The Vehement Flame

A moody Maurice, who puzzled her, and a faultfinding Eleanor, whom she was too generous to understand, drove the sixteen-year-old Edith into a real appreciation of Johnny Bennett. With him, she was still in the stage of unsentimental frankness that pierced ruthlessly to what she conceived to be the realities; and because she was as unselfconscious as a tree, she was entirely indifferent to the fact that Johnny was a boy and she was a girl, Johnny, however, nearsighted and in enormous shell-rimmed spectacles, and still inarticulate, was quite aware of it; more definitely so every week,—for he saw her on Saturdays and Sundays. "And it's the greatest possible relief to talk to you!" Edith told him.

Johnny accepted the tribute as his due. They had been coasting, and now, on the hilltop, were sitting on their sleds, resting. "Gosh! it's hot!" Johnny said: he had taken off his red sweater and tied its sleeves around his neck; "zero? You try pulling both those sleds up here, and you'll think it's the Fourth of July," Johnny said, adjusting his spectacles with a mittened hand. He frequently reverted to the grumpy stage—yet now, looking at Edith, grumpiness vanished. She was breathless from the long climb, and her white teeth showed between her parted, panting lips: her cheeks were burning with frosty pink. Johnny looked, and looked away, and sighed.

"Johnny," Edith said, "why do you suppose Eleanor gives me so many call-downs? 'Course I hate music; and once I said she was always pounding on the piano—and she didn't seem to like it!" Edith was genuinely puzzled. "I can't understand Eleanor," she said; "she makes me tired."

"I should think she'd make Maurice tired!" Johnny said, and added: "That's the worst of getting married. I shall never marry."

"When I was a child," Edith said, "I always said that when I grew up I was going to marry Maurice, because he was just like Sir Walter Raleigh. Wasn't that a joke?"

Johnny saw nothing amusing in such foolishness; he said that Maurice was old enough to be her father! As for himself, he felt, he said, that marriage was a mistake. "Women hamper a man dreadfully. Still—I may marry," Johnny conceded; "but it will be somebody very young, so I can train her mind. I want a woman (if I decide to marry) to be just the kind I want. Otherwise, you get hung up with Eleanors."

Edith lifted her chin. "Well, I like that! Why shouldn't she train your mind?"

"Because," Johnny said, firmly, "the man's mind is the stronger."

Edith screamed with laughter, and threw a handful of snow in his neck. "B-r-r-r!" she said; "it's getting cold! I'll knock the spots out of you on belly bumps!" She got on her feet, shook the snow from the edge of her skirt, flung herself face down on her sled, and shot like a blue comet over the icy slope. Johnny sped after her, his big sled taking flying leaps over the kiss-me-quicks. They reached the bottom of the hill almost together, and Johnny, looking at her standing there, breathless and rosy, with shining eyes which were as impersonal as stars, said to himself, with emotion:

"She's got sense—for a girl." His heart was pounding in his broad chest, but he couldn't think of a thing to say. He was still dumb when she said good-by to him at Maurice's door.

"Why don't you come to dinner next Saturday?" she said, carelessly; "Maurice will be away all week on business; but he'll be back Saturday."

Johnny mumbled something to the effect that he could survive, even if Maurice wasn't back.

"I couldn't," Edith said. "I should simply die, in this house, if it wasn't for Maurice!"

As, whistling, she ran upstairs, Edith thought to herself that Johnny was a lamb! "But, compared to Maurice, he's awfully uninteresting." Edith, openly and audibly, compared every male creature to Maurice, and none of them ever measured up to him! His very moodiness had its charm; when he sat down at the piano after dinner and scowled over some new music, or when he lounged in his big chair and smoked, his face absorbed to the point of sternness, Edith, loving him "next to father and mother," watched him, and wondered what he was thinking about? Sometimes he came out of his abstraction and teased her, and then she sparkled into gay impertinences; sometimes he asked her what she thought of this or that phrasing, "...though you are a barbarian, Skeezics, about music"; sometimes he would pull a book from the shelf over his desk and read a poem to her; and he was really interested in her opinion,—ardently appreciative if he liked the poem; if he didn't, it was "the limit."

Maurice was at home that Saturday night for which Edith had thrown the careless invitation to Johnny; and Mrs. Newbolt also dropped in to dinner. It was not a pleasant dinner. Eleanor sat in one of her empty silences; saw Maurice frown at an overdone leg of lamb; heard her aunt's stream of comments on her housekeeping; listened to Edith's teasing chatter to Johnny;—"What can Maurice see in her!" She thought. Before dinner was over, she excused herself; she had a headache, she said. "You won't mind, Auntie, will you?"

Mrs. Newbolt said, heartily, "Not a bit! My dear mother used to—"

Eleanor, picking up little Bingo, went with lagging step out of the room.

"Children," said Mrs. Newbolt, "why don't you make taffy this evening?"

"That's sense," said Edith; "let's! It's Mary's night out. Sorry poor old Eleanor isn't up to it."

Maurice frowned; "Look here, Edith, that isn't—respectful."

Edith looked so blankly astonished that Mrs. Newbolt defended her: "But Eleanor does look old! And she'll lose her figger if she isn't careful! My dear grandmother—used to say, 'Girls, I'd rather have you lose your vir—'"

"Don't raise Cain in the kitchen, you two," Maurice said, hastily; "Eleanor hates noise."

Edith, subdued by his rebuke, said she wouldn't raise Cain; and, indeed, she and Johnny were preternaturally quiet until things had been cleared away and the taffy could be started. When it was on the stove, there was at least ten minutes of whispering while they watched the black molasses shimmer into the first yellow rings. Then Johnny, in a low voice, talked for a good while of something he called "Philosophy"—which seemed to consist in a profound disbelief in everything. "Take religion," said Johnny. "I'd like to discuss it with you; I think you have a very good mind—for a woman. Religion is an illustration of what I mean. It's a delusion. A complete delusion. I have ceased to believe in anything."

"Oh, Johnny, how awful!" said Edith, stirring the seething sweetness; "Johnny, be a lamb, and get me a tumbler of cold water, will you, to try this stuff?"

Johnny brought the water ("Oh, how young she is!" he thought), and Edith poured a trickle of taffy into it.

"Is it done?" Edith said, and held out the brittle string of candy; he bit at it, and said he guessed so. Then they poured the foamy stuff into a pan, and put it in the refrigerator. "We'll wait till it gets stiff," said Edith.

"I think," said Johnny, in a low voice, "your hair is handsomer than most women's. I'm particular about a woman's hair."

Edith, sitting on the edge of the table, displaying very pretty ankles, put an appraising hand over the brown braids that were wound around her head in a sort of fillet. "Are you?" she said, and began to yawn—but stopped short, her mouth still open, for Johnny Bennett was looking at her! "Let's go into the library," she said, hurriedly.

"I like it out here," Johnny objected.

But as he spoke Maurice lounged into the kitchen. "Stiff?" he said.

"No; won't be for ages," Edith said—and instantly the desire to fly to the library ceased, especially as Mrs. Newbolt came trundling in. With Maurice astride one of the wooden chairs, his blue eyes droll and teasing, and Mrs. Newbolt enthroned in adipose good nature close to the stove, Edith was perfectly willing to stay in the kitchen!

"I say!" Maurice said. "Let's pull the stuff!"

Johnny looked cross. "What," he asked himself, "are Maurice and Mrs. Newbolt butting in for?" Then he softened, for Maurice was teasing Edith, and Mrs. Newbolt was tasting the candy, and the next minute all was in delightful uproar of stickiness and excitement, and Johnny, exploding into wild cackles of laughter, felt quite young for the next hour.

