JANE—
OUR STRANGER

JANE—
OUR STRANGER

A NOVEL

BY

MARY BORDEN

AUTHOR OF “THE ROMANTIC WOMAN”

LONDON
WILLIAM HEINEMANN LTD.

First published, 1923
New Impressions January, February, March,
April, August, 1924

Printed in Great Britain by Woods & Sons, Ltd., London, N.1.

CONTENTS

PART I

I

It is a pity we do not die when our lives are finished. Jane may live another twenty years—a long time to wait, alone between two worlds. Jane is forty-three, I am five years older, Philibert is fifty-six, my mother nearly eighty, we are all alive, and strangely enough Maman is the only one whose life is not yet ended. Hers will not end till the moment of her death. She has been a wise artist. She is still embroidering delicately the pattern of her days; she still holds the many threads in her fingers. Quietly, exquisitely she will put in the last stitches. They will be the most beautiful of all; they will be her signature, the signature of a lady. Then she will close her eyes and commend her soul to God and the perfect work of her worldly wisdom will be finished.

As for me, I see no reason why I should not live on indefinitely just as I have done, and on the whole I am more comfortable here than in Purgatory, a place that I imagine to be like the suburbs of London. I see myself there, tapping with my crutch, along endless tramway lines between interminable rows of dingy perky villas. This little street in the Faubourg Saint Germain is much nicer. It is old and proud and secretive; a good street for a cripple to live in; it shelters and protects him. Once he has entered it he has no distance to go to get home. It is usually deserted and the great pale houses show discreet shuttered windows with no one behind the shutters to stare at him. I am Philibert’s crippled brother. Something went wrong with me before I was born. Nothing else of importance has ever happened to me, except Jane’s marrying my brother.

Jane loved this little street. She said that it told her the story of France and conveyed to her all the charm of the Paris she loved best, the proud gentle mysterious Paris of the 18th century that with all its fine reserved grandeur assumes modestly the look of a small provincial town.

I came to live here when Philibert sold our house in the Rue de Varenne that is just round the corner, and my mother went to her new apartment near the Étoile. That was twenty years ago, and very little has changed in the street since I came to these rooms at the bottom of this little courtyard between Constantine’s big white house and the Embassy. The little man who peddled bird-seed has vanished long ago, his voice is no more to be heard chanting, but other street vendors still come by with their sing-song calls. What indeed was there that could change, save perhaps old Madame Barbier’s grocery shop at the corner, tucked up against Constantine’s stable wall? But even Madame Barbier has remained the same. Her hair is as smooth and glossy black, her tight corsage as neat, and her trim window with its glass jars of honey and the nice bright boxes of groceries is as it always has been. A thrifty respectable woman is Madame Barbier, with a pleasant word for her neighbours. For the rest, on the opposite side of the street there is the convent, with its pointed roof and the chapel belfry showing above the wall, and there are the five big houses with their great gates that make up the whole length of the street. Not a long street—often when I turn into it at one end, I recognize a familiar figure going out of it at the other, the good Abbé perhaps going home after confessing the sisters in the convent, or old Madame d’Avrécourt in her shabby black jacket, her fine little withered face under her bonnet, wearing its habitual enigmatic smile. Monsieur l’Abbé says that her voluminous petticoats are heavy with the sacred charms she has sewn into the hems, and that may well be; I know that her devotion is very great and her interest in the outside world very small, and the sight of her is comforting to me.

It is so quiet here, and so confined. It is like a cloister—or a prison—I am glad of that.

Tonight, Good Friday night, I can hear the good sisters in the chapel singing. The mysticism of their haunting chant penetrates the walls of this old house, and tonight because of their lamenting, because of their dread disciplined agony of supplication, the street is immensely deep and high, whereas yesterday it was just small and dim and worldly, with its houses blinking over its walls, a proud battered deceiving old street, hiding the rare beauty of its dwellings, guarding the secrets of its families behind mute shutters, till the day it should crumble to pieces or an insolent government should turn it upside down like an ash-bin.

It never, of course, could get used to Jane. Who of us did get used to Jane? Did I myself? Wasn’t she a big troubling problem to us all till the very end? How could we not be afraid of her? Poor magnificent Jane—fine timid innocent child—dangerous nature woman—dreadful crying message from a new bellowing land—what was she? What was she not? How could she fit in here? She was as strange here as a leopard beautifully moving down the grey narrow pavement. How she used to frighten the good Abbé. I have seen him scuttle into a neighbouring doorway to let her pass, as if there were no room for him along the stones she walked so grandly. It was true. There was no room for any one but Jane when she came, and now that she is gone never to come back again, the place is as dreary and empty as an abandoned cemetery and the light is as insipidly pale as the half shadow in a sick room. She has left a sickness in this place, because she came here sometimes to see me—and won’t come any more.

And yet I stay on here. I shall stay here always. I have no reason to go anywhere now that I have been to America to see Jane, and have come back with the accurate awful knowledge of the great distance between us. Ah, that wide sea, that New York, a high cold gate into a strange over-powering country, those immense prairies, and those tiny farm houses, with tiny women watching the train; Jane, a tiny woman, Jane a speck, in a town that is a dot on the map. I will write down Jane’s story. I will remember it all, everything that she told me and everything that I saw, and will put it all down exactly with perfect precision and accuracy, and then, perhaps I shall understand her. Poor Jane—she wanted to understand life. She believed always that there was a reason for things, an ultimate reason and a purpose. She was no philosopher, she was a woman of faith. She should have been the wife of a pioneer, the wife of such a man as Isak, who went into the wilderness with a sack over his shoulder. Jane was made for such a man. I can see them together going out under the sky, he, grave, deep-chested, long-limbed, “a barge of a man,” and beside him a woman like a ship, moving proudly. And she married Philibert. Could any one who has ever seen her with Philibert miss the meaning of their extraordinary contrast? Philibert with his clever jaunty little body, his exaggerated elegance, his cold blue eyes and his impudent charm. She made him look like a toy man. She could have broken him in two with her hands. Why didn’t she? It is a long story. People say that American women are very adaptable, very imitative. Jane wasn’t. She never became the least like us, except in looks and that meant nothing. Paquin and Chéruit and Philibert did that for her almost at once, but her looks, even without their aid, were always a disguise, never a revelation of her self. Some women are all of a piece with their charming exteriors, Jane was a child cased in armour. As she grew older she learned to use it, she made it answer, but she used it to become something she was not. I call up her image as I write. I evoke Jane as she was that last year in Paris, the most elegant woman in Europe, the most stared at, and the most indifferent. I remember the cold hard nonchalance that so frightened people she did not like, and the brilliant metallic grace that rippled over her like gleaming light when she was pleased. I remember her excessive hauteur in public, the disdainful carriage of her strange head that was like a coin fashioned by some morose craftsman of Benvenuto Cellini’s time. I recall the sidelong glitter of her little green eyes. I remember her in public places, towering above other women like an idol, mute, glittering, enigmatic, her curious profile with its protruding lower lip, the tight close bands of jewels round her forehead. What a figure of splendour she was in those days, when Philibert had done breaking her heart; and when at the age of forty she had ceased to care and had reached the perfection of her physical type.

