Part 7

"You didn't catch on to what he was hintin'?"

"No."

The girl gave an incredulous exclamation.

"And maybe you don't know either how Amy Jeffries got her place?" she added.

"She said a buyer for the firm saw her at Meyer & Schwarzschild's and liked her looks."

"That's straight," grinned the sceptic.

Jean shook her impatiently by the arm.

"What _isn't_ straight?" she demanded. "You are the one hinting now. What do you mean? Out with it!"

But the girl squirmed out of her grasp and darted laughing away.

"Ask Amy," she called.

XI

Jean meant to probe the mystery at the first possible moment, but her resolve weakened in Amy's presence. If the girl's light-heartedness did not of itself quiet suspicion, it at least disarmed it, while her unselfish joy at Jean's release from the thraldom of Meyer & Schwarzschild alone made the questions Jean had thought to put seem churlish and ungrateful. Moreover, Amy was full of a plan for the evening.

"I knew it was coming," she exulted. "Anybody with a pair of eyes could see by the way he's picked you out to talk to every night that you've got him going. He came to me first to ask if I thought you'd come, and when I accepted for both, he hustled right out to get the tickets."

"What tickets?" She did not ask who was the purchaser; she, too, had eyes.

"Tickets for the theatre--a vaudeville show."

Jean's face lit.

"Vaudeville! I've often wondered what it was like."

"You're not telling me you've never seen a vaudeville show?"

"Never. Nothing worth seeing ever came to Shawnee Springs. Ought we to go?"

"Do you mean, is it respectable? Sure! One of the best in the city."

"I don't mean that. Ought we to go in this way? I don't know him."

"Well, I do," rejoined Amy, decisively; "and if there's a nicer fellow between High Bridge and the Battery, I'll miss my guess. Of course, if you want to scare up a headache and back out, why, you can. I'm going, anyway, and I reckon the extra ticket won't go a-begging. The stenographer or the manicure would jump at the chance."

"Would he be offended?"

"Awfully. Why, he only asked me because he wanted you! Next time it will be you alone."

Jean needed little coaxing. She wanted exceedingly to see a New York theater, and she really liked the breezy young dentist. It had surprised her in their evening talks to find how much they had in common. He, too, had spent his youth in a country town, and, though he had migrated first to a smaller city to study for his profession, his early impressions of New York coincided very closely with her own. She later discovered the same community of interest with nearly every one so reared, but it now chanced that none other of Mrs. St. Aubyn's boarders--or, as she preferred to call them, guests--were country-bred, and Paul Bartlett got the credit of a readier sympathy accordingly. Thus, to-night, he did not share Amy's rather too frequently expressed wonder that Jean had never witnessed a vaudeville performance.

"Never saw anything nearer to it than a minstrel show myself, up to the time I went away to dental college," he confessed frankly, as they set out. "We only got 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' and 'East Lynne' troupes in our burg. Say, but they were a rocky aggregation! I could see that even then."

This also struck Jean as a notable coincidence.

"It seems as if you were describing the Springs," she said. "But we did get a circus or two."

"Then your town beat mine," Paul laughed. "We had to jog over to the county seat for Barnum's. Otherwise they seem to have been cut off the same piece of homespun. I'll bet you even had box socials?"

Jean's face suddenly lost its animation.

"Yes," she answered.

"Just about the limit, weren't they? I wonder Newport doesn't take 'em up. They're foolish enough. Yet I thought they were great sport once. I used to try to change the boxes when I suspected that some love-sick pair were scheming to beat the game. Maybe you've done that, too?"

"Yes," Jean assented again unsteadily.

She was infuriated with herself for her involuntary change of manner and burning face, neither of which, she feared, had escaped his quick eye. It galled her thoroughgoing honesty to be forever on her guard against disclosing her refuge history, yet there seemed no help for it. Unjust though it was, the stigma was as actual for her as for the guiltiest, and cloak it she must.