Eleanor, upstairs, with Bingo's little silken head on her breast, did not feel young; she heard the noise, and smelled the boiling molasses, and knew that Mary would be cross when she came home and found the kitchen in a mess. "How can Maurice stand such childishness!" She lay there with a cologne-soaked handkerchief on her forehead, and sighed with pain. "Why doesn't he stop them?" she thought. She heard his shout of laughter, and Edith's screaming giggle, and moved her head to find a cool place on the pillow. "She's too old to romp with him." Suddenly she sat up, tense and listening; he was enjoying himself—and she was suffering! "If he had a headache, I would sit with him; I wouldn't leave him alone!" But she was sick in bed,—and he was having a good time—with Edith. Her resentment was not exactly jealousy; it was fear; the same fear she had felt when Maurice had told her how Edith had rushed into his room the night of the great storm, the fear of Youth! She moved Bingo gently, stroking him until he seemed to be asleep; then sat up, and put her feet on the floor. The folded handkerchief slipped from her forehead, and she pressed her hands against her temples. "I'm going downstairs," she said to herself; "I won't be left out!" She felt a sick qualm as she got on to her feet, and went over to look at herself in the mirror ... her face was pale, and her hair, wet with cologne, was pasted down in straggling locks on her forehead; she tried to smooth it. "Oh, I look old enough to be—his aunt," she said, hopelessly. When she opened her door she heard a little thud behind her; it was Bingo, scrambling off the bed to follow her; as she went downstairs, unsteadily, and clinging to the banisters, he stepped on her skirt, so she had to stoop and pick him up. At the closed kitchen door she paused for a moment, leaning against the wall; her head swam. Bingo, held in one trembling arm, put out his little pink tongue and licked her cheek. "I won't be left out," she said again. Just as her hand touched the knob there was an outburst of joyous yells, and a whack! as a lump of taffy, flung by one of the roisterers, hit the resounding panel of the door—then Mrs. Newbolt's fat chuckle, and Johnny's voice vociferating that Edith was the limit, and Maurice—"Edith, if you put that stuff in my hair, I'll skin you alive!"

"Boil her in oil!" yelled Johnny.

Eleanor turned around and crept back to the stairs; she caught at the newel post, and stood, gasping; then, somehow, she climbed up to her room. There, lifting Bingo into his basket, she sank on her bed, groping blindly for the damp handkerchief to put across her forehead. "Mary will give notice," she said. After a while, as the throbbing grew less acute, she said, "He's their age." Bingo, crawling out of his basket, scrabbled up on to the bed; she felt his little loving cold nose against her face.

"What a kid Johnny Bennett is!" Maurice told Eleanor. He was detailing to her, while he was scrubbing the stickiness of the kitchen festivities off his hands, what had happened downstairs. "But do you know, I believe he's soft on Edith! How old is he?"

"He's nearly nineteen. Children, both of them."

"Nineteen?" Maurice said, astounded. Nineteen! Johnny? "Why, I was nineteen, when—" He paused. She was silent. Suddenly Maurice felt pity. He had run the gamut of many emotions in the last four years—love, and fright, and repentance, and agonies of shame, and sometimes anger; but he had never touched pity. It stabbed him now, and its dagger blade was sawtoothed with remorse. He looked at his wife, lying there with closed eyes, her pillow damp where the wet handkerchief had slipped from her temples, and her beautiful mouth sagging with pain. "Oh, I must be nice to her, poor thing!" he thought. Aloud he said, "Poor Eleanor!"

Instantly her dark eyes opened in startled joy; his tenderness lifted her into indifference to that throbbing in her temples. "I don't mind anything," she said, "if you love me."

"Can't I do something for your head?"

"Just kiss me, darling," she said.

He kissed her, for he was sorry for her. But he was thinking of himself. "I was Johnny Bennett's age, when ... And I wanted to kiss her! My God! I may have to keep up this kissing business for—for forty years!" And whenever he was kissing her, he would have to think how he was deceiving her; he would have to think of Lily. Yes; he had been a "kid," like Johnny! How could she have done it! Pity sharpened into anger: How could she have taken advantage of a boy? Well; he had had his fling. To be sure, he was paying for it now, not only in anxiety about money, but in shame, and furtiveness, and the corroding consciousness of being a liar, and in the complete shipwreck of every purpose and ambition that a young man ought to have. "And that day, in the field, I called it love!" He would have been amused at the cynical memory, if he had not been so bitter. "Love? Rot! Still, I ought to be kinder to her;—but I can't bear to look at her. She's an old woman."

Eleanor put out her hot, trembling hand and groped for his. "Good night, darling," she said; "my head's better."

"So glad," he said.

The next morning, as Eleanor, rather white and shaky, was dressing, she said, "Edith doesn't seem to realize that she is too old to be so free and easy with Johnny Bennett—and you."

"She's getting mighty good looking," Maurice said.

"She has too much color," Eleanor said, quickly.

Maurice was right. During Edith's second winter in Mercer she grew prettier all the time; poor, speechless Johnny, looking at her through his spectacles, was quite miserable. He told some of his intimate friends that life was a bad joke.

"I shall never marry; just do some big work, and then get out. There is nothing really worth while. Mere looks in a woman don't attract me," Johnny said.

But that Maurice found "looks" attractive, began to be obvious to Eleanor, who, night after night, at the dinner table, watched the smiling, shining, careless thing—Youth!—sitting there on Maurice's right, and felt herself withering in the dividing years. As a result, the annoyance which, when Edith was a child, she had felt at her childishness, began to harden into irritation at her womanliness. "I wish I could get her out of the house!" she used to think, helplessly.

She felt this irritation especially when they all went, one night, to dine with Tom Morton, who had just married and gone to housekeeping. It was a somewhat looked-forward-to event, although Eleanor thought Edith too young to dine out, and also the shabbiness of Maurice's evening clothes was on her mind. "Do get a new dress suit!" she urged; and he gave the stereotyped answer: "Can't afford it."

They started for the Mortons' gayly enough; but Maurice's gayety went out like a candle in the wind when, as he followed Eleanor and Edith into the parlor, he saw, and after a puzzled moment recognized, the third man in the Morton dinner of six—the man who had stood in Lily's little hall and said that the child would "pull through." ... The spiritual squalor of that scene flashed back in sharp visualization: the doctor; Lily, her amber eyes overflowing with tears, kissing his hand; Jacky's fretful cry from upstairs.... Here he was! that same kindly medical man, "getting off some guff to Mrs. Morton," Maurice told himself, in agonized uncertainty as to what he had better do. Should he recognize him? Or pretend not to know him? It galloped through his mind that if he did "know" him, Eleanor would ask questions. Oh, he knew Eleanor's questions! But if he didn't "know" him, Doctor Nelson would know that questions might be asked. The instant's hesitation between the two risks was decided by Doctor Nelson. He put out his hand and said, "Oh, how are you?" So Maurice said, "Oh, how are you?" as carelessly as anybody else.

Eleanor, when the doctor was introduced, said, a little surprised, "You know my husband?"

"I think I've met Mr. Curtis somewhere," Doctor Nelson said, vaguely.

"He knows so many people I don't," she thought, but she said nothing. No one noticed her silence—or Maurice's, either! The doctor, and Morton, and the handsome bride, were listening to Edith, amused, apparently, at her crudity and ignorance.

"Oh yes," Eleanor heard her say; "Eleanor's voice is perfectly fine, father says. I'm not musical. Father says I don't know the difference between 'Yankee Doodle' and 'Old Hundred.' Father say—" and so on.