I think of her as she was when her mother brought her to Paris and married her to Philibert; a great strapping girl with a beautiful body and an ugly sullen face that deceived us all. How could one see behind it? Can one blame them? I alone caught a glimpse. And she developed slowly in our artificial soil. It took twenty years for her to become a woman of the world, une grande dame. That was what they made of her. I say they, but I suppose I mean primarily Philibert. It is horrible to think of how much Philibert had to do with making her what she finally was. And Bianca had a hand in it too. That is even worse.

We had realized the moment of Jane’s apotheosis. We had seen her beautifully and gravely spread her wings. We held our breath, waited entranced, and then, just then, she disappeared. Suddenly we lost her.

I refer, now, to our group, the little Bohemian group of kindred spirits who loved Jane; Ludovic, Felix, Clémentine and the others. Extraordinary that these friends of mine should have been the ones to love Jane best. They were a gay lot of sinners, quite impossible judged by any standard but their own. My mother only knew of their existence, through Clémentine. She has always been in the habit of discussing artists and writers as if they were dead. It was distressing to her that Clémentine who was related to her by blood and had married a Bourbon, should have held herself and her name so cheap as to consort with men and women of obscure origin and problematical genius. As for me, a man could do as he liked within measure, if he did not forget to keep up appearances. She regarded my friendship for my wonderful Ludovic and all the rest of them as a substitute for the more usual and less troublesome clandestine affairs of the ordinary bachelor. As I could never “faire la noce” like other men I was allowed these dissipations of the mind, but maman never forgave me for introducing Ludovic to Jane. Dearest mother—it was no use telling her that Ludovic was the greatest scholar of his day. I didn’t try to explain. After all Ludovic needed no championing from me. I had wanted to do something for Jane; I had wanted to relieve in some way the awful pressure of her big bleak dazzling situation. Hemmed in by the complications of my relationship to her, how many times had I not groaned over the fact that she had been married by that awful mother of hers to the head of our house and not to some one else’s devilish elder brother, instead of to mine, I had pondered and tormented myself over a way of helping her that would not give Philibert the chance of coming down on me and shutting the big strong door of his house in my face, and at length my opportunity had come. It had seemed to me that for her at last the battle was over, and that she had achieved the desolate freedom which we could turn into enjoyment. Fan Ivanoff was dead. Bianca had disappeared. As for Philibert, he had grown tired of bothering her. Her sufferings no longer amused him. Her loneliness was complete. Although still to my eyes a figure of drama while we were essentially merry prosy people, she appeared to me to have acquired that spiritual mastery of events which made her one of us. I had reckoned without her child, Geneviève.

How could I have understood then the fear with which she contemplated her daughter’s future? And even supposing that I had understood everything, and had the gift of seeing into that future and had beheld the shadow of that lovely monster Bianca swooping down on Jane again to drive her to extremity, even supposing I had known what was going to happen and how that would take her away from us forever, I still could have done nothing more than I did do. It had seemed to me that we could provide her with a refuge, and so we did for a time. If Paris were to offer her any reward, any consolation, any comfort, then such a reward and such comfort was, I felt sure, to be found in the sympathy of these people who had gravitated to one another, out of the heavy mass of humanity that populated the earth, like sparks flying upwards to meet above the smoke and heat of the crowd in a clear lighted space of mental freedom. I gave her the best I had; I gave her my friends; and if they thought she had come to them to stay, well then so did I. Our mistake lay in thinking that because we were sufficient to each other we must be sufficient to Jane as well. I do not believe it occurred to any one of us how little we really counted for her; I, at least never knew it until the other day. Actually I had never realized that her soul was always craving something more, something like a heavenly certitude or a divine revelation.

Conceited? I suppose we were; but then you see the world did knock at our door for admittance. We had all literary and artistic Europe to choose from, and we did realize the things we talked of. I mean that we translated our thoughts into things people could see, ballets, pictures, bits of music. We worked out our ideas for the mob to gape at, and our success could be measured by the bitter hostility of such people as Philibert, who fancied himself as a patron of the arts—a kind of François I—and found us difficult to patronize.

Jane realized our worth of course. She had a touching reverence for our ability. She saw clearly the distinct worlds represented by my mother, and Ludovic; the one exquisite and sterile, beautifully still as a sealed room with panelled walls inhabited by wax figures; the other disordered and merry, convulsed by riotous fancies, where daring people indulged their caprices, scoffed at facts and respected intellect.

What Jane did not realize was the humanity underlying this life of ours. She thought us uncanny, but she could have trusted us in her trouble. And we on our side did not know that we did not satisfy her. After all, for the rest of us our deep feeling of well-being in one another’s company was like a divine assurance, an absolute ultimate promise. It was all the heavenly revelation we needed. When we gathered round Clémentine’s dinner-table with the long windows opening out of the high shabby room into the shadowy garden where we could hear during the momentary hush of our voices the note of its flutey tinkling fountain, or when we settled deep in those large worn friendly chairs before Ludovic’s fire on a winter’s night, in the cosy gloom of his overcharged bookshelves, it would come to us over and over again, like the repeated sense of a divine conviction, that this exquisite essence of human intercourse was nothing less than what we had been born for.

Jane could never have had that feeling, but we thought she shared it with us. We did not know about that deep relentless urge in Jane that was as inevitable as the rising tide. We never took seriously enough her fear of God.

