The Project Gutenberg eBook of Jane Journeys On, by Ruth Comfort Mitchell

Friday.

Dearest Sally:

It just happened that they need a new sketch act, so they cast "One Crowded Hour" at once and it is already in rehearsal.

Brother is excellent, a wistful-eyed, shabby youth who really looks convincingly ill and coughs in a way to carry conviction. Oh, but The Girl! My quaint New England spinster is gone and with her all the point of my playlet. They've given the part to a blooming, buxom, down-to-the-minute young person, late of "Oh, You Kewpie-Kid!" (in the chorus) and frankly contemptuous of this rôle. And The Man—the bandit—a fair-haired canary, an inch shorter than she is! They quarrel like fishwives and scold about the number of "sides" each other has, and refuse to play up prettily, and I'm heartsick over it all, Sally. The producing agent says it would be utterly impossible to "put it over" with the characters as I wrote it. He was fairly mild and merciful with me (thanks to Rodney, I daresay) but unbudgably firm, and at every rehearsal some touch of coyness or kittenishness is added. As an elixir of youth, I recommend him.

The girl patronizes me until I am ready to fling myself on the floor and squeal with rage. "Listen, girlie," she cooes, "don't you worry about this lil' ol' act! You leave it to me, hon'! I'll put the raisin in it!"

Rodney Harrison is hugely amused at my woe. He says I must remember that you can't slip the Idylls of the King in between the Black-faced Comedian and the Elephant Act. I suppose I must just bear it, grinning if possible, until I have won my footing and then I won't allow so much as a comma to be changed.

Brother is a dear. He opened his heart and gave me a five-act play of his own to read. The stage business is much funnier than the dialogue. After a melting moment he has—"Exeunt Mother." The old lady was clearly beside herself. Also me.

Wearily,

Jane.

Tuesday.

Dear Sally,

We open Thursday afternoon at a weird little try-out theater 'way downtown. I am like to perish of weariness and exasperation. Girl and Man have been fighting like Kilkenny cats. Yesterday she said, "Dearie, God is my witness, he uses me like I was the dirt under his feet!" The brother of Brother, a lean, clean-looking chap, lounges about at rehearsals and comforts me vastly with his under-the-breath comments on them. She has worked up the bit before The Man arrives, when she is pretending, you remember, into screaming comedy. She assures me it will "knock 'em dead!" And they have introduced a dance! Yes. He shows her "the coyote lope." I'm telling you the solemn truth, Sarah Farraday. Do you wonder that I'm an old woman before my time?

And as if I did not have enough to annoy me, Michael Daragh has been quite superfluously unpleasant about it. I wrote you how much he liked it when I read the original 'script to him? Well, he has kept talking about the glorious privilege of doing really good work and leavening the lump, and of how the public really wants the best, only the managers haven't faith to know it, and when I had to tell him about the changes,—the comedy and the dance and so on, he just looked at me and looked at me as if I were a lost soul. It was very tiresome.

"Good gracious, Michael Daragh," I said, "you don't suppose I like it, do you? But I've got to get my foothold. You can't be high-brow in the two-a-day, it seems. You've got to capitulate. It's simply what they call 'putting it over.'"

And he said, "I should be calling it 'putting it under,'" and stalked away.

Excuse a cross letter. So am I.

P.S. Just for which, I won't even tell him when or where the tryout is to be.

Thursday Night.

Well, my dear, they say it went fairly well. But it was absolutely the most harrowing thing I ever had to bear. Brother was a gem but Girl and Man messed up their lines and gave an alien interpretation to everything. How I hated the audience for roaring at her common comedy! They howled with delight when she pushed Brother over, and the coyote lope got the biggest hand of the day. I was behind the scenes, holding the 'script. Oh, but it's a grim land of disillusion back there! As she came off she gave me a kindly pat and said—

"Ain't they eatin' it up? Say, girlie, didn't I tell you I'd put the raisin in it?"

Unbelievably, heaven alone knows why, we are to open at the Palace next Monday. Some big act is canceled owing to illness and they have to have a sketch. We play two more performances downtown and then rehearse day and night to smooth over the rough places. I ought to be bubbling with thankful joy—the Palace! But I'm not. I doubt if I go on with vaudeville work after this.

Jadedly,

Jane.

Friday.

Dear S.,,

Something made me think of that girl I fed the other day and I looked her up. She was actually starving and her room rent long overdue and her landlady a regular story-book demon, so I fed her up and brought her home and coaxed Mrs. Hills to put a cot in my room for her. Her Burne-Jones jaw is sharper than ever and she has the mournfully grateful eyes of a setter. She's sleeping now as if she could never have enough,—just thirstily drinking up sleep.

Performance no better to-day. Terrific rehearsing starts early to-morrow morning.

Hastily,

Jane.

Sunday Morning.

Dearest Sally,

Rehearsal was called for nine sharp yesterday. Brother and his brother were waiting. Girl and Man appeared at ten-ten. She said—

"Dearie, I hate to tell you, but I got bad news for you." Then, turning to him, she said, compassionately, "Say, hon', you tell her! I haven't got the heart."

"Why," said the bandit, regretfully, "what she means is this: she's got a swell chance to go on tour with 'Kiss and Tell,' and she feels like she hadn't ought to turn it down. It's more her line than this kind of thing, you know."

I counted ten to myself, slowly, and then I said:

"Very well. I daresay you know of some girl who is a quick study and can get up in the part by Monday, with your help."

She stared and then began to giggle. "Say, girlie, I'm the limit. Didn't I tell you? I married the boy!" At my gasp she went on, confidentially, linking her arm in mine. "Yes, dearie. You see, it's like this. I gotter have somebody, anyhow, to look after luggage, and you know what this life is. A girl's gotter have protection."

When they were gone I turned to look at Brother. I almost thought he was going to cry, and he began to cough, just as he does in the sketch.

"Oh, please," I said, "don't keep doing that! We aren't rehearsing now."

And he stopped and said, "That's just it, Miss Vail. I'm not rehearsing. It's—that's how it is with me. That's why I knew I could get by with the part. I thought if we got good bookings, why, I'd be fixed to take a good long rest, afterwards,—out on the desert or up in the snow. It isn't bad, yet. They tell me I've got a great chance." Then his chin quivered. "That's why it kind of hits me right where I live, having this thing go on the rocks."

"It mustn't," I said. "It can't! We won't let it!" I knew it was only a miracle that could save us, in that breathlessly short time, but I have a vigorous belief in miracles. "There must be a man and a girl, somewhere——"

Then the lean, silent brother of Brother spoke. "I don't suppose you'd give me a whack at it, would you? I've learned every word of the whole 'script, watching every day the way I have. I can do it. I can do it if you'll let me. I don't think that fellow ever had your idea of it. Look,—the part where The Hawk tells her what a rotten deal he's always had, isn't this how you meant it?"—and he dropped into a chair, took a knee between his brown, lean hands, looked off into the empty theater for a moment—and then, Sally, he read the lines as I'd written them. Instantly, I was happier than I'd been since I tore the final page out of the typewriter, visualizing the thing as I meant it to be.

