She dressed hastily, in the later stages of her toilet vibrating between the silver-decked dressing-table, and the window, from behind the curtains of which she took recurrent peeps. At her last look she ran hastily down the stairs and opened the front door for Mrs. Stone, who was temporarily garbed in a polo cap and her husband’s spring overcoat, into the pockets of which she had thrust her hands.
“I saw you coming along! It’s too cold to be kept waiting on anybody’s door-step. Walk right in, tea will be ready in a moment.”
“I thought I’d be sure to find you in now,” said Mrs. Stone comfortably, shedding her masculine apparel in the hall on her way to the drawing-room where she established herself with the ease of custom in a Turkish chair by the gas logs. The Ridge was apt to assemble informally at Mrs. Laurence’s for five o’clock tea; it was known that she really had it whether there was any one there or not; there was always something pleasantly cosy about the little function.
Mrs. Stone watched her hostess lazily as she drew the low, china-laden table nearer the fire, and lighted the lamp under the brass kettle just brought in, her dark, graceful head bent over to watch it, and her hands showing very white against the dull red of her gown.
“It’s such a relief to get in here,” said the visitor, breaking the silence as she took the steaming cup of fragrant tea offered her, and helped herself to a tiny hot buttered scone, from a blue Canton dish. “They are getting in coal at the Budds’ this morning, and now they’re at it at the Spicers’—the noise nearly sets me crazy, the houses are so near together. O Mrs. Spicer, I didn’t hear you come in!”
Mrs. Stone looked up with a start to see another visitor walking, unannounced, into the room, a little woman in a long fur wrap with a lace scarf thrown over her head. “I was just saying—perhaps you heard me—what a noise your coal makes when it’s being put in.”
“Oh, don’t speak of it!” said Mrs. Spicer. She seemed to greet her hostess, shed her outer garments, perch herself on a little, straight-backed sofa, and take her cup of tea at one and the same moment with a swiftness of movement accelerated in her further speech, which tumbled forth like a small cataract. “Don’t speak of it, no one knows what I went through last summer, when you were at the seashore and your coal was laid in. I couldn’t sit on the piazza at all, and the thermometer was in the nineties. At the end of the third day I nearly had nervous prostration. Ernest Spicer was really worried about me. I never find it any economy to lay in a stock of coal; you use it up so much faster; it seems as if you were paying out for enough to last you until you died, and then, just at the time you didn’t count on taking the money for it you have to buy more. If we laid in a mine full in July we’d have to order coal in February.”
“Well, I wish I were laying it in now,” interposed Mrs. Laurence deftly, with a sigh. “Mr. Laurence ordered some this morning, and it hasn’t come yet. I would have sent a message to Harner’s, but I have been expecting the coal wagon every moment.”
“I saw your husband speaking to Mrs. Lalor as I came back from the butcher’s,” said Mrs. Stone. She paused significantly. “Isn’t she the most noticeable thing you ever saw! She never seems to have any morning clothes.”
“I don’t believe she has any money for new ones,” suggested Mrs. Laurence gently.
“No, I don’t suppose she has, but even then—— Of course, I’m sorry for her, we all are; every one knows what Mr. Lalor is, but do you know, the other day when I attempted to allude to all that she must have to bear up under—I felt so sympathetic towards her, after what the Bents told us—she stiffened up at once; she acted as if she hadn’t the slightest idea of what I was driving at. Now that’s absurd. To hear Mrs. Lalor talk about ‘Bennie’ you’d think he was the king-pin, as Mr. Stone expresses it.”
“Oh, but I think that’s really fine of her,” said Mrs. Laurence, with proselyting zeal. “There’s a courage, a devotion about her that always appeals to me; you can’t help seeing that she’s had such a hard time. I’m sure if you knew her better you’d like her.”
“She may be devoted to her husband,” said Mrs. Spicer very fast, “but if you’d see her going in on the train—Ernest Spicer says he always avoids her when he can; he does hate to be made conspicuous. I don’t care whether she comes of a good family or not; I think she’s common.”
Mrs. Laurence shook her head wisely. “I’m sure that you’re mistaken, not that I’m so well acquainted with her myself, but still——”
She took occasion later on to detain Mrs. Stone whisperingly a moment by the front door as both visitors were making their exit.
“I thought I wouldn’t say it before her—but why don’t you and Mr. Stone make a call at the Lalors to-night? Will has a little business with Mr. Lalor, and I’ll go with him. Do come.”
“Well, I’ll see,” temporized Mrs. Stone with a softening inflection.
Mrs. Stone was, as her hostess well knew, the kind of a person who, after disapproving publicly of a neighbour, privately sends her pickles. She hastened down the steps now to join her friend, her large, mannish figure in the overcoat and cap wobbling ludicrously on the narrow, slippery length of drift-bordered sidewalk under the gas-lamps that were already lighted.
The wind had gone down, but so had the mercury; the air was “bitter chill.” As Mrs. Laurence turned back into her hall the atmosphere there seemed only a few degrees warmer. Gas logs made but slight impression on the general temperature of a house in this weather; the hand that she held over the register received but the faintest, scarce-warm breath upon it. Mrs. Laurence still looked for a belated rattling coal-wagon, but the hour seemed long until her husband’s return; her heart bounded romantically at the sound of his footsteps now, just as it had done when she was a girl. His face was ruefully smiling as he said after the kiss of greeting:
“You don’t know what you’ve missed—all my fault, too! I bought you a two-dollar bunch of violets—— Now wait till I get through—and left them in the train.”
“Oh, Will!” His wife’s brows drooped tragically. “That’s so like you! You’re getting too absent-minded to live. My lovely violets!” she mourned tenderly.
“Isn’t the house very cold to-night?”
“Well, I should think it might be! It’s freezing.” Mrs. Laurence’s accumulated wrath poured forth. “There hasn’t been a sign of the coal you ordered this morning, and I’ve been waiting for it all day. It’s a perfect outrage, and I want you to tell Harner so, Will. You did order it, didn’t you?”
“Why, ye——” An extraordinary expression stole over Mr. Laurence’s thin face, it was as if his consciousness had been suddenly arrested in mid-air. Well as his wife knew his expressions and what they covered, this surprisingly baffled her. He drummed with his finger-tips on the edge of the dressing-table before relaxing enough to say guardedly, after a moment:
“By George! I don’t believe I did. I knew there was something—I’m awfully sorry, Anna, indeed I am.”
“You didn’t order it!—Will, please don’t drum on things that way, you know it drives me wild. Well, if you can’t remember one thing I ask you to do—if you can’t keep a single promise that you make me—— It isn’t the coal I care about—though my feet have been like stones all day—but it’s the fact that I can’t depend on you for anything. Please don’t whistle. You can attend to business matters well enough, but when it comes to the comfort of your wife and child——” an unforeseen sob broke across the words. “Of course, it’s been warm enough in your steam-heated office to-day. I’m glad it has been, I wouldn’t have had you cold for anything.” In spite of her tears she was following after him as he searched in his chiffonier drawer for a clean collar. “You’ve done it all so many times! You carried that important letter to Hetty in your pocket for six weeks before you told me.”