And so when she went away they thought—Ludovic and Clémentine and the rest of them—“She will be here tomorrow, she will come back just as she was, and she will find us just where she left us.” And they continued to talk about her as if she had left them but an hour before to go and show herself as she was often obliged to do in some great bright hideous salon. Her chair was always there by Ludovic’s fireside, and they took account in their discussions of her probable point of view, as if she’d been there with them. There was something touching in their expectancy. There was that in their manner to remind one of the simple fidelity of peasants who lay the place of the absent one every night at table. The truth did not occur to them, and I who wanted to be deceived let their confidence communicate itself to me. I told myself that they were right, that she was bound to come back, that they had formed in her the habit of living humourously as they did, that they had given her a taste for things she would not find elsewhere, and that she would never be content to live now in that big blank new continent across the Atlantic. The word Atlantic made me shiver. I must have had a premonition; I must have known that I was going to cross it, urged out upon that cold turbulent waste of horrid water by a forlorn hope and an anguished desire to see her once more.

I hugged to myself during those days of suspense my feeling of the irresistible appeal of my city. Had Jane not told me, one day on returning from Como, that in spite of the problems her life held for her here, she experienced nevertheless each time she went away such a poignant home-sickness for Paris, its streets, its sounds, its river-banks and its buildings, that she invariably came back in a tremor of fear, positively “jumpy” at the thought that perhaps during her absence it had changed or disappeared off the map altogether? If she felt like this after a month’s sojourn in Italy, what had I now to fear I asked myself? Had we not initiated her into the very secret heart of Paris? Was there a remnant of an old and lovely building that we had not shown her, or a fragment of sculpture or a picture worth looking at to which we had not introduced her? Had she not come to feel with us the difference of the temperature and tone of the streets, the excitement of the jangling boulevards, the bland oblivion of the Place de la Concorde, the ghostliness of the Place des Vosges, the intimate provincial secretiveness of our own old peaceable quarter? Had not Ludovic called into being for her out of the embers of his fire the historic scenes that had been enacted in all these and a hundred other places? Had he not made the whole rich fantastic past of our city unroll itself before her eyes? Was it a little thing to be allowed to drink at the source of so much humanized knowledge? Where in that new country of hers would she find so fanciful and patient and tender a friend as this great scholar?

So I piled up the evidence, and then when her letter came I knew that I had foreseen the truth, and when I took them the news and they all cried out to me—“Go and bring her back, and don’t come back without her”—I knew while their high commanding voices were still sounding in my ears that already I had made up my mind to go, and I knew too, lastly and finally, that I would not be able to bring her back.

She had enclosed in her letter to me a note for them which I gave to Clémentine, who read it and passed it on. One after another they scanned its meagre lines in silence. I saw that Ludovic’s hand was shaking. When he had finished he closed his eyes for a moment and his head jerked forward. I noticed in the light of the lamp how white he had grown in the last year, and how the yellow tint of his pallor had deepened. Clémentine said looking at me—“It is not intelligible. Perhaps you can explain.” And I was given the sheet of paper covered with Jane’s large careless scrawl:

“Dear Friends,” I read, “I am not coming back. I am here alone with the ghost of my Aunt Patty in the house where I lived as a child. It is a wooden house with a verandah at the back. There are snow-drifts on the verandah. I am trying to find out what it has all been about—my life, I mean. If I believed that I would understand over there on the other side of death, then perhaps I would not be bound to stay here now, but I know that Ludovic is right, and that the hope of eternal punishment like that of immortal bliss and satisfied knowledge is just the fiction of our vanity. My punishment is on me now, since among other things I have to give you up.

“Jane.”

They had cried out at me when I told them, but after reading the letter they were silent. It was as if they had been brushed by the wings of some strange fearful messenger from another world, as if some departed spirit were present. We might all have been sitting in the dark with invisible clammy hands touching our hair, so nervous had we become. The fall of a charred log in the fireplace made us jump.

Felix forced a laugh. “The ghost of her Aunt Patty,” he mocked dismally. “Now what does she mean by that?”

“Her Aunt Patty was the person who took care of her as a child. Miss Patience Forbes her name was. She seems to have been a remarkable character. Jane often spoke of her.”

My words only added to their mystification. An old maid in America, dead now, a remarkable character. What had she to do with them? What power had she over their brilliant courageous Jane? Were they nothing that they could be replaced by the wraith of an old puritan spinster?

The room seemed to grow chilly. Some one put a fresh log on the fire. A little fitful wind was whimpering at the windows. Now and then a gust of rain pattered against the glass with a light rapid sound like finger-tips tapping. Felix had wandered away down the long dim room, his hands in his pockets, his shoulders hunched as he stood with his back to us, and his nose close to the packed shelves of books against the farther wall. The tiny gilt letterings on the old bindings glimmered faintly in the lamplight. He seemed to be searching among all those little dim signs for an explanation. Far away beyond the network of gardens and old muffling houses one heard from some distant street the hoot of a motor. From the translucent depths of gleaming glass cabinets the small mute mysterious figures of jewelled heathen gods and little bronze Buddhas and curious carved jade monsters looked out at us as if through sheets of water.

Under the aged shadowy eaves of that room, full of strange old symbols and rare books and still rarer manuscripts, where so many ideas and faiths and records had been sifted, examined and relegated to dusty recesses, its occupants remained silent, staring at the new disturbing object of their mystification. Clémentine, tucked into a corner of the sofa, her boyish head that she dyed such a bad colour, on her hand, scrutinized the tip of her foot that she held high as if for better observation, in one of her characteristic angular attitudes. Her slipper dangled loose from her toe; now and then she gave it a jerk of annoyance.

They tried to take in the meaning of what they had read. The emotional content of that scrawled page was so strange to them as to appear almost shocking. They were rather frightened. Here indeed their philosophy of laughter broke down, for they loved Jane and could not make fun of her superstitions.

“We were never hard on her. We treated her gently.”

“Even when her seriousness bored us we were patient.”

“She can’t have loved us. We have never really known her then, after all.”

Clémentine jerked about. “I was always wanting her to take lovers. She wanted me to give up mine. Poor child—we were friends all the same.”

Felix’s falsetto came down to us in a shrill wail of exasperation.

“But we never attacked her religion. We left her alone. We were good to her.”

Clémentine nodded. “Yes, we were good.”

I remembered the day I had first brought Jane to them, clothed in her silks and sables, glittering with the garish light of her millions and her high cold social activities. I had brought her straight from the preposterous palace she had let Philibert build her to this deep dim nook where we laughed and scoffed at the world she lived in. I had been nervous then. I had been afraid they would find her impossible. But they had seen through the barbarous trappings, intelligent souls that they were. Hadn’t she realized how they had honoured her? Hadn’t she known what dependable people they were?