"She's tiresome!" Eleanor told herself. Later, as she sat at the little dinner table, all gay with flowers and the bride's new candlesticks and glittering bonbon dishes ("Hetty's showing off our loot," the bridegroom said, proudly), Eleanor, looking on, and straining sometimes to be silly like the rest of them, said to herself, bleakly, that the doctor, who looked fifty, had been asked on her account. When he began to talk to her it was all she could do to say, "Really?" or, "Of course!" at the proper places; she was absorbed in watching Edith—the vivid face, the broad smile, the voice so full of preposterous certainties! "I look old," she thought; and indeed she did—most unnecessarily! for she was only forty-four. Her throat suddenly ached with unshed tears of longing to be young. Yet if she had not been so bitter she would have seen that Maurice looked almost as old as she did! And no wonder. His consternation at the sight of Doctor Nelson had been panic! He could hardly eat. Naturally, the preoccupation of the two Curtises threw the burden of talk upon the others. Doctor Nelson gave himself up to his hostess, and Morton found Edith's ardors, upon every subject under heaven, most diverting; he teased her and baited her, and her eyes grew more shining, and her cheeks pinker, and her gayety more contagious with every repartee she flung back at him. Mrs. Morton struggled heroically with Maurice's heaviness, but she told her husband afterward, that Mr. Curtis was nearly as dull as his wife! "I couldn't make him talk!" she said. After a while she gave up trying to make him talk, and listened to Edith's story of what happened when she was a little girl and came to Mercer with her father:

"A terrible shipwreck!" Edith said; "I remember it because of Maurice's gallantry in giving the flopping girl his coat—he was a perfect Sir Walter Raleigh! Remember, Maurice?"

Maurice said, briefly, that he "remembered"; "if she says Dale, I'm dished," he thought; aloud, he said that the river was growing impossible for boating; which caused them to drop the subject of the flopping girl, and talk about Mercer's increasing dinginess, at which Edith said, eagerly:

"You ought to see our mountains—no smoke there!"

Then, of course, came tales of camping, and, most animatedly, the story of Eleanor's wonderful rescue of Maurice.

"She pulled that great big Maurice all the way down to Doctor Bennett's! And we were all so proud of her!"

Eleanor protested: "It was nothing at all." Maurice, in his own mind, was saying, "I wish she'd left me there!"

When the ladies left the gentlemen to their cigars, Edith was bubbling over with anxiety to confide to Mrs. Morton the joke about the "lady's cheeks coming off," and that gave the married women the chance to express melancholy convictions as to the wickedness of the world, to which Edith listened with much interest.

"I think my painted lady lives in Medfield," she said.

"Why, how do you know?" Eleanor exclaimed, surprised.

"Why, don't you remember the time I saw her, with that blue-eyed baby? She was just going into a house on Maple Street."

It was at this moment that the gentlemen entered, so there was no further talk of painted ladies; and, besides, Maurice was alert to catch Eleanor's eye, and go home! "Edith is capable of saying anything!" he was thinking, desperately.

However, Edith said nothing alarming, and Maurice was able to get her safely away from the powder magazine in the shape of the amiable doctor, who, following them a few minutes later, was saying to himself: "How scared he was! Yet he looks like a good fellow at bottom. A rum world—a rum world!"

The "good fellow" hurried his womenkind down the street in angry preoccupation. As soon as he and Eleanor were alone, he said, "When does Edith graduate?"

"She has two years more."

"Oh, Lord!" Maurice said, despairingly; "has she got to be around for two years?" Eleanor's face lightened, but Maurice was instantly repentant. "I ought to be ashamed of myself for saying that! Edith's fine; and she has brains; but—"

"She monopolized the conversation to-night," Eleanor said; "Maurice, it is very improper for her to keep talking all the time about that horrid woman!"

The sharpness of his agreement made her look at him in surprise. "She mustn't talk about Mrs. Dale!" he said, angrily.

"Dale? Is that her name?" said Eleanor.

"I don't know. I think so; didn't Edith call her that? Well, anyway, she mustn't keep talking about her!"

His irritation was so marked, that Eleanor's heart warmed; but she said, wearily, "I'll be glad myself when she graduates."

Edith, reflecting upon her first dinner party, wished Johnny had seen her, all dressed up. Then she pondered the possibilities of her allowance: If she was "going out," oughtn't she to have a real evening dress? But this daring thought faded very soon, for there didn't seem to be any dinner parties ahead. Mrs. Newbolt's supper table was, as Maurice said, sarcastically, the extent of the "Curtises' social whirl"—a fact which did not trouble him in the least! He had his own social whirl. He had made a man-circle for himself; some of the fellows in the office were his sort, he told Edith, and it was evident that their bachelor habits appealed to him, for he dined out frequently; and when he did, he was careful not to tell Eleanor where he was going, because once or twice, when he had told her, she had called up the club or house on the telephone about midnight to inquire if "Mr. Curtis had started home?" ... "I was worried about you, it was so late," she defended herself against his irritated mortification. He used to report these stag parties to Edith, telling her some of the stories he had heard; it didn't occur to him to tell any stories to Eleanor, because, as Henry Houghton had once said, Maurice and his wife didn't "have the same taste in jokes." When Edith chuckled over this or that witticism (or frowned at any opinion contrary to Maurice's opinion!) Eleanor sat in unsmiling silence. It was about this time Maurice fell into the way of saying "we" to Edith: "We" will have tea in the garden; "we" will put in a lot of bulbs on each side of the brick path; "we" will go down to the square and hear the election returns. Occasionally he remembered to say, "Why don't you come along, Eleanor?"

"No, thank you," she said; and sometimes, to herself, she added, "He keeps me out." The jealous woman always says this, never realizing the deeper truth, which is that she keeps herself out! Maurice did not notice how, all that winter, Eleanor was keeping herself out. She was steadily retreating into some inner solitude of her own. No one noticed it, except Mrs. O'Brien—and perhaps fat, elderly, snarling Bingo, who must sometimes, when his small pink tongue lapped her cheek, have tasted tears. By another year, Eleanor's mind had so utterly diverged from Maurice's that not even his remorse (which he had grown used to, as one grows used to some encysted thing) could achieve for them any unity of living. She bored him, and he hurt her; she loved him and tried to please him; he didn't love her, but tried to be polite; he was not often angry with her, he wasn't fond enough of her to be angry! So, forgetful of that security of the Stars—Truth!—to which he had once aspired, he grew dully used to the arid safety of untruth,—though sometimes he swore softly to himself at the tiresome irony of the office nickname which, with an occasional gilt hatchet, still persisted. He would remember that evening of panic at the Mortons', and think, lazily, "She can't possibly get on Lily's track!" So Lily lived in anxious thriftiness at 16 Maple Street; and Maurice, no longer acutely afraid of her, and only seeing her two or three times a year, was more or less able to forget her, in his growing pleasure in Edith's presence in his house—a pleasure quite obvious to Eleanor.

As for Edith, she used to wonder, sometimes, why Eleanor was so "up stage"? (that was her latest slang); but it did not trouble her much, for she was too generous to put two and two together. "Eleanor has nervous prostration," she used to tell herself, with good-natured excuse for some especial coldness; and she even tried, once in a while, "to make things pleasant for poor old Eleanor!" "I lug her in," she told Johnny.

"She's a dose," said Johnny.

"Yes," Edith agreed; "she's stupid. But I'm going to pull off a picnic, some Sunday, to cheer her up. 'Course you needn't come, if you don't want to."

Johnny, looking properly bored, said, briefly, "I don't mind."

This was in mid-September. "Are you game for it, Eleanor?" Edith said one night at dinner; "we can find some pleasant place by the river—"

"I know a bully place," Maurice said, "in the Medfield meadows; remember, Eleanor? We went there on our trolley wedding trip," he informed Edith.