“Yes, and if you’re going on like this every time I tell you anything, I’ll stop it,” said Mr. Laurence doggedly. “You don’t give me any credit for owning up, Nan. You wouldn’t know half the time when I make mistakes, if I didn’t tell you.”
“I don’t see what else you could have said when I asked you if you had ordered the coal.”
“I could have lied about it, I suppose,” said Mr. Laurence impatiently.
“O Will!” she gasped with horror. Her white chin went up, her dark eyes looked at him full of agitation. She put her hands on his shoulders and shook him ineffectively. “You wouldn’t—you couldn’t do that! You always tell me the truth, don’t you—all of it?”
“Usually,” assented her husband. He had finished settling his tie and now put his arms around her. “But if it’s going to make you any happier if I don’t——”
“No, no, no! You know I never could mean that—never! I could forgive you anything as long as you told me the truth.”
She clung to him as they went down to dinner together, and she forbore to allude to the state of the atmosphere, except by shivering once or twice—the gas logs sent forth a chill, blue flare. There was an odd return to that arrested, baffling expression on Mr. Laurence’s face, however, when his wife announced her intention of going around to the Lalors’ with him afterwards.
“Don’t you think it is too cold for you to go out to-night?” he asked, and she answered with a playful gleam of the sarcasm she couldn’t keep from using. “No, I think it’s too cold for me to stay in.”
It was a matter for ejaculating surprise on arriving at the Lalors’ to find the unexpected Spicers instead of the Stones, who, however, appeared in a few minutes. Mr. Spicer had a slender, correct elegance of aspect, while Mr. Stone was large, grayish, and rather portly. Beside the Spicers, a Mrs. Frere and her son, a dumb, immature youth, were already in possession of the field. Mrs. Frere’s position as a church worker carried her into connection with people whom she might not otherwise have met; the chief effect that she produced on every one now was an ardent desire that she should go. She sat in utter silence with folded hands, but her dumbness differed from that of her son in a patently avid appreciation of everything that was said or done.
Mrs. Lalor, in a low-throated, faded light green gown covered with beautiful old lace, was loud in expression of her surprise and delight at this haphazard gathering. Mr. Lalor, tall, handsome and with wandering dissipated eyes and the same droop alike to his reddish mustache and to his figure, came forward also with hospitable welcome, while his wife volubly ordered not only him but the other men in behalf of her guests:
“Bennie, get that armchair out of the corner for Mrs. Laurence; be careful the top doesn’t fall off of it—we break all our things moving so often! Mr. Stone, won’t you put that footstool under Mrs. Spicer’s feet, I’m sure she’s not comfortable. Mr. Spicer, if you’ll kindly move the table near me to make more room—Bennie, run up-stairs and get the little feather hand-screen for Mrs. Stone—I know that lamp’s shining in your eyes.” She pronounced it “Shinin’ in yo’ eyes,” with a caressing, indolent inflection to her soft voice. “It’s not the least trouble for him, Mrs. Stone—Bennie always waits on me.”
There was a seductive air of luxury about Mrs. Lalor in spite of the fact that the cheap, shabby upholstered chairs and sofa were profusely covered with cheaper “drapings” on such portions as were most subject to wear, and that the mantelpiece, also draped, was simply decorated with a single pink-mouthed grinning conch shell—yet the latter was indeed under an old, old painting of a low-browed woman whose white throat and rounded cheek gleamed out from rich brown shadows—a woman who, even thus dimly seen, seemed to match the lace on Mrs. Lalor’s gown.
“I only came because I thought you’d like me to,” whispered Mrs. Spicer to Mrs. Laurence in a pause of the later conversation. Mrs. Stone gave an affectionate little squeeze to her neighbour’s hand. “I thought Ernest would object, but he seemed quite willing. I wish that Mrs. Frere wasn’t here, you have to be so careful what you say before her.”
“We won’t stay very long,” murmured Mrs. Laurence assentingly. Mr. Lalor and her husband had apologetically disappeared behind closed doors to transact their business together, the latter with that last look at her over the heads of the others that meant their own special farewell. Mrs. Lalor had insisted on supplying every one with hot lemonade, on account of the coldness of the weather, calling the three men back and forth in her services and holding a little couet with them afterwards as she sat reclined in a rocking-chair.
“I reckon Mr. Eddie was right bored with only me to talk to before you all came in,” she announced with a smile directed at young Mr. Frere. “You don’t know how glad I am to see you gentlemen here. I enjoy gentlemen’s society so much. Of course, I’ve always had it till I came up No’th, and I miss it so much. I wish you could have seen our po’ch at home in the old times on a Sunday evenin’, with my sister Mollie’s friends, and Emma Lily’s, and mine, all lined up waiting for us to come down.”
“Indeed!” said Mrs. Stone.
“I told Bennie when I married him I never could settle down to just one.” Mrs. Lalor paused lightly. “I was engaged to six before that. But he always said—‘George’ my name is George—‘I want you should enjoy gentleman’s society just the same as you always did.’ I was engaged first when I was fourteen.”
“Oh, Southern engagements!” said Mrs. Laurence indulgently, with a gesture that disclaimed their seriousness of intent to Mrs. Stone’s startled gaze. There seemed to be an unforeseen electrical quality in the air; she had felt it even when she first came in, but every lightest speech was oddly charged with it, you couldn’t tell what was coming. Instead of vindicating her confidence in Mrs. Lalor, the latter seemed bent on a self destruction that might drag any one else down with her. She went on now happily.
“Of course, though I always cared most for Bennie—he was such a beautiful waltzer. Sometimes even now, after breakfast, if I’m a little blue, he says, ‘Come, George, let’s have a waltz,’ and he just spins me around the room while he whistles the tune. I don’t think there’s anything like dancing for keeping up the spirits. I don’t know what I’d do without Bennie up No’th here, he’s so thoughtful of me!”
“How extraordinary!” breathed little Mrs. Spicer to Mrs. Stone, athwart the rapt gaze of the silent Mrs. Frere. It was evident that neither Mr. Stone nor Mr. Spicer felt appalled, both men seemed to be impalpably walled off from the jurisdiction of their wives, as they sat smiling with interested indulgence at their hostess, with young Mr. Frere, open-mouthed, behind them.
In spite of the semi-artificiality of her aspect, Mrs. Lalor had an undoubted charm; her face looked younger and less drawn by lamplight, and her pretty, tear-soft eyes had their coquettish gleam in them, her careless attitude was full of lazy grace. She thrust out a slippered foot with its hanging length of ribbon, and gave an appealing glance at the man nearest her.
