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Title: Young People's Pride

Author: Stephen Vincent Benet

Release Date: July, 2005 [EBook #8403]
[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
[This file was first posted on July 7, 2003]

Edition: 10

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[ILLUSTRATION: "WHAT'S THAT?" SAID MRS. SEVERANCE SHARPLY] YOUNG PEOPLE'S
PRIDE

_A NOVEL_

BY STEPHEN VINCENT BENET

ILLUSTRATIONS BY HENRY RALEIGH COPYRIGHT, 1922

BY

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY

_First printing, August 1922_ _TO ROSEMARY

  If I were sly, I'd steal for you that cobbled hill, Montmartre,
  Josephine's embroidered shoes, St. Louis' oriflamme,
  The river on grey evenings and the bluebell-glass of Chartes,
  And four sarcastic gargoyles from the roof of Notre Dame.

  That wouldn't be enough, though, enough nor half a part;
  There'd be shells because they're sorrowful, and pansies since
  they're wise,
  The smell of rain on lilac-bloom, less fragrant than your heart,
  And that small blossom of your name, as steadfast as your
  eyes.

  Sapphires, pirates, sandalwood, porcelains, sonnets, pearls,
  Sunsets gay as Joseph's coat and seas like milky jade,
  Dancing at your birthday like a mermaid's dancing curls
  --If my father'd only brought me up to half a decent trade!

  Nothing I can give you--nothing but the rhymes--
  Nothing but the empty speech, the idle words and few,
  The mind made sick with irony you helped so many times,
  The strengthless water of the soul your truthfulness kept true.

  Take the little withered things and neither laugh nor cry
  --Gifts to make a sick man glad he's going out like sand--
  They and I are yours, you know, as long as there's an I.
  Take them for the ages. Then they may not shame your
  hand._

  "... For there groweth in great abundance
  in this land a small flower, much blown about
  by winds, named 'Young People's Pride'..."

DYCER'S _Herbal_
YOUNG PEOPLES PRIDE



I

It is one of Johnny Chipman's parties at the Harlequin Club, and as usual
the people the other people have been asked to meet are late and as usual
Johnny is looking hesitatingly around at those already collected with the
nervous kindliness of an absent-minded menagerie-trainer who is trying to
make a happy family out of a wombat, a porcupine, and two small Scotch
terriers because they are all very nice and he likes them all and he can't
quite remember at the moment just where he got hold of any of them. This
evening he has been making an omelet of youngest. K. Ricky French, the
youngest Harvard playwright to learn the tricks of C43, a Boston exquisite,
impeccably correct from his club tie to the small gold animal on his
watch-chain, is almost coming to blows with Slade Wilson, the youngest San
Francisco cartoonist to be tempted East by a big paper and still so new to
New York that no matter where he tries to take the subway, he always finds
himself buried under Times Square, over a question as to whether La Perouse
or Foyot's has the best _hors-d'oeuvres_ in Paris.

The conflict is taking place across Johnny's knees, both of which are
being used for emphasis by the disputants till he is nearly mashed like a
sandwich-filling between two argumentative slices of bread, but he is quite
content. Peter Piper, the youngest rare-book collector in the country, who,
if left to himself, would have gravitated naturally toward French and
a devastating conversation in monosyllables on the pretty failings of
prominent debutantes, is gradually warming Clark Stovall, the youngest
star of the Provincetown Players out of a prickly silence, employed in
supercilious blinks at all the large pictures of celebrated Harlequins
by discreet, intelligent questions as to the probable future of Eugene
O'Neill.

Stovall has just about decided to throw Greenwich Village omniscience
overboard and admit privately to himself that people like Peter can be both
human and interesting even if they do live in the East Sixties instead of
Macdougal Alley when a page comes in discreetly for Johnny Chipman. Johnny
rises like an agitated blond robin who has just spied the very two worms he
was keeping room for to top off breakfast. "Well" he says to the world at
large. "They're only fifteen minutes late apiece this time."

He darts out into the hall and reappears in a moment, a worm on either
side. Both worms will fit in easily with the youthful assortment already
gathered--neither can be more than twenty-five.

Oliver Crowe is nearly six feet, vividly dark, a little stooping, dressed
like anybody else in the Yale Club from hair parted in the middle to low
heavyish brown shoes, though the punctured patterns on the latter are a
year or so out of date. There is very little that is remarkable about
his appearance except the round, rather large head that shows writer or
pugilist indifferently, brilliant eyes, black as black warm marble under
heavy tortoise-shell glasses and a mouth that is not weak in the least
but somehow burdened by a pressure upon it like a pressure of wings, the
pressure of that kind of dream which will not release the flesh it inhabits
always and agonizes often until it is given perfect body and so does not
release it until such flesh has ceased. At present he is not the
youngest anything, except, according to himself 'the youngest failure in
advertising,' but a book of nakedly youthful love-poetry, which in gloomy
moments he wishes had never been written, although the _San Francisco
Warbler_ called it as 'tensely vital as the Shropshire Lad,' brought him
several column reviews and very nearly forty dollars in cash at twenty-one
and since then many people of his own age and one or two editors have
considered him "worth watching."

Ted Billett is dark too, but it is a ruddy darkness with high clear color
of skin. He could pass anywhere as a College Senior and though his clothes
seem to have been put on anyhow with no regard for pressing or tailoring
they will always raise a doubt in the minds of the uninstructed as to
whether it is not the higher carelessness that has dictated them rather
than ordinary poverty--a doubt that, in many cases, has proved innocently
fortunate for Ted. His hands are a curious mixture of square executive
ability and imaginative sensitiveness and his surface manners have often
been described as 'too snotty' by delicate souls toward whom Ted
was entirely unconscious of having acted with anything but the most
disinterested politeness. On the other hand a certain even-tempered
recklessness and capacity for putting himself in the other fellow's place
made him one of the few popularly lenient officers to be obeyed with
discipline in his outfit during the war. As regards anything Arty or Crafty
his attitude is merely appreciative--he is finishing up his last year of
law at Columbia.

Johnny introduces Oliver and Ted to everybody but Peter--the three were
classmates--shepherds his flock with a few disarmingly personal insults to
prevent stiffness closing down again over the four that have already got to
talking at the arrival of the two newcomers, and marshals them out to the
terrace where they are to have dinner. Without seeming to try, he seats
them so that Ted, Peter and Oliver will not form an offensive-defensive
alliance against the three who are strangers to them by retailing New Haven
anecdotes to each other for the puzzlement of the rest and starts the ball
rolling with a neat provocative attack on romanticism in general and Cabell
in particular.




II

"Johnny's strong for realism, aren't you, Johnny?"

"Well, yes, Ted, I am. I think 'Main Street' and 'Three Soldiers' are
two of the best things that ever happened to America. You can say it's
propaganda--maybe it is, but at any rate it's real. Honestly, I've gotten
so tired, we all have, of all this stuff about the small Middle Western
Town being the backbone of the country--"

"Backbone? Last vertebra!"

"As for 'Main Street,' it's--"

"It's the hardest book to read through without fallin' asleep where you
sit, though, that I've struck since the time I had to repeat Geology."
Peter smiles. "But, there, Johnny, I guess I'm the bone-head part of the
readin' public--"

"That's why you're just the kind of person that ought to read books like
that, Peter. The reading public in general likes candy laxatives, I'll
admit--Old Nest stuff--but you--"

"'Nobody else will ever have to write the description of a small Middle
Western Town'" quotes Oliver, discontentedly. "Well, who ever wanted to
write the description of a small Middle Western Town?" and from Ricky
French, selecting his words like flowers for a _boutonniere_.

"The trouble with 'Main Street' is not that it isn't the truth but that it
isn't nearly the whole truth. Now Sherwood Anderson--"

"Tennyson. Who _was_ Tennyson? He died young."

"Well, if _that_ is Clara Stratton's idea of how to play a woman who did."

The two sentences seem to come from no one and arrive nowhere. They are
batted out of the conversation like toy balloons.

"Bunny Andrews sailed for Paris Thursday," says Ted Billett longingly. "Two
years at the Beaux Arts," and for an instant the splintering of lances
stops, like the hush in a tournament when the marshal throws down the
warder, at the shine of that single word.

"All the same, New York is the best place to be right now if you're going
to do anything big," says Johnny uncomfortably, too much as if he felt he
just had to believe in it, but the rest are silent, seeing the Seine wind
under its bridges, cool as satin, grey-blue with evening, or the sawdust of
a restaurant near the quais where one can eat Rabelaisiantly for six francs
with wine and talk about anything at all without having to pose or explain
or be defensive, or the chimneypots of La Cite branch-black against winter
sky that is pallor of crimson when the smell of roast chestnuts drifts idly
as a student along Boulevard St. Germain, or none of these, or all, but for
each one nostalgic aspect of the city where good Americans go when they die
and bad ones while they live--to Montmartre.

"New York _is_ twice as romantic, really," says Johnny firmly.

"If you can't get out of it," adds Oliver with a twisted grin.

Ted Billett turns to Ricky French as if each had no other friend in the
world.

"You were over, weren't you?" he says, a little diffidently, but his voice
is that of Rachel weeping for her children.

"Well, there was a little cafe on the Rue Bonaparte--I suppose you wouldn't
know--"




III

The party has adjourned to Stovall's dog-kennel-sized apartment on
West Eleventh Street with oranges and ice, Peter Piper having suddenly
remembered a little place he knows where what gin is to be bought is
neither diluted Croton water nor hell-fire. The long drinks gather
pleasantly on the table, are consumed by all but Johnny, gather again. The
talk grows more fluid, franker.

"Phil Sellaby?---oh, the great Phil's just had a child--I mean his wife
has, but Phil's been having a book all winter and it's hard not to get 'em
mixed up. Know the girl he married?"

"Ran Waldo had a necking acquaintance with her at one time or another, I
believe. But now she's turned serious, I hear--_tres serieuse--tres bonne
femme_--"

"I bet his book'll be a cuckoo, then. Trouble with women. Can't do any
art and be married if you're in love with your wife. Instink--instinct of
creation--same thing in both cases--use it one way, not enough left
for other--unless, of course, like Goethe, you--" "Rats! Look at
Rossetti--Browning---Augustus John--William Morris--"

_"Browning!_ Dear man, when the public knows the _truth_ about the
Brownings!"

Ricky French is getting a little drunk but it shows itself only in a desire
to make every sentence unearthly cogent with perfect words.

"Unhappy marriage--ver' good--stimula-shion," he says, carefully but
unsteadily, "other thing--tosh!"

Peter Piper jerks a thumb in Oliver's direction.

"Oh, beg pardon! Engaged, you told me? Beg pardon--sorry--very. Writes?"

"Uh-huh. Book of poetry three years ago. Novel now he's trying to sell."

"Oh, yes, yes, yes. Remember. 'Dancers' Holiday'--he wrote that? Good
stuff, damn good. Too bad. Feenee. Why will they get married?"

The conversation veers toward a mortuary discussion of love. Being young,
nearly all of them are anxious for, completely puzzled by and rather afraid
of it, all at the same time. They wish to draw up one logical code to
cover its every variation; they look at it, as it is at present with the
surprised displeasure of florists at a hollyhock that will come blue when
by every law of variation it should be rose. It is only a good deal later
that they will be able to give, not blasphemy because the rules of the game
are always mutually inconsistent, but tempered thanks that there are any
rules at all. Now Ricky French especially has the air of a demonstrating
anatomist over an anesthetized body. "Observe, gentlemen--the carotid
artery lies here. Now, inserting the scalpel at this point--"

"The trouble with Art is that it doesn't pay a decent living wage unless
you're willing to commercialize--"

"The trouble with Art is that it never did, except for a few chance lucky
people--"

"The trouble with Art is women."

"The trouble with women is Art."

"The trouble with Art--with women, I mean--change signals! What do I mean?"




IV

Oliver is taking Ted out to Melgrove with him over Sunday for suburban
fresh-air and swimming, so the two just manage to catch the 12.53 from the
Grand Central, in spite of Slade Wilson's invitation to talk all night and
breakfast at the Brevoort. They spend the rattling, tunnel-like passage to
125th Street catching their breath again, a breath that seems to strike
a florid gentlemen in a dirty collar ahead of them with an expression of
permanent, sorrowful hunger. Then Ted remarks reflectively,

"Nice gin."

"Uh-huh. Not floor varnish anyway like most of this prohibition stuff. What
think of the people?"

"Interesting but hardly conclusive. Liked the Wilson lad. Peter, of course,
and Johnny. The French person rather young Back Bay, don't you think?"

Oliver smiles. The two have been through Yale, some of the war and much of
the peace together, and the fact has inevitably developed a certain quality
of being able to talk to each other in shorthand.

"Well, Groton plus Harvard--it always gets a little inhuman especially
Senior year--but gin had a civilizing influence. Lucky devil!"

"Why?"

"Baker's newest discovery--yes, it does sound like a patent medicine. Don't
mean that, but he has a play on the road--sure-fire, Johnny says--Edward
Sheldon stuff--Romance--"

"The Young Harvard Romantic. An Essay Presented to the Faculty of Yale
University by Theodore Billett for the Degree of--"

"Heard anything about your novel, Oliver?"

"Going to see my pet Mammon of Unrighteousness about it in a couple of
weeks. Oh _Lord!_"

"Present--not voting."

"Don't be cheap, Ted. If I could only make some money."

"Everybody says that there is money in advertising," Ted quotes
maliciously. "Where _have_ I heard that before?"

_"That's_ what anybody says about anything till they try it. Well, there
is--but not in six months for a copy-writer at Vanamee and Co. Especially
when the said copy-writer has to have enough to marry on." "And will write
novels when he ought to be reading, 'How I Sold America on Ossified Oats'
like a good little boy. Young people are _so_ impatient."

