CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Jean's work now took shape to her as something visible and apart. It was the system of wires that ran through life, connecting the days. The dynamo that kept it all vibrating was her love.

The depths of its peace surprised her. She loved, in secret, a married man. She had met his wife, eaten at their home, held their child in her lap. She had not only broken the standards of society, which did not matter at all, but she had broken what she had believed were her own. These did not matter either. There was nothing degrading in slipping away to meet Gregory, for nothing could degrade their love any more than a small boy could degrade the sun by throwing mud at it.

Christmas came. Applicants flooded the office, but Jean snatched as many hours as she could. When it was possible they had lunch together, and she often worked at night to make up for the teas they had in the quiet tea-room in the upper Thirties. They always went a bit earlier than the crowd and had an alcove to themselves. Jean had a sensuous delight in the contrast of leaving the office behind her, the waiting room never empty, the staff of extra helpers, the jangling 'phone, and then--this other world with Gregory. The place had once been a brownstone mansion, with carved staircases and pendulous chandeliers of crystal. Heads of baby angels looked down from the cornices and the shadows of stately men and women seemed always to lurk in the corners, aloof and disdainful, but curious of this new generation that smoked and talked immoderately on all subjects, at fragile tables, painted in strange colors. Waitresses, in chintz polonaises and powdered hair, served tea and muffins at extravagant prices. The same girl always served them, and Jean felt as if the alcove was theirs. It was the nearest they had to a home together. Here they retailed gossip and talked over their work. Gregory was giving every spare moment of his time to the designs for the auditorium and Jean loved to have him consult her even when the technical details were beyond her understanding. That he needed her in this way filled Jean with a warm glow, a distinct physical reaction that softened the outlines of her whole body. Coming from a happy hour with Gregory, Jean tackled problems that had troubled the office for weeks, and, as Berna said, "simply bored through them!"

Jean rarely thought of Margaret, and, when she did, it was as of one of their acquaintances. If Margaret had not been Gregory's wife, Jean would have enjoyed telling him about her. She could not feel personal about Margaret. She did not even resent her. In the natural world there were peacocks and orchids and slugs and worms; there were small, useful animals and needful growing things, and beautiful poisonous fungi that seemed to exist for no definite purpose. They all followed their own law. So there were Kittens and Tigers and Herricks and Marys and Jeans and Margarets and Pats. They were all different, and all needed. The mistake was in misunderstanding and confusing values. She had done this when she had married Herrick and Gregory had done it when he married Margaret.

But the really wrong thing, the wicked thing, was to be afraid. To refuse because one had not the courage to accept. To grow too weary spiritually to reach out and grasp the next rung of one's development and so swing up and up to the height of one's possibility. After a meeting with Gregory, Jean had often to make an effort to keep from running, so close was this tie between the spirit and the flesh.

On Sundays, when Gregory could get away without too greatly disturbing the plan of life in which he had so long acquiesced, or too greatly disappointing Puck, they went for long walks in the country. Jean lied to Mary and to her mother about these walks. She wanted every scrap, even the knowledge of their existence, to herself. Sometimes, at the last moment a complication arose, impossible to overcome, and the walk was postponed. Neither Jean nor Gregory ever asked why or referred to it again. They accepted, without the indignity of complaint, the conditions of their loving.

Gregory was happy, too. And, although, unlike Jean, he never realized in his muscles the spiritual values of their love, he did feel that life was a bigger and deeper thing than he had ever dreamed. Margaret's well-meaning scratching at his interests no longer annoyed him. He felt that she had been cheated, made in one of the small molds, when there were so many larger ones in which she might have been shaped.

The day before New Year, Jean took the afternoon off and they went for a long tramp through the snow in Jersey. It was a glorious day with blue sky and sunshine, faintly warm on the hill crests. They walked until dusk and then had tea before a log fire in a little French roadhouse, where the fat wife of the proprietor insisted on Jean's taking off her shoes and putting on a pair of Gustave's red carpet slippers while the shoes dried.

Jean laughed. "I shall never understand why such a healthy-looking, able-to-manage-herself being gets so much mothering. Every night in winter I have to restrain mummy by force from feeling if my stockings are damp. I wish you knew mummy, Gregory. She's so impossible to describe, but she makes such ripping anecdotes."

"I do feel rather cheated, but I have a pretty clear conception. I think she's like this."

He drew a small shaft, firm at the base, tapering to a point.

"Mummy to the life," Jean chuckled. "Now do Mary."

"That's harder." The pencil poised over the paper some time before he made a line.

"There. That's as near as I can get, but I'm not sure that the proportions are right."

It looked like two triangles, one imposed on the other, apex to apex.

"What's that in geometry? It's not like anything in life. Poor Mary, why does she come to a point in the middle and then flare again?"

"Because that's what she does. I always had the feeling with her, more than with any one I ever met, that she was spiritually constructed in sections. She has the ground work of one kind of person, but she isn't that kind. She started out planted firm on the earth, then she spired to a point, refused to end there, wanted to get back to earth again, couldn't, and so her soul built another triangle, on top of the first. She ends in a firm base again, but it's in the air. Now what do you suppose she would say if you told her--about us? She might say almost anything."

"Why, I know exactly what she'd say."

"What, Infallible One?"

"She'd say that it was none of her business."

Gregory laughed. "I suppose she would. After all, she is almost always right."

It was dark before they started back. With the ending of their days they always grew a little silent. Small, clear stars pricked the black and the moon peered timidly over the ridge top. They walked through the dry snow hand in hand. Twice Gregory stopped, drew Jean into his arms and kissed her. It made them both giddy to kiss like that, alone in the open, under the stars. Jean's lips clung to his, and when his hold loosened, she drew him to her again.

The deck of the ferryboat was deserted and they stood together in the stern, watching the ice cakes swirl in the black water. A cold wind swept down the river and whipped their faces. When the boat docked, Gregory took a quick kiss.

"It was a great walk."

Jean nodded.

"Happy New Year," she whispered, and led the way down the gangplank.

On New Year's morning Jean astonished Martha by going to early church with her. Martha asked for no reason, but her heart sang its thanksgiving as they trotted along through the clean crispness of the New Day. It was only six o'clock, but the church was full. The high altar, white in its frostwork of sheerest lace, blazed with candles. The air was heavy with the odor of thick white flowers and incense that never quite died out. Through it, like a refreshing draft, came the woodsy smell of greens and berries.

Abject with gratitude and humility, Martha slipped into the last pew and Jean knelt beside her. It was like dropping back through the years into her childhood. From force of association, Jean leaned her head on the pews in front and closed her eyes. She did not pray but she felt strangely near a God.

After a moment she stole a look at Martha, just as she used to do when she was little and wanted permission to get up and sit in the seat. It was queer how a motion could start an old train of thought. As strongly as if she were feeling it now, she remembered the anger that had always stirred her when her mother went on praying, without seeing the look. She had always hated the way Martha knelt, almost crouched, in the last pew. It had always made her want to walk straight on, up to the very altar itself, and face God standing, with her eyes open. If people loved God, as they said they did, why were they so afraid of him? If this was His house, why did they sneak around in it like burglars? How furious it had made her! And now, nothing had changed: Martha still crept into the last pew and crouched before her God, and it did not make Jean angry at all. Instead, it made a lump come into her throat, and down to the depths of her she was glad that Martha had her God.