"It's yours," I chortled in my joy. "You can have it on a silver salver!"

"If only we can get a girl," Brother was worrying. "We ought to get one, easy. She needn't be so much of a looker."

"And we'll cut the comedy and the dance," I said, thankfully.

"There must be a hundred girls crazy for the job, with all the idle acts there are now. All she's got to do is walk through,—it's actress proof, that part. If we could just get a girl, not too young, kind of pathetic looking——"

Then, suddenly and serenely, I knew what I was going to do. And I knew that, sink or swim, never again was I going to "put it under." I told them to wait. I taxied opulently home. My waif was curled up in my kimono, feeding my fan-tailed goldfish. "Hurry up," I said, briskly. "You're holding the rehearsal!"

While she was scrambling, bewilderedly, into her clothes, I explained to her and dug out the old 'scripts and carbons, and on the way back I told her the story and gave her the idea of how she was to play it. She hadn't had time to put on her sea-shell tint, but the hollows in her cheeks filled up with pink excitement as I talked. When I marched in with her the men gave her one look, grinned, and heaved gusty sighs of relief. We rehearsed all day and half the night. We haven't told the office a word about the defection of the two vaude-villains. The printing is out, of course, and the old names will stand. She is stiff with fright and bodily unfit for the strain, but she's giving everything she's got, and she's delicious in quality for the part.

Yours in weary bliss,

Monday. 3.15 A.M.

Sarah, I feel like Guido Reni (if it was Guido Reni) when he stabbed his servant to get the actual agony for the "Ecce Homo!" My girl fainted away in the middle of her big speech an hour ago. I have tucked her up in bed after a rub and a cup of hot milk and she is to sleep until noon. Brother's brother tried pitifully, but he didn't get through a single speech without prompting. I'm terrified! Suppose they muddle it utterly, what will the Powers say to me—after not telling them of the change in cast? I wish I hadn't asked Michael Daragh to come to the matinée. I must stop. I know I won't sleep a wink, but I'll put out the light and lie down and shut my eyes.

Jane.

Monday Midnight.

Oh, Sally dearest, I don't know where to begin! I'll make myself start with the morning. I slipped out before my starveling was awake, leaving a cheering note for her. I took the bus up to Grant's Tomb and walked back along the river to Seventy-second Street. It was the most marvelous blue-and-gold morning; I speeded myself to a glow on shady paths or sat steeping for a moment in the sun. I held happy converse with democratic dogs and reserved and haughty babies and dawdled, but even so I found myself with a panicky margin of time on my hands. Then I bethought myself of my never-failing remedy for troublesome thoughts and I went joyously forth like a he-goat on the mountains and bought a ruinous pair of proud shoes and put them on. I knew the gloating over them would leave me small room for forebodings. You know how I've always been. You used to call me "Goody Two-Shoes." These are cunningly contrived to make my No. 4, triple A, look like a 2, and I walked upon air, narrowly missing being mown down by traffic, my eyes upon my feet. On the way to the Palace I made myself repeat that lovely thing of Gelett Burgess's—

"My feet, they haul me round the house;

They hoist me up the stairs;

I only have to steer them, and

They ride me everywheres!"

I purchased an orchestra seat and inquired carelessly at what hour my sketch (only I didn't say it was my sketch) went on. I found we were sandwiched in between the newest Tramp Juggler and the Trained Seals! Then I went behind and saw my gallant little company, made up and dressed too soon, waiting in awful idleness with strained smiles and ghastly cheer. I petted and patted them all round and cast an agitated eye over the set. A grimy young stagehand made a minor change for me with a languid, not unkind contempt. "What's the big idea?" he wanted to know. "Goner slip 'em some high-brow stuff? Say, this is the wrong pew, sister. They won't stand for nothing like that here. Up in the Bronx, maybe—" I turned and basely fled. I went out in front and found my place. The orchestra rollicked through the overture and people poured in and ushers slid down the aisles and snapped down the seats. I studied the people's faces as a gladiator might have done in the arena. Thumbs up? Thumbs down? A row behind me, across the aisle, sat Michael Daragh, but he did not see me. Two petulantly pretty girls in regal furs sank into seats beyond me, and a white-spatted, rosy-wattled gentleman in a subduedly elegant waistcoat took the one on the end.

The annunciator flashed A and a pair of black-face comedians "opened the show," but they did not get it very far open for people were jamming in and elbows were silhouetted against the light. They doggedly plugged away, firing their tragic comedy, making brave capital even of the silences, but through my glasses I was sure I could see the strained anxiety of their eyes. It was a relief to have them go. Then the Trained Seals were with us, lovely things like gentle, tidy, sleek-headed little girls. My heart was going like a metronome set for a tarantella and my wrist-watch ticked breathlessly—"Coming—Coming—Coming!"

If only we were Z instead of C!

"Funny thing, you know," said the occupant of the end seat, conversationally, "they tell me they're easier than any other animal in the world to train, except a pig. Fact. Circus man told me."

He had a genial face, creased into jolly patterns, and my heart warmed to him, and to Michael Daragh and the pretty girls and the fat old lady in front of me. Nice people, kind people. It seemed certain that they must want real things, clean things.

I took out a pencil to make notes for corrections, but the annunciator said D, and a lady who would have done nicely as Venus came out attired as Cupid and the house rocked with welcome. I was cold with conjecture. What had happened back there? Had my poor starveling fainted again? Had Brother's brother died of fright? I sat shivering through the sprightly number until C, said the electric lights, and the orchestra began softly to play—

"In days of old,

When knights were bold—"

The curtain rose on the bleak telegraph station, on my thin spinster in her rocking chair. It was a lean vision for eyes lately ravished by the Venus lady's charms; programs rattled; the Tramp Juggler was to follow. I could see her chest rising and falling jerkily with her frightened breath and her hands shook so that she could hardly hold her sewing. From far aloft came that loud guffaw that speaks the vacant mind and one of the pretty girls next me giggled in echo. Then something seemed to go through my waif; the Burne-Jones jaw was taut; she got hold of herself; then, slowly, steadily, surely, little by little, she got hold of the house. The man on the end who had slouched comfortably down in his seat, sat sharply upright and the girls stopped whispering. Brother came on, and his brother as the Man. The tempo was perfect, the acceleration blood-quickening. Laughs came at unexpected places, friendly and cordial. The girl was like a melody in low tones; she built up her climax cunningly, warming, coloring, kindling.