Eleanor, struggling between the pleasure of Maurice's "remember," and antagonism at sharing that sacred remembering with Edith, objected; "It may rain."

"Oh, come on," Edith rallied her: "be a sport! It won't kill you if it does rain!"

But Maurice, after his impulsive recollection of the "bully place," remembered that the trolley car which would take them out to the river, must pass Lily's door; "I hope it will rain," he thought, uneasily.

However, on that serene September Sunday a week later, it didn't rain; and Maurice fell into the spirit of Edith's plans; for, after all, even if the car did pass Lily's ugly little house, it wouldn't mean anything to anybody! "I'll sit with my back to that side of the street," he told himself. "It's safe enough! And it will give Buster a good time." He didn't realize that he rather hankered for a good time himself; to be sure, he felt a hundred years old! But money was no longer a very keen anxiety (he had passed his twenty-fifth birthday); and the day was glittering with sunshine, and Edith would make coffee, and Eleanor would sing. Yes! Edith should have a good time!

They went clanging gayly along over the bridge, down Maple Street, and through the suburbs of Medfield until they came to the end of the car line, where they piled out, with all their impediments, and started for the river and the big locust.

"You'll sing, Nelly," Maurice said—Eleanor's face lighted with pleasure;—"and I'll tell Edith how a girl ought to behave on her wedding trip, and you can instruct Johnny how to elope."

Then, with little Bingo springing joyously, but rather stiffly, ahead of them, they tramped across the yellowing stubble of the mowed field, talking of their coffee, and whether there would be too much wind for their fire—and all the while Maurice was aware of Lily at No. 16; and Eleanor was remembering her hope of a time when she and Maurice would be coming here, and it would not be "just us"! and Johnny was thinking that Edith was intelligent—for a woman; and Edith was telling herself that this kind of thing was some sense!

Eleanor, sitting down under the old locust, watched the three young people. She wondered when Maurice would tell her to sing. "The river is a lovely accompaniment, isn't it?" she hinted. No one replied.

"I'm going in wading after dinner," Edith announced; "what do you say, boys? Let's take off our shoes and stockings, and walk down to the second bridge. Eleanor can sit here and guard our things."

"I'm with you!" Maurice said; and Johnny said he didn't mind; but Eleanor protested.

"You'll get your skirts wringing wet, Edith. And—I thought we were to sit here and sing?"

"Oh, you can sing any old time," Edith said, lifting the lid of the coffee pot and stirring the brown froth with a convenient stick.

"And I'm just to look on?" Eleanor said.

"Why, wade, if you want to," her husband said; "It's safe enough to leave Edith's things here."

After that he was too much absorbed in shooing ants off the marmalade to give any thought to his wife. The luncheon (except to her) was the usual delightful discomfort of balancing coffee cups on uncertain knees, and waving off wasps, and upsetting glasses of water. Maurice talked about the ball game, and Edith gossiped darkly of her teachers, and Johnny Bennett ate enormously and looked at Edith.

Eleanor neither ate nor gossiped; but she, too, watched Edith—and listened. Bingo, in his mistress's lap, had snarled at Johnny when he took Eleanor's empty cup away, which led Edith to say that he was jealous.

"I don't call it 'jealous,'" Eleanor said, "to be fond of a person."

"You can't really be fond of anybody, and be jealous," Edith announced; "or if you are, it is just Bingoism."

This brought a quick protest from Eleanor, which was followed by the inevitable discussion; Edith began it by quoting, "'Love forgets self, and jealousy remembers self.'"

Maurice grinned and said nothing—it was enough for him to see Eleanor hit, hard! But Johnny protested:

"If your girl monkeys round with another fellow," he said, "you have a right to be jealous."

"Of course," said Eleanor.

"No, sir!" said Edith. "You have a right to be unhappy. If the other fellow's nicer than you—I mean if he has something that attracts her that you haven't, of course you'd be unhappy! (though you could get busy and be nice yourself.) Or, if he's not as nice as you, you'd be unhappy, because you'd be so awfully disappointed in her. But there's no jealousy about that kind of thing! Jealousy is hogging all the love for yourself. Like Bingo! And I call it plain garden selfishness—and no sense, either, because you don't gain anything by it. Do you think you do, Maurice? ... For Heaven's sake, hand me the sandwiches!"

Maurice didn't express his thoughts; he just roared with laughter. Eleanor reddened; Johnny, handing the sandwiches, said that, though Edith generally could reason pretty well—for a woman—in this particular matter she was 'way off.

"You are long on logic, Edith," Maurice agreed; "but short on human nature; (she hasn't an idea how the shoe fits!)."

"The reason I'm so up on jealousy," Edith explained, complacently, "is because yesterday, in English Lit., our professor worked off a lot of quotations on us. Listen to this (only I can't say just exactly the words!): 'Though jealousy be produced by love, as ashes by fire, yet jealousy'—oh, what does come next? Oh yes; I know—'yet jealousy extinguishes love, as ashes smother flames.'"

"Who said that?" Maurice said.

Edith said she'd forgotten: "But I bet it's true. I'd simply hate a jealous person, no matter how much they loved me! Wouldn't you, Eleanor? Wouldn't you hate Maurice if he was jealous of you? I declare I don't see how you can be so fond of Bingo!"

Maurice, suddenly ashamed of himself for his pleasure in seeing Eleanor hit, was saying, inaudibly, "Good Lord! what will she say next?" To keep her quiet, he said, good-naturedly, "Don't you want to sing, Nelly?"

She said, very low, "No." Her throat ached with the pain of knowing that the one little contribution she could make to the occasion was not really wanted!

Maurice did not urge her. He and the other two took off their shoes and stockings; and went with squeals across the stubble, down a steep bank, to a pebbly point of sand, round which a sunny swirl of water chattered loudly, then went romping off into sparkling shallows. Edith's lifted skirt, as she stepped into the current, assured her against the wetting Eleanor had foreseen, and also showed her pretty legs—and Eleanor, on the bank, her tensely trembling hand cuddling Bingo against her knee, "guarded" her things! It was at this moment that her old, unrecognized envy of Youth turned into a perfectly recognizable fear of Age. Edith was a woman now, not a child! "And I—dislike her!" Eleanor said to herself. She sat there alone, thinking of Edith's defects—her big mouth, her bad manners, her loud voice; and as she thought,—watching the waders all the while with tear-blurred eyes until a turn in the current hid them—she felt this new dislike flowing in upon her: "He talks to her; and forgets all about me!" ... She was deeply hurt. "He says she has 'brains.' ... He doesn't mind it when she says she 'doesn't care for music,' which is rude to me! And she talks about jealousy! She knows I'm jealous. Any woman who loves her husband is jealous."

Of course this pathetically false opinion made it impossible for her to realize that jealousy is just a form of self-love, nor could she enlarge upon Edith's naïve generalization and say that, if a woman suffers because she is not the equal of the rival who gains her lover's love—that is not jealousy! It is the anguish of recognizing her own defects, and it may be very noble. If she suffers because the rival is her inferior, that is not jealousy; it is the anguish of recognizing defects in her lover, and it, too, is noble, for she is unhappy, not because he has slighted her, but because he has slighted himself! Jealousy has no such noble elements; it is the unhappiness that Bingo knows—an ignoble agony! ... But Eleanor, like many pitiful wives, did not know this. Sitting there on the bank of the river, without aspiration for herself or regret for Maurice, she knew only the anguish of being neglected. "He wouldn't have left me six years ago," she said; "He doesn't even ask me if I want to wade! I don't; but he didn't ask me. He just went off with her!"