“I know you want to tie my shoe for me, Mr. Stone—no, Mr. Spicer, I didn’t say you.”
She laughed gleefully as they both jumped for position, Mr. Stone’s large bulk going down heavily on one knee with exaggerated gallantry.
“Let me fan you while he’s doing it,” cried Mr. Spicer eagerly, seizing the required implement from the table.
“You’d better fan Mrs. Stone, she looks so warm,” suggested Mrs. Lalor. “The house is so heated, it makes one’s face burn after the cold air. Wouldn’t you like a little powder to cool it?” She jumped up hospitably, leaving Mr. Stone still upon the floor. “It isn’t the slightest trouble to get it, I always keep it in this little cupboard, with a puff and a handglass—and some rouge,” she explained in a confidential tone. “Not that I care for rouge myself, Bennie doesn’t like it, but some people always use it for the evenin’.”
Mrs. Stone gasped.
“Thank you, I need nothing of the kind,” she said hastily. She, the mother of four, a member of the Guild and the Vittoria Colonna Club to be spoken to in connection with rouge! Even Mrs. Laurence’s white chin went up—this did seem “common.”
“And I really think we’ll have to be going,” added Mrs. Stone with decision, rising as she spoke, a signal imitated by Mrs. Spicer, though Mrs. Frere sat fast.
“Oh, do wait for us,” pleaded Mrs. Laurence eagerly. “Here is my husband now. You’re ready to go now, aren’t you, Will?”
“Yes, as soon as I wrap up those documents,” he assented, with an unconscious exhilaration of tone that caught her ear. He disappeared into the opposite room once more. Mr. Lalor had just walked out of it, and down the length of the bare hall, with echoing steps.
“Oh, you must stay and have some more hot lemonade,” Mrs. Lalor begged warmly, and stopped suddenly short; a faint colour came into her cheek; it was as if she listened, not to the chorus, “No, not to-night——” “Thank you just the same——” “We really must go——” but to something impalpable, unguessed.
“Excuse me for just one moment,” she said and vanished swiftly into the narrow passage, leaving behind her a surprised, disapproving silence—even Mrs. Frere stood up; there was a queer, unexpected sensation that something was happening. Mrs. Laurence went out nervously to get her cloak. In that oblique glimpse down the hall to the dining-room she saw—or didn’t she really see anything?—a man’s arm stretched wildly out as if to reach something—a woman’s hand grasping it—the wavering shadow as of a struggle—and the faintest sound as of a key turning as it might be in a sideboard lock. Something must be happening——! Though only, indeed, one unimportant scene of a tragedy such as these happy, protected women had no knowledge of, that long, exquisitely heart-racking, unmentionable strain of living that companies the degradation of one who is loved.
“Did your coal come to-day, Mrs. Laurence?” asked Mrs. Stone in a chill, unnatural voice. They were all getting on their wraps now.
“No, it didn’t,” answered Mrs. Laurence. Justice compelled her to add, with an effort: “It wasn’t Harner’s fault, after all. Will forgot to order it on his way to the station; he felt so badly about it, but he’s had so much business on his mind lately that I really think I mustn’t ask him to do anything more.”
“You’re more lenient than my wife would have been,” said Mr. Stone jovially. “I’d have gotten it in the neck.”
“You’d have deserved it,” agreed Mr. Spicer.
“I feel dreadfully because you’re all going so soon,” said Mrs. Lalor appearing once more, clinging with both little hands to the arm of her husband, who, sullen and dejected, towered above her. She looked wan and thin, as if some ageing mist had settled over her, but the wrinkles that had deepened around her pretty eyes did not keep them from being indomitably flirtatious as she glanced back to the man who had followed them in.
“Mr. Laurence and I haven’t had a chance to tell any secrets at all!—What did you say, Mrs. Spicer? Yes, the house is warm, thanks to Mr. Laurence,” she assented gayly. “He insisted on orderin’ my coal for me this mornin’.”
There was a dead silence. To her dying day Mrs. Laurence could see that whole scene definitely before her—the embarrassed attitudes of the men; the arrested, guilty expression on her husband’s face that all might read; Mrs. Frere’s greedy joy; the compassionate gaze of Mrs. Stone and Mrs. Spicer after their swift flash of comprehension.—Yet after that one paralyzing moment she rose staunchly superior to the petty, yet excruciating entanglement of the situation. She stepped forward and kissed Mrs. Lalor good-bye in the face of her little world, with a hand-pressure that emphasized the words:
“I’m so glad Mr. Laurence could be of service to you,” before she made her exit with him. Yet there were those who felt that they were not deceived and the eyes of Mr. Stone and Mr. Spicer met as the door closed behind the husband and wife—and it was a glance that confided a sinister and mutual thankfulness of escape.
The two in question walked swiftly away in silence on the starlit, drift-bordered path; the wind had gone down but it was infinitely cold. They went, part of the time, in single file, but she ignored his tentative pressure on her arm; there seemed to be an icy chasm between them. The distance to the house was short, and it was not until they were inside it that she broke forth hotly, as if they had been talking together all the way, her crimson cheeks and blazing eyes facing his tall, reluctant figure as she threw off her wraps.
“It wasn’t as if I could ever say anything to those people to explain! Oh, it’s so perfectly horrid, so maddening, so utterly ridiculous on the face of it!—They’ll think I’m jealous of her—they’ll be sorry for me. Sorry! As if I could possibly be jealous of her. They’ll think you keep everything from me, and that they know more about you than I do. How could you have put me in such a position when just a word——” She made a little sound that was half a moan. “Why you didn’t have the decency to tell me before we went there I can’t see.” Her voice rose higher. “Yes I can—you were afraid; afraid of your wife! It does seem pretty bad to have you remember to do things for other people, when you can’t remember them for me, but that isn’t the point I mind most, it’s not the real thing—what I can’t stand is you not having the courage to own up, to tell me the truth. Why don’t you say something?”
“Because you’re saying it all.”
“O Will!” She gazed at him hopelessly as he stood in front of her, her hand laid detainingly on his arm. He looked very high-bred, very much a gentleman, with that air of aloof hauteur; there were circles under his dark eyes, and his lips had a compression that she well knew. If there was anything that Mr. Laurence hated temperamentally it was a shrewish woman; the ice of the winter’s night couldn’t freeze harder than he when she stormed, even though he allowed that she had righteous reason for her wrath. He spoke now, in answer to her appeal, with stiff, prideful humility:
“You know very well that I’m extremely sorry about the whole matter. As for ordering that coal for Mrs. Lalor, I meant to have told you about it when we got back, you know I never can keep anything from you; I don’t want to. I forgot it when I first came home—and then you took me by surprise, someway. And now don’t you think we’ve perhaps had enough of this? I’m tired.”