"Well, good Lord, Ted, we've been engaged eight months already and we
aren't getting any furtherer--"

"Remember the copybooks, my son. The love of a pure, good woman and the
one-way pocket--that's what makes the millionaires. Besides, look at
Isaac."

"Well, I'm no Isaac. And Nancy isn't Rebekah, praises be! But it is
an--emotional strain. On both of us."

"Well, all you have to do is sell your serial rights. After that--pie."

"I know. The trouble is, I can see it so plain if everything happens
right--and then--well--"

Ted is not very consoling.

"People get funny ideas about each other when they aren't close by. Even
when they're in love," he says rather darkly; and then, for no apparent
reason, "Poor Billy. See it?"

Oliver has, unfortunately--the announcement that the engagement between
Miss Flavia Marston of Detroit and Mr. William Curting of New York has
been broken by mutual consent was an inconspicuous little paragraph in the
morning papers. "That was all--just funny ideas and being away. And then
this homebred talent came along," Ted muses.

"Well, you're the hell of a--"

Ted suddenly jerks into consciousness of what he has been saying.

"Sorry" he says, completely apologetic, "didn't mean a word I said, just
sorry for Billy, poor guy. 'Fraid it'll break him up pretty bad at first."
This seems to make matters rather worse and he changes the subject
abruptly. "How's Nancy?" he asks with what he hopes seems disconnected
indifference.

"Nancy? All right. Hates St. Louis, of course."

"Should think she might, this summer. Pretty hot there, isn't it?"

"Says it's like a wet furnace. And her family's bothering her some."

"Um, too bad."

"Oh, _I_ don't mind. But it's rotten for her. They don't see the point
exactly--don't know that I blame them. She could be in Paris, now--that
woman was ready to put up the money. My fault."

"Well, she seems to like things better the way they are--God knows why,
my antic friend! If it were _my_ question between you and a year studying
abroad! Not that you haven't your own subtle attractions, Ollie." Ted has
hoped to irritate Oliver into argument by the closing remark, but the
latter only accepts it with militant gloom.

"Yes, I've done her out of that, too," he says abysmally, "as well as
sticking her in St. Louis while I stay here and can't even drag down enough
money to support her--"

"Oh, Ollie, snap out of it! That's only being dramatic. You know darn well
you will darn soon. I'll be saying 'bless you, my children, increase and
multiply,' inside a month if your novel goes through."

"If! Oh well. Oh hell. I think I've wept on your shoulder long enough for
tonight, Ted. Tell me your end of it--things breaking all right?"

Ted's face sets into lines that seem curiously foreign and aged for the
smooth surface.

"Well--you know my trouble," he brings out at last with some difficulty.
"You ought to, anyhow--we've talked each other over too much when we
were both rather planko for you not to. I'm getting along, I think. The
work--_ca marche assez bien_. And the restlessness--can be stood. That's
about all there is to say."

Both are completely serious now.

"Bon. Very glad," says Oliver in a low voice.

"I can stand it. I was awful afraid I couldn't when I first got back. And
law interests me, really, though I've lost three years because of the war.
And I'm working like a pious little devil with a new assortment of damned
and when you haven't any money you can't go on parties in New York unless
you raise gravy riding to a fine art. Only sometimes--well, you know how it
is--"

Oliver nods.

"I'll be sitting there, at night especially, in that little tin Tophet of a
room on Madison Avenue, working. I _can_ work, if I do say it myself--I'm
hoping to get through with school in January, now. But it gets pretty
lonely, sometimes when there's nobody to run into that you can really talk
to--the people I used to play with in College are out of New York for the
summer--even Peter's down at Southampton most of the time or out at
Star Bay--you're in Melgrove--Sam Woodward's married and working in
Chicago--Brick Turner's in New Mexico--I've dropped out of the Wall Street
bunch in the class that hang out at the Yale Club--I'm posted there
anyhow, and besides they've all made money and I haven't, and all they want
to talk about is puts and calls. And then you remember things.

"The time my pilot and I blew into Paris when we thought we were hitting
somewhere around Nancy till we saw that blessed Eiffel Tower poking out
of the fog. And the Hotel de Turenne on Rue Vavin and getting up in the
morning and going out for a cafe cognac breakfast, and everything being
amiable and pleasant, and kidding along all the dear little ladies that sat
on the _terrasse_ when they dropped in to talk over last evening's affairs.
I suppose I'm a sensualist--"

"Everybody is." from Oliver.

"Well, that's another thing. Women. And love. Ollie, my son, you don't know
how very damn lucky you are!"

"I think I do, rather," says Oliver, a little stiffly.

"You don't. Because I'd give everything I have for what you've got and
all you can do is worry about whether you'll get married in six months or
eight."

"I'm worrying about whether I'll ever get married at all," from Oliver,
rebelliously.

"True enough, which is where I'm glowingly sympathetic for you, though you
may not notice it. But you're one of the few people I know--officers at
least--who came out of the war without stepping all through their American
home ideas of morality like a clown through a fake glass window. And
I'm--Freuded--if I see how or why you did."

"Don't myself--unless you call it pure accident" says Oliver, frankly.
"Well, that's it--women. Don't think I'm in love but the other thing pulls
pretty strong. And I want to get married all right, but what girls I know
and like best are in Peter's crowd and most of them own their own Rolls
Royces--and I won't be earning even a starvation wage for two, inside of
three or four years, I suppose. And as you can't get away from seeing and
talking to women unless you go and live in a cave--well, about once every
two weeks or oftener I'd like to chuck every lawbook I have out of the
window on the head of the nearest cop--go across again and get some sort of
a worthless job--I speak good enough French to do it if I wanted--and go to
hell like a gentleman without having to worry about it any longer. And I
won't do that because I'm through with it and the other thing is worth
while. So there you are."

"So you don't think you're in love--eh Monsieur Billett?" Oliver puts
irritatingly careful quotation marks around the verb. Ted twists a little.

"It all seems so blamed impossible," he says cryptically.

"Oh, I wouldn't call Elinor Piper _that_ exactly." Oliver grins. "Even if
she is Peter's sister. Old Peter. She's a nice girl."

"_A nice girl?_" Ted begins rather violently. "She's--why she's--" then
pauses, seeing the trap.

"Oh very well--that's all I wanted to know."

"Oh don't look so much like a little tin Talleyrand, Ollie! I'm _not_
sure--and that's rather more than I'd even hint to anybody else."

"Thanks, little darling." But Ted has been stung too suddenly, even by
Oliver's light touch on something which he thought was a complete and
mortuary secret, to be in a mood for sarcasm.

"Oh, well, you might as well know. I suppose you do."

"All I know is that you seem to have been visiting--Peter--a good deal this
summer."

"Well, it started with Peter."

"It does so often."

"Oh Lord, now I've _got_ to tell you. Not that there's
anything--definite--to tell." He pauses, looking at his hands.

"Well, I've just been telling you how I feel--sometimes. And other
times--being with Elinor--she's been so--kind. But I don't know, Ollie,
honestly I don't, and that's that."

"You see," he begins again, "the other thing--Oh, _Lord_, it's so tangled
up! But it's just this. It sounds--funny--probably--coming from me--and
after France and all that--but I'm not going to--pretend to myself I'm in
love with a girl--just because I may--want to get married--the way lots of
people do. I can't. And I couldn't with a girl like Elinor anyway--she's
too fine."

"She is rather fine," says Oliver appreciatively. "Selective reticence--all
that."

"Well, don't you see? And a couple of times--I've been nearly sure. And
then something comes and I'm not again--not the way I want to be. And
then--Oh, if I were, it wouldn't be much--use--you know--"

"Why not?"

"Well, consider our relative positions--"

"Consider your grandmother's cat! She's a girl--you're a man. She's a
lady--you're certainly a gentleman--though that sounds like Jane Austen.
And--"

"And she's--well, she isn't the wealthiest young lady in the country, but
the Pipers _are_ rich, though they never go and splurge around about it.
And I'm living on scholarships and borrowed money from the family--and even
after I really start working I probably won't make enough to live on for
two or three years at least. And you can't ask a girl like that--"

"Oh, Ted, this is the twentieth century! I'm not telling you to hang up
your hat and live on your wife's private income--" "That's fortunate," from
Ted, rather stubbornly and with a set jaw.

"But there's no reason on earth--if you both really loved each other and
wanted to get married--why you couldn't let her pay her share for the first
few years. You know darn well you're going to make money sometime--"

"Well--yes."

"Well, then. And Elinor's sporting. She isn't the kind that needs six
butlers to live--she doesn't live that way now. That's just pride, Ted,
thinking that--and a rather bum variety of pride when you come down to it.
I hate these people who moan around and won't be happy unless they can do
everything themselves--they're generally the kind that give their wives a
charge account at Lucile's and ten dollars a year pocket money and go into
blue fits whenever poor spouse runs fifty cents over her allowance."

Ted pauses, considering. Finally,

"No, Ollie--I don't think I'm quite that kind of a fool. And almost thou
convincest me--and all that. But--well--that isn't the chief difficulty,
after all."

"Well, what _is_?" from Oliver, annoyedly.

Ted hesitates, speaking slowly.

"Well--after the fact that I'm not sure--France," he says at last, and his
mouth shuts after the word as if it never wanted to open again.

Oliver spreads both hands out hopelessly.

"Are you _never_ going to get over that, you ass?"

"You didn't do the things I did," from Ted, rather difficultly. "If you
had--"

"If I had I'd have been as sorry as you are, probably, that I'd knocked
over the apple cart occasionally. But I wouldn't spend the rest of my life
worrying about it and thinking I wasn't fit to go into decent society
because of what happened to most of the A.E.F. Why you sound as if you'd
committed the unpardonable sin. And it's nonsense."

"Well--thinking of Elinor--I'm not too darn sure I didn't," from Ted,
dejectedly.

"That comes of being born in New England and that's all there is to it.
Anyhow, it's over now, isn't it?"

"Not exactly--it comes back."

"Well, kick it every time it does."

"But you don't understand. That and--people like Elinor--" says Ted
hopelessly.

"I do understand."

"You don't." And this time Ted's face has the look of a burned man.

"Well--" says Oliver, frankly puzzled. "Well, that's it. Oh, it doesn't
matter. But if there was another war--"

"Oh, leave us poor people that are trying to write a couple of years before
you dump us into heroes' graves by the Yang tse Kiang!"

"Another war--and bang! into the aviation." Ted muses, his face gone thin
with tensity. "It could last as long as it liked for me, providing I got
through before it did; you'd be living anyhow, living and somebody, and
somebody who didn't give a plaintive hoot how things broke."

He sighs, and his face smooths back a little.

"Well, Lord, I've no real reason to kick, I suppose," he ends. "There are
dozens of 'em like me--dozens and hundreds and thousands all over the
shop. We had danger and all the physical pleasures and as much money as we
wanted and the sense of command--all through the war. And then they come
along and say 'it's all off, girls,' and you go back and settle down and
play you've just come out of College in peace-times and maybe by the time
you're forty you'll have a wife and an income if another scrap doesn't come
along. And then when we find it isn't as easy to readjust as they think,
they yammer around pop-eyed and say 'Oh, what wild young people--what
naughty little wasters! They won't settle down and play Puss-in-the-corner
at all--and, oh dear, oh dear, how they drink and smoke and curse 'n
everything!'"

"I'm awful afraid they might be right as to what's the trouble with us,
though," says Oliver, didactically. "We _are_ young, you know."

"Melgrove!" the conductor howls, sleepily. "Melgrove! Melgrove!"




V

The Crowe house was both small and inconveniently situated--it was twenty
full minutes walk from the station and though a little box of a garage had
been one of the "all modern conveniences" so fervidly painted in the real
estate agent's advertisement, the Crowes had no car. It was the last house
on Undercliff Road that had any pretense to sparse grass and a stubbly
hedge--beyond it were sand-dunes, delusively ornamented by the signs
of streets that as yet only existed in the brain of the owner of the
"development," and, a quarter of a mile away, the long blue streak of the
Sound.

Oliver's key clicked in the lock--this was fortunately one of the times
when four-year-old Jane Ellen, who went about after sunset in a continual,
piteous fear of "black men wif masks," had omitted to put the chain on the
door before being carried mutinously to bed. Oliver switched on the hall
light and picked up a letter and a folded note from the card tray.

"Ted, Ollie and Dickie will share that little bijou, the sleeping porch,
unless Ted prefers the third-story bathtub," the note read. "Breakfast at
convenience for those that can get it themselves--otherwise at nine. And
DON'T wake Dickie up.

MOTHER."

Oliver passed it to Ted, who read it, grinned, and saluted, nearly knocking
over the hatrack.

"For _God's_ sake!" said Oliver in a piercing whisper, "Jane Ellen will
think that's Indians!"

Both listened frantically for a moment, holding their breath. But there was
no sound from upstairs except an occasional soft rumbling. Oliver had often
wondered what would happen if the whole sleeping family chanced to breathe
in and out in unison some unlucky night. He could see the papery walls
blown apart like scraps of cardboard--Aunt Elsie falling, falling with her
bed from her little bird-house under the eaves, giving vent to one deaf,
terrified "Hey--what's that?" as she sank like Lucifer cast from Heaven
inexorably down into the laundry stove, her little tight, white curls
standing up on end....

Ted had removed his shoes and was making for the stairs with the
exaggerated caution of a burglar in a film.

"'Night!" called Oliver softly.

"G' night! Where's my bed--next the wall? Good--then I won't step on
Dickie. And if you fall over me when you come in, I'll bay like a
bloodhound!"

"I'll look out. Be up in a minute myself. Going to write a letter."