Suddenly, her fingers trembling, she began to take off her shoes and stockings. She would do what Edith did! ... It was a tremor of aspiration!—an effort to develop in herself a quality he liked in Edith. She went, barefooted, with wincing cautiousness, and with Bingo stepping gingerly along beside her, across the mowed grass; then, haltingly, down the bank to the sandy edge of the river; there, while the little dog looked up at her anxiously, she dipped a white, uncertain foot into the water—and as she hesitated to essay the yielding mud, and the slimy things under the stones, she heard the returning splash of wading feet. A minute later the three youngsters appeared, Edith's skirts now very well above the danger line of wetness, and the two men offering eager guiding hands, which were entirely disdained! Then as, from under the leaning trees, they rounded the bend, there came an astonished chorus:

"Why, look at Eleanor!"

"Your skirt's in the water," Edith warned her; "hitch it up, and 'come on in—the water's fine!'"

She shook her head, and turned to climb up the bank.

"'The King of France,'" Edith quoted, satirically, "'marched down a hill, and then marched up again!'"

Eleanor was silent. When the three began to put on their shoes and stockings, Eleanor, putting on her own, her skirt wet and drabbled about her ankles, heard Maurice and Johnny offering to tie Edith's shoestrings—a task which Edith, with condescending giggles, permitted. Both of the boys—for Maurice seemed suddenly as much of a boy as Johnny!—went on their knees to tie, and re-tie, the brown ribbons, Maurice with gleeful and ridiculous deference.

"Want me to tie your shoestrings for you, Nelly?" he said over his shoulder.

"I am capable of tying my own, thank you," she said, so icily that the three playfellows looked at one another and Maurice, reddening sharply, said:

"Give us a song, Nelly!" But she sitting with clenched hands and tensely silent, shook her head. She was too wounded to speak. For the rest of the poor little picnic, with its gathering up of fragments and burning paper napkins—the conversation was labored and conscious.

On the trolley going home, Edith was the only one who tried to talk; Eleanor, holding Bingo in her lap, was dumb; and Johnny—hunting about for an excuse to "get away from the whole blamed outfit!" only said "M-m" now and then. But Maurice said nothing at all. After all, what can a man say when his wife has made a fool of herself?

"Even Lily would have had more sense!" he thought.

That dismal festivity of the meadow marked the time when Maurice began to live in his own house only from a sense of duty ... and because Edith was there! A fact which Eleanor's aunt recognized almost as soon as Eleanor did; so, with her usual candor, Mrs. Newbolt took occasion to point things out to her niece. She had bidden Eleanor come to dinner, and Eleanor had said she would—"if Maurice happened to be going out."

"Better come when he's not going out, so he can be at home and amuse Edith!" said Mrs. Newbolt. "Eleanor, my dear father used to say that women were puffect fools, because they never could realize that if they left the door open, a cat would put on his slippers and sit by the fire and knit; if they locked it, he'd climb up the chimney, but what he'd feel free to prowl on the roof!"

Eleanor preferred to "lock the door"; and certainly during that next winter Edith's gay interest in every topic under heaven was a roof on which Maurice prowled whenever he could! Sometimes he stayed at home in the evening, just to talk to her! When he did, those "brains" which Eleanor resented, made him indifferent to many badly cooked dinners—during which Eleanor sat at the table and saw his enjoyment, and felt that dislike of their "boarder," which had become acute the day of the picnic, hardening into something like hatred. She wondered how he endured the girl's chatter? Sometimes she hinted as much, but Edith never knew she was being criticized! She was too generous to recognize the significance of what she called (to herself) Eleanor's grouch, and Maurice's delight in such unselfconsciousness helped to keep her ignorant, for he held his tongue—with prodigious effort!—even when Eleanor hit Edith over his shoulder. If he defended her, he told himself, the fat would be in the fire! So, as no one pointed out to Edith what the grouch meant, she had not the faintest idea that Eleanor was saying to herself, "Oh, if I could only get rid of her!" And as no one pointed out to Eleanor that the way to hold Maurice was not to get rid of Edith, but to "open the door," that corrosive thing the girl had called "Bingoism" kept the anger of the day in the field smoldering in her mind. It was like a banked fire eating into her deepest consciousness; it burned all that winter; it was still burning even when the summer vacation came and Edith went home. Her departure was an immense relief to Eleanor; she told Maurice she didn't want her to come back, ever!

"Why not?" he said, sharply; "I like having her here. Besides, think of telling Uncle Henry we didn't want Edith next winter! If you have the nerve for that, I haven't." Eleanor had not the nerve; so when, at the end of June, Edith rushed home, it was understood that she would be with Maurice and Eleanor during the next term.... That was the summer that marked the seventh year of their marriage—and the fourth year of Jacky, over in the little frame house on Maple Street. But it was the first year of a knowledge, surprisingly delayed!—which came to Edith; namely, that Johnny Bennett was "queer."

It may have been this "queerness" which made her attach herself to Eleanor, who, in August, went to Green Hill for the usual two weeks' visit. Maurice had to go away on office business three or four times during that fortnight, but he came up for one Sunday. He had insisted upon Eleanor's going, because, he said, she needed the change. "Can't you come?" she pleaded. "Do take some extra time from the office!"

"And be docked? Can't afford it!" he said; "but I'll get one week-end in with you," he promised her, looking forward with real satisfaction to the solitude of his own house. So Eleanor, saying she couldn't understand why he was so awfully economical now that he had his own money!—came alone,—full of remorse at deserting him, and worry because of his loneliness, and leaving a pining Bingo behind her. But, to her silent annoyance, as soon as she arrived at Green Hill she encountered a new and tiresome attentiveness from Edith! Edith was inescapably polite. She did not urge upon Eleanor any of those strenuous amusements to which she and Johnny were devoted; she merely gave up the amusements, and, as Johnny expressed it, "stuck to Eleanor"! Eleanor couldn't understand it, and when Maurice at last arrived, Johnny's perplexity became audible:

"Perhaps," he told Edith, satirically, "you may be able, now, to tear yourself away from Eleanor, and go fishing with me? You fish pretty well—for a woman. Maurice can lug her round."

"I will, if Maurice will go, too," Edith said.

"What do you drag him in for?"—John paused; understanding dawned upon him: "She doesn't want to be by herself with me!" His tanned face slowly reddened, and those brown eyes of his behind the big spectacles grew keen. He didn't speak for quite a long time; then he said, very low, "I'll be here to-morrow morning at four-thirty. Be ready. I'll dig bait."

"All right," said Edith; after which, for the first time in her life, she played a shabby trick on Johnny Bennett; as soon as he had gone home, she invited Eleanor (who promptly declined), and Maurice (who as promptly accepted), to go fishing, too! Then, having got what she wanted, she reproached herself: "Johnny'll be mad as fury. But when he gets to saying things to me he makes me feel funny in the back of my neck. Besides, I want Maurice."

The fishermen were to assemble in the grayness of the August dawn; and Johnny was, as usual, prepared to throw a handful of gravel at Edith's window to hurry her downstairs. But when he loomed up in the mist, who should be on the porch, fooling with a rod, but Maurice!

"What's he butting in for?" Johnny thought, looking so cross that Edith, coming out with the luncheon basket, was really remorseful. "Hullo, Johnny," she said. ("I never played it on him before," she was thinking.) But at that moment her remorse was lost in alarm, for standing in the doorway was Eleanor, her hair caught up in a hurried twist, a wrapper over her shoulders, her bare feet thrust into pink bedroom slippers. (Forty-six looks fifty-six at 4.30 A.M.)