I heard Clémentine say it again. “We were good, but she thought we were wicked because we broke the ten commandments. She thought a lot of the ten commandments.”

“It was the puritan spinster looking at us over her shoulder all the time.”

And still they pondered and puzzled, bewildered, depressed, at a loss, annoyed by their incapacity to picture to themselves even so much as the place where she was, alone at that moment. “St. Mary’s Plains, Mohican County, Michigan” was the address she gave. What an address to expect any one to take seriously. If it had been a joke the mixture of images would perhaps have conveyed something to them, but as a serious geographic sign they could do nothing with it. It had the character of a new glazed billboard, of a big glaring advertisement for some parvenu’s patent. To think of Jane sitting down away off there in the middle of a desert under it was too much for them. But the very outrageousness of the enigma helped them.

“She couldn’t do it from inclination,” some one of them said at last. “There must have been something terrible.”

Then it was that Ludovic startled us. He spoke slowly as if to himself.

“She was only beginning to learn how little conduct has to do with life. For others she had come to understand that what one does has little or no relation to what one is. I am convinced that she, poor child, is persuaded that she has committed some dreadful crime.”

But it was Clémentine who said the last word that I carried away with me.

“If she hadn’t married into your family,” she said, glaring out at me from the door of her taxi, “she would have been all right. Why, she should have chosen Philibert—”

“But, chérie amie, she didn’t. It was her mother who did it all.”

“Rubbish! She loved him. She loves him still.”

II

My mother was a Mirecourt. The family was of a prouder nobility than my father’s. Her people were of the Grand Chevaux de Lorraine. They fought with the English against the kings of France in the fourteenth century. One reads about them as fighters during several hundreds of years beginning with the Crusades. Sometimes they were on the right side, sometimes on the wrong. Later generations were not proud of the part they played in the siege of Orleans. But they were proud people and acted on caprice or in self-interest with a sublime belief in themselves. They did not like kings and were loth to give allegiance to any one. When Louis XI took away their lands, they went over to the king, but it is to be gathered from the letters of the time that they considered no king their equal. Richelieu was too much for them. He reduced them to poverty. To repair the damage the head of the family made a bourgeois marriage. They were sure of themselves in those days. Marrying money caused them no uneasiness nor fear of ridicule. My mother said one day when talking of Philibert and Jane—“We have done this sort of thing before but always with people of our own race who had a proper attitude. With foreigners one never knows.”

My father was a Breton. Anne of Brittany was the liege lady of his people. His aieux were worthy gentlemen who played an obscure but on the whole respectable part in history. An occasional spendthrift appeared now and then among them to add gaiety to their monotonous lives. The spendthrifts being few and the tenacity of the others very great, they amassed a considerable fortune and were ennobled by Louis XIV: a fact of which my aunt Clothilde used occasionally to remind us. Aunt Clothilde was my father’s sister. She had made a great match in marrying the first Duke of France, but she seemed to think nothing of that nor to have any consciousness of the obligations of her class. She made fun of the legitimists, scoffed at the idea of a restoration and despised the Duc d’Orleans for the way he behaved in England. She and my mother did not get on. My mother thought her vulgar. She was, but it didn’t detract from her being a very great lady. She was always enormously fat, a greedy, wicked old thing, with a ribald mind, but with a tremendous chic. Philibert called her La Gargantua. She was Rabelaisian somehow. I liked her. She never seemed conscious of my being different from other men, and she was kinder to Jane than the others.

There were a great many others. We made a large clan. It seemed strange to Jane that half the people in Paris were our cousins or uncles or aunts. But of course it is like that. One is related to everybody.

As a family we had the reputation of having very nice manners. It was thought that we knew very well how to make ourselves agreeable and what was more characteristic, how to be disagreeable without giving offense. My mother was reputed to be the only woman in Paris who could refuse an invitation to dinner in the same house six times running without making an enemy of its mistress. My mother was perpetually penning little plaintive notes of regret. She was greatly sought after and stayed very much at home. After my father’s death it became more and more difficult to get her to go anywhere, but she liked being asked so that she could refuse. The result was that she became something precious, inapproachable, a legend of good form and grace and she remained this always. I have on my table a miniature of her painted when she was married, at the age of eighteen. She was never a beauty. A slip of a thing, gentle and pale, with dark ringlets and very bright intelligent eyes. Her power of seduction was a thing that emanated from her like a perfume, indefinable and elusive. Claire, my sister, has the same quality.

One of my mother’s special pleasures as she grew older consisted in having her dinner in bed on some grand gala evening, and telling herself that she was the only lady of any importance in Paris who had refused to be present. Sometimes on such evenings she would send for me to come and sit with her for an hour. I would find her propped up on her pillows, her eyes glowing with animation under the soft old-fashioned frill of her voluminous boudoir cap, and presently I would become aware that she was submitting me to all the play of her wit and her charm, and I would know that out of a pure spirit of contradiction she was giving me, her poor ugly duckling, the treat that she had withheld from that brilliant gathering, whether to amuse me most or herself it would be difficult to tell. We understand each other. Her manner to me was always perfect. It was a beautiful and elaborate denial of the fact that my deformity was unpleasant to her. She went to a lot of trouble to pretend that she liked having me about. If she wanted a cab called in the rain and there wasn’t a servant handy—we didn’t have too many—it was a part of her delicacy to ask me to do it rather than have me think that she had my infirmity constantly on her mind. If she required an escort to some public place she would choose me rather than Philibert, but she would not always choose me, lest I should come to feel that she forced herself to do so. She had the humblest way of asking my advice, and then when she did not take it, went to the most childlike manœuvres to deceive me and make me think she had. When I came back from school in England, I remember wondering what she would do about me and her friends. She had an evening a week and received on these occasions a number of stiff old gentlemen and gossipy dowagers, a handful of priests and all the aunts and uncles and cousins. The question for her was whether she should inflict on me the penance of talking to these people in order to show me that she liked to have me about, or whether she would let me off attendance and trust to my superior understanding to assume that I was in her eyes presentable. I believe she would have decided on the latter bolder plan, had I not taken the matter out of her hands by asking her to excuse me. Her answer was characteristic.

“But naturally, mon enfant. You don’t suppose that I think these old people fit company for you. Only if it’s not indiscreet, tell me sometimes about your doings. I, at least, am not too old nor yet too young to be told.”