She had Gregory.

A young priest entered and the service began. Jean rose and knelt and made the proper responses. Words that she could not have recalled in any other setting, came spontaneously to her lips. While row after row of communicants went to the rail, she knelt, her head bowed. The monotonous murmur:

"Take and eat this--the body and blood of Christ which was given for thee, preserve thy body and soul to everlasting life."

Over and over, row after row, hung a background for her thoughts.

"Take, eat--preserve thy body--everlasting life."

Against it, she walked in the dark with Gregory and felt his lips seeking hers.

"--and may the blessing of God Almighty and His Son Jesus Christ remain with you always. Amen."

The young priest, followed by his assistant, moved across the chancel. Every head bowed before his going. There was a moment of silence, as if the earth had stilled, while God Himself went back to His own; then a rustle and people rose.

Martha and Jean were the first out. Jean slipped her arm into her mother's.

"Mummy, I'm terribly disappointed, but that belated Christmas present isn't done yet. You can't have it before Tuesday."

Martha pressed Jean's arm.

"I've had my present, Jeany, and it's made me wonderfully happy."

Jean smiled down at her. They walked along quickly for a few blocks, and then Martha said:

"Which do you think Mary would like better, Jean, chestnut dressing for the turkey, or just plain?"

CHAPTER THIRTY

In March, before the actual building of the tenements began, Jean and Gregory went away for a week-end. They had decided on the spur of the moment and taken the train like two truant children. Their plan was to get off wherever it looked attractive and stop at the first farmhouse that would take them in.

The train was a popular express and crowded, so they had to stand until the first stop was reached. Then Jean got a seat and Gregory went into the smoker. With her elbow on the windowsill and her chin in her hand, Jean gazed into the fleeing fields and was glad that Gregory was not there. It was almost too much, the deep hollows still snow-filled, the bare earth of the upper stretches, the faint green of swelling buds, and the two days before them. No duties to intervene, no appointments to keep. It was their first interlude of almost perfect freedom. But there were going to be many more in the summer ahead.

The train had made two stops. There were plenty of seats now. Jean looked up and saw Gregory coming towards her. For a moment she had a mixed feeling of complete possession and at the same time of personal isolation. He was hers, so completely, so inevitably hers, and yet this was the first time they had gone away together, stolen a little piece of life for their own. It was a diminutive honeymoon, but she couldn't say that to him. As she moved over and made room for him beside her, she realized how little they knew of each other's daily habits, their methods of doing personal things, and yet the way Gregory dropped into the place she made for him, gave her the feeling of having been married to him for a long time. She wondered what he was thinking.

But evidently Gregory was concerned with no such complicated analysis, for he turned to her presently:

"No place has hit the mark yet?"

"I don't believe I've been looking. I've just been soaking."

"Let's toss. Heads, the next; tails, the one after."

It was heads. Jean settled in her seat. Gregory looked at her and smiled. The smile deepened. He could not help but think of Margaret. Whichever way it had fallen, she would have suggested throwing again. The second station "might be so much better."

"You're a brick."

"Perfectly true, but why at this particular moment?"

"The explanation's much too subtle for your feminine mind."

"Because I didn't suggest tossing again?"

"Well, I'll be darned! How did you guess that?"

"You're a brick," Jean grinned. "As dense, every bit."

They got off at the next station, to the astonishment of the solitary native waiting for the down train, and struck across the fields. When they came to a forked road they stopped.

"We'll take turns at these decisions. You first."

"North."

They walked a mile between rickety fences that seemed to go on forever. Gregory looked out of the corner of his eye and Jean laughed.

"Did you do it on purpose?"

"If there isn't a break before that big maple down there, we'll call that a turn."

They reached the maple.

"Left," shouted Gregory, without stopping to reconnoiter.

They crossed a field, boggy with snow-filled ruts, and climbed a low rise. Directly beneath lay an old farmhouse with a sagging brown roof and red window casings, dulled by generations of sun and storm. A woman in a blue apron moved across the brown, bare earth behind the house to a white chicken run. Jean thought of the Portuguese ranch where she and Herrick had gone on their honeymoon, with the silent woman and the cows wandering over the hills.

"It wasn't _me_, that's all; it just wasn't me."

A very old dog rose from the sunshine, sniffed dutifully as they came up on the stoop, and lay down again. Gregory knocked on the screen door, and a girl with a baby in her arms opened it. She listened without interest while Gregory explained, and went off without a word. In a moment they heard her shrill:

"Ma, oh _ma_!"

The woman who had been feeding the chickens appeared, wiping her hands on her apron. She had a lumpy, overworked body, but her face had in it the patience of the earth, and there was something of spring in the pale blue eyes.

"Well, I guess we kin fix you up, seein' it's only for a couple of days. We couldn't take permanents yet, the spring cleanin' ain't done."

"There's the little room up back, ma?"

"How about the one over Uncle's? You could fix that up--it don't want much more than airin'."

Jean and Gregory waited while the two women settled the matter. The decision was in favor of the big one over Uncle John's.

"Mattie'll show you." The older woman took the baby and the girl led them up a narrow white staircase, uncarpeted and spotless, that zigzagged to the floor above.

At the end of the hall she opened a low door, painted white and fastened with a hand-made latch. They entered a huge room, whitewashed, with white wainscoting, white matting and a great white bed, the most spotless room Jean had ever seen. Ancient apple trees brushed the four gleaming windows and the cluck of chickens came from the yard. The smell of the earth, warmed slightly in the spring sun, and a faint fragrance from swelling trees, flooded it.

Jean reached out and touched the baby green of apple leaves. It made her think of the old pine and her attic room, and of how often she had reached out to shake the fog diamonds from the needles and wish that something would happen, anything to break the monotony. The old pine was thousands of miles away and that self years in the past. Inwardly and outwardly she now lived in another world. And yet, looking down the years, Jean could put her finger on no moment of sudden change. It must all have been there, from the beginning, in herself; her right of way through the world of action, which she had once believed held no entry for her; her marriage with a man who came to her from one woman's arms and left her for another; this wonderful love that was so right in spite of the world's standards. And the future? It was there, just as the present had been in the past. Jean leaned out of the window and drew the warm sweetness into her. For the first time in her life she felt part of a scheme, obedient to a law that worked on without her will.

The girl went out of the room and Gregory put down the grip. He came and stood beside her. She turned and laid her face against his shoulder. He stroked her hair gently, a new tenderness in his touch.

After a moment she raised her head and smiled.

"Let's go out and explore."

From the kitchen window Mrs. Morrison watched them. "Seems like a nice couple and powerful fond. Look, Mattie, he's holdin' her hand."

Hand in hand, Gregory and Jean were peering into the chicken run. The girl shrugged:

"I guess they ain't been married long. He won't be doin' it this time next year."

"Don't talk so shaller, Mat. What if he ain't? It can't be spring all year."

"No need fur it to be winter, either."

"The sooner you git over thinkin' them things, the better it'll be fur you, my girl. You got one of the best men livin'. There ain't a better provider than Jim in this county. Kissin's good enough, but it don't fill the wood box or spread the table."

The girl looked sullenly after the retreating figures.