"Darling," Eleanor said, "I believe I'd like to go up to the cabin to-day. Do let's do it—just you and I!"

The three young people all spoke at once:

Johnny said: "Good scheme! We'll excuse Maurice."

Edith said, "Oh, Eleanor, Maurice loves fishing!"

And Maurice said: "I sort of think I'd like to catch a sucker or two in this pool Johnny is always cracking up. I bet he's in for a big jolt about his trout! You come, too?"

"I'd get so awfully tired. And I—I thought we could have a day together up on the mountain," she ended, wistfully.

There was a dead silence. Johnny was thinking: "Gosh! I hope she gets him." And Edith was thinking, "I'd like to choke her!" Maurice's thoughts could not be spoken; he merely said, "All right; if you want to."

"I don't believe I'll go fishing, either," Edith said.

Eleanor, on the threshold, turned quickly: "Please don't stay at home on my account!"

But Maurice settled it. "I'll not go," he said, patiently; "but you must, Edith." He threw down his rod and went into the house; Eleanor, in her flopping pink slippers, hurried after him....

"I did so want to have you to myself," she said; "you don't mind not going fishing with those children, do you?"

He said, listlessly: "Oh no. But don't let's attempt the cabin stunt." Then he stood at the window and watched Johnny and Edith, with fishing rods and lunch basket, disappear down the road into the fog. He was too bored to be irritated; he only counted the hours until he could get back to Mercer, and the office, and the table under the silver poplar. "I'll get hold of the Mortons, and Hannah can give us some sort of grub, and then we'll go to a show," he thought. "I can stick it out here for thirty-six hours more."

He stuck it out that morning by sitting in Mr. Houghton's studio, one leg across the arm of his chair, reading and smoking. Once Eleanor came in and asked him if he was all right. He said, briefly, "Yes."

But she was uneasy: "Maurice, I'll play tennis with you?"

This at least made him chuckle. "You? How long since? My dear, you couldn't play a set to save your life!"

After that she let him alone for a while. Early in the afternoon the need to make up to him for what she had done grew intolerable: "Darling, let's play solitaire?"

"I'm going to write letters."

She left him to his letters for an hour, then came again: "Let's walk!"

"Well, if you want to," Maurice said, and yawned. So they trudged off. Eleanor, walking very close to her husband, was thinking, heavily, how far they were apart; but she did her best to amuse him by anxious ponderings of household expenses. He, sheering off to the other side of the road to escape her intimate and jostling shoulder, was thinking of the expenses of another household, and making no effort whatever to amuse her. His silence confessed an irritation which she felt but could not understand; so by and by she fell silent, too, though the helpless tears stood in her eyes. Then, apparently, he put his annoyance, whatever it was, behind him.

"Nelly," he said, "let's go down by the West Branch and meet Edith and Johnny? They'll be coming home that way, 'laden with trout,' I suppose," he ended, sarcastically.

Eleanor began to say, "Oh no!" Then something, she didn't know what, made her say, "Well, all right." As they turned into the wood road that ran up toward the mountain, she said another unexpected thing:

"Maurice, I'm tired. I'll go home; you go on by yourself, and—and meet Johnny." She didn't know, herself, why she said it! Perhaps, it was just an effort to make up for what she had done in the morning?

Maurice, astonished, made some half-hearted protest; he would go back with her? But she said no, and walked home alone. Her throat ached with unshed tears. "He likes to be with her! He doesn't want me,—and I love him—I love him!"

The two youngsters had made a long day of it. On their way to the brook that morning, crashing through underbrush, climbing rotting rail fences that were hidden in docks and briers, balancing on the precarious slipperiness of mossy rocks, the triumphant Johnny, his heart warm with gratitude to Eleanor, had led his captive and irritated Edith. When they broke through low-hanging boughs and found the pool, the trout possibilities of which Johnny had so earnestly "cracked up," Edith was distinctly grumpy. "Eleanor is a selfish thing," she said. "Gimme a worm."

"I think Maurice would have been cussedly selfish not to do what she wanted," Johnny said; "my idea of marriage is that a man must do everything his wife wants."

"Maurice is never selfish! He's great, simply great!" Edith said.

"Oh, he's decent enough," Johnny admitted, then he paused, frowning, for he couldn't open his bait box; he banged it on a stone, pried his knife under the lid, swore at it—and turned very red. Edith giggled.

"Let me try," she said.

"No use; the rotten thing's stuck."

But she took it, shook it, gave an easy twist, and the maddening lid—loosened, of course, by Johnny's exertions—came off! Edith shrieked with joy; but Johnny, though mortified, was immensely relieved. They sat down on a sloping rock, and talked bait, and the grave and spectacled Johnny became his old self, scolding Edith for talking so loudly. "Girls," he said, "are born not fishermen!" Then they waded out into the stream, and began to cast. It was broad daylight by this time, and the woods were filling with netted sunbeams; the water whispered and chuckled.

"Pretty nice?" Johnny said, in a low voice; and Edith, all her grumpiness flown, said:

"You bet it is!" Then, as an afterthought, she called back, "But Eleanor is the limit!"

Johnny, forgetting his gratitude to Eleanor, said, savagely: "Keep quiet! You scared him off! Gosh! girls are awful."

So Edith kept quiet, and he wandered up the stream, and she wandered down the stream, and they fished, and they fished—and they never caught a thing.

"I had one bite," Johnny said when, at about eleven, fiercely hungry, they met on the bank where they had left their lunch basket; "but you burst out about Eleanor, and drove him off. Girls simply can't fish."

Edith was contrite—but doubted the bite. Then they sat down on a mossy rock, and ate stacks of sandwiches and hard-boiled eggs, and watched the water, and talked, talked, talked. At least Edith talked—mostly about Maurice. Johnny lit his pipe, puffed once or twice, then let it go out and sat staring into the green wall of the woods on the other side of the brook. Then, suddenly, quietly, he began to speak....

"I want to say something."

"The mosquitoes here are awful!" Edith said, nervously; "don't you think we'd better go home?"

"Look here, Edith; you've got to be half decent to me—unless, of course, you've soured on me? If you have, I'll shut up."

"Johnny, don't be an idiot! 'Course I haven't soured on you. You're the oldest friend I've got. Older than Maurice, even."

"Well, I guess I am an older friend than Maurice! But lately you've treated me like a dog. You skulk round to keep from being by ourselves. You never give me a chance to open my head to you—"

"Johnny, that's perfectly absurd! I've had to look after Eleanor—"

"Eleanor nothing! It's me you want to shake."

"I do not want to shake you! I'm just busy."

"Edith, I care a lot about you. I don't care much for girls, as a rule. But you're not girly. And every time I try to talk to you, you sidestep me."

"Now, Johnny—"

"But I'm going to tell you, all the same." He made a clutch at the sopping-wet hem of her skirt. "I will say it! I care an awful lot about you. I'm not a boy. I want to marry you."

There was a dead silence; then Edith said, despairingly, "Oh, Johnny, how perfectly horrid you are!" He gasped. "You simply spoil everything with this sort of ... of ... of talk."

"You mean you don't like me?" His face twitched.

"Like you? I like you awfully! That's why I'm so mad at you. Why, I'm awfully fond of you—"

"Edith!"

"I mean I never had a friend like you. I've always liked you ten times better than any silly old girl friend I ever had. I've liked you almost as much as Maurice. Of course I shall never like anybody as much as Maurice. He comes next to father and mother. But now you go and—and talk ... I just can't bear it," Edith said, and fumbled for her pocket handkerchief; "I hate talk." Her eyes overflowed.