If the dentist noticed anything amiss, he was tactful and launched into an exchange of nonsense with Amy which lasted quite to the theater's garish door. Once within, Jean forgot that she had a past which might not be fearlessly bared for any eye. Amy squeezed her arm happily as they passed directly into the body of the house instead of mounting the stairs familiar to her feet when she paid her own way; and to the squeeze she added a look of transport and awe when, following the usher, they skirted the orchestra and entered a narrow passage near the stage.

"We've got _box_ seats!" she whispered huskily. "They couldn't have cost him less than a dollar apiece!"

Jean had a moment of timidity begotten of a vivid recollection of two cramped pigeon-roosts, always untenanted, which flanked the advertisement-littered drop-curtain of the Shawnee Springs Grand Opera House, but was speedily reassured to find that she need endure no such lonely distinction here. These boxes were many, and they held many, their own being shared by half a dozen persons besides themselves, while the hangings were so disposed that she could be as secluded as she pleased, yet miss nothing of the play.

The play! It was a series of plays, with endless other wonderful things, too. Nothing that she had conceived resembled this ever-shifting spectacle of laughter and tears. For there were tears--real ones! Jean had often jeered at girls who cried over novels, while those whom a play, or at least the Shawnee Springs brand of drama, could move to tears, were even less comprehensible; yet to-night, when a simple little piece dealing merely with an unhappy man and wife who, resolved to go their separate ways, callously divided their poor belongings until they reached a dead baby's shoes, ran its course, she found her breath short and her cheeks wet. She was at first rather ashamed of this weakness, attributing it to her refuge nerves, but she presently heard Amy sob, and, looking round, perceived handkerchiefs fluttering throughout the darkened house. Paul, on her other side, hemmed once or twice, and she supposed him disgusted with all this ado over a baby who never existed, but when the lights went up suddenly she discovered that his eyes were moist, too.

She liked this trait in Paul. She was glad, furthermore, that he did not scoff afterward, as did some men whom the acting had moved. It seemed to her a wholesome sign that he had the courage of his sympathies; one could probably rely upon that type of man. His mental alertness also impressed her anew. For him none of the quips of the Irish or German comedians were recondite, and he could explain in a nutshell the most bewildering feats of the Japanese adepts at sleight of hand. She wondered not a little at this special knowledge, and when they left the theatre he told her that it had been his chief boyish ambition to become a magician.

"I drummed up subscriptions, collected bones, old iron, and rubber for the tinman, peddled anything under the canopy that folks would buy, all for the sake of a little cash to get books and apparatus," he confessed. "Once, when I was about smart sixteen, I gave an exhibition,

## part magic lantern, part magic tommyrot. I hired the village hall, mind

you. What cheek I had those days!"

Jean was keenly interested. This, too, reminded her of the Springs and her own irrevocable playtime.

"Did people turn out?" she asked.

"Did they! I cleared twelve dollars."

"My!" jeered Amy. "I suppose you bought an automobile?"

"No; they hadn't been invented yet." He turned again to Jean. "Guess what I did buy!"

"More apparatus."

"Just as quick as I could get a money-order," he laughed. "You're something of a wizard yourself. You must have been a boy once upon a time."

"Yes," said Jean; "I was."

When they reached the street Paul suggested oysters, and after a faint demurrer from Jean, which a secret pinch from Amy abruptly quenched, he led the way to a restaurant. The establishment he chose had a German name, and was fitted up in a manner which Jean took to be German also. The chairs and tables were of a heavy medieval design, and matched the high paneling which surrounded the room and terminated in a shelf bearing a curious array of mugs and flagons. From a small dais in one corner an orchestra, made up of a zither, two mandolins, and a guitar, discoursed a wiry yet not unpleasant music which seemed, on the whole, less Teuton than American, of a most unclassical bounce and joyousness. Paul apologized for this flaw in an otherwise harmonious scheme, explaining that the American patrons outnumbered the German, but Amy patriotically declared that ragtime was better than foreign music any day, and pronounced the entire place as cute as it could be, which really left nothing else to be said.