“No, no; don’t go yet!” Mrs. Laurence’s hand pinioned him fast. She had known all along that she would forgive him when she had spoken her mind—what else can one do but forgive when one loves? Oh, that was but a little part of it—the forgiveness! The real need all the time was that he should be reinstated on the pedestal from which his own act had driven him. He must be, not the Will whom she forgave, but the Will whom she adored. Her certainty dropped from her; she began reasonably, to grow more and more tremulously beseeching.
“Will, please listen! I can’t bear it when you look at me as if you didn’t like me. Of course, I knew all the time that you were sorry—I knew you meant to tell me the truth! Of course, you can’t always think of it at the moment when I take you by surprise and fly at you and scold you—nobody could! I don’t wonder that you hate to tell me things, when I make it so hard for you. I ought to be a hundred times nicer than I am. When I saw her husband standing there to-night you looked so fine and beautiful and good—and truthful”—a sob, not tears, but just a sob broke athwart the words—“I thank God every day on my knees that I’m married to you!”
Her arms dropped from their hold, but his were around her now, pressing her closer, and still closer; the eyes he bent upon the upturned face were smiling, yet a little moist, too—his tender voice had in it every admission that she longed for as he whispered:
“Oh, Nan—foolish, foolish Nan! Such a sweet woman——!”
“Well, what do you want me to do to-day, Min? Speak up quick.” Mr. Harlow, in his holiday morning costume, consisting of a pair of old and baggy trousers, an outing shirt and an utterly incongruous coat, with bulging pockets, stood by the piazza steps, a disreputable grey felt hat held in one hand.
“It’s nearly ten o’clock, and I must go down-town and get some nails before the stores close for the day. I had expected to send one of the boys, but Betty tells me that Herbert has gone to play in the golf tournament, and Jack is off to the ball game. If there’s anything round the house you want mended, now’s your time to tell me.”
“We want a screw for the wringer—or perhaps it’s a nut,” said Mrs. Harlow, hazily, her eyes fixed on her husband. “The top is off the piano-stool again, and there is the arm of the red chair,—you’ll find it in the closet under the stairs,—and one of the faucets in the kitchen sink will keep running. Oh, yes, and there’s a caster broken off the refrigerator, too; we have to prop it up with a block of wood, but it’s so crooked that the water from it goes all over the cellar floor. Please don’t forget it, will you? But, David, you are not going down to the village looking like that? It’s really disgraceful! If any one should see you! It won’t take you a minute to go up-stairs and change your coat and put on another necktie.”
“What’s the matter with the clothes I have on?” Mr. Harlow looked down at himself with satisfaction. “Just the things to work in, good and easy. I’ll go on now, and you can think what else you want done, and tell me when I come back.” He stopped to take the letters from the grey-clad postman, who had just come up with the one mail of a holiday. “Here’s one for me from Tom. I’ll read it as I go along. Good-bye!”
Mr. Harlow, who had put on his hat, took it off in courtesy to his wife, as he looked back and smiled a last affectionate farewell to her from the other side of the gate. Her eyes watched his large form, with its firm stride, until it disappeared round the corner. She loved his little politenesses of manner to her.
The wind touched the purple clusters of wistaria above her head, and shook out a sweet perfume from them. The grass around the house was close cut and velvety, but next door the lawn-mower was click-clicking busily, and the sky was as blue as a summer sky.
Mrs. Harlow, slender and trim in a freshly washed lilac cambric gown that matched the wistaria, sat on the piazza opening her letters with the true holiday feeling of the suburbanite.
Nothing whatever of interest presented itself for her amusement, but the mere fact that her husband was at home for the day seemed to breathe a pleasant sense of confusion and excitement that disqualified her for any connected occupation, in spite of the big pile of sewing up-stairs.
“Any letters, mother?”
Betty, the daughter of the house, who had come out in a white shirt-waist and a straw hat decked with last year’s blue corn-flowers, perched herself on the end of the piazza. “I’m going to the train to meet Sylvia, but it isn’t time yet. I’m so glad she’ll be here! I haven’t seen her for weeks.”
“There’s a letter from your Aunt Kitty,” said the mother. “She says your Uncle Tom is going to retire from business. They want to take Lutie abroad for change of air. She must be nearly eight years old now. She’s been so well lately they’re afraid of a reaction. I can’t quite make out where they’re going first; it looks like Himalaya. Oh, I see! It’s Edinburgh.”
“It might as well be Himalaya. Lutie’s never had anything but changes of air since she was born,” said Betty, crossly. “How some people do travel! They seem to have money for everything, while we—well, things can’t go on like this much longer! I’m going to work and earn something just as soon as I can now. And Jack says he wants to leave school and go in an office like Herbert. It’s too bad to leave so much on father. Don’t you think he has had more on his mind lately?”
“I’m afraid he has,” said Mrs. Harlow, with a sigh. “Why do you ask?”
“Oh, something so horrid happened yesterday! I meant to keep it to myself, but I can’t.” Betty’s cheeks were red, her eyes were flashing. “I was at Mrs. Kennedy’s, with those books, and she asked if there was anything the matter with father, he had been looking so worn lately. She thought outsiders always noticed those things more quickly than the family.”
“The idea!” said Mrs. Harlow, indignantly.
“Then when I was in the hall I heard them talking; I couldn’t help it. They said—she and Mrs. Bradley—what a pity it was when a man didn’t get on well in business, and Mrs. Tower said she was always so sorry for the wife of an unsuccessful man; it must be so dreadful, if you had any ambition, to see your husband a failure. She said she never could really respect a man who showed himself deficient. I was so angry I could hardly walk home. I went up-stairs and cried. I wanted to burst right in and tell them how nobly father had behaved when that old Johnson absconded, and how he was trying to pay up all the back debts. But I knew it wasn’t any use——”
“Deficient!” Mrs. Harlow’s eyes glittered. “Your father’s brain—well, your father’s brain is far beyond most people’s. How he can make all those calculations the way he does——” She paused. Her own education dated back of the modern era. She was sound on the arithmetic of her butcher’s and grocer’s books, but beyond that all figures looked to her much like a drop of water seen through a microscope.
“There’s the whistle!” said Betty, suddenly jumping up and making for the train to meet her best friend.
The subject of this conversation had meanwhile been wending his way to the town. He perhaps had looked forward to a time of pecuniary ease and leisure, when, instead of tinkering round the house, he might play golf. But no one, not even his wife, quite understood what a holiday meant to Mr. Harlow.
To escape for a solid block of sunlit secular hours out of the grimy, artificially lighted, badly ventilated office, with its white, tired-looking clerks, and its association of intricate, harassing toil—to escape from this to the peacefulness of green grass, and the click of the lawn-mower, and the flickering of shade from the new leaves of the elms that arched the street, and the sweet voices of little children calling to one another, was to go back into a little corner of the emerald fields of boyhood.
Mr. Harlow was not in the least old; he was indeed barely middle-aged; yet there were moments when he knew that he was not so young as he had been. On the spring morning of a holiday the thought, even if it came, was robbed of its shadow.