"Edith! Look here; now, don't! Honestly, I can stand being turned down, but I can't stand—that. Edith, please! I never saw you do that—girl stunt. I'll never bother you again, if you'll just stop crying!"

Edith, unable to find her handkerchief, bent over and wiped her eyes on her dress. "I'm not crying," she said, huskily; "but—"

"I think," John Bennett said, "honestly, Edith, I think I've loved you all my life."

"And I have loved you," she said; "You are a lamb! Oh, Johnny, I'm perfectly crazy about you!"

His swiftly illuminating face made her add, hastily, "and now you go and spoil everything!"

"I won't spoil things, Skeezics," he said, gently; "oh, say, Edith, let up on crying! That breaks me all up."

But Edith, having discovered her handkerchief, was mopping very flushed cheeks and mumbling on about her own woes. "Why can't you be satisfied just to go on the way we always have? Why can't you be satisfied to have me like you almost as much as I like Maurice?"

"Maurice!" the young man said, with a helpless laugh. "Oh, Edith, you are several kinds of a goose! In the first place, Maurice is married; and in the second place, he's old enough to be your father—"

"He isn't old enough to be my father! And I shall never like anybody as much as Maurice, because there isn't anybody like him in the entire world. I've always thought he was exactly like Sir Walter Raleigh. Besides, I shall never marry anybody! But I mean, I don't see why it isn't enough for you to have me awfully fond of you?"

"Well, it isn't," Johnny said, briefly, "but don't you worry." He was white, but his tenderness was like a new sense. Edith had never seen this Johnny. Her entirely selfish impatience turned to shyness. "Edith," he said, very gently, "you don't understand, dear. You're awfully young—younger than your age. I didn't take in how young you were—talking about Maurice! I suppose it's because you know so few girls, that you are so young. Well; I can't hang round with you any more, as if we were ten years old. You see, I—I love you, Edith. That makes the difference ... dear."

"Oh," said Edith, desperately, "how perfectly horrid—" She looked really distracted, poor child! (but that was the moment when her preposterous youthfulness ceased.) She jumped to her feet so suddenly that Johnny, who had begun, his fingers trembling, to scrape out the bowl of his pipe, dropped his jackknife, which rolled down the steeply sloping rock into the water. "Oh, I'm so sorry!" Edith said.

John sighed. "Oh, that's nothing," he said, and slid over the moss and ferns to the water's edge; there, lying flat on his stomach, his sleeve rolled up, he thrust his bare white arm into the dark and troutless depths of the pool, and salvaged his knife. Edith, on the bank, began furiously to pack up. When Johnny climbed back to her she said she wanted to go home, "now!"

"All right," he said again, gently.

So, silently, they started homeward; and never in her life had Edith been so glad to see any human creature as she was to see Maurice on the West Branch Road! But she let him do all the talking. To herself she was saying, "It's all Eleanor's fault for not letting him come this morning! I just hate her!..."

That night her father said to her mother, rather sadly, "Mary, our little girl has grown up. Johnny Bennett is casting sheep's eyes at her."

"Nonsense!" said Mary Houghton, comfortably; "she's a perfect child, and so is he."

Curiously enough, though Edith's mother did not recognize what was going on between "the children," Eleanor did. When she came back to Mercer, a week later, she overflowed about it to Maurice. "Calf love!" she summed it up.

"She didn't look down on that kind of love seven years ago," he thought, cynically. But he didn't say so; no matter what his thoughts were, he was always kind to Eleanor. Lily, over in Medfield; Lily, in the small, secret house; Lily, with the good-looking little boy—blue-eyed, rosy-cheeked, blond-haired!—the squalid memory of Lily, said to him, over and over: "You are a confounded liar; so the least you can do is to be decent to Eleanor."

So he was kind.

"I couldn't bear myself," he used to think, "if I wasn't—but, O Lord!"

That "O Lord!" was his summing up of a growing and demoralizing sense of the worthlessness and unreality of life. Like Solomon (and all the rest of us, who see the universe as a mirror for ourselves!) he appraised humanity at his valuation of himself. He didn't use Solomon's six words, but the eight of his generation were just as exact—"The whole blooming outfit is a rotten lie! If," he reflected, "deceit isn't on my 'Lily' line, it is on a thousand other lines." From the small cowardices of appreciations and admirations which one did not really feel, up through the bread-and-butter necessities of business, on into the ridiculousness of what is called "Democracy" or "Liberty"—on, even, into those emotional evasions of logic and reason labeled "Religion"—all lies—all lies! he told himself. "And I," he used to think, looking back on seven years of marriage, "I am the most accomplished liar of the whole shootin' match!... If they get off that G. Washington gag on me any more at the office, somebody'll get their head punched."

All the same, even if he did say, "O Lord!" he was carefully kind to his boring wife.

But when Edith (suddenly grown up, it seemed to Maurice) came back for the fall term, he said "O Lord!" less frequently. The world began to seem to him a less rotten place. "Nice to have you round again, Skeezics!" he told her; and Eleanor, listening, went up to her room, and sat with her fingers pressed hard on her eyes. "It's dreadful to have her around! How can I get rid of her?" she thought. Very often now the flame of jealousy flared up; it scorched her whenever she recognized Edith's "brains," whenever she noticed some gay fearlessness, or easy capability; whenever she watched the girl's high-handed treatment of Maurice: criticizing him! Telling him he was mean because he was always saying he "couldn't afford things"! Declaring that she wished he would stop his everlasting practicing—and apparently not caring a copper for him! If Edith said, "Oh, Maurice, you are a perfect idiot!" Eleanor would see him grin with pleasure; but when Eleanor put her arms around him and kissed him, he sighed. To Maurice's wife these things were all like oil on fire; but it never occurred to her to try to develop in herself any of the qualities he seemed to find attractive in Edith. Instead, she thought of that June day in the meadow by the river when he said he loved her inefficiency—he loved her timidity, and, oh, how he had loved her love! He had made her promise to be jealous! Eleanor was not a reasoning person—probably no jealous woman is; but she did recognize the fact that what made him love her then, made him impatient with her now. This seemed to her irrational; and so, of course, it was!—just as the tide is irrational, or the turning of the earth on its axis is irrational. Nature has nothing to do with reason. So, in its deep and beautiful and animal beginnings, Love, too, is irrational. It has to ascend to Reason! But Eleanor did not know these things. All she knew was that Maurice hurt her, a dozen times a day.

She was brooding over this one Sunday afternoon in late September, when, at the open window of her bedroom, with Bingo snoozing in her lap, she listened to Edith, down in the garden: "How about a jug of dahlias on the table?"

And Maurice: "Bully! Say, Edith, why couldn't we have a yellow scheme for the grub? Orange cup, and that sort of fussy business you make out of cheese and the yolks of eggs? And yellow cakes?"

"Splendid! I'll mix up some perfectly stunning little sponge cakes, 'Lemon Queens.' Yellow as anything!"

This was all to get ready for a tea under the silver poplar, which was dropping yellow leaves down on the green table, and the mossy brick path, and the chairs for the company. The Mortons were coming, and there would be, Eleanor told herself, wearily, the usual shrieking over flat jokes,—Edith's jokes, mostly. Her dislike of Edith was a burning ache below her breastbone. "Maurice has her, so he doesn't want me," she thought; then suddenly she got up and hurried downstairs. "I'll fix the table!" she said, peremptorily.

"It's all done," Edith said; "doesn't it look pretty? Oh, Eleanor, let me put a dahlia behind your ear! You'll look like a Spanish lady!" She put the gorgeous flower into the soft disorder of Eleanor's dark hair, avoiding Bingo's angry objections, and said, with open admiration, "Eleanor, you are handsome! I adore dahlias!" she announced; "those quilly ones, red on the outside and yellow inside! There are some stunning ones on Maple Street, where I saw that Dale woman. Wonder if she'd sell some roots?"