Dear mother. She would have gone to the length of imputing to me a dozen mistresses if she had thought that would help me. And yet in spite of it all, perhaps just because of it all, I knew that the sight of me was intolerable to her. But this I feel sure was a thing that she never knew that I knew. It was a part of my business in life never to let her find it out.

My being sent to England to school had been to me a proof. Though my father had taken the decision I knew it was to get me out of my mother’s way. It was not the habit of our family to send its sons abroad for their education. Philibert had had tutors at home. None of my cousins had gone away. We were as a clan not at all given to travelling. In the extreme sensitiveness that engulfed me like an illness during a certain period of my youth, I had told myself bitterly that I was banished because they could not abide the sight of me, but my bitterness did not last, thank God; and when after my father’s death I came home to live, I set myself to matching my mother’s delicacy with my own. I arranged to convey to her the impression of being always at hand and yet I managed to be actually in her presence a minimum of time. I did things for her that I could do without being aggravatingly near her; such things as running errands and visiting her lawyer and looking after her meagre investments, accumulating these duties while at the same time I withdrew more and more from sharing in her social activities.

I had kept, for reasons of economy and in order to be near her, my apartment in a wing of her house over the porter’s lodge, in that part of the building that screened the house from the street. My windows looked on the one side across the street into some gardens and on the other side into our court yard. From my dressing-room I had a view of my mother’s graceful front door with the wide shallow steps before it and the gravel expanse of the inner carriage drive. Sometimes when I came home in the evening, Madame Oui, the concierge’s wife, would tap on the glass in her door that was just opposite my own little entrance behind the great double portals that barred us into our stronghold, and would tell me that my mother had come in and would like to see me. Or I would find a note bidding me come to her lying on my table. She wrote me a great number of notes, sprightly amusing missives that reminded one of the fact that Frenchwomen have been for centuries mistresses in the art of letter-writing. They gave me the news, recounted the latest family gossip, contained tips as to how to behave if I came across an aunt who owed her money, or an uncle who had lent her some, warned me against this or that person whom she did not want to see any more, asked me to pay a call on one of her ancient followers who was in bed with a cold, enclosed a tiresome bill that she hadn’t the money to pay immediately, or implored me in witty phrases of complaint to use my influence with Philibert and try to get him away from some woman: in all of which matters I did my best to meet her wishes save as regarded my brother. “My influence with Philibert” was one of my mother’s least successful fictions. I wonder even now that she kept it up. I suppose it would have seemed to her shocking to admit even tacitly that her two sons never spoke to each other if they could help it. Yet she must have known that although he lived nominally in my mother’s house up to the time of his marriage I scarcely ever saw him unless at a distance in some crowded salon. The few mutual friends we possessed never asked us to dinner or lunch together, and strangely enough in the one place where we might often have happened to come across one another, that is in my mother’s own boudoir, we never did meet. My mother must have managed this. She must have manœuvred to prevent such encounters. She arranged to see us always separately and yet continued to talk to us, each to the other, as if she supposed that beyond her door we were amusing ourselves together, thick as thieves.

She would say—“I hear this latest friend of Philibert’s whom he has so made the mode this year, is really quite pretty. Tell me what she looks like,”—assuming me to be perfectly aware of this affair. Or—“Your brother’s new tailor is not successful at all. He gives him the most exaggerated shoulders. Fifi is not tall enough to stand it. I wish you would get him to go back to the old one.” Or even—“Tell me what your brother is up to. I never see him.” As if I knew what Philibert was up to.

My rare meetings with him took place at my sister’s. She used sometimes to have us at her house together. Her husband would bring him home to lunch unexpectedly, or I would drop in unbidden and find him there. Poor Claire had married the biggest automobile works in the country, and had been taken to Neuilly and shut up there in a gigantic villa. She was finding that it tasked her philosophical docility to the utmost to meet the demands of the uxorious individual who paid all her bills from his own cheque book and was generous only in the way of supplying her with babies. She had had four in six years, and her health was a source of anxiety to my mother, who was frankly exasperated by the turn her daughter’s affairs had taken.

“My dear,” she said to me one night on her return from Neuilly, “I supposed that that man had married Claire to get into society, and now that I’ve given her to him he has taken her off to the wilderness. I don’t know what to make of it. The poor child is wasting away. He simply never leaves her alone. They go to bed together every night at ten o’clock. It is horrible.”

Claire may have bemoaned her lot to my mother in those long tête-à-têtes of theirs, but she never complained to me, nor did she, I believe, to Philibert, who was in the habit of borrowing money from her large, oily, sleek-headed husband. She had some of my mother’s mannerisms, her little way of quickly moving her head backwards with the slightest toss; the same light flexible utterance; the same sigh and sudden droop of irrepressible languor. I believe her to be the only person of whom Philibert was ever unselfishly fond. She pleased him. Her physical frailty, appealed to his taste which was in reality so fastidious, however vulgar some of his amusements might be, and her mocking spirit was congenial to him. When one thought of Claire one thought of her dark shadowed eyes with the deep circles under them marking the tender cheeks, and her truly beautiful smile. She was a collection of odd beauties combined in a way to make one’s heart ache, but there was something sharp in her—something hurting. Lovely Claire, cynical siren, how caressingly she spoke to me, how she drew out of my heart its tenderness, and how often she disappointed me. Not brave enough to be happy, far too intelligent not to know what she was missing, she took refuge in self-mockery and when faced with a crisis subsided into complete passivity.

One evening in the early summer, more than twenty years ago now, I found a note from my mother tucked in the crack of my door asking me to come to her at once as she had news for me of the utmost importance. I found my sister with her, and something in the attitude of the two women, who were so closely akin as to reproduce each one the same physical pose under the stress of a deep preoccupation, conveyed to me a suspicion that Philibert had that moment skipped out through the long open window. They sat, each in a high brocaded chair, their heads thrown back against their respective cushions, their hands limp in their laps and their eyes half-closed. I thought for an instant that both had fainted. My mother was the first to make a sign. She lifted an arm and in silence pointed a finger at a chair for me.

“Your brother,” she said, when once I was seated, “has sold this house over my head. He is going to be married.”

“To a little American girl,” breathed Claire.

“The fortune is immense,” added my mother.

“The daughter of that awful smart Mrs. Carpenter,” said Claire, opening wide her eyes the better to take in the horror.

“She asked me three times to luncheon,” said my mother. “I have never seen her.”

I looked from one to the other—“But if the fortune is immense—” I ventured.