"I'm sick o' livin' with people that's good providers. It's like havin' nothin' but bread mornin', noon and night. I want some----"

"That'll do, Mat, I don't stand fur no such talk as that. When Jimmy begins runnin' round and needin' shoes, his ma and pa kissin' ain't goin' to put 'em on him. Besides a woman shouldn't want things like that. It's fur men to think of them things. Hand me out the bread pan; I'll mix up some biscuits, seein' we ain't enough loaves."

The girl handed it to her. "I suppose I'd better spread a clean cloth."

"Take the big one in the second drawer, and you might put the wax plant in the center."

As the girl worked, she kept glancing to the window, but Jean and Gregory were out of sight, beyond a dip in the orchard.

"It is nice," she said wistfully.

Then the baby whined and she went to him. As soon as he saw her he stopped and gooed. The girl laughed and picked him up.

"You old false alarm you!" She burrowed in his neck and he squirmed with delight.

Out in the orchard, Gregory and Jean wandered under the apple trees, great old things, cumbered with dead branches.

"They can't have made a cent from this place for years, and it would pay with a few hundreds put into it. But this eastern land, a lot of it, is just like the families, run to seed. The men who have enough kick in them to do anything go away. A place like this always makes me feel wonderfully business-like and efficient, as if I could make the dead thing live again."

"It doesn't make me feel business-like. It makes me feel vague and poetic and--and unresponsible. I can't imagine anything more peaceful than those old, useless, unfruitful things, all budded over with baby green. I wish humans could grow old like that, keeping the possibility of spring."

"That's properly vague and poetic, but I don't know that it would be such fun. Think of looking seventy and feeling twenty!"

"It would be better than looking seventy and feeling it. A wee bit of spring, every year, right to the end, would be better than none. Wouldn't it?"

Gregory laughed. "Half a loaf better than none? Not for me. I'd rather have nothing than a tantalizing dab like that."

A cold finger touched Jean's heart. Were their snatched hours more than a "dab," a half loaf to him? They were glorious hours, but after all they were only crumbs. Jean shook off the feeling, and her hand slipped into Gregory's.

"Well, when you're seventy and I'm sixty-five, you'll be so jealous of my little green leaves, you won't know what to do."

"Will I?" Gregory held her close and rubbed his cheek softly against her hair.

"We're never going to grow old and gnarled, Jeany."

"I'll come and stick a little green leaf on your deadest bough."

"Better give it to me now." Gregory turned her lips to his and kissed her. "That was a nice little leaf," he whispered.

They rambled on again, turning up dead leaves for the small celandine that peeped out in surprise that spring was really come. As they turned to go back, the clang of a bell, mellowed by distance, reached them.

"I'll race you." They started, Jean a yard ahead. In a moment Gregory was in front of her. He shook his head reprovingly.

"Why, Jean Herrick, I'm astonished! What would Dr. Fenninger say?"

"Put me under observation in a psychopathic ward."

Gregory kissed her in the hollow of her throat.

"For that, he'd commit me to Matteawan."

The midday dinner was a heavy affair, but both Jean and Gregory won Mrs. Morrison's approval by their appetites.

"I do despise to cook for them peckish people, that looks as if they was choking down every mouthful. We're all hearty eaters here; even Uncle treats his vittles like he enjoyed 'em."

The old man at the end of the table looked up. "You're a powerful good cook, Mary. I ain't never sat down to a meal at your table that didn't hit the mark."

He was a very old man, small and withered, with a wrinkled brown face and kind blue eyes that peered like the wildflowers from the dead leaves. His meal was a bowl of oatmeal, covered with yellow cream, and a special kind of brown bread on a blue willow plate. His defense of his niece's cooking was his only part in the conversation, but he filled the room with the sense of his presence. Like spring warmth from the frozen earth, peace radiated from him. When he had finished his cereal and cream he left the room.

Mary Morrison looked after him.

"He's the best man that ever lived. I've ate and slept in the same house with him for almost fifty years and I ain't never seen him cross or heard him say an unkind thing."

"He ain't got nothin' to cross him, ma; not that I'm saying he ain't good."

"There's always things to cross folks, when they're the crossin' kind. I never seen any one yet that couldn't git crossed, give 'em half a chance. Sometimes you shame me, Mattie, with that shaller talk."

The girl began scraping the plates without answering. Mrs. Morrison went on to Jean.

"Mattie here's the kind that no chip gets by, but life'll learn her. I kin remember when Uncle had things to upset anybody when he was younger, but he never let 'em. He'd just go off and read the Book a spell and come back among folks smilin'. Why, he's read the Bible clear through most two hundred times, and there's a stack of _Christian Heralds_ out in the barn that reaches to the second loft. He don't read nothin' else and he reads 'em all the time."

Mattie carried off the scraped plates, and her mother gathered up the knives and forks. With the touch of the dirty dishes, she came back to her everyday manner.

"Now you folks kin do anything you like. There's some books on the shelf in the parlor, if you want to stay in, but most city folks want to be outdoors every minute. It's right pretty over in the woods, but the ground's damp yet, even in the sun. You'd better take a buggy robe; we got a lot of old ones in the barn fur that."

Jean was already at the door, when Mrs. Morrison added:

"I clear forgot to ask your names; seem like I always know people when they like the place."

Jean stepped into the outer hall.

"Murray," Gregory said after a brief pause.

"Murray. That's easy. We git some awful queer ones in summer, and I was never no good at names. Mattie has to keep 'em straight."

She passed through the swing door with the tray of forks and knives,

"It's Murray, Mattie; Mr. and Mrs. Murray," Jean heard her say.

Jean went quickly out into the sunshine. Gregory waited until his pipe was drawing well before he joined her.

For an hour they kept to the road that led up hill and then down into the dogwoods, just beginning to swell with spring. At last they spread the robe where the sun splattered through in golden pools and a little creek gurgled as if it had done something very sly and clever in stealing away from winter. Gregory lay with his head in Jean's lap and they talked, the silences growing longer and longer, until, looking down after an unusually long one, Jean saw that he was fast asleep.

It was the first time that Jean had ever seen Gregory asleep. She wanted, with an almost irresistible need, to draw him closer. The thought of Margaret Allen stabbed as it had never done before. Margaret had nothing that was hers, but she had so much less than was her own. And Gregory had so much less than was his. Between them Margaret stood, clutching with each hand a part of what was theirs, giving nothing in return.

Then the need to make Gregory happy, to yield for his happiness every scrap of herself, to give everything that was beautiful, to drown in this beauty the ugliness over which she had no control, and, if there was anything unbeautiful in their own relations, to make it perfect, swept Jean. There should be nothing but peace and content in her. Her hand moved lightly over Gregory's hair. It was thick and soft, with a deep wave that drew her hand.

Herrick's hair had been fine and rather silky. Again Jean wondered at the separateness of her two selves.

The sun was going when Gregory woke. He had slept deeply and woke with a dazed, child look in his eyes. Jean wished for a moment that he were really a child so that she could pick him up in her arms and carry him away, follow the sun, and never be separated any more.

"That was some sleep!"

"You _almost_ snored."

"Impossible. Even my prosaic soul couldn't snore in the spring woods--with a lady."

He reached both arms and drew Jean's head down.

"Such a nice lady! I love her."