"Good gad!" ejaculated the spatted gentleman in the aisle seat, "you know, that girl can act!" The old lady in front lifted a frank handkerchief; the giggling girls were raptly watching. Now the Girl's big moment came. Her voice, faded and gentle before, was harsh and strident. "I don't care! I don't care! You hush! You keep still!"

When she gave him his broth she had seemed the gentlest of living creatures; now, pushing him ruthlessly to the floor, she was a fury, pitiless, obsessed. All the starved romance, all the pinched poverty of her life, all the lean and lonely years she had known cried out in hunger, not to be denied; she was a tigress doing battle for her mate.

And then, when the rattle and roar of the train died away, Brother's hacking cough sounded from behind the closed door, and stark reality laid hold on her again. Her thin hands went together on her breast and then fell slackly to her sides. She seemed visibly to shrink and shrivel. Racked and spent with her one crowded hour, she stood looking into the bleak and empty vista of the years.

I was in the aisle before the curtain fell, speeding past the people, the applauding people, the beautiful, kind, understanding people, past the benediction of Michael Daragh's lifted look. The applause followed me out through the lobby—oh, Sally dear, no choir invisible could make half so celestial a sound!—and when I got behind the scenes it was still coming in—solid, genuine, hearty waves of it.

I heard hurrying feet behind me but I did not pause. I guessed who it was, but I wouldn't turn to look. In the orderly chaos of props and people—and it was an ugly land of disillusion no longer but the land of heart's desire, Sally—I found my gallant little band of fighting hope, beaming and breathless after the fifth honest curtain, coming to me on buoyant feet.

Stern St. Michael had caught up with me then, and he bent his austere head to say very humbly, "Woman, dear, I'm so high with pride for you, and so low with shame for me, that I could ever be doubting——"

But the grimy young stagehand, halting in front of me with an armful of the Tramp Juggler's playthings, cut his sentence in two.

"Say,"—he held out a dark and hearty paw—"put her there, sister! Say, I guess maybe that's poor? Say, I guess maybe that's not puttin' it over!"

Jubilantly,

Jane.

The grave Irishman, Michael Daragh, was a constant delight. He was no more aware, she saw clearly, of her as a person, as a woman, than he was of Emma Ellis of the lidlike hats and shabby hair. Nothing that was human was alien to him, certainly, and nothing that was feminine was anything more than merely human to him. It appeared, however, that he did have a sense of values of a sort, for he halted her in the hall, one dark December day, with a request. Would she be coming with him to-morrow to the Agnes Chatterton Home, where there was a girl in black sorrow?

"Why, yes, of course I'll come, but—why?" Jane wanted to know. "What makes you think I could help? I don't know very much about—that sort of thing."

He smiled swiftly and winningly and it was astonishing to see how the process lighted up his lean face. "Ah, that's the reason! She's had her fill of us, God help her. The way we've been exhorting her for days on end. You'll be bringing a fresh face and a fresh feeling to the case. And"—he stopped and looked her over consideringly—"'tis your sort can help and heal."

"Because," said Michael Daragh, and she had the startled feeling that he was not in the least paying her a compliment but rather laying a charge upon her, "you have been anointed with the oil of joy above your fellows." Then, quite as if the matter were wholly settled, he gave her directions and went his way.

Jane had never seen an Agnes Chatterton Home. She had heard of them, of course, as asylums for what the village called Unfortunate Girls, furtive and remote retreats for stricken creatures who fled the light of day, but when she found herself actually on her way to see one, the following day, she slackened her pace and made her way more slowly and with conscious reluctance. She was a little annoyed with herself for acquiescing so meekly to the big Irishman's plan. After all, she had not broken the old home ties (to put it lyrically) for this sort of thing, now, had she? She had to come to New York to seek her fortune, not to—to—whatever it was that Michael Daragh wanted her to do. And yet, she was always being drawn, willynilly, into any woe within her ken. Herself a contained creature of radiant health and placid nerves with a positively masculine aversion to scenes and applied emotion of any sort, people were always coming and confiding in her. She had been the reluctant repository for the secrets of half her little town. As a matter of fact, and this she could not know of herself, it was because she demonstrated the solid theory that one happy person was worth six who were trying to make others happy. But now she was marching deliberately into the heart of a misery which did not in the least concern her and where, she felt sure, she would be wholly unwelcome. She stood still in an unsavory thoroughfare, seriously considering a retreat, but she saw Michael Daragh waiting for her on the next corner, and she kept on.

"I very nearly turned back," she said. "And I very nearly didn't come at all. I had the most alluring invitation for matineé and tea." (Rodney Harrison had been most insistent.)

"I had your word you'd be coming," said the Irishman. He looked at her impersonally. She was buttoned to the chin in a cloak the color of old red wine and there was a jubilant red wing in her dark turban, and it may have occurred to him that she made a thread of good cheer in the dull woof of that street, but he went at once into the story.

"Ethel's lived on at the Home ever since her baby was born. It'll be two, soon, and herself going for eighteen."

"Yes. Doing grandly, she is, in the same shop as her good elder sister. Well, one day she tells the matron she has a sweetheart, a decent chap, wanting to marry her.

"'Fine,' says Mrs. Richards. 'What were we always telling you? And will he be good to the baby?'

"'You'll be giving up your child, that you kept of your own free will, that you've worked and slaved for, and be wedding him with the secret on your soul?'

"'I will,' says the girl, and not all the king's horses and all the king's men can move her, Jane Vail." They were picking their way through a damp and squalid street and he stooped to set a wailing toddler on its unsteady feet.

"'Tis the sister's doing, we think, she the hard, managing kind and Ethel the weak slip of a thing. Coming to-day, Irene is, to carry it off to the place she's found for it—some distant kin down Boston way, long wanting to adopt and never dreaming this child is their own blood."

"There's the heart scald. 'Tis the light of her eyes. But Irene, d'you see, has scared her into feeling sure she'll lose him if she tells. Wait till you see the look she has on her. 'Supping the broth of sorrow with the spoon of grief,' they would be calling it, home in Wicklow."

Jane sighed. "She'll loathe me, of course,—an absolute outsider. Coming in—nobly giving up a matinée and tea—to rearrange her life for her. Oh, I don't believe I dare!"

He nodded again, comprehendingly. "I know well the way you're feeling. But with the likes of her, poor child, somebody has to rearrange the lives they've mussed and mangled!"

Jane sighed again. "I'll try, Michael Daragh. You know, your two names make me think of the wind off the three lakes on the road to Kenmare and the black line of the McGillicuddy Reeks against the sky?"

His eyes lighted. "'Tis good, indeed, to know you've seen Ireland. Whiles, I'm destroyed with the homesickness." He kept a long silence after that, his eyes brooding.