His face had the kind smile that children always trusted, as he stopped to pick up a tiny, curly-haired girl who had fallen in his way. The action showed him the letter, which he had forgotten, still in his hand.
He opened and read it as he walked, stopped short and read it again with knitted brows. Then he walked on and on, as one deep in thought, until he came to the other side of the village. He did not go near the stores, but strolled instead towards a large, unoccupied house that stood surrounded by lawns and trees, well apart from its neighbours. There was a clear view of the hills from the porch. Mr. Harlow walked round the house and through the garden, and sat on the porch steps, still deep in thought.
“I did not know what had become of you,” said his wife, running down the walk to meet him as he once more came in through the gate. “Why, it’s after twelve o’clock! I was afraid something had happened to you! I suppose you’ve been talking all this time to somebody.” She did not give him an opportunity to answer, but drew him up beside her to one of the piazza chairs. “I know you won’t have time to mend all those things I asked you to, without taking up all your afternoon, and I don’t want you to do that. But I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to fix the leg of the refrigerator.”
“It would be better to buy a new one, wouldn’t it?” asked Mr. Harlow, impartially.
“‘Better to buy a new one!’ I only wish I could. How queer you act, David! Aren’t you going to put the netting on the screens now? I think you’ll have time before dinner; it’s to be at one o’clock to-day.”
“I can’t do the screens now, Min. The store was shut when I went to buy the nails. Who’s that talking to Betty?”
“It’s Sylvia; she has come out for a couple of days. And, O David, a telegram came for Betty while you were gone, from Harry Leroy. He’ll be on to-night, and he’s not going back to Indiana any more. He has a position here with his cousin.”
“Hum!” Mr. Harlow looked doubtfully considerate. “How old is Betty? Fifteen?”
“She will be nineteen in September.”
“Oh, well, she’s nothing but a child yet,” said Mr. Harlow, in a tone that defied denial.
“Nothing but a child,” assented his wife, cheerfully.
There was a pause. “How old were you when we were married, Min?”
“Twenty. It was entirely too young.”
“I remember,” Mr. Harlow’s voice was reflective, “my mother told me she was married at seventeen and my grandmother was married at fifteen; and I had an aunt who——”
“If you remember any more I’ll go in the house!” said his wife, indignantly. “What is the matter with you, David? Where have you been this morning?”
“Well, Min, I’ve something to tell you. I——” he stopped, his voice altered and his eyes became suddenly alert. “Hello! What’s that over there?”
“Smoke, isn’t it?” she answered, her gaze following his towards the horizon. “It seems to me I can smell it.”
“Looks like a fire, doesn’t it?”
“Yes, but I don’t hear any fire-bells.”
Mr. Harlow rose. “Two-thirds of our beloved volunteer fire department are off on a picnic or a procession or something to-day. I’m going over to that smoke on the old bicycle, and find out what’s the matter.”
“You’d a great deal better stay at home!” his wife called after him, but he was gone.
She still sat on the piazza. A few moments later a rider sped past, and then another. Then the fire-bells began to ring at last—clang! clang! clang, clang, clang!
The fire was on the outskirts of the village, in a different direction from that which Mr. Harlow had taken in the morning. The smoke rose a blacker and blacker column in the distance, interspersed with sudden bursts of flame. The crackling sound of burning wood, the occasional sound of something falling, and hoarse voices calling to one another were borne faintly yet unmistakably upon the air.
“I’m going to the fire!” It was Betty, hat in hand, who had rushed down-stairs breathless. “Come on, Syl! Oh, isn’t it exciting! Just look at that blaze! There go our boys!”
The street was filled with an outpouring of bicycles with their riders, and with boys and men coming in from the various games, Herbert in one set, Jack in another. The village was rapidly becoming deserted. Mrs. Harlow began to wish she might go, too, but she guaged the distance and forbore.
The fire had started in some outhouses, and helped by a sudden breeze, had leaped merrily over intervening space towards a large barn that stretched out red and imposing over one end of the field. Beyond that was a dwelling-house. The barn, which was new, while piled at one end with fodder, was as yet untenanted by any animals, as Mr. Harlow thankfully discovered on reaching the place.
The stir in the village had not extended to these outlying fields, which were all deserted, as became a holiday. A woman stood in the doorway of the house, watching the blaze. One man was running off, shouting for help, and another was carrying two buckets of water towards the barn.
He came up to Mr. Harlow and put the buckets on the ground.
“There ain’t any use in carryin’ water,” he said, “not a mite o’ use, only it seemed sort o’ natural to do it. Just look at those flames!”
“The engine ought to hurry up if it’s going to do any good,” said Mr. Harlow.
“Can’t do a particle of good if it does come. There ain’t any water here—that is, not more than a teacupful; well and cistern’s dry as a bone.”
“The house will not catch,” said Mr. Harlow; “the wind is the other way. You are sure there was no one in the barn?”
“Sure,” said the man.
They were gazing at the flames, which enveloped one end of the structure. Another moment, and there was a deafening crash through the roar of the fire; half of the barn had fallen in, and revealed beyond, high up on one of the big beams of the rafters, the white faces and crouching forms of six little children, huddled close together. Playing in the loft, they had climbed higher and higher back, to get out of reach of the flames.
A cry of horror broke from the two onlookers. The next instant the man, wildly shrieking for help, followed Mr. Harlow, who sped towards the barn.
The flames that had left one part of the building still untouched were rapidly curling round it, lighting up the faces of the children. The roof sloped with a sharp pitch, but there were a couple of projecting ledges below it.
Mr. Harlow had been an athlete in his day. In spite of his large, heavily built frame, he was still quick of motion, sure of foot, keen of eye. He took off his coat and threw it on the ground, and then in some way he was climbing up the barn.
He disappeared, then reappeared again inside. Swinging himself up on a blackened rafter, he held with one hand to a support above, and with the other lifted one half-insensible child from her perch, and swung her over into the waiting grasp of a fireman below, for the engine had come up, and the field was black with the whole swarming village population, gathering larger and larger forces each minute.
Six times did Mr. Harlow’s strong arm plunge forward and encircle a helpless, drooping little form in the sight of the field of breathless spectators.
As the last one was safely handed over, a sharp breath of relief came from the crowd. Then there was a leaping flame, and a cloud of smoke surged up and hid him from view.
“The doctor says he’ll be all right soon. Really, mother, we’re not keeping anything from you.”
Betty, with high-keyed voice, flaming cheeks and wild eyes, was under the impression that she was pacifically calm of demeanour. She had been taken home in a friend’s buggy.
“There’s not the least cause for worry. He’s only suffocated a little, you know, from the smoke, and of course his hands are burned a little, and his feet; and he’s not quite conscious yet, but he’s all right. I was to tell you that particularly, but you’re always so nervous! They’ll have him home here soon. Herbert’s with him, and Syl is bringing his coat. And—O mother!”