“It is all tied up,” wailed my mother. “Her trustees insist on his debts being paid beforehand. I understand nothing—but nothing.” Her head dropped forward. She pressed her thumb and forefinger against her worn eyelids. She began to cry.

Claire, with a strange sidelong look at her expressive of compassion and exasperation and wonder, got up and walked to the window and stood with her back to us looking out into the garden.

“I should have thought my son-in-law would have saved me this humiliation,” said my mother, fumbling with her left hand for her handkerchief. “But Claire says he has already lent Philibert very considerable sums.” I saw my sister’s slender figure stiffen. “What curious people Americans are. It seems that the father made such a will as passes belief. The child comes into the entire fortune but can only dispose of the income. The mother has an annuity, Claire says it must be a big one as she entertains a great deal. Why did you not tell me your brother was getting so dreadfully into debt? The girl is just eighteen. It appears that in America girls reach their majority at eighteen. Her name is Jane. A most unpleasant name. Philibert says she is not pretty. These mésalliances are so tiresome. If only he could have married that exquisite little Bianca. I shall be obliged to receive the mother. I am sure she has a very strong accent.”

My poor mother stretched out her hand to me. “What is to become of us?” she wailed gently. I felt very sorry for her. I understood that she was afraid of the invasion of a horde of big noisy strangers. I tried to comfort her. She seemed to me for the first time pitiful, and I saw that her youthfulness was after all, just one of the illusions she cast by the exercise of her will. It fell from her that evening as if it had been some gossamer veil destroyed by her tears.

Claire remained silent. Only once during all my mother’s broken lament did she speak, and then she said without turning—“I should have thought one such marriage in a family was enough.”

It transpired that Philibert needed five hundred thousand francs to put him straight, that the house was being sold for a million and that the remaining half was my mother’s, since they owned the property between them. He had brought her the deed of sale to sign that afternoon, and had gone away with the signature in his pocket. She said—“Naturally I could not refuse. It is not as if he could have sold half the building.”

I felt humiliated for my mother. It seemed to me that my brother had injured her in a most offensive way. There was a kind of indecency about the proceeding that made me ashamed. It was the kind of thing I had hoped we were none of us capable of doing. He was taking away from her not only her shelter and security, but a part of her own personality. It was as outrageous as if he had forced her to cut off her hair and had taken it round to a wigmaker to turn into a handful of gold. I saw that without that fine old house, so like her own self expressed in architecture, with its bland and graceful exterior and delicate ornamented rooms, she would lose a vital part of her entity. She was not one of those people whose public and private selves are distinct. The proud little bright-eyed lady who drove out of those stately doors in her brougham to dispense finely gradated smiles to the meticulously selected people of her acquaintance, and the passionate intriguing mother so given to subterfuges of kindness and ineffable make-believe of disinterested affection, were one and the same person. She had no special manner for the world. There was no homely naturalness for her to subside into, no loose woolly dressing-gown of conduct and no rough carpet slippers of laziness to don in the presence of her family or by her lonely self. What she was when in attendance on the Bourbons that she was in her own silent bedroom. Even about her weeping there was a certain style. Her tears were pitiful but not ugly. They had destroyed the illusion of her youthfulness, but they had not marred her elegance. There was measure and appropriateness and dramatic worth in her weeping. Her son had not broken her heart or her spirit; he had merely dragged off some of her clothing. She stood denuded, impoverished, a little shrunken in stature, that was all. It was that that enraged me. I said—“What a brute.” My mother pulled me up sharply.

“My son,” she said to me, with more of haughtiness than I had ever seen in her manner to any one of us. “I have consented to do what your brother has asked. I have approved of his conduct. That is sufficient.”

I felt then the finality, the hopelessness. I believe I smiled. The change was sudden. It had always been like that with mother. She might complain of Philibert but no one could criticize him to her.

“Ah, well,” I said, “if you have made up your mind to accept her—”

Mother lifted her head quickly. “Whom?”

“Your new daughter-in-law.”

I am almost sure that she turned pale. I cannot have imagined it. Her words too, gave me the same painful impression.

“I have accepted it, not her, as yet.”

And suddenly I thought of the girl, Jane Carpenter, whom I had not yet laid eyes on, with an immense pity.

“Yes,” said Claire, coming back to us, and looking at us with her least charming, most bitterly mocking air. “We prepare a nice welcome for her. I wonder how she will like us.”

But my mother had the last word.

“We shall, I presume, know how to make ourselves agreeable,” she said, putting away her handkerchief into her little silk bag. I saw that she would shed no more tears over the girl, Jane Carpenter.

III

Mrs. Carpenter was an American who apologized for her own country. She had found it incapable of providing a sufficient field of activity for her social talents and called it crude. The phrase on her lips was funny. There was much about her that was funny, since one could not in the face of her bright brisk self-satisfaction call her pathetic.

The flattery of such migrations as hers is mystifying to Parisians like myself, who know that our city is the most delightful place in the world, but do not quite understand why so many foreigners like Mrs. Carpenter should find it so. She seemed to derive an immense satisfaction from the fact that she lived in Paris. But why? Where lay the magic difference between her Paris and her New York? She had established herself in a large bright apartment in the Avenue du Bois de Bologne. Her rent was high, her furniture expensive, her table lavish, her motor had pale grey cushions and silver trimmings. All these things she could have had in New York. She might have paid a little more for them over there, but that would only have added to her pleasure. She liked to pay high prices for things. It may be that I am doing her an injustice. There were moments when her indefatigable pursuit of us all filled me with scornful pity and made me think that she did hide under her breezy successful manner a wistful and romantic admiration for things that were foreign and old, and a touching respect for things she did not understand. She once told me that she had wanted to take an old hotel in our quarter, something with atmosphere and a history and old-world charm. But somehow she had not found what she wanted. The houses she saw were dark and gloomy and insanitary. They were wonderfully romantic but they had no bathrooms. She had wanted one in particular, had wanted it awfully, but the owner had insisted on staying on in little rooms under the roof, which meant his using her front stairs, so at last she had given up the idea. Her apartment was certainly not gloomy. It glittered with gold—golden walls, gold plate, gilt chairs. She ended by liking it immensely, but was sometimes a little ashamed of being so pleased with it. Perhaps, at odd moments, she called it crude.