"I don't believe it. Sleeping! While the lady has to stay awake and drive away--malaria. Look, the sun has almost gone, it's only just touching the very edge of the farthest strip."

Gregory heard none of this. He was watching the light in Jean's eyes. They were so gray and deep, so like quiet pools, touched with sun, in which one could go down and down and never reach the bottom.

"I don't believe it," Jean repeated; "I can't possibly, in view, or rather sound of, the evidence."

"Then you shouldn't be here with me. To go off with a gentleman who doesn't love you! You ought to be ashamed."

"I'm not." Jean laughed and laid her face against his. His lips touched her chin. "Maybe I love him enough for both," she whispered.

"No--you--couldn't--love--him as much--as that, because he loves you--just that--much himself." Little kisses on her neck and cheek broke the words. And Jean felt part of the soft, black earth, the tang of the rotting leaves and the spring budding.

They walked back through the woods, chilly now that the sun was gone. It was dusk when they came to the road again. The lamp was lit and there was a homey smell of fried potatoes and fresh cake. Mattie had put on a clean dress and done her hair low on her neck. The break of outsiders had penetrated her consciousness and she was looking forward to the evening, Uncle John had already had his supper, and was reading the Bible in his armchair by the stove. There was no sign of Mattie's husband. But near the end of supper a wagon stopped.

"Good land, that'll be Jim, and we've et most everything clean."

"I'll scramble him some eggs, if it is. Don't you go fussin', ma. He ought to let us know."

But the wagon went on and no one came.

Jean insisted on drying the dishes and after the requisite amount of objection Mrs. Morrison gave her a towel. She often talked over with Mattie this strange eagerness of city women to do dishes. Mattie always concluded that it was only because they never did them any other time. But Jean really wanted to do them. She liked the feel of the low-raftered room, all skewed out of plumb with age, dim in the corners, where the lamplight did not touch. Through the uncurtained windows the fields stretched away under the cold night sky. They framed the warm comfort within, gave it a permanence it did not really have. With the filling of the dishpan Mrs. Morrison began a story of a family feud that had gone on for years and was all about a chicken, in the beginning. From time to time she stopped while she held long arguments with Mattie on exact names and dates. Jean caught snatches of it between her own thoughts.

At last the dishes came to an end, and Mrs. Morrison hung up the checked apron.

"Now, if you folks likes music, we got some pretty records and Mat'll be glad to work 'em fur you."

"You're coming, too?"

"I don't mind if I do, until it's time to set the bread. But I'm an early bedder, like most country folks. Now, Mattie, she'd stay up gassin' all night."

The girl frowned. "Country folks got such silly notions they fix to live by. You got to go to bed at seven so you kin git up at five, whether there's anything to git up fur or not."

"Honest, Mat, sometimes you make me think of old cousin Beggs that hadn't all her senses. If country folks didn't git up till the time you want 'em to, who'd feed the chickens?"

"Seems like most people just keep 'em so they can git up to feed 'em. Not more'n a third of 'em lays, anyhow. What tunes do you like, Mrs. Murray?"

"Won't the graphaphone wake the baby?" Jean made a last attempt to save herself and Gregory.

"He always wakes up round this time anyhow and he likes it. When he's old enough I'm goin' to git him music lessons."

"You have quite a little time to look around for a teacher! How old is he?"

"Four months. But it'll take all that time to find one in this hole." The first spark of mischief lit the girl's eyes. Mrs. Morrison laughed.

"Go along with you and put on 'I'm Waiting at the Gate.'"

She rolled down her sleeves, lowered the lamp and followed them. She sat on the step that raised the "parlor" from the living-room and leaned back against the door jamb, as if the Axminster rug and plush rockers with which the delightful old room was desecrated, was unfamiliar ground. Mattie put on the record and it began its wailing call for some one to meet some one else at the old gate and not to forget.

The woman in the door closed her eyes. Mattie sat beside the machine, her cheek in her hand, staring at the carpet. They were lost in the sentiment of words and music.

"Pa always liked that terrible," the woman murmured, as the plaint ended in a mournful throb. "Mattie used to play it by the hour fur him."

For a moment something fleeted across her face and Jean saw it in the face of the younger woman, too, hopeless longing, desire without strength to demand.

Was that it, the bond that had held them, pa and ma, and Mattie? Was that why the girl had married and stayed? Would the baby, too, generation after generation, until the stock died out?

As if in answer, a small cry came from the room beyond.

"You kin put 'em on. It's easy. I got to go."

She went out. Jean followed. In the center of a fourpost bed, an atom kicked its flannel-swathed legs and puckered its face for a real howl, if its first warning did not bring immediate attention. But as Mattie lifted it the puckers smoothed, the incipient howl turned into a gurgle.

"Some day I'm just goin' to let you howl and howl and howl until you get so hungry, you old greedyguts! Don't you think I've got anything to do but feed you? Hey, answer me!"

She kissed and tickled him and he writhed with delight.

"There, satisfied now, ain't ye?" She held him close and the baby's doubled fists dug into her breast. The only sound was the faint hiss of the baby's sucking. Suddenly the girl looked up.

"Got any babies?"

Jean shook her head.

"Been married long?"

Again Jean moved her head slowly in negation. Her eyes never turned from the small black head against the girl's white breast.

"It's just as well not to begin right off. I was a fool, but nobody told me. I'd like to have waited a while till I'd been somewhere and seen somethin', besides trees and chickens."

The baby made his first stop, withdrew his milky lips and smiled at Jean. She knelt and laid her chin in the warm crease of his neck.

"You ought to have one if you like 'em that much." The girl nodded backwards to the room behind. "He kind of looks like he might like 'em, but you never kin tell. Most men don't care a rap _after_ they're here."

Jean got up. The baby went half-heartedly back to finish. The girl began rocking him and humming the refrain of the couple that never met by the gate after all. The baby's eyes closed. Jean tiptoed from the room.

Gregory lay on the couch reading. In the kitchen Mrs. Morrison was setting the bread. Jean drew a glass of cold water from the pitcher pump on the sink, drank it slowly and went upstairs without going again into the parlor.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Although for the last year Dr. Pedloe had objected to many things that Jean had done, he really was proud of the energy and magnetism that made her district better known than all the other districts combined. He had rather enjoyed reproving Jean, but had never considered removing her. Now, when he understood that she had not only thought of leaving, but was about to leave, he offered to raise her salary. Nothing else occurred to him.

"It's nice of you, and I appreciate your appreciation of what I have tried to do, but really, Dr. Pedloe, it is not a question of money, at all. I have just outgrown it. I am not making any criticism, but I feel stifled. I want a bigger coat. The old one is too tight."

To refer to the elaborate organization of which he had been the head for fifteen years, as an old coat possible to outgrow in six, annoyed and amused him.

"Really, Mrs. Herrick, I don't see where you are going to find a fitting garment. Expanding--er--coats are rather tricky garments."

The remark pleased him and he smiled.

"I have found one." Jean outlined her idea of a Woman's Congress, in time to grow to national proportions.

"It will take years, Mrs. Herrick."

"It may. And then, again, it may not."

"In the meantime it will be just as suffocating as anything else."

"That's where we don't agree. It's constructive. We shall be building towards something, slowly, no doubt, but surely. We shall not be--patching uselessly."