Jane watched him and wondered. "He's a mystery to me," Mrs. Hetty Hills always appended after a mention of him. (It teased her to have mysteries in her boarding-house.) "Has an income, of course—has to have, to live—doesn't earn anything worth mentioning with all this uplift work—and gives away what he does get. Emma Ellis doesn't know any more about him than I do. But I will say he's less trouble than any man I ever had under my roof. And, of course, he's not common Irish." (Mrs. Hills had still her Vermont village feeling of red-armed, kitchen minions, freckled butcher boys running up alley-ways, short-tempered dames in battered hats who came—or distressingly didn't come—to you of a Monday morning.)

They walked swiftly and without speech now, and Jane had again her sense of his resemblance to the Botticelli St. Michael. "He ought really to be carrying his sword and his symbol," she told herself, "and I daresay Raphael and Gabriel are beside him if I could only see them. Am I Tobias? And have I a fish to heal a blindness?"

"Of course," said Jane, indignantly. "I should have known it at once, even without the hideous sign, for its smugly dreary look of good works! Why must they have that liver-colored glass in the door?" They mounted the worn steps. "And 'Welcome' on the mat! Oh, Michael Daragh, how ghastly! Who did that to them?"

He shook his head. "Most of our things are given, you see." He rang the bell and they heard its harsh and startling clamor.

A sullen-faced girl in a coarse, enveloping pinafore opened the door. Her hands and arms were red and dripping and from a dim region at the rear came the smell of dishwater. Down the narrow, precipitate stairway floated an infant's thin, protesting wail and Jane felt a sick sense of sudden nausea.

"Thank you, Lena," said the Irishman. "This lady is Jane Vail, a good friend come to see us."

The girl, who might have been sixteen, gave Jane a stolid, incurious look and shuffled down the hall, closing the door on a portion of the stale smell.

Mrs. Richards was in her office. She greeted Jane civilly but eyed her in some puzzlement. Here was a strange bird, clearly, to alight in this dingy barnyard.

The matron bridled a little. She was a pallid, tired woman with skeptical eyes. "Well, I'm sure that's very kind of her but I'm afraid it's no use. I've just come down from talking to her, nearly all her noon hour. She wouldn't go to the table. She's turned sullen, now. She won't take any interest in the Christmas preparations; wouldn't help the girls a bit." She sighed and looked at a table cluttered with paper paraphernalia for holiday decorations. In her world of bleak realities the tinsel trimmings for fête days left her cold. "I declare, Mr. Daragh, I believe we've worried with her long enough. I've about made up my mind that we'd better tell the young man ourselves and have done with it. I believe it's our duty."

"But, if she won't? They're planning to be married Monday, and Irene's coming to-day to take Billiken away with her."

"Let Jane Vail be trying her hand. Will you come up to her now?" He strode out of the room and Jane followed him, smiling back at Mrs. Richards with a deprecatory shake of her head. She wished the matron could know how much of an intruder she felt. But once out of the severe little office, mounting the stairs after Michael Daragh, her usual vivid sense of drama came back to her. This was, after all, what she had left the snug harbor for and put out to sea. This was better than tea with Sarah Farraday in the "studio"—than "little gatherings of the young people,"—than walking home with Marty Wetherby—than laughing painstakingly at the jokes of Teddy-bear's father. This was life more abundantly.

It didn't even matter that the grave Irishman took so for granted her dedication to this obscure girl's need. That had been very nice ... about the oil of joy.

"Here's where she'll be," he said, pausing at a closed door, "feeding her child."

"Going for eighteen," he had said, but even that had not prepared Jane for the poignant youth of the girl. She looked a child, in her shrunken middy blouse, her fair hair hanging about her eyes. She was sitting on the floor, urging bread and milk on a fat and gurgling baby in a little red chair. She did not look up at first, but went on speaking to the child.

"Please, Billiken, eat for Muddie! Billiken—when it's the last time Muddie'll ever have to feed you? Take it quick or Muddie'll give it to the kitty-cat!"

The other eyed her defensively and she tried to tidy her hair with hands that shook. On the left was a tiny, pinhead solitaire.

"Oh, my God!" Little red spots of rage flamed in her thin cheeks and she struck her hands together. "Can't they leave me alone? I've told 'em I won't talk any more. I've told 'em my mind's made up for keeps. But they keep at me and keep at me!"

Jane stood still. "I know I haven't any right here," she said, distressedly, "and I know you don't want me."

The girl scrambled to her feet and went to the bureau where she stood pulling and patting at her hair. "What'd you come for, then?" She muttered it under her breath, but Jane caught the words.

"Well, if you know Michael Daragh, you must know that when he asks you to do a thing, even a hard one, you—just do it!" Ethel did not comment or turn her head and Jane found the sense of drama which had borne her so buoyantly up the stairs deserting her. She wanted to go out of that drab room and down those drab stairs and out of that drab house forever, but she resolutely forced herself to cross the room and bent down beside the giddy little red chair.

"Can't you see?" It was curt and sullen, not at all the tone for an Unfortunate Girl to employ toward a young lady anointed with the oil of joy. "She grins just like the Billikens do. Ever since she was a teenty thing." She gave her caller a long, rebellious stare. "You don't look like a nurse or a Do-gooder."

"I'm not," said Jane promptly. "I'm merely Michael Daragh's fr——" She broke off, catching herself up. Well, now, was she? His friend, after a few weeks of slenderest acquaintance? She had a feeling that the grave Irishman had obeyed the command to come apart and be separate. Rodney Harrison was a warm and tangible friend, but this stern and single-purposed person—"Michael Daragh asked me to talk with you," she said, sitting down beside the baby. "I'd love to feed her. May I?"

"No!" Ethel swooped down on her child, jealously snatching up the bowl. "Not when it's my last chance!" She leveled a spoonful and held it to the widely grinning Billiken. "Come! Gobble—gobble! Eat for poor Muddie!" A wave of self-pity went visibly over her and she held her head down to keep Jane from seeing her tears.

"D'you s'pose I want to?" she snarled it, savagely. Here was maternity, parenthood, another breed than that of the Teddy-bear's hot, pink nursery.

Ethel's face flamed, but she looked her inquisitor more fully in the eye than she had done at any time before. "Because—Jerry! Jerry! That's why."

Now there came into the childish face a look of shrewd and calculating wisdom. "I can—I could—have other babies, but I couldn't ever have another—him!" Strength here, of a sort, it appeared, in this Weak Sister.

"It must be very wonderful to care for any one like that," said Jane, respectfully. The girl looked at her with quick suspicion, but her eyes were entirely honest. "What is he like, this Jerry person?"

Ethel relaxed a little and the tensest lines smoothed out of her face. "Well ..." she took her time to it, sorting and choosing her words, "he's not good-looking, but he looks—good."