Everybody was drinking beer with his food, or, speaking more accurately, eating a little food with his beer, and Paul ordered two or three bottles of the exceedingly dark variety most in vogue, which he and Amy consumed. Amy rallied Jean upon her abstinence, and asked if she had signed the pledge; but Paul seemed to respect her scruples.

"Felt the same way myself once," he said. "Whenever the good old scandal specialists up our way saw a fellow slide into the hotel on a hot day for a glass of lager, they thought he was piking straight for the eternal bonfire. Naturally the boys punished a lot of stuff they didn't want, just to live up to their reputations. It's some different down here."

"I should say so," agreed Amy, boisterously. "Why, my stepfather began to send me out for beer almost as soon as I could walk. The idea of its hurting anybody! I don't believe I'd feel it if I drank a keg."

Paul did not seem as impressed by this statement as were an after-theater party at an adjoining table, and embraced a quiet opportunity to move an unfinished bottle out of her enthusiastic reach. Jean glowed under the scrutiny of the supper-party opposite, and, exchanging a look with Paul, rose presently to go. Amy objected eloquently, pointing out that it still wanted half an hour of midnight and that department stores did no business Sundays, together with sundry arguments as trenchant, which plainly carried weight with the attentive tables roundabout, but failed to convince her companions. Near the door she fell in with an unexpected ally in the person of Mr. Rose, who listened to her protests quite as sympathetically as if they had not already reached him across the room, and promptly invited them all to what he termed a nightcap with himself. Jean declined civilly, and Amy, though sore tempted, followed her example. Once outside, however, she asserted her perfect independence by walking off with Mr. Rose on his remarking easily that he would stroll their way.

"Aching incisors!" ejaculated the dentist, grimly watching them forge ahead. "Where did I get the foolish idea that I was her escort? Who is that flower, anyhow?"

"An employee in our store."

"Oh!" said Paul. "Clerk?"

"No; a floor-walker."

"Oh!" he said again, with a change of intonation which Jean detected. "In her department?"

"No; in mine."

"Oh!"

Amy's laugh came back shrilly through the now sparsely frequented street.

"I shouldn't have ordered so much beer," admitted the man. "It was too heavy for her, even if her stepfather--but let's cut that out!"

Jean herself thought that this passage from the Jeffries family history might better be left undiscussed. She quickened their pace till they were close upon Amy's too buoyant heels, and so continued to their door.

Amy was full of regrets that she could not at this hour with propriety ask Mr. Rose into Mrs. St. Aubyn's drawing-room, and as Paul inhospitably neglected to offer his quarters, the floor-walker, with unflagging cordiality and self-possession, took himself off.

"I don't cotton to Mr. Rose," said the dentist, in a voice too low for Amy, who was already mounting the stairs. "I hope you don't."

"I don't know him."

"You don't want to know him, take my word for it. This isn't sour grapes because he butted in, mind you. If you knew the city, I wouldn't say a word."

Jean bent a frank gaze upon him under the dim hall light. Paul met it to her satisfaction.

"Thank you for to-night," she said, giving him her hand. "Thank you for all of it; for the theater and the supper and for--this."

Explanations with Amy were impossible now, but the following morning, which the girls spent luxuriously in bed, proved auspicious. Amy's waking mood was contrite. She owned of her own engaging accord that she had made a goose of herself in the restaurant, suggesting by way of defence that her stepfather must have favored quite another kind of beer. She as frankly conceded that the Rose episode was indefensible, and promised ample apologies to the dentist.

"He'll understand how it was," she said. "Paul's not a Jake Meyer."

"Will Mr. Rose understand?" asked Jean, pointedly.

Amy shot her a sidelong glance.

"Why not?"

"He's not--well, a Paul Bartlett."

"He isn't a Jake Meyer, either, if that's what you mean," retorted Amy, rising on her elbow. "I like Rosey and make no bones of telling you. What have you got at the back of your big brown eyes there? Somebody has been stuffing you, I guess. Was it some kind friend at Meyer & Schwarzschild's? What did they say about Rosey and me?"