Dr. Pedloe's smile vanished. "I wish you every success, Mrs. Herrick. No doubt we can still be mutually helpful. If there is anything I can do, please believe that the patched coat is at your disposal. I understand that you wish to sever your connection by the end of the month?"

"I should like to very much. We are going to try and get into running order as a definite organization before the summer vacation takes every one out of town, and be ready to plunge in head first in the fall."

"I see."

"But of course, if you have no one in mind for my district, or would like me to stay on a few weeks to break in my successor----"

"I don't believe, Mrs. Herrick, I need to trespass on your new interest to that extent. I have in mind Miss Carlisle, of Upper West. She is much more fitted by experience and temperament for your district than for her own simple one. I have been wanting to put her in a larger field for some time."

"Then perhaps----"

Dr. Pedloe nodded. "I don't mean to suggest--but if you care to assume your new duties before the end of the month, I should not want you to feel that we stand in your way. You are taking Miss Grimes with you? Then Miss Carlisle might come down for a couple of days, shall we say the beginning of the week, to get a general idea of your office system. Would that be perfectly satisfactory?"

"Oh, quite. It's very kind of you to be so considerate."

Dr. Pedloe rose, his dignity saved. "Perhaps I shall call upon your organization some day for a return favor."

Jean wanted to wink at him, but she held out her hand.

"We shall be more than glad."

They shook hands, and Dr. Pedloe turned to his desk as if, in the half hour's talk, mammoth duties had accumulated. Jean let herself out.

Down on the sidewalk she stood still and laughed until she realized that people were staring.

"He did it, got it in by the tail, but got it. _Fired_, by Gosh!"

She could scarcely keep from telling Ben as he took her up in the elevator to her own office, or Miss Grimes, who was the only one in. But the former would have been so puzzled and the latter so indignant, that she refrained. Besides, only two people could get the full flavor, Mary and Gregory. She was going to have tea with him at half past four, and there was not a spare moment before that. Mary would have to wait.

In the privacy of her own office, Jean stood in the middle of the floor and stretched her arms to the spring air pouring in at the open window.

"It's going to be another glorious summer. A perfectly ripping summer."

Then she turned to work and refused to think of anything else until the clock struck four. On the first stroke she closed and locked the desk.

Usually Jean reached the tea-room first. She liked it so. She liked to be there a few moments ahead, to listen to the hum of women's voices, catch scraps of conversation from a world of other interests, and then, to look up and see Gregory cutting through it straight to her. It set her apart, made her a direct choice in a concrete way that never failed to make her heart give an extra throb.

But to-day Gregory was already there. He was sitting with his elbow on the table, his chin in his hand. With his free hand he traced idle designs on the tablecloth. At the sight of Jean he rose and drew out her chair, letting his hands rest for a moment on her shoulders, which was the only caress the publicity allowed. But as he took his own place again, Jean saw the worried look in his eyes. Gregory rarely came troubled to tea, and when he did, it took only a few moments to drive it away. Sometimes she liked him to be a little tired, for the joy of dissipating it.

"Well, how did things go to-day?" It was their stock beginning, but to-day there was a forced interest in the tone that struck through Jean's gayety.

"Great! I've been fired."

"That's a good cause for gratitude." For a moment they smiled in understanding of their own viewpoint. Then the tea and muffins came and Jean began to describe Dr. Pedloe's disapproval of her and all her works. Gregory listened and his eyes appreciated the points as Jean made them. But he offered no comments of his own and suddenly Jean wondered whether he was listening at all. Gregory never sat attending in that absent way. Fear crept on Jean, but she pushed it aside. If it were something serious he would tell her. But nothing very terrible could have happened in the twenty-four hours since she had seen him. His work was going well and he was pleased with the designs for the contest. Still he sat there, crumbling the muffin which he made no pretense of eating. Jean went on with the telling, but her own interest lessened.

Across the table, Gregory believed he was listening with the outward show of interest he always felt. But there was no real interest in him. For Puck was sick. She had been ailing for several days, and this morning the doctor had come, and after he had looked at Puck and talked a little with Margaret, he had telephoned for a nurse. Gregory's nerves were still taut with the anxiety of waiting for the doctor to come from Puck and tell him what was the matter. Like all persons unused to illness, he wanted the relief of a specific name. It localized the danger and brought the enemy into the open. He had steeled himself to anything, for Margaret's excited helplessness had ended in a burst of hysteria and he knew he would have to face it alone. Then the door of Puck's room had opened and the doctor beckoned to him. Puck's fever-bright eyes looked at him without recognition, and Gregory knew that if Puck died he would remember her always like that, so small in her white bed, with no smile of welcome for him, and unconscious of Lady Jane by her side.

"There is nothing to worry about, but I will be frank with you, there is a lot to look out for. Your child is one of the finest samples of modern, high-strung baby nerves that I have seen in a long while. That fever doesn't amount to anything and she will be up in a few days. It won't be necessary for me to come again, so I will tell you now, keep her back. She is too old for her years already. She has inherited a rather hysterical nervous tendency, but she's got a will of iron too. She rarely cries, does she? No, I thought not. If she threw things around and had what old-fashioned parents used to call 'a bad temper,' she would let off the steam that way. But she doesn't. We grown-ups forget all about our own childhood. There, I guess that's all. Keep her back. Don't reason with her too much. She thinks too hard, anyhow. A little of the plain old-style faith in what mother says or father says is wonderfully restful, like believing in God when we grow up. See that she has other children to play with, and keep an eye on her yourself. We men so often think that children are--any woman's special province."

Gregory had sat on beside Puck's bed until the nurse came. And for the first time since they had put Puck, a wailing mite, into his arms, he had felt helpless, inadequate, lost in the problem of the small person, so distinctly a bit of himself. And of Margaret....

He had come to meet Jean, full of the need to talk about this, to get a little of her sanity. But now, sitting opposite her, he could not do it. It belonged so completely to the world outside their world. How could he tell any one, Jean least of all, this fear that Puck might grow up like her mother? For the first time, tea with Jean was an effort, held something of the same quality that the forced cheerfulness of dinners with Margaret had. As he crumbled his muffin and listened, Gregory tried to be just. It was not fair to Jean to drag his worries into their hour, but the effort to keep them out tangled his already too complex world almost to breaking.

Jean watched the nervous working of his fingers and her fear grew. Something must be very wrong. Her longing to comfort him struggled with her pride against asking a confidence he might not wish to give. At last pride went to defeat.

Jean covered his hand with hers.

"What is it, Gregory? You look worried to death."

Her touch assured him sympathy. He would tell her. What? Ask her to understand all that Puck meant to him? Show her a part of his life that she did not touch at all?

"Out with it." The forced gayety of the tone rasped. He wanted to withdraw his hand. Where was the boasted intuition of feminine love? Why didn't Jean know what he wanted to tell her? The firm fingers pressed his, as if to give him courage. He looked up. Jean was waiting with a calm strength in her eyes. What on earth did she think was the matter? The situation became suddenly overtuned and ridiculous. Gregory pushed back his chair and rose.

"Nothing, really. Have I been such an awful bore? I'm sorry, but I'm terribly tired. I was up all night."

"Why?"

Jean's eyes, on a level with his own, demanded the truth. Gregory felt trapped and angry.