Betty fell into Mrs. Harlow’s arms, and they wept together.
“It was the most glorious thing you ever saw!” said the daughter, brokenly. “Syl and I reached the field just after Herbert and Jack, and we heard some one saying, ‘Yes, six children in there, but there’s a man trying to get them out.’
“And then we saw a figure in the barn, through the smoke, and Herbert cried, ‘It’s father! it’s father!’ and ran forward, and Jack and I just screamed, ‘It’s father! Oh, it’s father!’ And oh, you ought to have heard everybody, mother,—I’ll never forget it,—and Jack cheered, but I could only cry, ‘It’s father!’ And then there was a sort of a crash, and then lots of people came up and told us he’d be all right soon, and Mr. Nevin put me in his buggy and brought me home. But if you’d seen how surprised everybody was to find it was father! What’s the matter with you, mother?”
“Oh, nothing,” said the mother. She had drawn her form from her daughter’s embrace and was standing erect. “It doesn’t surprise me in the least. I always knew how brave your father was. Why, when we were engaged he saved a man from—O Betty, Betty, here they come!”
It was a cavalcade led by Jack, with outriders on bicycles and followers on foot, surrounding an ancient barouche, on one seat of which Mr. Harlow was solicitously propped up by his son Herbert, his white face, grotesque with scorched hair, smiling quizzical encouragement at his wife.
“I’m all right,” he said, in response to her faltering, “O David!” “Such nonsense! I don’t know what all this fuss is about.”
“We know, Mrs. Harlow,” said the doctor, as he helped his charge out of the carriage and up-stairs, still protesting, with bandages on his hands and feet. He professed himself as fit as a fighting cock to the wife who sat by his side and gazed at him, while Betty and Herbert received visitors and reporters below with the condescension of those of the blood to the lesser nobility.
“Yes, it’s the third time.” Betty’s voice had become attuned to the recital as the afternoon wore on towards dusk. “Once he rescued a man from the rapids in the St. Lawrence River—my uncle said it was one of the most daring deeds he ever witnessed; and another time he stopped a runaway horse, and saved two women from being dashed against a stone wall. And another time, when he was quite a boy, he had a fight with two burglars in the dark, and forced them—— What is it Herbert wants, Syl? I’ll go up-stairs and see. Will you just take this jelly that Mrs. Scovel brought over, and put it where Jack can’t get at it?”
“Mother!” She opened the door of the ‘throne-room,’ where the invalid, propped, up among his pillows, with a napkin under his chin, had the air of an enormous infant as his wife fed him with beef tea.
“Mother, there’s another reporter down-stairs. Herbert says he wants one of father’s pictures. There’s the telegraph boy riding up—it’s the sixth message we’ve had. Jack, bring it to me here! I’ll open it. It says, ‘Just heard the news. Love and congratulations for our hero.’ It’s from Aunt Kitty. Herbert wired her at once.”
“It’s the most fool business I ever heard of,” said the man in the bed, helplessly. “If I’d done anything, I wouldn’t mind, but——”
“Yes, dear, don’t excite yourself,” said his wife, in soothing tone. “Betty——” She gave her daughter a warning glance.
“I hope we’re through with all this tommy rot,” said Mr. Harlow, as Betty’s footsteps retreated.
He did not hear her voice again going on fluently to a fresh batch of visitors: “Once he rescued a man on the St. Lawrence River from a stone wall—I mean the rapids, one of the most daring deeds——”
“Min!”
“Yes, David.”
“Get my coat. Who’s that at the door now?”
It was Herbert’s voice this time. “What year was father born in?”
“Great Scott!” moaned the invalid. “Go down and tell ’em you don’t know. Shut that door! Get my coat, Min, and in the inner left-hand side pocket—don’t hold it upside down; you’ll let all my keys fall out; there, I told you so—some of that change rolled under the bed—never mind, look for it later. The left-hand pocket, I said——” Twenty-one years of matrimony had not availed to teach Mrs. Harlow the intricacy of her husband’s pockets. “Not that one; there, now you’ve hit it! Take that letter out.”
“Why, it’s the one you got from Tom this morning!”
“Yes; open it, and read for yourself. Tell me how it strikes you.”
As Mrs. Harlow read, the colour rose in her face. “Tom wishes to retire from active business—yes, that’s what Kitty’s letter said. I should think he’d have to, when—O David, he says if you’ll take his place in the firm—he has long been thinking of such an arrangement—David!”
“Ah, don’t take my hand, dear!” He winced instinctively, but his tone was very gentle. “Foolish woman, stop kissing those bandages.”
“O David, now your worries will all be over at last! The children had been planning how they could help you. I wonder what it will seem like to be able to buy anything new once more. And perhaps we could take the Morris house!”
“That’s just what I had been thinking of. I was over there prowling round the place this morning. I thought we’d go down and look at it again together after dinner. And I’m glad for your sake, Min, that I’m not such a failure as it seemed, after all, dear. You won’t have to be ashamed of your husband. What’s that noise?”
There was the roll of drums and the sound of flying footsteps, mingled with Betty’s hysterical tones:
“O mother! O mother! Look out of the window! The procession is stopping outside!”
Like the Lady of Shalott, Mrs. Harlow made three paces through the room to look beyond her threshold. Before her dazed vision rose ranks and ranks of men, crowding the street before her doorway, with the flag in front.
Some one was waving the flag, and Herbert was speaking, and then there was a cheer, and another, and another, and yet another; but she was not standing by the window; her face was down by her husband’s.
“Oh,” she breathed, with a loving scorn in her choking voice, as she touched the bandaged hand that tried to seek hers, “I don’t need to have you climb up burning barns and rescue children, I don’t need to have you ‘successful,’ as they call it, to know who you are! If every one despised you, if you were so poor you had to—dig—wells, I’d still know you were the dearest, the bravest, the best, the most wonderful man in all the world! I’m just too proud of you to live!”
“Big weddings are horrid. I think it’s a great deal nicer to elope—my grandmother eloped, and she was only sixteen at the time, nearly two years younger than I.”
“That is a very foolish way to talk, Tina; times are quite different, now.”
“I don’t see why! Anyway, I hate weddings. I only care for dances. Momsey, aren’t you going to let me go to this dance? What difference does it make if I’m not out? All my friends are to be there—the Clarks, and Edith Bayne and Francis Fanshawe. Daddy said I could go before he went away, and I’ve been counting on it all the time, and now you won’t let me!”
Tina sat on an ottoman in the centre of the big, mahogany-furnished, old-fashioned room, with her light hair falling over one ear and her large, clear, blue eyes fixed tragically on the face of the parent who sat busily sewing. Tina’s slim shoulders were hunched forward and her feet crossed in the attitude which always brought forth her mother’s rebuke:
“Don’t sit that way, dear; it’s very unladylike. How often have I told you, Tina, that if you get in the habit of sitting like that when we’re alone you’ll do it when you don’t realize it.”