"So I'd already deduced, Craig Kennedy, my friend. Well, give her my love!"

He smiled like a bad little boy and disappeared round the corner. A stair
creaked--they were the kind of stairs that always creaked like old women's
bones, when you tried to go up them quietly. There was the sound of
something soft stubbing against something hard and a muffled "_Sonofa--_"

"What's matter?"

"Oh, nothing. Blame near broke my toe on Jane Ellen's doll's porcelain
head. 'S all right. 'Night."

"'Night." Then in an admonitory sotto-voce, "Remember, if you wake Dickie,
you've got to tell him stories till he goes to sleep again, or he'll wake
up everybody else!"

"If he wakes, I'll garotte him. 'Night."

"'Night."

Oliver paused for a few minutes, waiting for the crash that would proclaim
that Ted had stumbled over something and waked Dickie beyond redemption.
But there was nothing but a soft gurgling of water from the bathroom and
then, after a while, a slight but definite addition to the distant beehive
noises of sleep in the house. He smiled, moved cautiously into the dining
room, sat down at the small sharp-cornered desk where all the family
correspondence was carried on and from which at least one of the family a
day received a grievous blow in the side while attempting to get around it;
lit the shaded light above it and sat down to read his letter.

It was all Nancy, that letter, from the address, firm and straight as any
promise she ever gave, but graceful as the curl of a vine-stem, gracile as
her hands, with little unsuspected curlicues of humor and fancy making
the stiff "t's" bend and twisting the tails of the "e's," to the little
scrunched-up "Love, Nancy" at the end, as if she had squeezed it there to
make it look unimportant, knowing perfectly that it was the one really
important thing in the letter to him. Both would take it so and be thankful
without greediness or a longing for sentimental "x's," with a sense that
the thing so given must be very rich in little like a jewel, and always
newly rediscovered with a shiver of pure wonder and thanking, or neither
could have borne to have it written so small.

It was Nancy just as some of her clothes were Nancy, soft clear blues and
first appleblossom pinks, the colors of a hardy garden that has no need for
the phoenix-colors of the poppy, because it has passed the boy's necessity
for talking at the top of its voice in scarlet and can hold in one shaped
fastidious petal, faint-flushed with a single trembling of one serene
living dye, all the colors the wise mind knows and the soul released into
its ecstasy has taken for its body invisible, its body of delight most
spotless, as lightning takes bright body of rapture and agony from the
light clear pallor that softens a sky to night.

Oliver read the letter over twice--it was with a satisfaction like that
when body and brain are fed at once, invisibly, by the same lustre of
force, that he put it away. One part of it, though, left him humanly
troubled enough.

"Miss Winters, the old incubus, came around and was soppy to mother as
usual yesterday--the same old business--I might be studying in Paris, now,
instead of teaching drawing to stupid little girls, if I hadn't 'formed'
what she will call 'that unfortunate attachment.' Not that I minded,
really, though I was angry enough to bite her when she gave a long
undertaker's list of Penniless Authors' Brides. But it worries mother--and
that worries me--and I wish she wouldn't. Forgive me, Ollie--and then
that Richardson complex of mother's came up again--"

"Waiting hurts, naturally,--and I'm the person who used to wonder about
girls making such a fuss about how soon they got married--but, then, Ollie,
of course, I never really wanted to get married before myself and somehow
that seems to make a difference. But that's the way things go--and the only
thing I wish is that I was the only person to be hurt. We will, sooner or
later, and it will be all the better for our not having grabbed at once--at
least that's what all the old people with no emotions left are always so
anxious to tell you. But they talk about it as if anybody under thirty-five
who wanted to get married was acting like a three-year-old stealing
jam--and that's annoying. And anyhow, it wouldn't be bad, if I weren't so
silly, I suppose--"

"Waiting hurts, naturally," and that casual sentence made him chilly
afraid. For to be in love, though it may force the lover to actions of
impossible courage does not make him in the least courageous of himself,
but only drives him by the one large fear of losing this love like a
soldier pricked from behind by a bayonet over the bodies of smaller fears,
or like a thief who has stolen treasure, and, hearing the cry at his heels,
scales a twenty foot wall with the agile gestures of a madman. All the
old-wives' and young men's club stories of everything from broken
engagements to the Generic and Proven Unfaithfulness of the Female Sex
brushed like dirty cobwebs for an instant across his mind. They tightened
about it like silk threads--a snaky web--and for one scared instant he
had a sense of being smothered in dusty feathers, whispering together and
saying, "When you're a little older and a great deal wiser. When you've
come to my age and know that all girls are the same. When you realize that
long engagements seldom mean marriage. When--"

He put the cobwebs aside with a strain of will, for he was very tired in
body, and settled himself to write to Nancy. It was not the cobwebs that
hurt. The only thing that mattered was that she had been hurt on his
account--was being hurt now on his account--would be hurt, and still and
always on his account, not because he wanted to hurt her but because it was
not within his power, but Life's, to hurt her in that respect or not.

"Oh, felicitous Nancy!" the pen began to scratch. "Your letter--"

Stupid to be so tired when he was writing to Nancy. Stupid not to find the
right things to say at once when you wanted to say them so much. He dropped
the pen an instant, sat back, and tried to evoke Nancy before him like
a small, clear picture seen in a lens, tried to form with his will the
lifeless air in front of him till it began to take on some semblance and
body of her that would be better than the tired remembrances of the mind.

Often, and especially when he had thought about her intensely for a
long time, the picture would not come at all or come with tantalizing
incompleteness, apparently because he wanted it to be whole so much--all he
could see would be a wraith of Nancy, wooden as a formal photograph, with
none of her silences or mockeries about her till he felt like a painter who
has somehow let the devil into his paintbox so that each stroke he makes
goes a little fatally out of true from the vision in his mind till the
canvas is only a crazy-quilt of reds and yellows. Now, perhaps, though, she
might come, even though he was tired. He pressed the back of a hand against
his eyes. She was coming to him now. He remembered one of their walks
together--a walk they had taken some eight months ago, when they had been
only three days engaged. Up Fifth Avenue; Forty-second Street, Forty-third,
Forty-fourth, the crosstown glitter of lights, the reflected glow of
Broadway, spraying the sky with dim gold-dust, begins to die a little
behind them. Past pompous expensive windows full of the things that Oliver
and Nancy will buy when Oliver's novel has gone into its first fifty
thousand, content with the mere touch of each other's hands, they are so
sure of each other now. Past people, dozens of people, getting fewer and
fewer as Forty-sixth Street comes, Forty-seventh, Forty-eighth, always a
little arrogantly because none of the automatic figures they pass have ever
eaten friendly bread together or had fire that can burn over them like
clear salt water or the knowledge that the only thing worth having in life
is the hurt and gladness of that fire. Buses pass like big squares of
honeycomb on wheels, crowded with pale, tired bees--the stars march slowly
from the western slope to their light viewless pinnacle in the center of
the heavens, walking brightly like strong men in silvered armor--the stars
and the buses, the buses and the stars, either and both of as little and
much account--it would not really surprise either Oliver or Nancy if the
next green bus that passes should start climbing into the sky like a clumsy
bird.

The first intoxication is still upon them--they have told nobody except
anyone who ever sees them together--they walk tactfully and never too
close, both having a horror of publicly amatory couples, but like the
king's daughter--or was it Solomon's Temple?--they are all glorious within.
Fifty-fifth, Fifty-sixth, Fifty-seventh--the square in front of the
Plaza--that tall chopped bulky tower lit from within like a model in a
toyshop window--motors purring up to its door like thin dark cats, motors
purring away. The fountain with the little statue--the pool a cool dark
stone cracked with the gold of the lights upon it, and near the trees of
the Park, half-hidden, gold Sherman, riding, riding, Victory striding ahead
of him with a golden palm.

Ahead of them too goes Victory, over fear, over doubt, over littleness, her
gold shoes ring like the noise of a sparkling sword, her steps are
swift. They stand for an instant, hands locked, looking back at the long
roller-coaster swoop of the Avenue, listening to the roll of tired wheels,
the faint horns, the loud horns. They know each other now--their hands grip
tighter--in the wandering instant the whole background of streets and tall
buildings passes like breath from a mirror--for the instant without breath
or clamor, they exist together, one being, and the being has neither flesh
to use the senses too clumsily, nor human thoughts to rust at the will, but
lives with the strength of a thunder and the heedlessness of a wave in a
wide and bright eternity of the unspoken.

"All the same," says Nancy, when the moment passes, lifting a shoe with the
concern of a kitten that has just discovered a thorn in its paw, "New York
pavements are certainly _hard_ on loving feet."




VII

So the picture came. And other pictures like it. And since the living that
had made them was past for a little they were both fainter and in a measure
brighter with more elfin colors than even that living had been which had
made them glow at first. White memory had taken them into her long house of
silence where everything is cool with the silver of Spring rain on leaves,
she had washed from them the human pettiness, the human separateness,
the human insufficiency to express the best that must come in any mortal
relationship that lasts longer than the hour. They were not better in
memory than they had been when lived, for the best remembrance makes only
brilliant ghosts, but they were in their dim measure nearer the soul's
perfection, for the tricks of the sounding board of the mind and the
feckless instrument of the body had been put away. "We've had infinites
already--infinites," thought Oliver, and didn't care about the ludicrous
ineptness of the words. He smiled, turning back to the unwritten letter. If
they hadn't had infinites already--he supposed they wouldn't want more so
badly right now. He smiled, but this time without humor. It had all seemed
so easy at first.

Nancy had been in Paris at fourteen before "business reverses" of the kind
that mild, capable-looking men like Mr. Ellicott seem to attract, as a
gingerbread man draws wasps, when they are about fifty, had reduced him to
a position as chief bookkeeper and taken Nancy out of her first year in
Farmington. Oliver had spent nine months on a graduate scholarship in Paris
and Provence in 1919. Both had friends there and argued long playful hours
planning just what sort of a magnificently cheap apartment on the _Rive
Gauche_ they would have when they went back.

For they were going back--they had been brilliantly sure of it--Oliver had
only to finish his novel that was so much better already than any novel
Nancy had ever read--sell a number of copies of it that seemed absurdly
small in proportion to the population of America--and then they could live
where they pleased and Oliver could compose Great Works and Nancy get ahead
with her very real and delicate talent for etching instead of having to do
fashion-drawings of slinky simperers in Lucile dresses or appetite-arousing
paintings of great cans of tomato soup. But that had been eight months ago.
Vanamee and Company's--the neat vice-president talking to Oliver--"a young
hustler has every chance in the world of getting ahead here, Mr. Crowe. You
speak French? Well, we have been thinking for some time of establishing
branch-offices in Europe." The chance of a stop-gap job in St. Louis for
Nancy, where she could be with her family for a while--she really ought
to be with them a couple of months at least, if she and Oliver were to be
married so soon. The hopeful parting in the Grand Central--"But, Nancy,
you're sure you wouldn't mind going across second-class?"

"Why Ollie, dear, how silly! Why, what would it matter?" "All right, then,
and remember, I'll wire _just_ as soon as things really start to break--"

And then for eight months, nothing at all but letters and letters, except
two times, once in New York, once in St. Louis, when both had spent painful
savings because they simply had to see each other again, since even the
best letters were only doll-house food you could look at and wish you could
eat--and both had tried so hard to make each disappearing minute perfect
before they had to catch trains again that the effort left them tired as
jugglers who have been balancing too many plates and edgy at each other for
no cause in the world except the unfairness that they could only have each
other now for so short a time. And the people, the vast unescapable horde
of the dull-but-nice or the merely dull who saw in their meetings nothing
either particularly spectacular or pitiful or worth applause.

And always after the parting, a little crippled doubt tapping its crutches
along the alleys of either mind. "Do I _really?_ Because if I do, how can I
be so tired sometimes with her, with him? And why can't I say more and do
more and be more when he, when she? And everybody says. And they're older
than we are--mightn't it be true? And--" And then, remorsefully, the next
day, all doubt burnt out by the clear hurt of absence. "Oh how could I!
When it is real--when it is like that--when it is the only thing worth
while in the world!"

But absence and meetings of this sort told on them inescapably, and both
being, unfortunately, of a rather high-strung intelligence and youth,
recognized it, no matter how much consciousness might deny it, and wondered
sometimes, rather pitiably, why they couldn't be always at one temperature,
like lovers in poetry, and why either should ever worry or hurt the other
when they loved. Any middle-aged person could and did tell them that they
were now really learning something about love--omitting the small fact that
Pain, though he comes with the highest literary recommendations is really
not the wisest teacher of all in such matters--all of which helped the
constant nervous and psychological strain on both as little as a Latin
exorcism would help a fever. For the very reason that they wished to be
true in their love, they said things in their letters that a spoken word or
a gesture would have explained in an instant but that no printed alphabet
could; and so they often hurt each other while meaning and trying to help
all they could.

Not quite as easy as it had seemed at first--oh, not on your life not,
thought Oliver, rousing out of a gloomy muse. And then there was the
writing he wanted to do--and Nancy's etching--"our damn careers" they had
called them--but those _were_ the things they did best--and neither had had
even tolerable working conditions recently--

Well, sufficient to the day was the evil thereof--that was one of those
safe Bible-texts you seemed to find more and more use for the older you
grew. Bible-texts. It was lucky tomorrow was Sunday when slaves of the
alarm-clock had peace. Oliver straightened his shoulders unconsciously and
turned back to the blank paper. He did love Nancy. He did love Nancy. That
was all that counted.