"Handsome men ... you can't trust 'em...." A look of wintry reminiscence came into her eyes for an instant. "I think more of Jerry than—than anybody, ever. I can't remember my folks. They died when I was just a little thing. My sister Irene, well, I guess she meant all right, only, she was so awful proper, always. She was always scared to talk about—things. I never knew anything till I knew—everything!" A small shiver went over her at that and she was still for a moment. "But Jerry!" Her mouth was young and soft again on that word. "He's different from anything I ever thought a man could be. He's almost like a girl, some ways. You know, I mean just as nice and comfortable to talk to and be with." She kept her gaze on Jane's warmly comprehending face, now. "And he's awful smart, too. The firm wants to send him to the branch store in Rochester and put him in charge of Gent's Furnishings. I guess I'd like to live there ... where everybody'd be strange. Jerry, he don't know where I live. I never let him bring me clear home. Mrs. Richards—she's the matron—she says he'll find out about me some day and hate me, but he won't find out. Nobody knows except Irene and the people here,—and nobody'd be mean enough to just go and tattle to him,—would they?"

"Oh, I don't believe any one would, intentionally. But" (how appeal to a sense of fair play where no fair play had been?) "that isn't what frightens me, Ethel."

"What? You needn't be scared about Billiken. She'll be all right. They're awful nice people, rich and everything, and they're crazy to have her. 'A blue-eyed girl with curly hair and a cheerful disposition,' they says to Irene. And they think her mother's dead."

"Then I think it's pretty mean not to play fair with him, don't you? Come," said Jane with a brisk heartiness she was far from feeling, "tell him to-day, right now, when you go back."

She shook a stubborn head. "Now you're being just like all the rest of 'em. I thought you sort of—understood."

"Well, it's too late now. Irene's coming today to take Billiken. It's all settled and everything. It's too late now, even if I wanted to. Besides"—she flamed with hot color again—"I couldn't tell him in the daytime ... right there in the store!"

"Oh, Ethel—in anything so big,—something that means your whole life,—time and place can't matter."

The girl began to dab at her eyes with a damp, small wad of blue-bordered handkerchief. "I just couldn't tell him in the daytime. I nearly did, last night. I meant to, 'cross-my-heart,' I did! We went for a walk, and I was just—just sort of beginning when a woman came sneaking by and—said something to him. You know. And he said—'Poor devil!' That's what he called her. 'Poor devil!' That's just how he said it." Now she dropped her inadequate handkerchief and wept convulsively into her hands and a thin shaft of sunshine lighted up the meager solitaire.

Billiken leaned forward, her fat, small face filled with contrition and patted her mother on her bowed head. "Billiken gob—gobble din—din! Muddie not cly!"

It seemed to Jane that she was marching endlessly round a Jericho with walls that reached to the sky with a flimsy tin toy trumpet in her hands. How blow a blast to shatter them? "Ethel, the only thing you can bring him is the truth. Are you going to give him a lie for his wedding gift?"

She winced but her mouth was sullen. "You can make me feel terrible, but you can't make me tell."

"No," said Jane, "I can't make you tell. And Mrs. Richards can't make you tell, nor even Michael Daragh. But—your own heart can." She leaned swiftly nearer and put an arm about the flat, little figure. "Ethel, how much do you love him?"

"More than Irene?" The affirming nod was quick and positive. "More than the baby?" Again the nod, slower, but still sure. "But that's not enough, Ethel. You don't know anything about loving unless you love him more than you love yourself."

"Do you know what I'm trying to say to you? I don't know as much about loving as you do, Ethel. I've never loved any one—yet. But I know this! Your Jerry may never find out about your trouble, but whether he does or not, you couldn't be happy while you knew you were cheating him,—while you knew you had married him without telling him the thing it's his right to know. Ethel, you've got to love him more than yourself. You've got to love him more than you want him!"

The color ebbed slowly out of Ethel's small face and Billiken began to whimper. Far down the street the inevitable hurdy-gurdy ground out the inevitable "Marseillaise." "La jour de gloire est arrivé!" Was it?

"Love him,—more than I want him?" She said it over in a halting whisper. "Love him more than I—" Her lips moved inaudibly, forming the second half of the sentence. She bent over Billiken, crushing her in an embrace which made her cry. Then she caught up her foolish little hat and jammed it on without a glance at the mirror and flung herself into her coat. "I better go quick!" She was still whispering. "I better go quick!" She ran out of the room. Jane heard her on the stairs, then the slam of the front door and the sharp staccato of her feet upon the sidewalk.

Billiken, released from the spell, lifted up her voice and shrilly wept, passionately pushing away her bowl and spoon, roaring with rage when Jane tried to touch her. It seemed to Jane that there was furious accusation in the small, red countenance. "Don't shriek at me like that," she said, indignantly. "I'm not taking your mother away from you,—I'm trying to keep her for you!"

The door opened and Michael Daragh came in, his face glowing. "From the look she had on her when she flew by," he said, "I'm thinking you've surely won where the rest of us lost."

Jane sighed. "She's going to tell him, in the garish daylight, at the Gent's Furnishing counter. If she can! But she's left me with the 'heart-scald'!"

Michael Daragh had picked up Billiken at once and at once she had ceased to roar and soothed to a whimpering cry. "Hush, now acushla," he said, "hush now,—let you be still, solis na suile!" The baby stopped altogether, her ear intrigued by the purling Gaelic. "If you'll be slipping out now, the way she won't be noticing, I'll have her fine and fast asleep in two flips of a dead lamb's tail!"

Jane slipped out obediently and stepped softly down the precipitate stair. The matron looked up, her lips thinly compressed.

"Well, I guess she'll change her mind by the time she gets to the store. She's very weak, Ethel is."

Mrs. Richards' lips tightened to a taut line. "When they get mad crazy about a man" (the plural pronoun pigeonholed Ethel in a class) "they're like the Rock of Gibraltar."

"I'd like to stay the rest of the afternoon, if you don't mind," said Jane, at her winningest. "That is, if there's something I can do?" She looked at the littered table.

"How'd you like to cut out the paper joy-bells?" The matron melted a little. "A lady brought in the paper and the pattern yesterday, but I haven't had time to get the girls at them yet."

"Well, I guess it isn't the regular Christmas shade, but I don't know that it matters, particularly. I expect it was some she had in the house. You might put the girls at cutting them out and you could do the Merry Christmas sign." She gave her a long and narrow placard in mustard green and shook out some pattern letters from an envelope. Then she rang a firm and authoritative bell. "I'll have the girls assemble in the dining room and they can work at the big table."