The color flew into Maurice's face. "Did you get your bicycle mended?" he said.

Instantly Edith forgot the dahlias, and plunged into bicycle technicalities, ending with the query, "Why don't you squeeze out some money, and buy one of those cheap little automobiles, Maurice, you mean old thing!"

"Can't afford it," Maurice said.

But Eleanor was puzzled. There had been a hurried note in Maurice's voice when he asked Edith about her bicycle—an imperative changing of the subject! She looked at him wonderingly. Why should he change the subject? Was he annoyed at Edith's bad taste in referring to the creature? But Edith's taste was always bad, and Maurice was not generally so sensitive to it; not as sensitive as he ought to be! Or as he had been in those old days when he had said that Eleanor was too lovely to know the wickedness of the world, and he "didn't want her to"! She was really perplexed; and when Edith rushed off to make the cakes, and Maurice went indoors, she sat there in the garden, looking absently out through the rusty bars of the iron gate at the distant glimmer of the river, and wondered: "Why?"

She was still wondering even when the Mortons arrived, bringing with them—of all people!—Doctor Nelson. ("Gosh!" said Maurice.) "We're celebrating his appointment at the hospital; he's the new superintendent!" Mrs. Morton explained.

Eleanor said, mechanically, "So glad to see you, Doctor Nelson!" But she was saying to herself, "Why was Maurice provoked when Edith spoke of Mrs. Dale?" When some more noisy and very young people arrived, she was too abstracted to talk to them. She was so silent that most of them forgot her; until Mrs. Morton, suddenly remembering her existence, tried to be conversational:

"I suppose Mr. Curtis told you of our wild adventure on the river in August, when we got beached and spent the afternoon on a mud flat?"

"No," Eleanor said, vaguely. But afterward, when the guests had gone, she said to Maurice, "Why didn't you tell me about your adventure with the Mortons?"

"He told me," Edith said, complacently.

"I forgot, I suppose," Maurice said, carelessly, and lounged off into the house to sit down at the piano—where lie immediately "forgot" not only the adventure on the river—but even his dismay at seeing Doctor Nelson!—who by this time was, of course, quite certain that it was a "rum world."

That winter—although he was not conscious of it—Maurice's "forgetfulness" in regard to his wife became more and more marked, so it was a year of darkening loneliness for Eleanor. She was at last on that "desert island"—which had once seemed so desirable to her;—she had nothing to interest her except her music (and the quality of her voice was changing, pathetically); furthermore, Maurice rarely asked her to sing, so the passion had gone out of what voice she had! She didn't care for books; she didn't know how to sew; and, except for Mrs. Newbolt, there was no one she wanted to see. Often, in her empty evenings, while Edith was in her own room studying, she sat by the fire and cried, and broke her heart upon her desire for a child—"then he would be happy, and stay at home!"

It was a dull house; so dull that Edith made up her mind to get out of it for her next winter at Fern Hill. When she went home for the Easter vacation, she expressed decided opinions: "Father, once, ages ago"—she was sitting on her father's knee, and tormenting him by trying to take his cigar away from him—"you got off something about the dinner of herbs and Eleanor's stalled ox—"

"Good heavens, Buster! You haven't said that before Eleanor?"

"Ha! I got a rise out of you!" Edith said, joyfully; "I haven't mentioned it, yet; but I shall make a point of doing so unless you order two pounds of candy for me, at once. Well, I suppose what you meant was that Eleanor is stupid?"

"Mary," said Henry Houghton, "your blackmailing daughter is displaying a glimmer of intelligence."

"I'm only reminding you of your own remark," Edith said, "to explain why I want to be in one of the dormitories next winter. Eleanor is stupid—though she's never fed me on stalled ox! And I think she sort of doesn't like it because I'm not awfully fond of music."

"You are an absolute heathen about music," her father said.

"Well, it bores me," Edith explained, cheerfully; "though I adore Maurice's playing. Maurice is a lamb, and I adore just being in the house with him! But she's nasty to him sometimes. And when she is, I'd like to choke her!"

"Edith—Edith—" her mother remonstrated. And her father reminded her that she must not lose her temper.

"Let your other parent be a warning to you as to the horrors of an uncontrolled temper," said Henry Houghton; "I have known your mother, in one of her outbursts of fury, so far forget herself as to say, 'Oh, my!'"

Edith grinned, but insisted, "Eleanor is dull as all get out!"

"Consider the stars," Mrs. Houghton encouraged her.

But Mr. Houghton said, "Mary, you've got to do something about this girl's English! ... You miss John Bennett?" he asked Edith (Johnny was taking a special course in an Eastern institute of technology).

"He did well enough to fill in the chinks," Edith said, carelessly; "but it's Maurice's being away that takes the starch out of me. He's everlastingly tearing off on business. And when he's at home—" Edith was suddenly grave—"of course Maurice is always 'the boy stands on the burning deck'; but you can't help seeing that he's fed up on poor old Eleanor! Sometimes I wonder he ever does come home! If I were in his place, when she gets to nagging I'd go right up in the air! I'd say, well,—something. But he keeps his tongue between his teeth."

That evening, when Henry Houghton was alone with his wife, he said what he thought about Maurice: "He is standing on the burning deck of this pathetic marriage of his, magnificently. He never bats an eyelash! (Your daughter's slang is vulgar.)"

"Eleanor is the pathetic one," Mary Houghton said, sadly; "Maurice has grown cynical—which is a sort of protection to him, I suppose. Yes; I'm afraid Edith is right; she'd better be out at the school next winter. It isn't well for a girl to see differences between a husband and wife.... Henry, you shan't have another cigar! That's the third since supper! Dear, what is the trouble about Maurice?"

"Mary, things have come to a pretty pass, when you snoop around and count up my cigars! I will smoke!" But he withdrew an empty hand from his cigar box, and said, sighing, "I wish I could tell you about Maurice; Kit; but I can't betray his confidence."

"If I guessed, you wouldn't betray anything?"

"Well, no. But—"

"I guessed it a good while ago. Some foolishness about a woman, of course. Or—or badness?" she ended, sadly.

He nodded. "I wish I was asleep whenever I think of it! Mary, there are some pretty steep grades on Fool Hill, and he's had hard climbing.... It's ancient history now; but I can't go into it."

"Of course not. Oh, my poor Maurice! Does Eleanor know?"

"Heavens, no! It wouldn't do."

"Honey, the unforgivable thing, to a woman, is not the sin, but the deceit. And, besides, Eleanor loves him enough to forgive him. She would die for him, I really believe!"

"Yet the green-eyed monster looks out of her eyes if he plays checkers with Edith! My darling," said Henry Houghton, "as I have before remarked, your ignorance on this one subject is colossal. Women can't stand truth."

"It's a provision of nature, then, that all men are liars?" she inquired, sweetly; "Henry, the loss of Edith's board won't trouble Maurice much, will it?"

"Not as much, of course, now that he has all his money; but he has to scratch gravel to make four ends meet," Henry Houghton said.

"Four ends!" she said; "oh, is it as bad as that? He has to support—somebody?"

He said, "Yes; so long as you have guessed. Mary, I really must have a smoke."

"Why am I so weak-minded as to give in to you!" she sighed; then handed him the cigar box, and scratched a match for him; he held her wrist—the sputtering match in her fingers—lighted the cigar, blew out the match, and kissed her hand.

"You are a snooper and a porcupine about tobacco; but otherwise quite a nice woman," he said.