  "Oh, felicitous Nancy!
  Your letter was--"




VIII

The water was a broken glass of blue, sunstruck waves--there were few
swimmers in it where the two friends went in next morning, for the beach
proper with its bath-houses and float was nearly a quarter of a mile down.
Oliver could see Margaret's red cap bobbing twenty yards out as he tried
the water cautiously with curling toes, and, much farther out, a blue cap
and the flash of an arm going suddenly under. Mrs. Severance, the friend
Louise had brought out for the week-end, he supposed; she swam remarkably
for a woman. He swam well enough himself and couldn't give her two yards in
the hundred. Ted stood beside him, both tingling a little at the fresh of
the salt air. "Wow!" and they plunged.

A mock race followed for twenty yards--then Oliver curved off to duck
Margaret, already screaming and paddling at his approach, while Ted kept
on.

He swam face deep, catching short breaths under the crook of his arm,
burying himself in the live blue running sparkle, every muscle stretched as
if he were trying to rub all the staleness that can come to the mind and
the restless pricklings that will always worry the body clean from him,
like a snake's cast skin, against the wet rough hands of the water.
There--it was working--the flesh was compact and separate no longer--he
felt it dissolve into the salt push of spray--become one with that long
blue body of wave that stretched fluently radiant for miles and miles
till it too was no more identity but only sea, receiving the sun, without
thought, without limbs, without pain. He sprinted with the last breath
he had in him to annihilation in that light lustrous firmament. Then his
flung-out hand struck something firm and smooth. With the momentary twinge
of a jarred toe, he stopped in the middle of a stroke, grabbed at the firm
thing unthinkingly, felt it slip away from him, trod water and came up
gasping.

"Oh, I'm _horribly_ sorry!" Gurgle and choke at water gone the wrong way.
"Honestly--what a dumb-bell trick! but I didn't see you at _all_ and with
the whole Sound to swim in I thought I was safe--"

He rubbed the water out of his eyes. A woman in a blue cap. Pretty,
too--not one of the pretty kind that look like drenched paper-dolls in
swimming.

"Don't apologize--it's all my fault, really. I should have heard you
coming, I suppose, but I was floating and my ears were under water--and
this cap! You did scare me a little, though; I didn't know there was anyone
else in miles--"

She smiled frankly. Ted got another look at her and decided that pretty was
hardly right. Beautiful, perhaps, but you couldn't tell with her hair that
way under her cap.

"You're Mr. Billett, aren't you? Louise said last night that her brother
was bringing a friend over Sunday. She also said that she'd introduce
us--but we seem to have done that."

"Rather. Introduction by drowning. The latest cleverness in Newport
circles--see 'Mode.' And you're Mrs. Severance."

"Yes. Nice water."

"Perfect."

A third look--a fairly long one--left Ted still puzzled. Age--thirty?
thirty-five? Swims perfectly. On "Mode." Wide eyes, sea-blue, sea-changing.
An odd nose that succeeded in being beautiful in spite of itself. A rather
full small mouth, not loose with sense nor rigid with things controlled,
but a mouth that would suck like a bee at the last and tiniest drop of any
physical sweet which the chin and the eyes had once decided to want. The
eyes measure, the mouth asks, the cleft chin finds the way. A face neither
content, nor easily to be contented--in repose it is neither happy nor
unhappy but only matured. Louise's friend--that was funny--Louise had such
an ideal simplicity of mind. Well--

"If you float--after a while you don't know quite where you're floating,"
said Mrs. Severance's voice detachedly.

Ted made no answer but turned over, spreading out his arms. For a few
moments they lay like corpses on the blue swelling round of the water
looking straight through infinite distance into the thin faint vapor of the
sky.

"Yes, I see what you mean."

"We might be clouds, almost, mightn't we?" with a slow following note of
laughter.

Ted looked deeper into the sky, half-closing his eyelids. It seemed to take
his body from him completely, to leave him nothing but a naked soothed
consciousness, rising and falling, a petal on a swinging bough, in the
heart of blue quietude like the quiet of an open place in a forest empty
with evening.

"Clouds," said Mrs. Severance's voice, turning the word to a sound breathed
lightly through the curled and husky gold of a forest-horn.

Through the midst of his sea-drowsiness a queer thought came to Ted. This
had happened before, in sleep perhaps, in a book he had read--Oliver's
novel, possibly, he thought and smiled. Lying alone on a roof of blue
water, and yet not lying alone, for there was that slow warm voice that
talked from time to time and came into the mind on tiptoe like the creeping
of soft-shoed, hasteless, fire. You stretched your hands to the fire and
let it warm you and soon your whole body was warm and pleased and alive.
That was when you were alive past measure, when all of you had been made
warm as a cat fed after being hungry, and the cat arose from its warmth and
went walking on velvet paws, stretching sleek legs, sleek body, slowly
and exquisitely under the firelight, heavy with warmth, but ready at the
instant signal of the small burning thing in its mind to turn like a black
butterfly and dance a slow seeking dance with the shadows of the fire that
flickered like leaves in light wind, desirable, impalpable and wavering,
never to be quite torn down from the wall and eaten and so possessed. But
there was an odd thirsty satisfaction in trying to tear the shadows.

Fantastic. He had not been so fantastic for a long time.

"And tomorrow there's 'Mode.' And fashion-plates. _And_ Greenwich
Villagers," said the voice of Mrs. Severance. He made some reply
impatiently, disliking the sound of his own voice--hers fitted with the
dream. When had he been this before?

The Morte d'Arthur--the two with a sword between.

He sank deeper, deeper, into the glow of that imagined firelight--the flame
was cooler than water to walk through--that time he had almost taken a
turning shadow into his hand. The sword between--only here there was no
sword. If he reached out his hand he knew just how the hand that he touched
would feel, cool and firm, like that flame. Cool and silent.

There must have been something, somewhere, to make him remember....

He remembered.

A minute later Oliver had splashed up to them, shouting "A rescue! A
rescue! Guests Drown While Host Looks On Smilingly! What's the matter, Ted,
you look as if you wanted to turn into a submarine? Got cramp?"




IX

Mrs. Crowe relaxed a little for the first tired minute of her day. Sunday
dinner was nearly over, and though, in one way, the best meal in the week
for her because all her children were sure to be at home, it was apt to be
pure purgatory on a hot day, with Sheba dawdling and grumbling and Rosalind
spilling pea-soup on her Sunday dress, and Aunt Elsie's deafness increased
by the weather to the point of mild imbecility.

She had been a little afraid today, especially with two guests and the
grandchildren rampant after church, and the extra leaf in the table that
squeezed Colonel Crowe almost into the sideboard and herself nearly out of
the window and made the serving of a meal a series of passings of over-hot
plates from hand to hand, exposed to the piracies of Jane Ellen. But it
had gone off better than she could have hoped. Colonel Crowe had not
absent-mindedly begun to serve vegetables with a teaspoon, Aunt Elsie had
not dissolved in tears and tottered away from the table at some imagined
rudeness of Dickie's, and Jane Ellen had not once had a chance to take off
her drawers.

"Ice tea!" said the avid voice of Jane Ellen in her ear. "Ice tea!"

Mrs. Crowe filled the glass and submitted a request for "please"
mechanically. She wondered, rather idly, if she would spend her time in
purgatory serving millions of Jane Ellens with iced tea.

"Ahem!" That was Colonel Crowe. "But you should have known us in the days
of our greatness, Mrs. Severance. When I was king of Estancia--"

"I'd rather have you like this, Colonel Crowe, really. I've always wanted
big families and never had one to live in--"

"Heard from Nancy recently, Oliver?" from Margaret, slightly satiric.

"Why yes, Margie, now and then. Not as often as you've heard from Stu
Winthrop probably but--"

"Motha, can I have some suga on my booberrish? Motha, can I have some suga
on my booberrish? Motha--_peesh!_"

"Oh, hush a minute, Rosalind dear. I don't know, Oliver. I'll speak to Mr.
Field about it if you like. I should think they'd take little sketches like
a couple of those Nancy showed you--though they aren't quite smart-alecky
enough for 'Mode'--" "Grandfather, Grandfather! How old would you be if you
were as old as Methusaleh? Are you older than he is? _Grandfather!_"

Entrance and exit of a worried Sheba with the empty dish of blueberries,
marred only by Jane Ellen's sudden cries of "Stop thief!"

Mrs. Crowe tried to think a little ahead. Tomorrow. Ice. Butter. Laundry.
Oliver's breakfast early again. Louise--poor Louise--two years and a
half since Clifford Lychgate died. How curious life was; how curious and
careless and inconsecutive. The thought of how much she hoped Oliver's
novel would succeed and the question as to whether the Thebes grocer who
delivered by motor-truck would be cheaper than the similar Melgrove bandit
in the long run mixed uneasily in her mind.

Rosalind had seemed droopy that morning--more green crab-apples probably.
Aunt Elsie's gout. Oliver's marriage--she had been so relieved about Nancy
ever since she had met her, though it had been hard to reconcile domestic
virtues with Nancy's bobbed hair. She would make Oliver happy, though,
and that was the main thing. She was really sweet--a sweet girl. Long
engagements. Too bad, too bad. Something _must_ be done about the stair
carpet, the children were tearing it to pieces. "Ice tea! Ice tea!"

"No, Jane Ellen."

"Yash."

"No, darling."

"Peesh yash?"

"No. Now be a good little girl and run out and play quietly, not right in
the middle of the broiling sun."

"And so Lizzie said, 'Very well, but if I do take that medicine my death
will be wholly on your responsibility!'" with a sense of climax.

"But I really would like to, Mrs. Severance, if you can ever spare the
time."

Ted and Louise's friend seemed to be getting along very well. That was
nice--so often Oliver's friends and Louise's didn't. It seemed odd that
Mrs. Severance should be working on "Mode"--surely a girl of her obvious
looks and intelligence left with no children to support--some nice man--A
lady, too, by her voice, though there was a trifle of something--

She only hoped Mrs. Severance didn't think them all too crowded and noisy.
It was a little hard on the three children to have such an--intimate--home
when they brought friends.

"I think we'd better have coffee out on the porch, don't you?" That meant
argument with Sheba later but an hour's cool and talk without having to
shout across the dear little children was worth the argument.

Everybody got up, Ted being rather gallant to Mrs. Severance. Oliver looked
worried today, worried and tired. She hoped it wasn't about Nancy and the
engagement. What a miserable thing money was to make so much difference.

"Mrs. Severance--"

"Mr. Billett--"

Louise's friend was certainly attractive. That wonderful red-gold
hair--"setter color" her sister had always called it of her own. She must
write her sister. Mrs. Severance--an odd name. She rather wished, though,
that her face wouldn't turn faintly hard like that sometimes.

"No, Dickie. No chocolate unless your mother says you can have it. No,
Rosalind, if mother says not, you _certainly_ cannot go over and play at
the Rogers',--they have a paralytic grandmother who is very nervous."

Well, that was over. And now, for a few brief instants there would be
quiet and a chance to relax and really see something of Oliver. Mrs. Crowe
started moving slowly towards the door. Ted and Mrs. Severance blocked the
way, talking rather intimately, she thought, for people who had only known
each other a few hours; but then that was the modern way. Then Ted saw her
and seemed to wake up with a jump from whatever mild dream possessed him,
and Mrs. Severance turned toward her.

"It's so _comfortable_ being out here, always," she said very naturally and
kindly, but Mrs. Crowe did not reply at once to the pretty speech. Instead
she flushed deeply and bent over something small and white on the chair
with the dictionary in it that had been next to hers. Jane Ellen had
finally succeeded in taking off her drawers.




X

Ted and Oliver were down at the beach at Southampton two Sundays
later--week-end guests of Peter Piper--the three had been classmates at
Yale and the friendship had not lapsed like so many because Peter happened
to be rich and Ted and Oliver poor. And then there was always Elinor,
Peter's sister--Ted seemed, to Oliver's amused vision, at least, to
be looking at Elinor with the hungry eyes of a man seeing a delicate,
longed-for dream made flesh just at present instead of a girl he had known
since she first put up her hair. How nice that would be if it happened,
thought Oliver, match-makingly--how very nice indeed! Best thing in
the world for Ted--and Elinor too--if Ted would only get away from his
curiously Puritan idea that a few minor lapses from New England morality in
France constituted the unpardonable sin, at least as far as marrying a nice
girl was concerned. He stretched back lazily, digging elbows into the warm
sand.

The day had really been too hot for anything more vigorous than "just lying
around in the sun like those funny kinds of lizards," as Peter put it, and
besides, he and Oliver had an offensive-defensive alliance of The Country's
Tiredest Young Business Men and insisted that their only function in life
was to be gently and graciously amused. And certainly the spectacle about
them was one to provide amusement in the extreme for even the most mildly
satiric mind.

It was the beach's most crowded hour and the short strip of sand in front
of the most fashionable and uncomfortable place to bathe on Long Island
was gay as a patch of exhibition sweet-peas with every shade of vivid or
delicate color. It was a triumph of women--the whole glittering, moving
bouquet of stripes and patterns and tints that wandered slowly from one
striped parasol-mushroom to the next--the men, in their bathing suits or
white flannels seemed as unimportant if necessary furniture as slaves in
an Eastern court. The women dominated, from the jingle of the bags in the
hands of the dowagers and the faint, protesting creak of their corsets as
they picked their way as delicately as fat, gorgeous macaws across the
sand, to the sound of their daughters' voices, musical as a pigeon-loft,
as they chattered catchwords at each other and their partners, or
occasionally, very occasionally, dipped in for a three-minute swim.
Moreover, and supremely, it was a triumph of ritual, and such ritual
as reminded Oliver a little of the curious, unanimous and apparently
meaningless movements of a colony of penguins, for the entire assemblage
had arrived around, twelve o'clock and by a quarter past one not one of
them would be left. That was law as unwritten and unbreakable as that law
which governs the migratory habits of wild geese. And within that little
more than an hour possibly one-third of them would go as far as wetting
their hands in the water--all the rest had come for the single reason of
seeing and being seen. It was all extremely American and, on the whole,
rather superb, Oliver thought as he and Peter moved over nearer to the
parasol that sheltered Elinor and Ted.