"Oh, that damned contest. I've been working for the last two weeks on the wrong tack." He held her coat and Jean turned to slip her arms into the sleeves.

What a silly she had been! As if any man ever lost a night's sleep and was the same the next day. After all, she was rather like Martha sometimes. Jean smiled to herself.

As he turned up the collar of her coat, Gregory's fingers brushed her cheek. She turned her head and kissed them swiftly.

"Well, rub it out and do it over again, because you know you're _going to win_."

* * * * *

Gregory met the nurse in the hall. She carried Lady Jane in her arms and smiled reassuringly.

"She is ever so much better. She had a fine sleep and woke with no fever at all. She asked for you."

Puck was propped up with pillows, her eyes fastened on the door waiting for Lady Jane. At the sight of Gregory she wriggled with delight.

"Well, Pucklets, all better?"

He sat down on the side of the bed and put an arm about her. Lady Jane was forgotten. Puck reached up and stroked his cheek. It was an old gesture of Margaret's, and brought back sharply the days of his brief engagement when, sitting on the arm of Margaret's chair before the library fire, with the slender grace of her pressed near, he had wanted sometimes to crush her to him. But always she had seemed to sense the ferocity of his mood and to stave it off by this gentle stroking of his cheek, as she might have quieted her pet Angora. Gregory drew a little beyond the reach of Puck's touch, and she nestled to him.

"Quite all well, Puckie, sure?"

Puck nodded. "I got all better when I went to sleep. I can get up to-morrow, can't I, Miss Burns?"

"I don't know about that, but very soon, if you're a good girl and don't talk to father too much."

"I won't." Puck's lips snapped as if she were never going to say another word and the nurse went out laughing.

Gregory's hold tightened. He had always thought of Puck as another self, very small and feminine, but still a great part of himself. Now he knew that she was Margaret, too. And something else, beyond them both. She was herself. She was a part of his experience, his reaction, his fate. And yet her own experience, her own reaction, her fate could never be his. Sitting with his arms tight about Puck, who soon fell asleep, Gregory felt the terrible isolation of every living soul. No one could ever reach another. He and Margaret were worlds apart. They had never really touched at all. They had created Puck and Puck was distinctly herself and apart. She would grow up and marry and have children of her own....

Gregory put Puck back on the pillow and tiptoed from the room. Annie was just bringing in the soup. In a few moments he and Margaret were eating, and Margaret was retailing the misfortunes of the Burns family, which had forced pretty Gertrude Burns to take up nursing.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

At the end of the week Miss Burns left and in a few days Puck was running about the house as usual. The only reminder that something had changed somewhere in his world, were the advertisements of summer resorts that littered Margaret's desk. The doctor had ordered "bracing air, salt water and everything as unlike the city as possible." So Gregory rented their own bungalow on Long Island to Benson for the summer and tried to be patient with Margaret in her search. She finally decided on a small boarding house in Maine, as far from civilization as she could get, where there were other children for Puck to play with. Margaret did not expect to enjoy the summer and measured her devotion to Puck by the degree of her own discomfort.

Puck was not told until it was necessary to pack Lady Jane's things. Then she was hysterical with excitement at the idea of going "a long, long way on a boat." She invested Maine with all the magic details of Gregory's bed-time stories. But when she found that he was not coming with them, her joy died as suddenly as if it had been turned off with a spigot.

"I don't want to go 'a long, long way on a boat' without my daddy." She squared her shoulders and looked quietly at Margaret.

"But it's too far, dear. Daddy has to stay and work for us and we mustn't tease him."

"I don't want my daddy to stay and work for us."

"But, Puck, it's a lovely place, with the great big green sea rolling in almost to the house and little boats to go out in when it's calm."

"I don't want the sea to roll into the house, and who'll take me out in the little boats?"

"The man will. He takes all the children every day."

"I don't think I want to go."

Margaret did not argue the matter further and went on packing the trunks. Puck, however, stopped all preparations and sat with her brows drawn in a frown exactly like Gregory's, hugging Lady Jane.

She did not run to meet Gregory that night and through dinner scarcely spoke. Gregory watched her anxiously. At half past eight, without being told, she went to get ready for bed.

"What's the matter with Puck?"

"I had to tell her this afternoon that you can't come with us."

Gregory put down the evening paper. "I suppose you exaggerated it's being a long way, and she thinks she's going to the ends of the earth?"

"You needn't be rude. Please remember that it will be no particular pleasure taking a nervous child on a sea trip alone."

"Damn!"

Margaret bit her lip. "If you could control your temper until we're out of the way, it would help. I have had about all I can stand with her and finding the place and settling the details."

Gregory was ashamed of his outburst. After all, Margaret could not help being herself and he was sorry for her in an impersonal way.

"But I wish you wouldn't talk so much about her nerves. A baby scarcely six. You'll make her so."

"I don't think you can tell me anything about Puck that I don't know. Remember, I am with her all day, not just at night in time to tell her stories. If any one excites and makes her nervous, it's you. Remember, you never hear the versions of those stories she gives Lady Jane."

Margaret had used this shaft so often that the barb had dulled. "Well, she's not going to have any of them for some time."

Puck's bare feet pattered along the hall and she entered ready for her bed in her little white pajamas, that buttoned up the back out of her reach. Gregory buttoned them and swung her into his lap.

"Where's Lady Jane? Is she too tired for a story to-night?"

"Lady Jane don't feel like stories to-night."

"Dear me! She's not sick, is she?"

"No, she's not sick, really. But she isn't very happy."

Across Puck's head, Margaret made warning signs to Gregory to drop the subject, but his hold only tightened and he rubbed his chin on Puck's soft hair.

"That's too bad, Puckie. What's she unhappy about?"

Puck herself had been warned not to mention Maine but nothing had been said about Lady Jane. And Lady Jane was desperately unhappy, almost as miserable as Puck herself.

"I--don't--think--she wants to go to--Maine."

"Oh, she'll like it after she gets there. Especially if you take Priscilla and Dorothy along too."

"They don't want to go either."

"Well, I'll tell you what we'll do. You go along with mother on Monday, and then, if you want Lady Jane or Priscilla, I'll bring them when I come."

Puck jerked upright in his arms. They looked at each other. Slowly Puck smiled. Gregory smiled back. With his hands on the slight shoulders, he looked into her eyes.

"I can't come up with you and mother, Pucklets, but I'll come later, before the summer is over and stay a whole month."

There was a pause during which Margaret wondered why men were so annoying. Without a doubt, Gregory had intended to come up, but it was just like him to give no one the satisfaction of knowing it.

"I think, daddy, I'll take Lady Jane and Priscilla. You couldn't take care of them very well, could you?"

"I think that would be better. I don't quite understand about their food," he added, remembering suddenly that Lady Jane and Priscilla were in the stage of being babies for the last two weeks.

Puck cuddled into his arms with a deep sigh of relief. Her tottering world was stable again.

"Tell me about Pergameleon," she demanded, and Gregory obeyed with the garbled version that passed for the story between them.

A week later he saw them off on the boat and came back to Gramercy Park to have dinner with Jean.

It was going to be a happy summer.

After much deliberation Dr. Mary had taken a second year's leave from the Neighborhood House, and gone to London for the summer to study conditions in the East End. The house was theirs.