Immediately there were shuffling feet in the hall, slow feet on the stair, a heavy tread in the dining room behind them. Where was the youth in those young feet? There was something in the dragging gait that made Jane shiver. Seventeen of them seated themselves about the long table, all in huge, enveloping pinafores of dull brown stuff, coarse and stiff. They ranged in age from twenty to twelve but on every face, pretty or plain, stolid or wistful, sullen or sweet, she read the same look of crushed and helpless waiting. She spread out her materials and gave her directions and the girls set soberly to work. Seventeen heads bent in silence over the table; scissors creaked; upstairs a baby cried fretfully. There leapt into Jane's mind a memory picture of Nannie Slade Hunter before the joyfully hailed arrival of the Teddybear,—the tiny, white, enameled chiffonier with its little bunches of painted flowers spilling over with offerings—Lilliputian garments as 'fine as a fairy's first tooth'—the chortling pride of Edward R.—the beaming, nervous mother and mother-in-law—the endless flowers and books; Nannie herself, cunningly draped and swathed in Batik crêpe, prettier than ever before in her pretty life—

Jane went quickly out of the room and sat down on the bottom step of the stairs which seemed to be rushing headlong out of the house of drab tragedy.

She lifted a twisting face. "Michael Daragh, I never cry, even at funerals, but I'm going to cry now!"

"Now that would be the great waste of time surely," he smiled down at her. "Masefield has the true word for it,—'Energy is agony expelled,' says he. Let you be making that Merry Christmas sign the while you're sorrowing."

"There they sit—in those awful, mud-colored pinafores—making paper joy-bells! I can't bear it! Magenta joy-bells!" The matron started upstairs and Jane drew aside to let her pass. "What are they going to have for Christmas, Mrs. Richards?"

"Well, we have a real nice dinner,—not turkey, of course, but a nice dinner," said the matron, "and every girl gets a pair of stockings and a handkerchief and a Christmas postcard——"

"With more joy-bells?" Jane wanted hotly to know, "or an angel in a nightdress and a snow scene?"

Mrs. Richards went firmly up the stairs. "We naturally cannot take much time to pick out the subjects, but every girl gets a pretty card."

Jane got swiftly to her feet. "Michael Daragh, do you know what I'm going to do?" She hadn't known herself an instant earlier. "I'm not going home to Vermont for the holidays! I'm going to stay and help with the Christmasing here—and I'll spend the money I would have spent on my trip. I'm going to buy holly and greens and miles of red ribbon and acres of tissue paper and a million stickers, and seventeen presents—seventeen perfectly useless, foolish, unsuitable, beautiful things! Do you hear, Michael Daragh?"

"I hear," he said, and again his lean face lighted oddly from within, "I hear, God save you kindly, and I'm rare and thankful to you, Jane Vail!"

The doorbell cut jaggedly into Jane's exalted mood and she went into the office and sat down to work on the Merry Christmas sign. She meant to replace it with a joyful scarlet one, but meanwhile it would keep her fingers busy and give her an excuse for lingering until Ethel came back with the news of her confession and its results, and she could be planning the holiday cheer she meant to make in this melancholy house. She was still rather startled at her sudden decision but pleased with herself beyond words. To give up the festive return to the village ... her Aunt Lydia's damp-eyed delight, the "little gatherings of the young people" in her honor, the gay and jingling joy of the season ... and stay in a boarding house and make determined merriment for the Agnes Chatterton home. Then, tracing a large and ugly M, she laughed aloud. The truth was, she told herself flatly, she was pleased to the marrow of her bones to be here instead of there, not only in fresh fields and pastures thrillingly and picturesquely new, but away from the reckless necessity for settling the Marty Wetherby matter once and for all. And the big Irishman seemed almost pathetically pleased at her announcement, and it was entirely conceivable that Rodney Harrison would provide flesh-pots and diversions. All in all, she was cannily glad to abide by her hasty and handsome offer, and she worked steadily at her letters while Mrs. Richards wrote at her littered desk.

"Well, there's Irene, come for Billiken! That doesn't look much as if Ethel had told him." There was a good deal of triumph in the glance she flung at Jane. "Well, I can't say I'm surprised; I didn't think she'd have the courage."

Michael Daragh came in, his face grave. "Here's Irene, come for the child. I don't like the look of it."

A young woman presented herself at the office door. There was resolute respectability in her blue serge suit, brushed shiny, too thin for December wear. She carried a small straw telescope and her voice sounded capable and firm. "Can I go right up, Mrs. Richards?"

"Wait," said the Irishman, as she turned toward the stairs. "Did Ethel tell him?"

"You mean, did she tell Jerry about—about the baby?" The good sister of the erring sister flushed painfully. "Not that I've heard of. I guess she knows better than that."

"There is no 'better than that,'" said Michael Daragh, sternly. "There is nothing better than the truth." The line of his lean jaw was salient.

"If I can once get her respectably married," said Irene, nippingly, her small face resolute, "I won't worry about what she tells or doesn't tell. It's been hard enough on me, I can tell you!" She went briskly upstairs and they heard her firm closing of the door.

Jane insisted on hope. "Perhaps she did tell him, and everything's all right, but she had no chance to see Irene and explain! Surely you won't let her take Billiken until we are sure?"

Then the front door opened quietly and Ethel came in to stand before them, her tragic and accusing eyes on Jane. "You made me tell," she said. "You made me!" And when Jane ran to her, questioning, eager, she pushed her away. "It's you! It's you did it!"

Michael Daragh strode to her and put a steadying arm about her shoulders. "Child, tell us the way of it."

Her teeth were chattering and her face seemed to grow whiter and whiter. "I told him. I told him everything. I kept saying to myself over and over, all the way to the store, just what she told me"—she flung a bruised and bitter look at Jane—"'I must love him more than I want him'—and I went straight up to him at his counter, right there in the daytime. He was selling a necktie to a fat old man with a red neck. It was a dark blue tie with light blue spots on it." She added the detail carefully in her spent little voice. "I waited until he was gone and then I told Jerry. He just looked at me and looked at me, and made me say it again, and then—then he just walked away without looking back. I had to go to work, but I watched and watched, and watched. He never came back to his counter. Pretty soon I just got crazy. I went over and asked. They said he was sick, and gone home." She sagged in Michael Daragh's hands and he lifted her and carried her into the matron's room, the matron hurrying beside him.

Then Jane Vail sat alone in the ugly office, contemplating the result of her eloquence. She could hear Ethel's sobbing and the matron's sharp treble, and the steady and rhythmic flow of the Irishman's voice. She rose to follow them, but the closed door halted her. They had wanted her to do this thing, to do the thing they had failed to do, and she had done it; and now they shut her away while they strove to heal where she had hurt.

Why had she done it? Why had she come at all? Why had she mixed and muddled in this sordid tangle which was none of her bright business? And why—chief of all whys—had she rashly and sentimentally offered to give up her holidays at home for the futile endeavor to make Christmas merry for these miserable girls?

Rage rose in her, rage at herself, rage at the sobbing, tarnished girlhood in there, at her sharp sister, at the matron, at the zealot who had dragged her into it all. Let him take Emma Ellis next time. This was her work, and she—Jane Vail—belonged in the world of clean and pretty things and in that world she would stay. She decided against undignified flight; she would wait for Michael Daragh and walk home with him to Mrs. Hills' boarding house, and she would be very civil about it all, but she would make it clear, even to an other-worldly settlement worker, that her brief detour into this sort of thing was finished; that she was on the highway again, speeding toward the place she had visioned for herself.