"Nothing," answered Jean, suspicious of her warmth; but now told her plainly whom and what they had mentioned.

Amy listened without surprise.

"There was bound to be some gossip," she commented, at length. "I counted on it."

"You counted on it!"

"Certainly. Jake knew the buyer's record from A to Z, and there were others."

Jean had a moment's giddiness, and shrank from her explorations.

"Did you?" she faltered.

"Of course. Do you suppose I couldn't read him like a book after all I've been through?"

"Yet you went just the same! You--"

"I trusted to luck, and for once luck was with me. He had a big offer from a Chicago firm, and left town the very day I went into the cloak department. Oh, you needn't stare," she added, with a touch of passion. "The world hasn't been any too kind to me, and I'm learning to beat it at its own selfish game. Don't let it worry you."

"I can't help it."

"Then you're silly. I'm not as soft as I look. Besides, you'll find yourself pretty busy paddling your own canoe."

Jean fell into a brooding silence. The new life was incredibly complex. It held possibilities before which imagination flinched. A picture, recalled again and again with extraordinary vividness, flashed once more before her. She saw a camp among birches bordering a pellucid lake; a boyish, pacing figure; a straightforward, troubled face confronting her own. She evoked a voice, "To be a stranger in New York, homeless, friendless, without work, the shadow of that place over there dogging your steps...." Every syllable, every intonation, was ineffaceable. Where was he now, that flawless young knight of the enchanted forest, who had stayed her folly and changed the current of her life? He had promised to befriend her when, against his counsel, she had thought to dare this unknown world. Would he still have faith, should they meet?

Amy's laugh caught her back to the room of three dormers.

"You looked a million miles away," she said. "If you were another sort of girl, I'd say you were dreaming of your best fellow. What! Blushes! Then you were? Was it Paul?"

"Paul!" Jean repelled the suggestion with a pillow. "Take that!"

They said no more of the buyer--he was luckily out of the reckoning; and although Jean deemed the dentist a wiser judge of men in general, and of floor-walkers in particular, than Amy, she decided for the present to side with neither, but try to weigh Mr. Rose for herself. If Amy was skimming thin ice, she was at least a practiced skater, with the chastening memory of a serious splash. Moreover, to recur to Amy's metaphor, she had a canoe of her own to paddle, as she was roughly reminded that same afternoon.

XII

It happened at dusk while they were returning from Central Park, which Amy had selected as a primary lesson in Jean's civic education. They were homing by way of Broadway, and were well back into the theatrical section, when Jean's guide gripped her abruptly by the arm, dragged her into the nearest doorway, and hurried her half up the dark flight of stairs to which it led. Even here she enjoined silence, pointing for explanation to the square of pavement framed by the doorway, into which an instant later loitered the bedizened key to the riddle--Stella Wilkes.

There was no mistaking her. For an interminable interval she lingered, watchful of the street, so distinct under the electrics that they could even make out her mole. Then, aimlessly as she had come, she drifted out again and away.

"Thank my stars I saw her first that time!" gasped Amy, still fearfully intent upon the lighted square.

"You knew she was in New York?"

"Yes. I've seen her before. She came up to me one night looking even worse than now. She was more painted, and her eyes were like burned holes. She said she was broke, but had the promise of a place. It was to sing in some gin-mill, I think. She _can_ sing, you know. Remember how she'd let her voice go in chapel, just to show off? I loaned her a dollar to get rid of her. I was afraid somebody I knew might see us together. I think she saw I was afraid."

"You shouldn't have let her see; it gives her a hold on you. I shan't dodge."

Jean began consistently to descend, but Amy caught her back.

"Wait," she pleaded. "Do wait a little longer. Wait for my sake, if you don't care yourself. But you'd better fight shy of her, too, I can tell you. She hasn't forgotten the prison riot. She mentioned it the night I saw her, and said she'd get plenty square with you yet."