Mrs. Malison’s voice had the tone of a well-worn persistency. She was a young-looking woman for her years, and still handsome enough to make the resemblance to her youngest daughter very apparent even to the obstinate little curve of the short upper lip. The answer was almost as automatic:
“I wouldn’t care! Momsey, why won’t you let me go to the dance?”
“Now, Tina, what is the use of teasing mother any more about that?” said the second daughter, coming into the room. Elinor was small and dark, with finely marked eyebrows, regular features, and an expression of great intelligence, wrecked at times by a shattering wave of nervousness. At the moment she carried in her hand a bird’s bathtub, filled with water, destined for the cage over by the window, where a brown and dishevelled canary hung mopingly from a perch. She went on:
“You know perfectly well that mother thinks you’ve been staying up a great deal too late in the evening. You cannot study and go out at the same time. And she told you she didn’t approve of your being so much with Francis Fanshawe—none of us do. He may be a nice enough boy, but he isn’t our kind. We all of us think you’d better let the acquaintance drop.”
“Oh, if you don’t want me to do anything!” Tina’s eyes began to sparkle ominously. “It doesn’t make the slightest difference to me when you talk that way about my friends. I like them, no matter what you and Annette say. You’ve always been down on Francis! And I don’t care whether I keep on with my studies or not.”
“Tina!” Elinor carefully inserted the bathtub in the cage before flinging herself volubly upon the subject. “Tina, you can’t mean that—you want to be educated, I hope! Besides, you’ll enjoy coming out into society a great deal more later, and if you’re seen everywhere now, people will be taking you for much older than you are.”
“I wouldn’t care!” Tina’s defiant tone took on an increasing rapidity. “I don’t see what good it does to be educated, anyway. People like you just as well when you’re silly. I think it’s dreadfully stupid to go to college the way you did and get so critical, and never see any fun in things, and analyze everybody the way you do Robert Harper, so that you never know whether you like him or not. I wish you’d take enough interest in him to get him to shave off that horrid, little, black mustache—it makes him look so sleek! I don’t care for what they teach in books. It doesn’t do me any good to learn about the ancient Egyptians and the battles of the Civil War, and write Enoch Arden over upside down; I hate Enoch Arden, he makes me so cross—— I care for automobiles, and skating and having a good time with my friends, and dancing. And it’s no use telling me I’ll enjoy myself more later. I want to enjoy myself now! Maybe there won’t be any ‘later’; maybe I’ll be dead.”
“I wonder how you make a bird take a bath,” said Elinor in an absorbed tone. She regarded the canary with a baffled eye. “I’ve had the water warm and I’ve had it cold; I’ve put the tub in every position I can think of, and left it there for half a day at a time, and he only hops around and looks at it.” Her voice rose in sudden, nervous excitement. “I don’t know what to do. He hasn’t taken a bath in a week. He must take a bath!”
“You get in and show him how,” jibed Tina, with a delighted childish giggle. She jumped up from the ottoman, swooping her arms down to embrace the mother, who still sat sewing. “All right momsey, I’m to go to the dance; it’s all settled. Let me try Tweetums, Elinor!” she ran over to the cage, brushing her sister to one side. Tina seemed to take the light with her when she moved; it clung around her bright hair, and radiated from her fair skin and her dear eyes, and even lurked, shimmering, in the folds of her sky-blue gown. She stood with upraised head touching the gilded wires of the cage, talking in tender, caressing sound to the little feathered rebel, with a lure of sugar crumbs upon her red lips, until he came to peck at them. What made the transition—what magic was hers? There was a sudden splash, a shower of raindrops over her laughing, triumphant face as she started back, before she ran from the room. Tina had the winning way.
“I thought I heard Tina in here,” said a taller sister, entering by another door. Annette was perhaps not so pretty as the other two, but she had a large, blonde gentleness, very reposefully attractive. She had been engaged for four years to a charming fellow, whose only lack was that of money, consequent on a dependent mother and sisters. The lovers had preserved the spirit of romance by varying the manifestations of it—for the last twelvemonth spending their time with note-book and pencil, raptly ciphering out the future possibilities of a livelihood for two on the narrowest known limit. Although Annette and Joseph had seen each other nearly every evening during this probation her soft eyes suffused and her soft cheeks rosed as virginally on the thousandth time he appeared as on the first.
She held up a garment now as she spoke. “I want to give this new waist to Tina to mend. Just see where she’s torn it! I found it under her desk.”
“Now, Annette, if you’ve been putting her room to rights again——!” Elinor held up her hands in despair.
“I couldn’t stand seeing it the way it was,” said Annette apologetically.
“Yes, of course, that’s the way you spoil her. I’m sure you and I were brought up very differently. Here, give me a needle and thread, she’ll never mend that waist. Mother, now you’ve let Tina think she’s going to the dance, that settles it; you can’t go back on it now: but I think she ought to understand that this is absolutely the last time.”
“She seemed to take it so to heart,” said the mother weakly. She tried to rally herself intelligently. “Of course I don’t mind her accepting invitations occasionally; she’s nearly eighteen; but the girls who are not out have more going on than the girls that are. And that young Fanshawe—he seems a stupid sort of a boy, to me; but he does such reckless things I do not like to have Tina with him.”
“Oh, mother, he’s all right, really, he’s only young.” Annette’s tone was gently protesting. “He’s so much richer than the others that he can do more things—that’s all; she’ll soon get tired of him. All the boys in that set are devoted to Tina. When a girl is as pretty as she is——” The three looked at each other in the pause that followed, but each saw only the image of the beloved youngest.
Tina, indeed, was in that stage of rebellion at life in which she could see no meaning in any law of her elders; her young desire controverted all their worldly experience. What was the use of saying she couldn’t want to do things when she patently did? Refusal hardened her; reason was only that which darkeneth understanding. She resented any appeal to her affection, not because she had little, but because she had so much that she fought being mastered by it, and thrown into those hated fits of weeping and contrition. She stormily wanted what she wanted. Yet if she were left untrammelled she showed unexpected glimpses of a heart passionately loving and tender; an undercurrent as old as the world, as deep as life, profoundly affecting. Tina was the only one of the family who had “temperament,” a fact dimly perceived only in the desire to shield the child from something unknown. At present there was the uneasy feeling that this something might be a youthful attachment for Francis Fanshawe.
To the critical eye, young Fanshawe, an orphan, was simply a stolid and uninteresting young fellow of twenty-one, tall, heavily built, and reddish in hair and complexion. Elinor characterized him as “thuddy,” a word coined by the family to indicate the quality of weight. He had no expression, and was tongue-tied in the presence of his elders, even the sympathetic Annette failing to elicit response from him, though with the youth of his own “set” Francis seemed to be voluble enough in the loud exchange of catch phrases and slangy interjections which made their happy intercourse, and he and Tina could talk by the hour together in a murmuring undertone. He was rather dangerously well off in a community where only the fathers had money, a fact in itself calculated to affect his reputation. But his light-blue eyes could look squarely into yours, and he had a good grip of the hand. He was undoubtedly a nice enough boy if you liked that kind, though Elinor could only wonder that anybody did. She herself only liked people who interested and stimulated.