Now she drove her mind resolutely away from the Agnes Chatterton Home, to the Vermont village, then across the sea ... Florence ... the old palaces ... the Arno ... the little tea room in the Via Tornabuoni where she went sometimes at this very hour ... little heart-shaped cakes with green icing—Upstairs three babies began to scream at once, harshly and hideously, and an opened door somewhere at the rear of the house confessed to cabbage for dinner, and the present came swiftly and unbeautifully back. It came back with a bang. Jane resolutely set herself to think the thing out clearly. If the matron or the Irishman had persuaded Ethel to divulge her dark young past to her suitor, he would have repudiated her just the same; therefore she—Jane—might shake off her mantle of guilty responsibility. And after all, bleak as life looked to the little creature now, still sobbing stormily in Mrs. Richards' room, wasn't she safer than she would be married to her Jerry with that stalking secret?—"Whose happiness resteth upon a lie is as a spirit in prison." The whole world, the whole godly, gossiping, ferreting world, would have conspired together to tell him. Now she climbed nimbly to secure conviction in the eternal justice of things. The girl had gone gallantly, in garish daylight, holding her happiness in her hand, and told the truth. Now she was in the dust, but wouldn't it all come right for her in the end? Wouldn't it have to come right for her? The sense of helpless misery fell away from her and she was so confident of coming joy that she started toward the closed door of the matron's room. No; she would not go in, but she was warm with comfort. It seemed close and breathless in the office and she went to the street door and opened it for a swallow of the keen winter air, and stood out upon the top step, looking down into the dingy thoroughfare. There was a young man, half a block away, on the opposite side. He was walking slowly, looking at the numbers on the houses, and presently he looked across at the Agnes Chatterton Home. Then he stood quite still, staring at it.

He came over very slowly, and mounted the steps with lagging feet, and he was still staring, his eyes rather dazed.

"Oh," said Jane, "I think I know who you are!" She was a little breathless with happy excitement. "Aren't you—I don't know the rest of your name, but aren't you—Jerry?"

"Yes, ma'am," said the youth. There was a close color harmony about him; his jubilant cravat picked up the dominant note of his striped silk shirt and the royal purple of his hose struck it again, an octave lower. The removal of his velvet hat disclosed wide and flanging ears which gave his face an expression of quaint comedy, now at variance with his aghast and solemn look.

Jane's bright presence there on that dreary doorstep, her hailing of him, her knowledge of his identity, seemed to awake no wonder in him. He looked as if he had finished with surprise; as if nothing could ever startle him again.

She left him in the correct and cheerless little reception room and flew up the headlong stairs and into Ethel's room, her face luminous. The good sister was just finishing her packing of Billiken's belongings into the telescope and the child, snug in tiny sweater and knitted cap, watched her absorbedly. Jane caught her up without a word and carried her out of the room.

"I'm about ready to go," the young woman called after her, sharply. "Please don't take her things off!"

Jane did not answer her. She sped down the stairs as swiftly and easily as a person in a dream, and opened the closed door boldly, without even a knock, and marched in, Billiken in her arms. She felt like an army with banners.

Ethel's first fury of grief had spent itself and she sat leaning limply back, her eyes closed, breathing in long, quivering sighs.

Billiken flung herself at her mother with a lilting squeal of joy, and Ethel's eyes opened and narrowed with a cold and appraising scrutiny. Her hands twisted together in her lap; she seemed to be weighing and balancing. At length, with a little brooding cry, she caught the baby in her arms.

Michael Daragh smiled sunnily at Jane, but she had no instant to spare for him then. She pulled Ethel to her feet. "Come," she said, imperiously. "Come and bring Billiken!" She led her out of the room.

Jane was guiding the girl, her face buried against the baby's woolen cap. "Look!" she said again, at the door of the dim reception room.

Ethel halted on the threshold, peering through the gathering winter dusk. "Oh,—Jerry?" she gasped, uncertainly.

The young man from the Gent's Furnishings strode forward to meet her, his eyes on her blurred and swollen face. "Say, listen," he began, "say, listen—" Then his gaze dropped to the child in her arms and grew bleak, and Ethel shrank back and away from him, her eyes wide and terrified.

It seemed to Jane, standing there in the ugly hall of the Agnes Chatterton Home, between the sharp-visaged matron and the Irishman who looked like Botticelli's saint, as if all the love and pity in the world hung by a hair above the pit.

It was a new and unpleasing thing to Billiken, to find cold eyes upon her, level, unloving, hostile eyes, but she had an antidote. Gazing blithely back at him with the wide little grin which had earned her the name of "the God of Things as They Ought to Be," she held out her arms with a gurgling cry and flung herself at the young man with the gay cravat as she had flung herself at her mother two minutes before.

The hot color flooded his face, his freckles were drowned in a red sea, his flanging ears were crimson. Suddenly, gropingly, he reached out for them both, and got the two of them into his arms. "It'll be O.K.," he said, huskily, winking hard. "It'll be O.K.! Say, listen, I got it all figured out! They been wantin' me to go to the Rochester store anyway, and we don't know a livin' soul there!"

They went away, the other three, and left them there together, and there were two little dabs of color on the matron's high cheekbones and her sharp eyes looked oddly dim. "Well," she said, "well—I guess that's settled right enough. And I guess we've got you to thank for it, Miss Vail."

"We have, surely, God save you kindly," said Michael Daragh, and his face had what Jane called its stained-glass-window look.

She felt very flushed and humbled under their beaming approbation. "There's only her own courage to thank!" But she snatched up a bit of the despised decoration, her cheeks scarlet. "You know,—I'm so happy—so gorgeously, dizzily happy—I can hear that magenta-colored paper joy-bell ring a silvery chime!"

It was November when Jane made her exodus from the Vermont village and her entry into New York, and by early summer she had written and sold three one-act plays for vaudeville which yielded plump little weekly royalties and gave her a reputation quite out of proportion to her output and experience. They began to advertise her sketches as "different" and to build up a vogue. "So and So in a Jane Vail act," said a pretty billboard, and Rodney Harrison gave himself jocularly proud airs as her discoverer and sponsor.

"I do not seem to crave the brother effect," said Mr. Harrison deliberately, before he gave his attention to a hovering head waiter. He was distinctly what her village called "not a marrying man," but he was beginning to have his moments of meaningful look and word.

"Well, then," said Jane, after agreeing to alligator pear salad, "shall we say Fairy God-cousin? That's a gay and pleasing relationship without undue responsibilities. Will that do?"