"I wish it was Egypt," said Peter languidly. "Any more peppermints left,
El? No--well, Ted never could restrain himself when it came to food. I wish
it was Egypt," he repeated, making Elinor's left foot a pillow for his
head.

"Well, it's hot enough," from Oliver, dozingly. "Ah--oo--it's _hot_!"

"I know, but just think," Peter chuckled. "Clothes," he explained
cryptically, "Mrs. Willamette in a Cleopatra nightie--what sport! And
besides, I should make a magnificent Egyptian. Magnificent." He yawned
immensely. "In the first place, of course, I should paint myself a
brilliant orange--"

The Egyptians. An odd wonder rose in Ted--a wonder as to whether one of
those stripped and hook-nosed slaves of the bondage before Moses had ever
happened to stand up for a moment to wipe the sweat out of his eyes before
he bent again to his task of making bricks without straw and seen a
princess of the Egyptians carried along past the quarries.

"Tell us a story, El," from Oliver in the voice of one who is
sleep-walking. "A nice quiet story--the Three Bears or Giant the Jack
Killer--oh heaven, I _must_ be asleep--but you know, anything like that--"

"You really want a story?" Elinor's voice was reticently mocking. "A story
for good little boys?"

"Oh, _yes!_" from Peter, his clasped hands stretched toward her in an
attitude of absurd supplication. "All in nice little words of one syllable
or we won't understand."

"Well, once there were three little girls named Elsie, Lacie and Tillie and
they lived in the bottom of a well."



[ILLUSTRATION: "WELL, ONCE THERE WERE THREE LITTLE GIRLS"] "What _kind_ of
a well?" Oliver had caught the cue at once.

"A treacle well--"

       *       *       *       *       *

She went on with the Dormouse's Tale, but Ted, for once, hardly heard
her--his mind was too busy with its odd, Egyptological dream.

The princess who looked like Elinor. Her slaves would come first--a fat
bawling eunuch, all one black glisten like new patent-leather, striking
with a silver rod to clear dogs and crocodiles and Israelites out of the
way. Then the litter--and a flash between curtains blown aside for an
instant--and Hook Nose gazing and gazing--all the fine fighting curses of
David on the infidel, that he had muttered sourly under breath all day,
blowing away from him like sand from the face of a sphinx.

Pomp sounding in brass and cries all around the litter like the boasting
color of a trumpet--but in the litter not pomp but fineness passing.
Fineness of youth untouched, from the clear contrast of white skin and
crow-black hair to the hands that had the little stirrings of moon-moths
against the green robe. Fineness of mind that will not admit the
unescapable minor dirts of living, however much it may see them, a mind
temperate with reticence and gentleness, seeing not life itself but its own
delighted dream of it, a heart that had had few shocks as yet, and never
the ones that the heart must be mailed or masked to withstand. The thing
that passed had been continually sheltered, exquisitely guarded from the
stronger airs of life as priests might guard a lotus, and yet it was
neither tenderly unhealthy nor sumptuously weak. A lotus--that was it--and
Hook Nose stood looking at the lotus--and because it was innocent he filled
his eyes with it. And then it passed and its music went out of the mind.

"_Ted_!"

"What? What? Oh, yeah--sorry, Elinor, I wasn't paying proper attention."

"You mean you were asleep, you big cheese!" from Peter.

"I wasn't--just thinking," and seeing that this only brought raucous mirth
from both Peter and Oliver, "Oh, shut up, you apes! Were you asking me
something, El?"

It was rather a change to come back from Elinor in scarab robes being
carried along in a litter to Elinor sitting beside him in a bathing suit.
But hardly an unpleasant change.

"I've forgotten how it goes on--the Dormouse--after 'Well in.' Do you
remember?"

"Nope. Look it up when we get back. And anyhow--" "What?"

"Game called for to-day. The Lirrups have started looking important--that
means it's about ten minutes of, they always leave on the dot. Well--"
and Peter rose, scattering sand. "We must obey our social calendar, my
prominent young friends--just think how awful it would be if we were the
last to go. Race you half-way to the float and back, Ted."

"You're on," and the next few minutes were splashingly athletic.

Going back to the bath-house, though, Ted laughed at himself rather
whimsically. That extraordinary day-dream of the slave and the
Elinor Princess! It helped sometimes, to make pictures of the very
impossible--even of things as impossible as that. If Elinor had only been
older before the war came along and changed so much.

He saw another little mental photograph, the kind of photograph, he mused,
that sleekly shabby Frenchmen slip from under views of the Vendome
Column and Napoleon's Tomb when they are trying to sell tourists picture
post-cards outside the Cafe de la Paix. Judged by American standards the
work would be called rather frank. It was all interior--the interior of a
room in a Montmartre hotel--and there were two people in it to help out
the composition--and the face of one seemed somehow to be rather deathly
familiar--

That, and Elinor. Why, Hook Nose could "reform" all the rest of his life in
accordance with the highest dictionary standards--and still he wouldn't be
fit to look at his princess, even from inside a cage.

Also, if you happened to be of a certain analytic temperament you could see
what was happening to yourself all the while quite plainly--oh, much too
plainly!--and yet that seemed to make very little difference in its going
on happening. There was Mrs. Severance, for instance. He had been seeing
quite a good deal of Mrs. Severance lately.

"Oh, Ted!" from Peter next door. "Snap it up, old keed, or we'll all of us
be late for lunch."

They had just sat down to lunch and Peter was complaining that the whipped
cream on the soup made him feel as if he were eating cotton-batting, when a
servant materialized noiselessly beside Oliver's chair.

"Telephone for you, Mr. Crowe. Western Union calling."

Oliver jumped up with suspicious alacrity. "Oh, love, love, love!" crooned
Peter. "Oh, love, love, love!" Oliver flushed. "Don't swipe all my butter,
you simple cynic!" He knew what it was, of course.

"This is Oliver Crowe talking. Will you give me the telegram?"

Nancy and Oliver, finding Sunday mails of a dilatory unsatisfactoriness,
had made a compact to use the wire on that day instead. And even now Oliver
never listened to the mechanical buzz of Central's voice in his ear without
a little pulse of the heart. It seemed to bring Nancy nearer than letters
could, somehow. Nancy had an imperial contempt for boiling down attractive
sentences to the necessary ten or twenty words. This time, though, the
telegram was short.

"Mr. Oliver Crowe, care Peter Piper, Southampton," clicked Central
dispassionately. "I hate St. Louis. I would give anything in the world if
we could only see each other for twenty-four hours. Love. Signed, Nancy."

And Oliver, after hanging up the receiver, went back to the dining-room
with worry barking and running around his mind like a spoiled puppy,
wondering savagely why so many rocking-chair people took a _crepey_
pleasure in saying it was good for young people in love to have to wait.




XI

Tea for two at the Gondolier, that newest and quotation-marked "Quaintest"
of Village tea rooms. The chief points in the Gondolier's "quaintness" seem
to be that it is chopped up into as many little partitions as a roulette
wheel and that all food has to be carried up from a cellar that imparts
even to orange marmalade a faint persuasive odor of somebody else's wash.
Still, during the last eight months, the Gondolier has been a radical
bookstore devoted to bloody red pamphlets, a batik shop full of strange
limp garments ornamented with decorative squiggles, and a Roumanian
Restaurant called "The Brodska" whose menu seemed to consist almost
entirely of old fish and maraschino cherries.

The wispy little woman from Des Moines who conducts the Gondolier at
present in a series of timid continual flutters at actually leading the
life of the Bohemian untamed, and who gives all the young hungry-looking
men extra slices of toast because any one of them might be Vachel Lindsay
in disguise, will fail in another six weeks and then the Gondolier may turn
into anything from a Free Verse Tavern to a Meeting Hall for the Friends of
Slovak Freedom. But at present, the tea is much too good for the price in
spite of its inescapable laundry tang, and there is a flat green bowl full
of Japanese iris bulbs in the window--the second of which pleases Mrs.
Severance and the first Ted.

Besides like most establishments on the verge of bankruptcy, it is such
a quiet place to talk--the only other two people in it are a boy with
startled hair and an orange smock and a cigaretty girl called Tommy, and
she is far too busy telling him that that dream about wearing a necklace
of flying-fish shows a dangerous inferiority complex even to comment
caustically on strangers from uptown who _will_ intrude on the dear
Village.

"Funny stuff--dreams," says Ted uneasily, catching at overheard phrases for
a conversational jumping-off place. His mind, always a little on edge now
with work and bad feeding, has been too busy since they came in comparing
Rose Severance with Elinor Piper, and wondering why, when one is so like a
golden-skinned August pear and the other a branch of winter blackberries
against snow just fallen, it is not as good but somehow warmer to think of
the first against your touch than the second, to leave him wholly at ease.

"Yes--funny stuff," Mrs. Severance's voice is musically quiet. "And then
you tell them to people who pretend to know all about what they mean--and
then--" She shrugs shoulders at the Freudian two across the shoulder-high
partition.

"But you don't believe in all this psycho-analysis tosh, do you?"

She hesitates. "A little, yes. Like the old woman and ghosts. I may not
believe in it but I'm afraid of it, rather."

She gives him a steady look--her eyes go deep. It is not so much the
intensity of the look as its haltingness that makes warmth go over him.

"Shall we tell our dreams--the favorite ones, I mean? Play fair if we do,
remember," she adds slowly.

"Not if you're really afraid."

"I? But it's just because I am afraid that I really should, you know. Like
going into a dark room when you don't want to."

"But they can't be as scary as _that_, surely." Ted's voice is a little
false. Both are watching each other intently now--he with a puzzled sense
of lazy enveloping firelight.

"Well, shall I begin? After all this _is_ tea in the Village."

"I should be very much interested indeed, Mrs. Severance," says Ted rather
gravely. "Check!" "How official you sound--almost as if you had a lot of
those funny little machines all the modern doctors use and were going to
mail me off to your pet sanatorium at once because you'd asked me what
green reminded me of and I said 'cheese' instead of 'trees.' And anyhow, I
never have any startling dreams--only silly ones--much too silly to tell--"

"Please go on." Ted's voice has really become quite clinical.

"Oh very well. They don't count when you only have them once--just when
they keep coming back and back to you--isn't that it?"

"I believe so."

Mrs. Severance's eyes waver a little--her mouth seeking for the proper kind
of dream.

"It's not much but it comes quite regularly--the most punctual,
old-fashioned-servant sort of a dream.

"It doesn't begin with sleep, you know--it begins with waking. At least
it's just as if I were in my own bed in my own apartment and then gradually
I started to wake. You know how you can feel that somebody else is in the
room though you can't see them--that's the feeling. And, of course being a
normal American business woman, my first idea is--burglars. And I'm very
cowardly for a minute. Then the cowardice passes and I decide to get up and
see what it is.

"It _is_ somebody else--or something--but nobody I think that I ever
really knew. And at first I don't want to walk toward it--and then I do
because it keeps pulling me in spite of myself. So I go to it--hands out
so I won't knock over things.

"And then I touch it--or him--or her--and I'm suddenly very, very happy.

"That's all.

"And now, Dr. Billett, what would you say of my case?"

Ted's eyes are glowing--in the middle of her description his heart has
begun to knock to a hidden pulse, insistent and soft as the drum of gloved
fingers on velvet. He picks words carefully.

"I should say--Mrs. Severance--that there was something you needed and
wanted and didn't have at present. And that you would probably have it--in
the end."

She laughs a little. "Rather cryptic, isn't that, doctor? And you'd
prescribe?"

"Prescribe? 'It's an awkward matter to play with souls.'"

"'And trouble enough to save your own,'" she completes the quotation. "Yes,
that's true enough--though I'm sorry you can't even tell me to use this
twice a day in half a glass of water and that other directly after each
meal. I think I'll have to be a little more definite when it comes to your
turn--if it does come."

"Oh it will." But instead of beginning, he raises his eyes to her again.
This time there is a heaviness like sleep on both, a heaviness that draws
both together inaudibly and down, and down, as if they were sinking through
piled thickness on thickness of warm, sweet-scented grass. Odd faces come
into both minds and vanish as if flickered off a film--to Rose Severance,
a man narrow and flat as if he were cut out of thin grey paper, talking,
talking in a voice as dry and rattling as a flapping windowblind of their
"vacation" together and a house with a little garden where she can sew and
he can putter around,--to Ted, Elinor Piper, the profile pure as if it were
painted on water, passing like water flowing from the earth in springs,
in its haughty temperance, its retired beauty, its murmurous quiet--other
faces, some trembling as if touched with light flames, some calm, some
merely grotesque with longing or too much pleasure--all these pass. A great
nearness, fiercer and more slumbrous than any nearness of body takes their
place. It wraps the two closer and closer, a spider spinning a soft web out
of petals, folding the two with swathes and swathes of its heavy, fragrant
silk.

"Oh--mine--isn't anything," says Ted rather unsteadily, after the moment.
"Only looking at firelight and wanting to take the coals in my hands."

Rose's voice is firmer than his but her mouth is still moved with content
at the thing it has desired being brought nearer.

"I really can't prescribe on as little evidence as that," she says with
music come back to her voice in the strength of a running wave. "I can
only repeat what you told me. That there was something you needed--and
wanted"--she is mocking now--"and didn't have at present. And that you
would probably--what was it?--oh yes--have it, in the end."

The wispy little woman has crept up to Ted's elbow with an illegible bill.
Rose has spoken slowly to give her time to get there--it is always so much
better to choose your own most effective background for really affecting
scenes.