I used to go there sometimes, long before Jane came to Paris. I am sorry now that I did. Had I known Mrs. Carpenter was going to be, for me, Jane’s mother, I would not have gone. It is not nice to remember that I used to make fun of Jane’s mother, and accept her hospitality with amused contempt. We all did. She was to us an object of good-humoured derision. Poor old Izzy. She fed us so well; she begged us so continually to come. She seemed to derive such pleasure from hearing the butler announce our names. I am sure she believed that awful flat of hers to be the social centre of a very distinguished society. The more of a mixture the better to her mind:—Austrians, Hungarians, Poles,—she liked having princes about, and their dark furtive eyes and beautifully manicured hands filled her with joy. It was only after Philibert got hold of her that she began to understand that perhaps, after all, too cosmopolitan a salon was not quite the thing. Philibert took her in hand. He had learned somehow about Jane. He already had his idea.

And now I come upon a curious problem. I find that two distinct Mrs. Carpenters exist in my mind, and I cannot reconcile them. One was a beautiful romantic creature whom Jane—far away in the Grey House in St. Mary’s Plains—called mother and wrote to once a week and loved with a pure flame of loyalty; the other was Izzy Carpenter, whose loud voice and tall elastic fashionable figure was so well-known in Paris: Busy Izzy, who was run by Philibert, and a group of young ne’er-do-weels. I find it very difficult to realize that this jolly slangy woman, with curly grey hair and a blue eye that could give a broad wink on occasion, was identical with the figure of poetry Jane dreamed about night after night in her little restless cot at the foot of her Aunt Patty’s four-poster bed. It is disturbing to think that even about this decided hard-edged vivacious woman there should have been such a difference of opinion, such a contrast of received impressions as to make one wonder whether she had any corporeal existence at all. I think of that stern humorous spinster Patience Forbes comforting the child who was always asking questions about her mother; I think of her taking the aching young thing on her gaunt knees in the old rocking chair with its knitted worsted cushion, and lulling that troubled eager mind to rest with stories of her mother’s childhood.

I can see the grim face of Patience Forbes while she searches her memory for pleasant things about her heartless prodigal sister. She sits in a bay window looking out into the back garden where there is a sleepy twittering of birds. The trams thunder past up Desmoine’s Avenue. The milkman comes up the path; the white muslin curtains billow into the peaceful room that smells of lavender and mint. There is sunlight on the old mahogany. Jane’s great-grandmother, in an oval frame, looks down insipidly, her eyes mildly shining between the low bands of her parted hair. And Jane has her arms round her Aunt Patty, and her face, so unlike the gentle portrait, is troubled and brooding, a sullen ugly little face with something strange, half wild, that recalls her father and frightens the good woman who holds her close and goes on answering questions about her sister Isabel. And then I think of Mrs. Carpenter not as Jane’s mother, but as the daughter of old Mrs. Forbes of the Grey House, and I am again bewildered. Those people in St. Mary’s Plains, Jane’s grandmother, her aunts and her uncle, were people of sense and character and taste. Who that knew Izzy Carpenter would have thought it? Who that knew Jane could deny it? I suspect Mrs. Carpenter of having been ashamed of them. Jane’s loyalty saved her from any such stupidity.

When I went to St. Mary’s Plains the other day, Jane showed me, on the wall of her uncle’s study, an old print representing the first log cabin of the French settler who had come there across the Canadian border in 1780. In the picture a Red Indian carrying a tomahawk and capped with feathers skulks behind the trees at the edge of the clearing, and in the foreground a group of Noah’s Ark cattle are guarded by a man with a gun. Under the print is written—“St. Marie les Plaines,” and the signature “Gilbert de Chevigné.” It was a Monsieur de Chevigné from Quebec, Jane told me, who built the Grey House. The name had been corrupted to Cheney; the Cheneys were her grandmother’s people. Many of the families in St. Mary’s Plains traced a similar history. The town in growing had cherished the story of its French foundation and its social element had grown to believe that it had a special sympathy with our country. Its well-to-do people were constantly coming from and going to France. With an indifference bordering on contempt, and an ease that suggested the consciousness of special claims and opportunities, they would cross the really tremendous expanse of territory that lay between their thresholds and the Atlantic sea-board, ignoring the existence of Chicago, Buffalo, Boston, Philadelphia and New York, and set sail for Cherbourg. It was considered a perfectly natural occurrence and one scarcely worthy of self-congratulation for a girl from St. Mary’s Plains to marry a foreigner of real or supposed distinction, but those who neither married abroad nor at home, but were led astray by the vulgar attraction of some rich man from the far west or east were the subject of pitying criticism. Such had been the case with Jane’s mother. Silas Carpenter had come bearing down on St. Mary’s Plains, a wild man from the great west; like a bison or a moose breaking into a mild and pleasant paddock. Isabel Forbes, headstrong, discontented, covetous, had fallen to his savage charm, his millions and the peculiar oppressive magnetism of his silence, that seemed filled with the memories of unspeakable experiences. The first rush to the goldfields of California loomed in the background of his untutored childhood. Later he had gone to the Klondike. Gold—he had dug it out of the earth with his own great hands. Then he had taught himself oddly from books. A speculator, a gambler, he had a passion for music, and played the flute. A strange mixture. To please Isabel’s family he gave up poker, went to church, was married in a frock-coat. People said he had Indian blood in his veins. It seems possible. He had the long head and slanting profile and the mild voice characteristic of the race. Society in St. Mary’s Plains was genuinely sorry for Isabel’s family when she married him. But she went away to New York to live and was forgotten until on Silas’ sensational death her departure for Paris revived interest in her doings.

“The Grey House” as it was known in St. Mary’s Plains, had the benevolent patriarchal air of a small provincial manor. Built sometime in the seventies it had not had too many coats of paint during its lifetime, and its calm exterior with the double row of comfortable windows each flanked by a pair of shutters was weather-stained and worn like the visage of some bland unconcerned person of distinction who is not ashamed to look in his old age a little like a weather-beaten peasant. It stood well back from the street in the centre of a wide plot of ground not large enough to be called a park, though containing a few nice trees. The lawn indeed merged in the most sociable way into the grounds of other neighbouring houses and ran smoothly down in front to the edge of the public side-walk where there was no wall or railing of any kind. A scarcely noticeable sign beside the path that led from the street to the front porch with its two wooden pillars said “Keep off the grass.”

There were only two storeys to the Grey House and a garret with dormer windows in the grey shingled roof, the rooms of the ground floor being raised only a foot or two from the level of the street, so that Jane’s grandmother, sitting in her armchair by the living-room window could look up over the tops of her spectacles and see and recognize her acquaintances who often even at that comfortable distance would bow or lift their hats to the little old lady as they passed.

