cecily as true. Della wasn’t the “type” to understand what she was talking about. Della had been told that she was the type to wear electric blue, to carry off a Marcel, to dance the toddle. And it was true. She hadn’t got a word of what Cecily said, and she wouldn’t. To her little mind there was no entrance for the abstract or the philosophical. It must all be pictorial.

Cecily felt failure, and as she felt she wasn’t gaining her point, she cast about for new weapons. She was on the offensive with her philosophy this time, and she realized that the old weapons of defense were useless. She could not make Della see these things by talking to her. But there must be a way; she must find it.

“You and Walter can talk about how low I am when you see him. He feels like you do,” said Della bitterly.

“Walter thinks you’re wonderful,” answered Cecily. “He’s crazy about you.”

Della began to cry again. “Then why is he so cruel? Why does he want me to go through such an awful thing?”

“He doesn’t mean to be cruel. Of course he doesn’t realize what it means to a woman.”

That was the right note. A hint of martyrdom.

“I should say not.”

“And men are always pleased at news like that. I tell you, Della” (Cecily was striking her stride now), “men are never as crazy about a woman as when she is expecting her first baby. You see, they feel so grateful and so miserable.”

“I should think they would,” moaned Della.

“Of course you can’t see it as I do, but really the nicest time of my married life was before Dorothea came.” She faltered a little at that, for it was hard to use those memories for Della’s sake, but she realized that Della was listening finally.

“Dick couldn’t do enough for me.”

“Didn’t you die—staying in for months?”

“But you don’t, my dear—that’s awfully old-fashioned. That belonged to the days (here was an inspiration) when they didn’t have the modern point of view. And you can get the loveliest dresses. You’d be like a picture, Della.”

It was clear that at last Della was getting a Madonna vision of herself. She had stopped crying except for an occasional dab at her eyes and with her eyes fixed on the other side of the room looked very young and pathetic.

“There’s one thing,” said Cecily. “It isn’t all misery by any means. Everybody’s so awfully interested in you and so awfully nice to you; and you can do everything except maybe dive and dance—along towards the end—and then of course all the——”

“But the end when you die, maybe!”

“You don’t die. You have so much anesthetic you don’t know anything about it. Then you have a cunning little baby and you can have the loveliest baby things. Of course Walter wouldn’t want you to have any of the hard care of it.” Skillful Cecily, sliding over all the things that had made her children real to her; nights of watching and caring when a baby had a cough or a touch of croup, the routine of nursing, the fatigue and ill health which might be eased, but which could never be destroyed. She was fighting for Della’s baby now, and if Della saw it as a pink and white doll in a dotted Swiss cloud, with herself as an invalid in interesting negligees, still she was gaining her end. That it was a great step for Cecily—this relinquishing of her own fastidiousness in discussion, this generosity of method—she did not realize, yet.

Della was growing calmer. Her hysteria had half spent itself and Cecily had turned her mind away from horrors for the moment, anyway. It was probably the first time for many days that she had been able to see anything except blackness, and the relief showed in the relaxation of her body. Cecily ventured a little further. She was feeling a sudden warmth of affection for Della. The sense of her usefulness to some one outside her own group of children and the feeling that some one had turned to her for confidence and compassion was expanding all her starved emotions. She put her arm around Della.

“Poor little Della.”

“Isn’t life terrible?” asked Delia mournfully.

“You want to stop worrying about everything,” answered Cecily. “You want to just lie back and let us take care of you. We’ll all see you through it and make it just as easy. Just let me talk to Walter and explain things and he won’t upset you again.”

“He was so cruel.” Della relapsed again. “I didn’t tell you everything. He said I was a coward and——”

“He was excited. You’d better spend the night here now, Della. I’m going to tuck you up and telephone to Walter where you are.”

“Do you think he’ll come over?”

“Of course—to make sure you are all right.”

She got Della into bed finally, diverting her momentarily by pressing upon her her most elaborate nightgown and negligee. Della cast a fleeting, discouraged glance at herself in the glass and slid between the covers, too worn out to resist longer.

“Of course I shan’t be able to sleep,” she said, “so if Walter comes over, he might come up for just a moment.”

Cecily nodded and turned the light low. Then, from the safe distance of the kitchen extension telephone, she telephoned Walter and half an hour later let him in.

“You say she’s gone to bed?”

“Quite worn out. But she wanted to see you.”

“Is she still hysterical?”

“No; she’s calmer.”

Walter’s boyish face had grave lines of anxiety traced on it. He paced up and down the room for a minute, then turned to Cecily.

“Tell you what was the matter with her?”

“Yes.”

He took a few more turns.

“Of course she’s very young,” he said, “but there doesn’t seem any excuse for some of the things she said. She—I didn’t think women—even girls—felt that way. I know it’s a sacrifice, but I thought every woman had instincts.”

“Every woman has, but not always at this stage. Wait till the baby comes.”

A funny, shaken smile came over Walter’s face.

“I’d do anything in the world to make it easy. But of course if she’s going to hate it so——”

“It’s just her condition,” Cecily told him. “Lots of women are hysterical. You’re utterly in the wrong, Walter, when you argue with her. You want to soothe her, divert her. She’s just a child and she hasn’t had a bit of experience.”

“She’s older than you were.”

“Della says I’m a different type, but I can remember, Walter, times when the world frightened me to death. The only thing that helped was to feel that Dick was going along with me.”

She stopped, and then went on again: “I don’t believe you ought to try to make Della think of the serious things any more than she naturally will. Be awfully considerate, fussy; spoil her—she likes that. Make father spoil her, too. And remember, no matter how cross or queer she may be, that ignoring all that is part of the penalty you have to pay for having a baby of your own.”

“Della’s not your style,” said Walter for the hundredth time, “but, really, if you would you could do a lot for her. She’s light on the surface, but there’s more to her than you’d think. Awfully sweet and generous. If we did have a baby and she had it to think about——”

“I know.”

“Will you help us through, Cecily? I don’t know much about such things, and mother’s gone. Her own mother is rather dreadful. Boarding house! We haven’t seen much of you lately, and that’s been all my fault, too. But now it might be—you’d be an angel to sort of stand by Della.”

“Of course I will.”

“Is Della in your room?”

“Yes. Come up.”

At the door of the room with the dim light they paused and listened, but Della was not sobbing. They entered softly. She had turned on her side and fallen asleep like a peaceful child.

“I’d say good-night to her,” said Cecily, and went downstairs again, closing the door after her. For a moment the warmth at her heart persisted and then loneliness, more devastating than ever, bitterness, jealousy of that husband and wife upstairs—together—swept her.