"And now I really must be getting back," she cuts in briskly, her fingers
playing with a hat that certainly needs no rearrangement, when Ted, after
absent-mindedly paying the bill, is starting to speak in the voice of one
still sleep-walking.

"But it _was_ delightful, Mr. Billett--I love talking about myself and you
were really very sweet to listen so nicely." She has definitely risen. Ted
must, too. "We must do it again some time soon--I'm going to see if there
aren't any of those books with long German names drifting around 'Mode'
somewhere so that I'll be able to simply stun you with my erudition the
next time we talk over dreams."

They are at the door now, she guiding him toward it as imperceptibly and
skillfully as if she controlled him by wireless.

"And it isn't fair of me to let you give all the parties--it simply isn't.
Couldn't you come up to dinner in my little apartment sometime--it really
isn't unconventional, especially for anyone who's once seen my pattern of
an English maid--"

Sunlight and Minetta Lane again--and whatever Ted may want to say out of
his walking trance--this is certainly no place where any of it can be said.




XII

Oliver Crowe, at his desk in the copy-department of Vanamee and Co.'s,
has been spending most of the afternoon twiddling pencils and reading and
rereading two letters out of his pocket instead of righteously thinking up
layouts for the new United Steel Frame Pulley Campaign. He realizes that
the layouts are important--that has been brought to his attention already
by several pink memoranda from Mr. Delier, the head of the department--but
an immense distaste for all things in general and advertising in particular
has overwhelmed him all day. He looks around the big, brightly lighted room
with a stupefied sort of loathing--advertising does not suit him--he is
doing all he can at it because of Nancy--but he simply does not seem to get
the hang of the thing even after eight months odd and he is conscious
of the fact that the Powers that be are already looking at him with
distrustful eyes, in spite of his occasional flashes of brilliance. If he
could only get _out_ of it--get into something where his particular kind of
mind and training would be useful--oh well--he grunts and turns back to his
private affairs.

The letter from Easten of Columbiac Magazines--kindly enough--but all
hope of selling the serial rights of his novel gone glimmering because of
it--Easten was the last chance, the last and the best. "If you could see
your way to making short stories out of the incidents I have named, I
should be very much interested--" but even so, two short stories
won't bring in enough to marry on, even if he can do them to Easten's
satisfaction--and the novel couldn't come out as a book now till late
spring--and Oliver has too many friends who dabble in writing to have any
more confidence in book royalties than he would have in systems for beating
the bank at roulette. Well, _that's_ over--and a year's work with it--and
all the dreams he and Nancy had of getting married at once.

Those pulley layouts have to be fixed up sometime. What can you say about a
pulley--what _can_ you say? "The United Steel Frame Pulley--Oh Man, There's
a Hog for Work!" Oliver turns the cheap phrase in his mind, hating its
shoddiness, hating the fact that such shoddiness is the only stuff with
which he can deal.

Sanely considered, he supposes he hasn't any business using up a month's
meagre savings and three small checks for poems that he has hoarded since
April in going out to St. Louis Friday. Mr. Alley wasn't too pleased with
letting him take Saturday and half Monday off to do it, too. But then there
was that telegram ten days ago. "I'd give anything in the world if we could
only see each other--" and after other letters unsatisfactorily brief, the
letter that came Monday "I have such grand news, Ollie dear, at least it
may be grand if it works out--but oh, dear, I do want to see you about it
without tangling it up in letters that don't really explain. Can't you make
it--even a few hours would be long enough to talk it all over--and I do so
want to see you and really talk! Please wire me, if you can."

Grand news--what kind he wondered--and dully thought that he couldn't see
her, of course, and then suddenly knew that he must. After all, there
didn't seem to be much use in saving for the sake of saving when all the
saving you could possibly do didn't bring you one real inch nearer to what
you really wanted. _Apres moi le deluge--apres ca le deluge_--it might even
come to that this time, they were both so tired--and he viewed the prospect
as a man mortally hurt might view the gradual failing of sun and sky above
him, with hopelessness complete as a cloud in that sky, but with heart and
brain too beaten now to be surprised with either agony or fear. They must
see each other--they were neither of them quiet people who could love
forever at a distance without real hope. Great Lord, if he and Nancy could
ever have one definite basis to work on, one definite hope of money in the
future no matter how far off that was--But the present uncertainty--They
couldn't keep on like this--no two people in the world could be expected to
keep on.

Nancy. He is seeing Nancy, the way she half-lifts her head when she has
been teasing and suddenly becomes remorseful and wants him to know how much
she does love him instead.




XIII

A hot night in the Pullman---too hot to sleep in anything but a series of
uneasy drowsings and wakings. Smell of blankets and cinders and general
unwashedness--noise of clacketing wheels and a hysterical whistle--anyhow
each sweaty hour brings St. Louis and Nancy nearer. St. _Nancy_, St.
_Nancy_, St. _Nancy_, says the sleepless racket of the wheels, but the
peevish electric fan at the end of the corridor keeps buzzing to itself
like a fly caught in a trap. "And then I got married you see--and then I
got married you see--and when you get married you aren't a free lance--you
aren't a free lance--you're _settled_!"

It will have to be pretty grand news indeed that Nancy has to make up for
this last week and the buzz of the electric fan, thinks Oliver, twisting
from one side of his stuffy berth to the other like an uneasy sardine.




XIV

"More beans, Oliver," says Mrs. Ellicott in a voice like thin syrup, her
"generous" voice. The generous voice is used whenever Mrs. Ellicott wants
to show herself a person of incredibly scrupulous fairness before that
bodiless assemblage of old women in black that constitute the They who
Say--and so it is used to Oliver nearly all the time.

"No thank you, Mrs. Ellicott." Oliver manages to look at her politely
enough as he speaks but then his eyes go straight back to Nancy and stay
there as if they wished to be considered permanent attachments. All Oliver
has been able to realize for the last two hours is the mere declarative
fact that she is _there_.

"Nancy!"

"No, thanks, mother."

And Nancy in her turn looks once swiftly at her mother, sitting there at
the end of the table like a faded grey sparrow whose feathers make it
uncomfortable. It isn't feathers, though, really--its only Oliver. Why
can't mother get reconciled to Oliver--why _can't_ she--and if she can't,
why doesn't she come out and say so instead of trying to be generous to
Oliver when she doesn't want to while he's there and then saying mean
things when he's away because she can't help it?

"Stanley?"

"Why, no, my dear--no--yes, a few, perhaps--I might reconsider--only a few,
my dear,"--his voice does not do anything as definite as cease--it merely
becomes ineffectual as Mrs. Ellicott heaps his plate. He then looks at the
beans as if he hadn't the slightest idea where they came from but supposes
as long as they are there they must be got away with somehow, and starts
putting them into his mouth as mechanically as if they were pennies and he
a slot-machine.

It is hot in the Ellicotts' dining-room--the butter was only brought in a
little while ago, but already it is yellow mush. There are little drops on
the backs of Mr. Ellicott's hands. Oliver wants to help Nancy take away the
dishes and bring in the fruit--they have started to make a game out of it
already when Mrs. Ellicott's voice enforces order.

"No, Oliver. No, please. Please sit still. It is so seldom we have a
_guest_ that Nancy and I are apt to forget our _manners_--"

Oliver looks to Nancy for guidance, receives it and subsides into his
chair. That's just the trouble, he thinks rather peevishly--if only Mrs.
Ellicott would stop acting as if he were a guest--and not exactly a guest
by choice at that but one who must be the more scrupulously entertained in
public, the less he is liked in private.

The fruit. Mrs. Ellicott apologizing for it--her voice implies that she is
quite sure Oliver doesn't think it good enough for him but that he ought
to feel himself very lucky indeed that it isn't his deserts instead. Mr.
Ellicott absent-mindedly squirting orange juice up his sleeve. Oliver and
Nancy looking at each other.

"Are you the same?" say both kinds of eyes, intent, absorbed with the wish
that has been starved small through the last three months, but now grows
again like a smoke-tree out of a magicked jar, "Really the same and really
loving me and really glad to be here?" But they can get no proper sort of
answer now--there are too many other Ellicotts around, especially Mrs.
Ellicott.

Dinner is over with coffee and cigarettes that Mrs. Ellicott has bought for
Oliver because no one shall ever say she failed in the smallest punctilio
of hospitality, though she offers them to him with a gesture like that of a
missionary returning his baked-mud idol to a Bushman too far gone in sin
to reclaim. Mr. Ellicott smoked cigarettes before his marriage. For twenty
years now he has been a contributing member of the Anti-Tobacco League.

And now all that Oliver knows is that unless he can talk to Nancy soon
and alone, he will start being very rude. It is not that he wants to be
rude--especially to Nancy's family--but the impulse to get everyone but
Nancy away by any means from sarcasm to homicidal mania is as reasonless
and strong as the wish to be born. After all he and Nancy have not seen
each other wakingly for three months--and there is still her "grand news"
to tell, the grandness of which has seemed to grow more and more dubious
the longer she looked at Oliver. Now is the time for Mr. and Mrs. Ellicott
to disappear as casually and completely as clouds over the edge of the sky
and first of all, not to mention the fact that they are going. But Mrs.
Ellicott has far too much tact ever to be understanding.

She puts Mr. Ellicott's hat on for him and takes his arm as firmly as if
she were police, and he accepts the grasp with the meekness of an old
offender who is not quite sure what particular crime he is being arrested
for this time but has an uncomfortable knowledge that it may be any one of
a dozen.

"Now we old people are going to leave you, children alone for a little
while" she announces, fair to the last, her voice sweeter than ever.
"We know you have such a great many important _affairs_ to talk
over--particularly the _splendid_ offer that has just come to Nancy--my
little girl hasn't told you about it yet, has she, Oliver?'

"No, Mrs. Ellicott."

"Well, her father and myself consider it quite _remarkable_ and we have
been _urging_--very _strongly_--her acceptance, though of course" this with
a glace smile, "we realize that we are only her _parents_. And, as Nancy
knows, it has always been our dearest wish to have her decide matters
affecting her happiness entirely _herself_. But I feel sure that when both
of you have talked it _well_ over, we can trust you both to come to a
most _reasonable_ decision." She breathes heavily and moves with her
appurtenance to the door, secure as an ostrich in the belief that Oliver
thinks her impartial, even affectionate. Her conscientiousness gives her a
good deal of applause for leaving the two young people so soon when they
have all one evening and another morning to be together--but subconsciously
she knows that she has done her best by her recent little speech to make
this talking-it-over a walk through a field full of small pestilent
burrs, for both Oliver and Nancy. They say _au revoir_ very politely--all
four--the door shuts on Mr. Ellicott's meek back.

Mrs. Ellicott is not very happy, going downstairs. She knows what has
undoubtedly happened the moment the door was shut--and a little twinge of
something very like the taste of sour grapes goes through her as she thinks
of those two young people so reprehensibly glad at being even for the
moment in each other's arms.




XV

An hour later and still the grand news hasn't been told. In fact very
little that Mrs. Ellicott would regard as either sensible or reasonable has
happened at all. Though they do not know it the conversation has been oddly
like that of two dried desert-travellers who have suddenly come upon water
and for quite a while afterwards find it hard to think of anything else.
But finally:

"Dearest, dearest, what was the grand news?" says Oliver half-drowsily. "We
must talk it over, dear, I suppose, I guess, oh, we must--oh, but you're so
sweet--" and he relapses again into speechlessness.

They are close together, he and she now. Their lips meet--and meet--with a
sweet touch--with a long pressure--children being good to each other--cloud
mingling with gleaming cloud.

"Ollie dear." Nancy's voice comes from somewhere as far away and still as
if she were talking out of a star. "Stop kissing me. I can't think when you
kiss me, I can only feel you be close. If you want to hear about that news,
that is," she adds, her lips hardly moving.

All that Oliver wants to do is to hold her and be quiet--to make out of
the stuffy room, the nervous rushing of noise under the window, the air
exhausted with heat, a place in some measure peaceful, in some measure
retired, where they can lie under lucent peace for a moment as shells lie
in clear water and not be worried about anything any more. But again, the
time they are to have is too short--Oliver really must be back Monday
afternoon--already he is unpleasantly conscious of the time-table part of
his mind talking trains at him. He takes his arms from around Nancy--she
sits up rubbing her eyes with the back of her hand as if to take the
dream that was so glittering in them away now she and Oliver have to talk
business-affairs.

"Oh, my _hair_--lucky it's bobbed, that's all--I'd have lost all the
hairpins I ever had in it by now--Well, Ollie--"

Her hand goes over to his uneasily, takes hold. For a moment the dream
comes back and she forgets entirely what she was going to say.

"Oh _dear_!"

"Nancy, Nancy, Nancy!"

But she will be firm about their talking. "No, we mustn't really, we
mustn't, or I can't tell you anything at all. Well, it's this.

"I didn't tell you about it at all--didn't even imagine it would come to
anything. But that old geology specimen Mrs. Winters knows the art-editor
of "The Bazaar" and she happened to say so once when she was here being
gloomy with mother, so I wormed a letter out of her to her friend about
me. And I sent some things in and the poor man seemed to be interested--at
least he said he wanted to see more--and then we started having a real
correspondence. Until finally--it was that Friday because I wrote you the
letter right away--he goes and sends me a letter saying to come on to New
York--that I can have a regular job with them if I want to, and if they
like my stuff well enough, after a couple of months they'll send me to
Paris to do fashions over there and pay me a salary I can more than live on
and everything!"

Nancy cannot help ending with a good deal of triumph, though there is
anxiety behind the triumph as well. But to Oliver it seems as if the floor
had come apart under his feet.