"That will do for the present," said Mr. Harrison. He regarded her across the small table with perfectly apparent satisfaction. Nothing bucolic here; a dark and gypsy beauty which glowed and kindled beside the fainter types about them, a wholly modish smartness, an elusive something to which he could not put a name, which gave him always the sense of glad pursuit. There had been in his early attitude, as she had divined, just a trifle of the King and the Beggar Maid, the Town Mouse and the City Mouse, but that was gone now. She knew his New York very nearly as well as he did himself and with her increased activities had come decreased dependence on him. She was either so gayly busy or so busily gay that she was able to accept only one invitation in four, which made it very necessary to ask her early and often. He was a wary young man, Rodney Harrison, urban from head to heel; marriage had not entered into his calculations. Yet he was aware of his growing fondness and approval, his growing conviction that domesticity with Jane Vail need not of necessity be the curbing and cloying thing he had visioned.

It was May when he told her that his mother wanted to come to see her, and it was the following day that Jane wrote home to tell them she was coming to Vermont for the summer months. She wasn't quite ready for Rodney Harrison's mother to call on her; she wanted a little time and a little perspective, and she knew that the hour had struck for her to go back and put a firm if mournful period to the affair of Marty Wetherby. There had been constantly recurring scoldings by mail from Sarah Farraday and Nannie Slade Hunter, and, while he was the poorest and least articulate of correspondents, his stammering letters had still achieved a pathos of their own, and the thing was no longer to be shirked.

So she said good-by at the boarding house to Mrs. Hills and Emma Ellis and Michael Daragh and at the station to Rodney Harrison; and went back in smart triumph with a wardrobe trunk full of clever clothes and the latest shining model in typewriters.

They were out in force to meet her; her Aunt Lydia Vail, happily tearful and trembling; Nannie Slade Hunter and Edward R. with the amazingly enlarged and humanized Teddy-bear, in their new roadster; Sarah Farraday, a little thinner after her hard-driven winter of teaching; and Martin Wetherby, panting a little even in his thin summer suit, removing his handsome Panama to mop a steaming brow.

The first evening was all Miss Lydia's, save that Sarah was coming over later to stay the night, and again Jane sat in the rosewood and mahogany dining room, served by the middle-aged maid who did not know that there was a servant problem, and ate the reliable stock supper—the three slices of pink boiled ham on the ancient and honorable platter of blue willow pattern ware, the small pot of honey, the two kinds of preserves, the hot biscuit, the delicate cups of not-too-strong, uncolored Japan tea, the sugar cookies, the pale custard.

Miss Vail had missed her niece acutely, as she would have missed a lovely elm from the street or the silhouette of the mountain which she got from her bedroom window, but she had wanted the dear girl to be happy, and she clearly was happy, brimmingly, radiantly, and she had gone down to her twice for merry and bewildered little visits and had come thankfully home again.

She beamed at her now across the table and insisted, as of old, that she eat two of the three slices of pink ham shaved to a refined thinness, and then they went into the pretty parlor and visited cozily until the little spinster's head began to jerk forward in the pauses, and Sarah Farraday, who had waited conscientiously until nine o'clock, appeared. Then Miss Lydia went upstairs to take off her plump, snug things and slip into her flannelette nightdress—the nights were still what she called "pretty sharp," and get into bed and "read until she got sleepy."

"Hannah says she sneaks in every night and snaps off the light after she's sound asleep," said Sarah. "It's a mercy she doesn't have to use a lamp,—she'd have burnt the house down years ago."

"She 'doesn't sleep,'" said Jane, looking tenderly after her, plodding plumply up the stairs, "she 'just rests her eyes for a moment.' Sally, let's go up to my room and have a regular, old-time talk-fest!"

So they went up the narrow stairs with their arms entwined about each other and took off their dresses and slipped into kimonos and let down their hair, but they found a strange and baffling constraint.

"Sally, dear," Jane determinedly broke the spell, "what's the silly matter with us?"

The blonde music teacher's eyes filled up with her ready tears. "It's—you've been away so long, and we've drifted so far apart.... Your life—your wonderful life——"

"Now, Sarah Farraday," her friend pounced upon her, "after the miles upon miles of letters I've written you, do you dare to feel that you don't know as much about my life as I do? Viper-that-bites-the-hand-that-writes-to-it! Why, I could have done another playlet—two—in the time I've taken to tell you everything!"

"You've been marvelous about letters," Sarah admitted with a grateful sniff, "but——"

"And what's more—and this admits of no argument—next winter you're coming down to me for a month of giddy gamboling and to soak your soul in symphonies and operas!"

Sarah Farraday gave a little gasp and her thin cheeks flushed. "Oh, my dear, you're a lamb to think of it, but of course I couldn't. It's wonderful, just even to think about it, but it couldn't possibly happen."

"Now that," said Jane sternly, "is a wicked and immoral remark! There is nothing too good to be true, and it's blasphemy to say so."

"Oh, well ... of course, with you—" She left her sentence trailing and let her thin hands fall in her lap limply, palm upward and stared at Jane. Her dark hair was shimmering and floating about her and her dark eyes were pools of light. "Janey," she leaned toward her and spoke wistfully, "are you really as impossibly happy as you look?"

"Happier," said Jane, promptly. She began to brush her dusky mane with long and sweeping strokes. "Still doing this a hundred and twenty times a night, Sally, no matter at what scandalous hour I come in."

But the other persisted with sudden sapience. "I mean, are you really as happy as you act, or are you just—gay?"

"Both," said Jane, stoutly. ("Sixty-two, sixty-three, sixty-four—) I've had a bright and shining time, work and play, with my feet very much on the earth,—or the pavements, rather. I'm satisfied, Sally."

"But oh," said Sarah, forlornly, "you said you wouldn't be really 'going away' from us, but you have! Millions of miles away—a whole world away, Jane! You've proved your point,—succeeded beyond our wildest dreams——"

"Not beyond my wildest dreams, old dear," said her best friend with happy impudence. "You were more modest for me than I was for myself!"

"—beyond our wildest dreams," Sarah repeated stubbornly, "and you can carry on your work just as well here, now, and wouldn't it be the loveliest, most natural thing in the world for you to stay at home? Jane—poor old Marty!" She ran to Jane and flung her arms emotionally about her.

But the other cut in, panic-stricken, "Oh,—don't make up your mind now—to-night! Wait! Just spend the summer in the dear old way, as we've always done, and see if you don't fit right into your old niche again, with—with——"

"With a steadily fattening Marty," said Jane, bright-cheeked, "and a hot, pink nursery with a fat and well-oiled Kewpie?"

"To be anything but decently and sanely frank about," said Jane. "My child, the story isn't going to have that particular happy ending for which you pant. You see all my life in a proscribed pattern. Like a sentimental ballad's second verse ... back to the grassy meadows ... childhood's happy hours again.... Once again he sang—