Every one in St. Mary’s Plains knew the Grey House. When one of the Misses Forbes went shopping, she would say “Send it to the Grey House, please,” and the young man in the dry goods’ store would answer—“Certainly, Miss Forbes, it’ll be right along. Mrs. Forbes is keeping well, I hope? Let me see, it’s ten years since I was in her Sunday-school class.” And Miss Minnie—it was usually Minnie who did the shopping—would smile kindly at the chatty young man who certainly did not mean any harm.

The occupants of that house were people content to stay at home, who did not always know what day of the month it was, and who found a deep source of well-being in the realization that tomorrow would be like today. I imagine those gentlewomen doing the same thing in the same way year after year, wearing the same clothes made by the same family dressmaker, and opposing to the disturbing menace of events the quiet obstinacy of their contentment. I watch them at night go up the stairs together at ten o’clock, kiss one another at the door of their mother’s room and go down the dim corridor, Patty staying behind like a sentinel under the gas-jet, her bony arm lifted, waiting to turn the light still lower once they were safe behind their own closed doors. Jane in her bed used to hear their voices saying, “Good-night, mother dear, pleasant dreams. Good-night, Minnie. Good-night.” And if the man of the house, Jane’s Uncle Bradford, were at his club playing whist, Beth, from the rosy interior of her cretonne chamber would be sure to call out—“I left the front door on the latch for Brad. I suppose it’s all right.” And Patience would say—“Who would burgle this house?” And Minnie would add—“I put his glass of milk in his room.” And then there would be silence disturbed only by the sound of footsteps moving to and fro behind closed doors. And Jane would wait drowsily for Aunt Patty to come in and say “Good gracious, child, not asleep yet? It’s past ten o’clock.”

To the Forbes family the doings of the outer world were a pleasant distant spectacle that interested and amused but made them feel all the happier to be where they were. When a letter arrived from Izzy bearing its Paris postmark, they would read it together, become pleasantly animated over the news and then settle down with relief at the thought that they didn’t have to go over there and do all those things. The letter would then be added to a package bound with an elastic band and put away in the secretary until some one came to call and asked how Isabel was getting on.

I seem to see them all, on these occasions, sitting there in their habitual attitudes. I imagine the little grandmother, with the letter open in her black silk lap, adjusting her spectacles on the slender bridge of her arched nose, and Jane on a footstool beside her, waiting to listen once more with absorbing interest to the extracts from her mother’s letter that she already knew by heart, and the two or three friends sitting round rather primly on the old mahogany chairs, and Aunt Beth with her embroidery on the horsehair sofa, and Aunt Minnie making the tea, and Aunt Patty teaching one of her birds to eat from her lips at the window, and perhaps Uncle Bradford, who has come home from his office, visible across the hall through the door in his study with some weighty volume on his knees, and a good cigar between his lips. I seem to hear the purring song of the tea kettle and the pleasant sound of voices calling one another intimate names. I see the faded carpet with its dimmed white pattern and the stiff green brocaded curtains in their high gilt cornices, and the pleasant mixture of heterogeneous objects selected for use and comfort. I have in my nostrils the perfume of roses opening out in the warmth of the room, and of the newly baked cakes made for tea by Aunt Minnie, and still another finer perfume, the faint fresh fragrance of the spirit of that little old lady who ruled the house in gentleness and was beloved in the town. A humourous little old lady who was not afraid of death, and believed in the clemency of a Divine Father. She liked Jane to read aloud to her while she knitted,—Trollope, Charles Lamb, Robert Burns, were her favourites, and she enjoyed a good tune on the piano, and would beat time with her knitting needles when Beth played a waltz. But on Sundays Beth played hymns and the servants came in after supper to sing with the family “Rock of Ages,” “Jesus Lover of my Soul,” “Abide with Me.” Jane liked those Sunday evenings. They made her feel so safe, was the way she put it.

All the inmates of the Grey House were God-fearing but Minnie was the most religious. She had a talent for cooking and a craving for emotional religious experience. The kitchen of the Grey House was a very pleasant place with a window that gave onto the back verandah, and often on summer mornings Aunt Beth who was young and pretty, would take her sewing out onto this back porch while Aunt Minnie in the kitchen was making cakes, and they would talk through the open window with Jane curled up in the hammock beside Beth’s work-table. Beth, would call out in her very high small voice that expressed her plaintive dependence and blissful confidence in the protected life she so utterly loved—“Minnie, Minnie!” and the sound of the egg-beater in the kitchen would cease, and Aunt Minnie would call through the open window in her lower, deeper tone—

“Yes, what do you say?”

“I forgot to tell you that Mrs. Blatchford asked me if I’d ask you to make six cakes for the Woman’s Exchange Fourth of July Sale.”

And Aunt Minnie would exclaim—

“Good gracious. Six angel cakes, that makes thirty-six eggs.” While beating up the whites of eggs for her famous cakes Minnie would ponder on the power of mind over matter, the healing of physical pain by faith, and the ultimate purifying grace of the Divine Spirit. One day she announced that she had joined the Christian Science Church. The family took the news seriously. Jane’s grandmother turned very white. She leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes and whispered—“Oh, Minnie dear, I’m so sorry.” Uncle Bradford brought his fist down on a table with a crash and shouted—“Don’t you do it, Minnie. These newfangled religions are no good.” Beth wept. Patience said “Hmph.”

Jane didn’t like the new look on her Aunt Minnie’s face, but the religious mystery behind it had a worrying fascination. She listened to the talk of her elders hoping to learn about this new faith, but it was characteristic of them not to argue or discuss things that affected them deeply, so she learned little, and she was afraid to ask her Aunt Patience who seemed somehow not at all patient with Minnie just now. So she was reduced to talking it all over with Fan, her friend, who lived next door. They would sit astride the fence that divided the two back gardens and talk about God and their elders.

“Aunt Minnie has got a new religion,” Jane announced. “Religions are funny things. I don’t think I like them but they do do things to you.”

“Pooh! I know. It’s not half so queer as Mormons and Theosophites and Dowyites.”

“What’s all that?”

“The Mormons have lots of wives. They live in Salt Lake City and practice bigamy. The Dowyites are in Chicago. There’s a big church there full of crutches of all the lame people Dowy has cured by miracle.”

“Well, Aunt Minnie says there’s no such thing as being lame or sick, and everything is a miracle.”

“He-he! I’m not a miracle”