Tricked by her uncertain nerves, Jean came under the sway of Amy's panic. They lurked cowering in the hallway till sure of a clear coast; then, darting forth, hurried round the first corner to a quieter thoroughfare which Stella would be less apt to haunt. Here, too, they continually saw her in imagination, and sought other doorways and rounded other corners for safety. Fear tracked them home, plucked at them in their own street, mounted their own steps, entered their own door, and abode with them thereafter.

Nor, for one of them at least, did the crowded weeks next following bring forgetfulness or reassurance. Jean was ever expecting the dreaded face to leer at her from the blurred horde which swam daily by the little island in the toy department, where she sold children's games. While she elucidated the mysteries of parchesi or dissected maps to some distraught mother of six, another part of the restless mechanism of her brain was painting Stella to the life. She pictured the outcast's vindictive joy at running her down, heard her mouth the unspeakable for all who would lend an ear. And who would not! She quailed in fancy before the gaping audience--the curious shoppers, the round-eyed cash-girls, the smirking clerks, Mr. Rose, the floor-walker.

Once, issuing from such a dream, she found herself face to face with Mr. Rose, who had come unnoticed to her counter, and so clear-cut was the vision, she merged the unreal with the real and blenched at his voice.

"Not taking morphine lunches, are you?" he asked, leaning solicitously over the counter.

She stared hazily till he repeated his question.

"Morphine lunches! What are they?"

The man enacted the pantomime of applying a hypodermic syringe to his arm.

"So," he said. "Some of the girls who can't lunch at home get into the way of it. Bad thing--very."

"Why should you suspect me of such a thing?" demanded Jean, indignantly. "Do I look like a morphine-fiend?"

"No offence intended. Noticed a queer look in your eyes, that's all. Stunning eyes! I'd hate to see 'em full of dope. Perfectly friendly interest, understand."

She welcomed the fretful interruption of a customer, but the woman was only returning some article, not buying, and the transaction required the floor-walker's sanction. When the shopper had gone her way, he leaned to Jean again.

"If it's worry about holding your place after the holidays," he said, "why, you can't quit it too soon. We've watched your work, and it's all right. The forelady says you've learned the stock quicker than any green clerk she's had in a dog's age, and you know she's particular. Whoever else goes, you stick."

Jean gave a long breath of thankfulness, but she was not too happy to be practical.

"And the pay?" she asked.

"The same for the present. You're still a beginner, you know."

"It is very little. The girl who had my place left because she could not live on it, I hear."

Mr. Rose tapped his prominent teeth with a pencil.

"She said something of the kind to me," he admitted. "She was unreasonable--very. What could she expect of six dollars?"

The handsome saleswoman at the dolls' furniture counter was intoning, "Oh, Mr. Rose! Oh, Mr. Rose!" with increasing petulance, and the floor-walker sped to her, leaving his cryptic utterance unexplained. Jean asked a fellow-clerk more about her predecessor, and learned that as she lived somewhere in the Bronx, both carfare and lunches had been serious items. These, fortunately, she herself need not consider. It was half the battle to feel permanent. She could shift somehow on her present wage till promotion came.

There was, moreover, a certain compensation in feeling herself a factor in this great establishment which everybody knew who had heard of New York at all. It was a show place of the metropolis, one of the seventy times seven wonders of the New World. Its floor space was reckoned in acres, its roof housed a whole city block, its capital represented millions, its wares the habitable globe. Nothing essential to human life seemed to be lacking. There were scales for your exalted babyship's earthly advent; patent foods, healing drugs, mechanical playthings for your childish wants or ills; text-books for your growing mind; fine feathers for your expanding social wings; the trousseau for your marriage; furnishings from cellar to attic for your first housekeeping; a bank for your savings; fittings for your office; the postal service, the telegraph, the telephone, lest business suffer while you shop; bronzes, carvings, automobiles, steam yachts, old wines, old books, old masters for your topping prosperity; comforts innumerable--oculists, dentists, discreet photographers, what not--for your lean and slippered decline; and, yes, even the sad few vanities you may take with you to your quiet grave.