Gregory felt young and carefree as he touched the bell button, with the one long and two short, that was his ring.

Enveloped in a kitchen apron, her hands covered with flour, Jean opened the door.

"Why, how do you do?"

"How do you do? I thought I should find Dr. MacLean. She's not in?"

"No, I'm sorry, but she's just run over to London for a minute. Will you leave a message?"

"If I may. Will you tell her, please, that you're the most glorious thing in the world and I love you?"

The last words were buried in the warm smoothness of Jean's neck. She turned her head and their lips met.

"Now, if you'll go and take off your coat and put on an apron you can help me make some Martha Norris biscuits."

Gregory did as he was told, and they got dinner together. Afterwards they went into the living-room where they had sat so often the summer before, good friends, disturbed in no way by the presence of the little doctor, and Jean wondered what power had arranged this summer, so far beyond her dreams. Mary in London, Margaret and Puck in Maine, beyond the reach of week-ends even. There was only Martha.

Deep in the leather chair, with Gregory's arms about her, his fingers moving gently over her cheek and throat, Jean wished that Martha would go away too. She wanted them all out of her life, every one, for the next three months. Beyond that she did not think.

* * * * *

It was perfect. So perfect that Jean marveled and was humble. The days themselves, the actual passing of time took on personality. As the givers of happiness, the hours became conscious. They were servants bringing gifts.

Jean's duties were light and she and Gregory spent a part of each day together. The quiet tea-room was now a thing of the past, so far in the past that Jean smiled whenever she remembered how homelike it had once seemed. They had long, lazy afternoons on the sands of nearby beaches, making comments on the human shadows that moved beyond their own world of reality. They chattered like children or were silent as the mood dictated. They had dozens of gay meals, like the first they had prepared on the night that Margaret and Puck had left. And quiet hours in the warm stillness of the summer nights, with the voice of the city coming in echoes over the dusty trees of the Park. These were the best of all. In those moments it seemed to Jean that their souls mingled, and that the law of each human soul's separateness was set aside for their benefit.

Hampered only by such demands as Jean felt to be her duty to Martha, the weeks slipped by. Ringed about by their freedom, Jean felt that their love was striking into a deeper and deeper reality. A quality of peace and security enveloped it that she did not know had been lacking before. Its roots went down below her personality, the accident of her "Jeanness," down into the stuff of life itself. Often, when she and Gregory sat silent, Jean felt that this love was not theirs at all; they were the possessed, not the possessors.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

The third week in August, Dr. Mary returned. She came without warning, so that, late in the afternoon, when Jean came rushing in to start dinner, she stopped, staring at the figure upon the couch with surprise so intense that it deprived her of motion.

"Sunstroke, Jean?" Mary threw back the two braids of white hair, drew the hideous blue dressing gown closer and put on her slippers.

"Mary!"

"The same. Come in and sit down, won't you?"

Jean smiled and managed to get her arms about Mary and hug her.

"Well, that's more like it." Mary paddled back to her couch and Jean dropped beside her. "My, but it's good to be home again."

"We've missed you," Jean ventured and when she heard the ease of her own tone, a little courage came back. "Now, begin at the beginning and tell me the whole thing."

To her relief, Mary did. Jean listened with a fixed smile of understanding, made the expected comments, laughed in the right places, and waited for the one long and two short rings that meant Gregory. While Mary disposed in scathing terms of all English Social Betterment work, Jean wondered whether she had seen the fruit and vegetables that must be waiting on the dumb-waiter and how to explain them. As far as Mary knew, Gregory had dropped from their lives. And any moment, it would come, the one long and two short, and she would have to say something.

"I tell you, Jean, I thought there was no brand of human left alive, who could make me despair of the race. But a middle class Englishman does. He's insulated, absolutely insulated in his own righteousness. He would rather----"

There it was, the one long and two short.

"Good Heavens! Jean, are you giving a party? I saw a whole box of things on the waiter."

"No. It's only Gregory. I stumbled into him accidentally one day and, now the family's in Maine, he comes to dinner sometimes."

"Well, I'll be darned. What was the matter with him? Did you ever find out?"

"Never asked him," Jean remarked from the door. "I forgot all about it, myself. I don't believe he ever thought it needed any."

"A regular homefest! Run along and open the door. I won't bother to change my things."

Jean opened the door, but before Gregory could take her in his arms, she stepped back with a warning look.

"You're much too early! I haven't even begun to get dinner." She motioned to the living-room. "Mary," her lips formed.

"Hell!" Gregory almost said it aloud.

"Well, go into the other room and wait as patiently as you can," she whispered.

Jean went into the kitchen. The table was strewn with the things for dinner just as Mary had dumped them out. Jean's eyes filled with tears. "I won't let it end, I won't, I won't." In the other room she heard Gregory's well-feigned surprise and Mary's laugh.

Jean put on her apron and began to get dinner. Mary's anecdotes flowed on like a river, breaking every now and then on the rock of Gregory's laughter. After all, perhaps it did not make so much difference to him. Last evening they had sat for almost an hour, silent, with their hands linked across the intervening space between the chairs and Jean had been wonderfully happy. Had he been happy, too? How did she know that he had not been a little bored? Jean's eyes blurred and the tomato she was peeling slipped into the sink with a plop.

"You fool. What do you expect? She _is_ interesting and he can't sit there like a statue." Jean scooped up the tomato and threw it viciously into the garbage pail.

"Jean! Oh, Jean, come here a minute," Gregory called. "Do it again for Jean. It's a scream."

Mary twitched the dressing gown so that it trailed like a royal robe and twisted the white hair into a knob not unlike a coronet.

"Mamie Horton, of Chicago, now Duchess Mary of Belfort, doing the East End, visiting a family of eight living on three dollars a week." The doctor's face froze into a mask of horror and she pointed dramatically to what was supposed to be the laborer's dinner table. "Most unhygienic. I will send you a case of shredded wheat to-morrow!"

"Never, Mary. That's too much. You've spoiled it."

"Well, it wasn't shredded wheat, but it was just as bad. Jean, I longed for you. If there had been anything in thought transference you would have hopped on the next boat. You think your committee is bad! You ought to see real caste at the business. And worse than that are the Mamie Hortons. Why, when I told a group of the reals and the pseudos, at a luncheon, about the tenements, and how you had raised the money and had the whole thing going in a few months, they stared at me, and Horton actually said: 'Reahlly,' in that exasperating English voice that means: 'You're a liar.' It takes a year to call a meeting over there."

"I suppose she wouldn't believe the evidences of her senses if she saw them. They're finished except a few last touches."

"Not really, Jean!"

"Infected, Mary! 'Not reahlly!'"

"Score! But, Jean, you don't mean they're all ready for tenants? I hope they're not in yet."

"They will be in another week."

Dr. Mary bounced out of her chair. "Let's go out and see them."

"What? Now?"

"Yes, now. It won't take long. Gregory can call a taxi while I get on my clothes. You don't know how I've come to love those things, Jean. Whenever that cumbersome machine of 'British thoroughness' lumbered over me I used to say,

"There's a land that is fairer than day, Where things get done right away."

"What's the objection to going now? Won't the food keep?"

"If you've made up your mind, it doesn't matter whether the food keeps or not. I don't suppose there is any reason not to go, except that you ought to be tired."