When he has failed so ludicrously and completely, Nancy has succeeded and
succeeded beyond even his own ideas of success. She can go to Paris and
have all they ever planned together, now; it has all bent down to her like
an apple on a swinging bough, all hers to take, from lunch at Prunier's
and sunset over the river to that perfect little apartment they know every
window of by heart--and he is no nearer it than he was eight months ago. He
has felt the pride in her voice and knows it as most human and justified,
but because he is young and unreasonable that pride of hers hurts his own.
And then there is something else. All through what she was saying it was
"I" that said, not "we."

"That's fine, Nancy," he says uncertainly. "That's certainly fine!"

But she knows by his voice in a second.

"Oh, Ollie, Ollie, of course I won't take it if it makes you feel that way,
dear. Why, I wouldn't do anything that would hurt you--but Ollie I don't
see how this can, how this could change things any way at all. I only
thought it would bring things nearer--both of us getting jobs and my having
a Paris one and--"

Her voice might be anything else in the world, but it is not wholly
convinced. And its being sure beyond bounds is the only thing that could
possibly help Oliver. He puts his hands on her shoulders.

"I couldn't do anything but tell you to take it, dearest, could I? When
it's such a real chance?" He is hoping with illogical but none the less
painful desperation that she will deny him. But she nods instead.

"Well then, Nancy dear, listen. If you take it, we've got to face things,
haven't we?"

She nods a little rebelliously.

"But why is it so _serious_, Ollie?" and again her voice is not true.

"You know. Because I've failed--God knows when I'll make enough money for
us to get married now--with the novel gone bust and everything. And I
haven't any right to keep you like this when I'm not sure of ever being
able to marry you--and when you've got a job like this and can go right
ahead on the things you've always been crazy to do. Nancy, you _want_ to
take it--even if it meant our not getting married for another year and your
being away--don't you, don't you? Oh, Nancy, you've _got_ to tell me--it'll
only bust everything we've had already if you don't!"

And now they have come to a point of misunderstanding that only a trust as
unreasonable as belief in immortality will help. But that trust could never
be bothered with the truth of what it was saying at the moment--it would
have to reach into something deeper than any transitory feeling--and they
have an unlucky tradition of always trying to tell each other what is
exactly true. And so Nancy nods because she has to, though she couldn't
bear to put what that means into words.

"Well, you take it. And I'm awful sorry we couldn't make it go, dear. I
tried as hard as I could to make it go but I guess I didn't have the stuff,
that's all."

He has risen now and his face seems curiously twisted--twisted as if
something hot and hurtful had passed over it and left it so that it would
always look that way. He can hardly bear to look at Nancy, but she has
risen and started talking hurriedly--fright, amazement, concern and a queer
little touch of relief all mixing in her voice.

"But Ollie, if you can't _trust_ me about something as little as that."

"It isn't that," he says beatenly and she knows it isn't. And knowing,
her voice becomes suddenly frightened--the fright of a child who has let
something as fragile and precious as a vessel of golden glass slip out of
her hands.

"But, Ollie dear! But, Ollie, I never meant it that way. But Ollie, I love
you!"

He takes her in his arms again and they kiss long. This time though there
is no peace in the kiss, only the lost passion of bodies tired beyond
speech. "Do you love me, Nancy?"

Again she has to decide--and the truth that will not matter for more than
the hour wins. Besides, he has hurt her.

"Oh, Ollie, Ollie, yes, but--"

"You're not sure any more?"

"It's different."

"It's not being certain?"

"Not the way it was at first--but, Ollie, we're neither of us the same--"

"Then you _aren't_ sure?"

"I can't--I haven't--oh, Ollie, I don't know, I don't know!"

"That means you know."

Again the kiss but this time their lips only hurt against each
other--Oliver feels for a ghastly instant as if he were kissing Nancy after
she had died. It seems to him that everything in him has made itself into a
question as discordant and unanswered as the tearing cry of a puppy baying
the moon, struck out of his senses by that swimming round silver above him,
ineffably lustrous, ineffably removed, none of it ever coming to touch him
but light too pale to help at all. He is holding a girl in his arms--he can
feel her body against him--but it is not Nancy he is holding--it never will
be Nancy any more. He releases her and starts walking up and down in a
series of short, uneasy strides, turning mechanically to keep out of the
way of chairs. Words come out of him, words he never imagined he could ever
say, he thinks dizzily that it would feel like this if he were invisibly
bleeding to death--that would come the same way in fiery spurts and pauses
that tore at the body.

"Don't you see, dear, don't you _see_? It's been eight months now and we
aren't any nearer getting married than we were at first and it isn't honest
to say we will be soon any more--I can't see any prospect--I've failed
in everything I thought would go--and we can't get married on my job for
_years_--I'm not good enough at it--and I _won't_ have you hurt--I _won't_
have you tied to me when it only means neither of us doing what we want and
both of us getting, older and our work not done. Oh, I love you, Nancy--if
there was any hope at all I'd go down on my knees to ask you to keep on but
there isn't--they've beaten us--they've beaten us--all the fat old people
who told us we were too poor and too young. All we do is go on like this
both of us getting worked up whenever we see each other and both of us
hurting each other and nothing happening--Oh, Nancy, I thought we could
help each other always and now we can't even [Illustration: AND THEN THE
QUEER MAN HAD GONE OUT OF THE DOOR] a little any more. You remember when we
promised that if either of us stopping loving each other we'd tell?"

Nancy is very silent and rather white.

"Yes, Ollie."

"Well, Nancy?"

"Well--"

They look at each other as if they were watching each other burn.

"Good-by darling, darling, darling!" says Ollie through lips like a
marionette's.

Then Nancy feels him take hold of her again--the arms of somebody else in
Oliver's body--and a cold mouth hurting her cheek--and still she cannot
speak. And then the queer man who was walking up and down so disturbingly
has gone out of the door.




XVI

Oliver finds himself walking along a long street in a city. It is not a
distinguished street by any means--there are neither plate-glass shops nor
'residences' on it--just an ordinary street of little stores and small
houses and occasionally an apartment building named for a Pullman car. In
a good many houses the lights are out already--it is nearly eleven o'clock
and this part of St. Louis goes to bed early--only the drugstores and the
moving-picture theatres are still flaringly awake. His eyes read the sign
that he passes mechanically, "Dr. Edwin K. Buffinton--Chiropractor,"
"McMurphy and Kane's," "The Rossiter," with its pillars that look as if
they had been molded out of marbled soap.

Thought. Memory. Pain. Pain pressing down on his eyeballs like an iron
thumb, twisting wires around his forehead tighter and tighter till it's
funny the people he passes don't see the patterns they make on his skin.

Somebody talking in his mind, quite steadily and flatly, repeating and
repeating itself like a piece of cheap music played over and over again on
a scratched phonograph record, talking in the voice that is a composite of
a dozen voices; a fat man comfortable on a club lounge laying down the law
as if he were carefully smearing the shine out of something brilliant with
a flaccid heavy finger; a thin sour woman telling children playing together
"don't, don't, don't," in the whine of a nasty nurse.

"All for the best, you know--all for the best, we're all of us sure of
that. Love doesn't last--doesn't last--doesn't last--as good fish in
the sea as ever were caught out of it--nobody's heart could break at
twenty-five. You think you're happy and proud--you think you're lovers and
friends--but that doesn't last, doesn't last, doesn't last--none of it
lasts at all."

If he only weren't so _tired_ he could do something. But instead he feels
only as a man feels who has been drinking all day in the instant before
complete intoxication--his body is as distinct from him as if it
were walking behind him with his shadow--all the colors he sees seem
exaggeratedly dull or brilliant, he has little sense of distance, the next
street corner may be a block or a mile away, it is all the same, his feet
will take him there, his feet that keep going mechanically, one after the
other, one after the other, as if they marched to a clock. There is
no feeling in him that stays long enough to be called by any definite
word--there is only a streaming parade of sensations like blind men running
through mist, shapes that come out of fog and sink back to it, without
sight, without number, without name, with only continual hurry of feet to
tell of their presence.

A slinky man comes up at his elbow and starts to talk out of the side of
his mouth.

"Say, mister--"

"Oh, _go_ to hell!" and the man fades away again, without even looking
startled, to mutter "Well, you needn' be so damn peeved about it--I'll
say you needn' be so damn peeved--whatcha think you are, anyhow--Marathon
Mike?" as Oliver's feet take Oliver swiftly away from him.

Nancy. The first time he ever kissed her when it was question and answer
with neither of them sure. And then getting surer and surer--and then when
they kissed. Never touching Nancy, never. Never seeing her again never any
more. That song the Glee Club used to harmonize over--what was it?

  We won't go there any more,
  We won't go there any more
  We won't go there any mo-o-ore----

He lifts his eyes for a moment. A large blue policeman is looking at him
fixedly from the other side of the street, his nightstick twirling in a
very prepared sort of way. For an instant Oliver sees himself going over
and asking that policeman for his helmet to play with. That would be the
cream of the jest--the very cream--to end the evening in combat with a
large blue policeman after having all you wanted in life break under you
suddenly like new ice.

He had been walking for a very long time. He ought to go to bed. He had a
hotel somewhere if he could only think where. The policeman might know.

The policeman saw a young man with staring eyes coming toward him,
remarked "hophead" internally and played with his nightstick a little
more. The nearer Oliver came the larger and more unsympathetic the
policeman seemed to him. Still, if you couldn't remember what your hotel
was yourself it was only sensible to ask guidance on the question. His
mind reacted suddenly toward grotesqueness. One had to be very polite to
large policemen. The politeness should, naturally, increase as the square
of the policeman.

"I wonder if you could tell me where my hotel is, officer?" Oliver began.
"What hotel?" said the policeman uninterestedly. Oliver noticed with an
inane distinctness that he had started to swirl his nightstick as a large
blue cat might switch its tail. He wondered if it would be tactful to ask
him if he had ever been a drum major. Then he realized that the policeman
had asked him a question--courtesy demanded a prompt response.

"What?" said Oliver.

"I said 'What hotel?'" The policeman was beginning to be annoyed.

Oliver started to think of his hotel. It was imbecile not to remember the
name of your own hotel--even when your own particular material and
immaterial cosmos had been telescoped like a toy train in the last three
hours. The Rossiter was all that he could think of.

"The Rossiter," he said firmly.

"No hotel Rossiter in _this_ town." The policeman's nightstick was getting
more and more irritated. "Rossiter's a lotta flats. You live there?"

"No. I live in a hotel."

"Well, what hotel?"

"Oh, I tell you I don't remember," said Oliver vaguely. "A big one with a
lot of electric lights."

The policeman's face became suddenly very red.

"Well, you move on, buddy!" he said in a tone of hoarse displeasure. "You
move right on! You don't come around me with any of your funny cracks--I
know whatsa matter with you, all right, all right. I know whatsa matter
with you."

"So do I." Oliver was smiling a little now, the whole scene was so
arabesque. "I want to go to my hotel."

"You move on. You move on _quick_!" said the policeman vastly. "It's a
long walk down to the hoosegow and _I_ don't want to take you there."

"I don't want to go there," said Oliver. "But my hotel--"

"_Quit arguin'"_! said the policeman in a bark like a teased bulldog.

Oliver turned and walked two steps away. Then he turned again. After all
why not? The important part of his life was over anyhow--and before the
rest of it finished he might be able to tell one large policeman just what
he thought of him.

"Why, you big blue boob," he began abruptly with a sense of pleasant
refreshment better than drink, "You great heaving purple ice wagon--" and
then he was stopped abruptly for the policeman was taking the necessary
breath away.




XVII

About which time Nancy had finished crying--raging at herself all the
time, she hated to cry so--and was sitting up straight on the couch
looking at the door which Oliver had shut as if by looking it very hard
indeed she could make it turn into Oliver.

It _couldn't_ end this way. If it did it just meant that all the last year
wasn't real--hadn't any more part in reality than charity theatricals. And
they'd both of them been so sure that it was the chief reality that they
had ever known.

He wasn't _reasonable_. She hadn't wanted the darned old job, she'd wanted
to marry him, but as long as they hadn't seemed to get very far in the
last eight months when he'd been trying to work it--why couldn't _she_
try----

Then 'Oh Nancy, be honest!' to herself. No, that wasn't true. She'd wanted
the job, wanted to get it, hadn't thought about Oliver particularly when
she'd tried for it except to be a little impatient with him for not using
more judgment when he picked out his job. Did that mean that she didn't
love him? Oh Lord, it was all so mixed up.

Starting out so clearly at first and everything being so perfect--and then
the last four months and both getting tireder and tireder and all the
useless little misunderstandings that made you wonder how could you if you
really cared. And now this.

For an instant of mere relief from strain Nancy saw herself in Paris,
studying as she had always wanted to study, doing some real work, all
Paris hers to play with like a big gray stone toy, never having to worry
about loving, about being loved, about people you loved. Being free. Like
taking off your hot, hot clothes and lying in water when you were too hot
and tired even to think of sleeping. Oliver too--she'd leave him free--
he'd really work better without her--without having her to take care of
and make money for and worry about always----

The mind turned the other way. But what would doing anything be like with
Oliver out of it when doing things together had been all that mattered all
the last year?

They couldn't decide things like this on a prickly hot August night when
both of them were nearly dead with fatigue. It wasn't _real_. Even after
Oliver had shut the door she'd been sure he'd come back, though she hoped
he wouldn't just while she was crying; she never had been, she thought
viciously, one of those happy people who look like rain-goddesses when
they cry.

He must come back. She shut her eyes and told him to as hard as she could.
But he didn't.

All very well to be proud and dignified when both of you lived near each
other. But Oliver was going back to New York tomorrow--and if he went back
while they were still like this--She knew his train--the ten seven.

She tried being proud in a dozen different expressive attitudes for ten
minutes or so: Then she suddenly relaxed and went over to the telephone,
smiling rather ashamedly at herself.