With Elinor a lover was a creature to be analyzed mercilessly under the suspicion that otherwise he might get some power over one by sheer force of his affection; he was pictured in all sorts of impossible situations to test his attraction, every barrier was erected that ingenuity could devise. The way Elinor “treated” Robert was one of the stock subjects of interest and reprehension in the family, though Robert, intelligent, darkly good-looking and ineffective, was simply pleased if she was pleasant, and patiently snubbed when she wasn’t. Annette and Joseph—that patently good fellow who had had the courage of his convictions four years ago—enjoyed their little confidences of amused laughter over the situation. Still, precedent had made an engagement of marriage something to be very thoughtfully entered into, or necessarily prolonged. When it came to Tina——
Mrs. Malison wrote to her husband, as he did to her, every night during his long absences from home. She reposed so thoroughly in theory on his judgment that neither of them realized that in practice she decided everything. Her resolution to restrict the girl’s gaieties was suddenly hardened by the events of the dance, though it was twenty-four hours before she got a chance to express it, Tina having slept until the late afternoon in defiance of her pledge to study, and visitors taking up the rest of the day. One visitor, indeed, was partly responsible for the mother’s steadily increasing purpose; kind, elderly, little Miss Ward in her neat black jacket, trimmed with a mysterious ginger-coloured fur, being one of those amiable conversationalists who scatter the seeds of discomfort wherever they tread. Mrs. Malison, although she knew from aforetime what she had to expect, couldn’t help the usual thrill of exasperation at the opening sentence:
“How fleshy you are growing! I said the other day as you were passing, ‘I hardly knew Mrs. Malison, she’s getting so stout; it’s easy to see that she doesn’t let things worry her!’ Your husband looked very badly, I think, when he was here last. I want to apologize for not coming before to congratulate Miss Elinor on her engagement to Mr. Harper.”
“My dear Miss Ward, you have been misinformed”—Mrs. Malison felt that she was holding herself well in hand—“Elinor would be very much obliged to you, I’m sure—but there is no engagement.”
“Well, now, isn’t that singular!” Miss Ward’s small features indicated a deep and wondering interest. “I certainly understood from Mrs. Painter that Ethel said it was announced; I know she mentioned that every one was talking of it. I was there yesterday looking at the things Mrs. Painter brought over from the other side—beautiful, aren’t they? She gave me a lovely little framed photograph from some place in Italy—Sorrento, I think; you can get them here for a quarter, but of course it’s the thought you value. She showed me the most exquisite laces—and hats——! Six of them; perfect dreams. How pretty your hat looks this year; you’ve had such good wear out of it, too, haven’t you? I’m sure I never mind if a thing isn’t in the newest style! Oh, by the way, my sister was one of the chaperons with you last night at the young people’s dance. She said Miss Tina evidently enjoyed herself if one could judge by her actions—quite a case, isn’t she! And so noticeable-looking, too. Of course, when she gets as old as your other daughters she’ll sober down; I’m sure, as I told my sister, you never see them doing anything conspicuous.”
Conspicuous! The word of all others calculated to bring the blood to a mother’s cheek. Mrs. Malison trembled almost visibly with her effort at self-control, as she switched the conversation further afield, though she saw as plainly as on the night before the lighted ballroom and the tall, lissome, white-clad figure of Tina, with gleaming golden hair and scintillating eyes, “holding hands” with Francis Fanshawe in ring-around-a-rosy fashion, now high above her head, now swinging low down, as the two went flying across the floor, not once, but many times, with an exaggerated, heel-and-toe, boy-and-girl sportiveness after every one else was seated and the music had grown as freakishly mad as they. Mrs. Malison had not realized at first that it was Tina. Then, after that whispered rebuke they had disappeared until it was nearly time to go home, emerging finally, on being sent for, from a palm-hidden corner of the enclosed balcony, Tina with very flushed cheeks, hazy eyes and a general air of having been Called Back, too plain to be mistaken—a perfectly open, childlike defiance of inevitable comment that made one moan in ludicrous dismay. There is nothing so patently open to criticism as innocence. Even through the “thuddiness” of Francis there showed the glitter of an eye which told of the spirit within. Mrs. Malison’s annoyance had culminated when she spoke to Tina on the second morning. She was fully nerved for struggle. This thing had to stop.
“Tina, I have been waiting for an opportunity to speak to you about the ball. I was very much displeased with your behaviour; very much displeased! I felt obliged to write to your father about it. I cannot allow you to go to another dance this winter.”
“All right; I don’t want to,” said Tina uninterestedly.
She had thrown herself down on the wicker lounge beside a black poodle stretched out on the Roman-striped coverlet, and putting her arms around the animal surveyed her mother from this position. Mrs. Malison’s eyes feasted on the picture.
“Tina, you are entirely too young to do as you please. You know nothing about the consequences. After this you are to attend to your studies. I don’t wish you to be seen with Francis Fanshawe any more; and I don’t wish you to invite him here.”
“He’s not coming,” said Tina briefly. “Momsey, I want a new grey suit! I know I had this green one last month, but I hate it. All my friends are getting grey suits now.”
“Tina, have you quarrelled with Francis?”
“No.”
Mrs. Malison looked uncomfortably puzzled.
“Then—— Has he done anything you don’t like, dear?”
“No.”
“There isn’t anything that you’re keeping from me?” In spite of denial, Mrs. Malison felt the tenacity of some purpose that she could not fathom.
“No; oh, no!” Tina raised her voice at the sight of her two sisters in the doorway. “You can come in; momsey’s finished scolding me. I want a new grey suit—all my friends have grey suits!”
“Well, of all things!” Elinor’s tone was exasperated. “Another new suit—when Annette and I have been wearing our old ones all winter! That’s so like you, Tina, never considering where the money is to come from.”
“I don’t care where the money comes from! Annette, don’t you think I can have it?”
“It seems a little foolish, dear—unless you could wear it later in the season,” began Annette pacifically. “By the way, I heard you say that Francis wasn’t coming here. I thought he was going to take you and Edith to the school concert to-night.”
“No; Robert’s going to take us,” said Tina. She detached herself from her sisters’ embrace and ran away, with the black poodle after her.
“Robert,” repeated Elinor meditatively; she sat down in the chair her mother had just vacated and stared at Annette. “How very odd! Robert has never taken Tina anywhere. She must have written to him. That child does the most unexpected things! I was wondering last night if I would care for Robert if he were quite different. Some men have such a brutal streak in them. On the other hand, you like a man to know his own mind and keep to it.”