"Hotel Rosario?"

"Yes."

"Can I speak to Mr. Oliver Crowe? He is staying there isn't he?"

A pause full of little jingling sounds.

"Yes, he's staying here but he hasn't come in yet this evening. Do you
wish to leave a message?"

Nancy hesitates.

"N-no." That would be just a little too humble.

"Or the name of the party calling?" He will know, of course. Still, had
she better say? Then she remembers the need of punishing him just a
little. After all--it is hardly fair she should go all the way toward
making up when he hasn't even started.

"No--no name. But tell him somebody called, please."

"Very well."

And Nancy goes back to wonder if the reason Oliver hasn't gone back to the
hotel is that he is returning here in an appropriate suit of sackcloth.
She hopes he _will_ come before mother and father get back.

But even while she is hoping it, the large blue policeman is saying
something about "'Sturbance of the peace" to the desk-sergeant, and Oliver
is going down on the blotter as Donald Richardson.




XVIII

"You simply must not worry yourself about it so, Nancy, my darling," says
Mrs. Ellicott brightly. "Lovers' quarrels are only lovers' quarrels you
know and they seem very small indeed to people a little older and more
experienced though I daresay they may loom terribly large just at present.
Why your father and myself used to have--ahem--our little times over
_trifles_, darling, mere _trifles _" and Mrs. Ellicott takes a pinch of
air between finger and thumb as if to display it as a specimen of those
mere trifles over which Mr. and Mrs. Ellicott used to become proudly
enraged at each other in the days before she had faded him so completely.

Nancy, after a night of intensive sleeplessness broken only by dreams of
seeing Oliver being married to somebody else in the lobby of the Hotel
Rosario can only wonder rather dully when it could ever have been that
poor father was allowed enough initiative of his own to take even the
passive part in a quarrel over a trifle and why mother thinks the prospect
implied in her speech of her daughter's marriage being like unto hers can
be so comforting. Nancy made one New Year's resolution the second day
of her engagement, "If I ever find myself starting to act to Ollie the way
mother does to father I'll simply have to leave him and never see him
again." But Mrs. Ellicott goes on.

"If Oliver is at all the sort of young man we must hope he is, he will
certainly come and apologize at once. And if he should not--well Nancy, my
little girl," she adds hieroglyphically "there are many trials that seem
hard to bear at first which prove true blessings later when we see of what
false materials they were first composed."

Mr. Ellicott thinks it is time for him to go to the office. It is five
minutes ahead of his usual time but Mrs. Ellicott has been looking at him
all the way through her last speech until he feels uneasily that he must
be composed of very false material indeed. He stops first though to give
an ineffective pat to Nancy's shoulder.

"Cheer up, Chick," he says kindly. "Always sun somewhere you know, so
don't treat the poor boy too hard," and he shuffles rapidly away before
his wife can look all the way through him for the vague heresy implicit in
his sentence.

"It is all very well for your father to say such things, but, Nancy,
darling, you shall not be put upon by Tramplers" proceeds Mrs. Ellicott in
her most cryptically perfect tones. "Oliver is a man--he must apologize.
A man, I say, though little more than a boy. And otherwise you would now
be pursuing your Art in Paris due to dear kind Mrs. Winters who has always
stood our truest friend and now this other opportunity has come also but I
would never be the first to say that even such should not be sacrificed
most gladly for the love of a true kind husband and dear little children
though marriage is but a lottery at best and especially when affections
are fixed upon their object in early youth."

All this without a pause, pouring over the numbed parts of Nancy's mind
like thin sweetish oil. Nancy considers wearily. Yes, Oliver should
apologize. Yes, it is only being properly dignified not to call up the
Rosario again to find if he is there. Yes, if he truly loves her, he will
call--he will come--and the clock hands are marching on toward ten-seven
and his train like stiff little soldiers and mother is talking, talking--

"Not that I wish or have wished to influence your mind in any way, my
darling, but environment and propinquity count for mountains in such first
youthful attachments and sometimes when we are older to be looked back
upon with such regret. Nor would I ever have Words Spoken that should seem
to injure the choice of my daughter's heart--but when young men cannot
provide even Hovels for their _fiancees_ a reasonable time having been
given, it is only just that they should release them and you looking like
death all these last two months. Never wishing that my own daughter should
act in Ways dishonorable in the slightest but time is the Test in such
matters and if such tests are not to be survived it is best they should
end and no one can deny that the young man talks very queerly and was
often quite disrespectful to you though you may say that was joking but it
would not have been joking in my day and young men with queer nervous eyes
and hands I never have nor will quite trust--"

But it's Oliver that's doing this, Oliver who turned funny and white when
she cut her finger with the breadknife making sandwiches and wanted her to
put all sorts of things on it. Oliver who was always so sweet when she was
unreasonable and always the first to come looking unhappy after they'd
quarrelled even a little and say it was all his fault. Why the very last
letter she got from him was the one that said if she ever stopped loving
him he knew he'd die.

"And when things are ended it is better that such things should be though
doubtless not necessary to put an announcement in the paper yet since
God in his infinite wisdom arranges all things for the best. And with such
a splendid position opening before her it would be only dignified to bring
the young man to his senses for it would not be right to let unreasonable
young men stand in the way of advantages offered by Foreign Travel and
study and these things are soon forgotten, my dear, and if nervous young
men will not admit like gentlemen that they are in the wrong when only
engaged what kind of husbands will they make when married forever? And is
not a broken engagement better than lifelong unhappiness when there are so
many too many sinful people divorcing each other every day and all men who
write for their living use stimulants, my dear, such is literary history
and my dearest have your cry out on mother's shoulder."

The sweetish oil has risen about Nancy relentlessly--it is up to her
waist now and still it keeps talking and flowing and creeping higher. Very
soon when the fatter black soldier on the clock-face has only hitched
himself along a little, it will be over her head and the roving Nancy, the
sparkling Nancy, the Nancy that fell in love will be under it like a calm
body, never to rise or run or be kissed with light seeking kisses on the
soft of her throat again. There will only be a dignified Nancy, a sensible
Nancy, a Nancy going to Paris to study and be successful, a Nancy who,
sooner or later will marry "Some good, clean man."

A little tinkle of chimes from the clock. Six minutes more. The Nancy that
was stands on tiptoe, every eager and tameless bit of her hoping, hoping.
If mother weren't there that Nancy would have been at the telephone an
hour ago in spite of young people's pride and old people's self-respect
and all the thousand and one knife-faced fetishes that all the correct and
common-sensible people hug close and worship because they hurt.

She can see the train sliding out of the station. Ollie is in it and his
face is stiff with surprise and unforgiveness like the face of some
horrible stranger you went up to and spoke to by mistake, thinking he was
your friend. By the time the train is well started he will have begun
talking to that fluffy girl in the other half of the Pullman--no, that
isn't worthy, he wouldn't--but oh Ollie, Ollie!

Half an hour later the telephone rings. Nancy is finishing the breakfast
dishes--her hands jump as she hears it--a slippery plate slops back into
the water and as she dives after it she realizes painfully that the new
water is much too hot.

"What _is_ it, mother?" For an instant the Nancy who has no real self-
respect is talking again.

"Just a minute, Isabella. Mrs. Winters, dear. Don't you want to speak to
her?"

"Oh."

Then----

"Not right now. When I'm through with these. But will you ask her if she's
going to be in this afternoon--I want to tell her about my taking the New
York job."

Satisfied oil pouring back into the telephone with a pleased, thin
chuckle.

"Yes, Nancy has decided. Well, dear, I think she had better tell you
herself--"

Nancy is looking dolefully down at her thumb. Foolish not to have cooled
off that water a little--she has really burned herself. For an instant she
hears Oliver's voice in her ears, low and concerned, sees Oliver kissing
it, making it well. But these things don't happen to sensible, self-
respecting modern girls with experienced mothers, especially when all the
former have now quite made up their own minds.




XIX

It was with some nightmare surprise that Oliver on waking regarded his
tidy cell. Then he remembered and in spite of the fact that yesterday
evening with all that belonged to it kept hurting wherever it was that
most of him lived with the stiff repeating ache of a nerve struck again
and again by the same soft hammer, he couldn't help laughing a little. The
popular college remedy for disprized love had always been an instantaneous
mingling of conflicting alcohols--calling a large policeman a big blue
boob seemed to produce the same desired result of bringing one to one's
senses by first taking one completely out of them without the revolving
stomach and fuzzed mind of the first instance. He tried to think of
yesterday evening airily. Silly children quarreling about things that
didn't matter at all. Of course Nancy should have the job if she wanted--
of course he'd apologize, apologize like Ecclesiastes even for being alive
at all if it was necessary--and then everything would be _all_ right, just
all right and fixed. But the airy attitude somehow failed to comfort--it
was a little too much like trying to shuffle a soft-shoe clog on a new
grave. Nancy _had_ been unreasonable. Nancy _had_ said or hadn't denied
that she wasn't sure she loved him any more. He _had_ released her from
the engagement and told her good-by. He stared at the facts--they sprang
up in front of him like choking thorns--thorns he had to clear away with
his hands before he could even touch Nancy again. Was he sure--even now?
All the airiness dropped from him like a clown's false face. As he thought
of what would happen if Nancy had really meant it about not loving him, it
seemed to him that somebody had taken away the pit of his stomach and left
nothing in its place but air.

Anyhow the first thing to do was to get out of this place--he examined the
neat bars in the door approvingly and wondered how the devil you acted
when you wanted to be let out. There wasn't any way of opening a
conversation about it with no one to talk to--and the corridor was merely
a length of empty steel--and, damn it, his train left at Ten Seven and he
had to see Nancy and explain everything in the world before it left--and
if he didn't get back to New York in time he might lose his job. There
must be some way of explaining to the people in charge that he hadn't
done anything but kid a policeman--that he must get out.

He went over to the door and tried it tentatively--no inside doorknob, of
course, this wasn't a hotel. He looked through the bars--nothing but
corridor and the cell on the other side. Should he call? For an instant
the fantastic idea of crying "Waiter!" or "Please send up my breakfast!"
tugged at him hard, but fantasy had got him into much too much trouble as
it was, he reflected savagely. It made you feel ridiculously self-
conscious, standing behind bars like this and shouting into emptiness.
Still he had to get out. He cleared his throat.

"Hey," he remarked in a pleasant conversational tone. "Hey!"

No answer, he grew bolder.

_"Hey!"_ This time the conversational tone was italicized. A rustle of
voices somewhere rewarded him--that must be people talking. Well, if they
talked, they could listen.

"HEY!" and now his voice was emphatic enough for headline capitals.

The rustle of voices ceased. There was a moment of stupefied silence.
Then,

"SHUT UP!" came from the end of the corridor in a roar that made Oliver
feel as if he had been cooing. The roar irritated him--they might be a
little more mannerly. He clutched the bars and discovered to his pleased
surprise that they would rattle. He shook them as hard as he could like a
monkey asking for peanuts.

"Hey there! I want to get out!" and though he tried to make his voice as
impressive as possible it seemed to him to pipe like a canary's in that
long steel emptiness.

"I've got to catch a train!" he added desperately and then had to stuff
his coat sleeve into his mouth to keep from spoiling his dramatics with
most unseasonable mirth.

There were noises from the end of the corridor--the noises of strong men
at bitter war with something stronger than they, strange rumblings and
snortings and muffled whoops. Then the voice came again and this time its
words were slow and deliberately spaced so as to give it time to master
whatever rocked it between whiles.

"Say--you--_humorist_" said the voice and here it rose sharply into an
undignified squawk of laughter, "You--innercent--child--comedian--you--
Charlie--Chaplin--of the--hoosegow--you _shut_ up--or I'll come down
there and--bend--something--over--your merry little face--_understand?_"
"Yes sir," said Oliver subduedly.

"Ah right. Now go bye-bye--mama'll call you when she's ready to take you
walking" then explosively "I got to catch a train! Oh Holy Mike!"

Oliver left the window and went back toward his bunk, considerably
chastened. As he did so a bundle of second-hand clothes on the floor
rolled over and disclosed a red and unshaven face.

"Wup!" said Oliver--he had almost stepped on it.

"Wha'?" said the bundle, opening sick eyes.

"Oh nothing. I only said good morning."

"Wha'?"

"Good morning."

"Wha'?"

"Good morning."

After incredible difficulties, the bundle attained a sitting position.

"You kid'n me?" it demanded thickly, looking at Oliver with as much
surprise as if he had just grown up out of the floor like a plant.

"Oh no. No."

"You're _nah_ kid'n me?"

"No."

"Ah ri'. 'S countersign. Pass. Fren'."

It attempted a military gesture but succeeded merely in hitting its mouth
with its hand. It then looked at the hand as if the latter had done it on
purpose and became sunk in profound cogitation.

"Not feeling very well today?" Oliver ventured.

It looked at him.

"_Well?_" it said briefly. Then, after a silence devoted to trying to find
where its hands were.

"Hoosh."

"What?" said Oliver.

"_Hoosh_. Goo' hoosh. Gran' hoosh. Oh, _hoosh!_" and as if the mention of
the word had stricken it back into clothes again it slid slowly down on
its back, closed its eyes and began to snore.

Oliver, perched on his bunk for what comfort there was, sat and
considered. He looked at the bundle--the bars--the bars--the bundle. The
bundle wheezed apoplectically--no sound of footsteps came from beyond the
bars. Oliver wondered if Nancy loved him. He wondered if he would ever
catch that Ten Seven. But most of all he wondered why on earth he had
happened to get in here and how on earth he was ever going to get out.




XX

The sky had been a blue steam all day, but at night it quieted, there were
faint airs. From the window of the apartment on Riverside Drive you c