"I almost died resting for the last five days. I could _walk_ there."

Jean went back to take off her apron and Gregory followed.

"It'll be better than staying here," he whispered, with his arms about her. "And it was going to be such a nice evening."

Jean patted his cheek. "Never mind. We'll have a lot more. Now run along and call a taxi."

Dr. Mary was indefatigable. She insisted on inspecting every floor and getting the view from every side. And, in the end, she pronounced it "a darn good job." But Jean did not feel it was "a job" at all. It was a bit of her life and Gregory's. It was built of the hours they had spent together. It was not an insensate thing. It was alive. She and Gregory had created it. Her hand moved on the clean, white wall.

"You nice living thing. Make everybody well and don't let anybody die."

Jean smiled. It was somewhat like a prayer.

When there was nothing left but the solarium on the roof, they sat down to rest on one of its green benches. In the afterglow, the East River ran a stream of gold. The span of the bridges hung airy webs in the heat-hazed air. Far below little tugs chugged up and down, whistling. The gray of their smoke filtered through the gold, softening it to filmy gauze. But across the river, on the workhouse island, a bell clanged. From the last sunny spots, old men and women came reluctantly, and the hideous red buildings swallowed them, one by one. Soon they would all be asleep, the old men in their wards and the old women in theirs. Perhaps in the night some would die quietly in their sleep. In the morning the superintendent would look up the names on the books, notify any relatives he could find, and send blanks to charity organizations that there was room for a few more of the homeless old.

Not one of them had ever expected it to end like that. The race had speeded faster and faster, beyond their strength. They had stumbled, gone down, and been trampled under. Strong in the faith of their own ability, she and Mary and Gregory, all the well-groomed men and beautiful gowned women about them, went securely on. But what guarantee had they that this strength would last forever? Each human being was such a tiny obstruction, a mere grain of sand against the force of a terrific current. Even in the small trickle of the stream which one called one's own personal affairs, it was impossible to guide the force. Here was the course of her summer twisted suddenly by an event over which she had no control.

"I won't let it. I _will_ have the next four weeks."

"A penny, Jean. You look as if you were settling the affairs of nations."

"I was doing what mummy calls 'guiding Providence.'"

"Too strenuous for summer, Jean. Leave it 'til winter."

"No. 'Now's the appointed time.' 'To-night the Lord may come.' Hence, you and Gregory go home alone, Mary. I go to Jersey. I've had a revelation."

Nor would Jean let Gregory go even to the ferry with her, but insisted that he go back and hear more of the East End.

"But, dear, I want to see you terribly to-night. I want----"

He had dropped behind as they were following Mary out so that for a moment he and Jean were alone. Jean smiled and shook her head.

"Can't be helped. I've got to go really. Besides it's--it's your revelation too."

"I don't want any revelation. I want you," he added hotly.

"So do I, that's why I'm going." The words came in a low rush, and then Mary was looking back to them.

But it was only when Jean actually stood with her finger on the button of Pat's bell, that she realized how astonished Pat would be, and how she had neglected Pat and the babies that summer. And once Pat had known almost every thought that crossed her mind.

"I'm besotted, absolutely dippy, and I'd use God Almighty if I needed Him."

The door opened and Pat herself stood gazing as if she doubted the evidence of her senses.

"_Jean!_"

Two small naked figures, lurking in the shadow of the upper landing, came tumbling down at their mother's cry and Jean was lost in a tangle of arms and legs.

"Jean! It's Auntie Jean!"

"Jeanie, Frank!" Pat clutched at the waving legs, while Jean held them closer and laughed across at Pat.

"At least they're glad to see me, Pat, and you've only shrieked 'Jean!'"

"I am so glad to see you, Mrs. Herrick. Won't you come in? I was just putting the children to bed."

"So I see. And we're going right on with the process." Jean hoisted her namesake to her shoulder and started for the stairs, dragging the rotund Frank by the hand.

When they were safely tucked in and Jean had recounted as much of the old witch who was turned into a gingerbread house as she could remember, and promised to come soon, "very, very soon, lots soon," Pat turned off the light and she and Jean went down to the cool dark piazza. And then, for the first time, in her gratitude for the darkness, Jean realized how deeply she hated to lie to Pat. She would have given much to be able to throw both arms about Pat and say:

"Patsy, I want you to help me. I want you to take mummy out of the way. I want this last month, free and beautiful for the most glorious thing in my life. There is only one little month left, Pat, four short weeks, and I want them so."

"I thought you were never going to come any more, Jean, and I was beginning to get 'hurt,' like mummy."

"It wasn't because I didn't want to come." Jean looked out into the moonlit garden. "But I've been terribly busy, and mummy hasn't been well. The words left Jean with the feeling that something very deep inside her had been ripped out.

"Mummy not well? Why, Jean, what's the matter?"

"I don't know, Pat. You know she never complains and would sit up in her coffin to explain that she was perfectly well. But she isn't. I want her to go away for a rest, but you know how likely she is to do that. I can't go along, too."

"The summer has been a fright. Even Frankie got rather peaked last month, and it takes a great deal to wear an ounce off him."

There was a short pause, and then Jean added, with an effort at a laugh:

"Perhaps she's just homesick for a little trouble or illness. Now if Elsie lived in some nice quiet suburb and was going to have one of her horrible babies, or Tom would cut off a leg, she'd pack up and be right there on the dot."

"And you're so disgustingly efficient and healthy! Poor mummy, you were never meant for her daughter. I say, do you suppose she would come over here if I could develop something that doesn't have to show? I couldn't turn pale or faint, not to save me, never did in my life, but I might manage a general breakdown. Worry over the children and Big Frank's raise in salary?"

Jean looked away. "Are you sure it would be all right? She loves the babies and she would come in a minute, if she thought you needed her."

"Well, I do. I'll 'phone her to-morrow."

"She'll come--and thanks, Patsy."

Blurred by the porch screening, a small patient face looked quietly at Jean. Jean got up quickly.

"Let's go inside, Pat. I believe it's cooler."

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

Gregory Allen had never intended to let three months pass without telling Jean of his promise to go to Maine. But at first his going had seemed a distant point, and then, as it crept nearer and nearer, the right moment for the telling never came. Now, how could he say: "I am going to Maine to-morrow for a month. I promised Puck when she was ill." He had said nothing of the illness at the time. How drag out his own state of mind on the afternoon he had had tea with Jean and lied to her?

Gregory wished that Jean would say something, almost anything, to break the silence. Not a soul seemed to be alive in the great building about them. On the river occasional excursion steamers turned their dazzling flashlights, lighting the room and Palisades to uncanny, whitish glow. They were huge phantoms moving in the stillness. All the worlds of the universe hung motionless in perfect adjustment. Jean sat utterly at rest, so near him that by the smallest motion he could touch her. But Gregory did not move.

"Did you ever feel anything so restful? It's positive, the silence, not negative. _Listen_ to it. I could almost 'go into the silence' myself, if I didn't have to shut my eyes and concentrate. If I could keep them open and--and dissolve instead. I believe it would be rather restful."

"Do you?"

If he hacked at this peace with words he would force an opening through which an opportunity might come, and Jean would know that he did not want to go, except for his promise to Puck. But Jean drifted back into the stillness again and it seemed to Gregory that she actually dissolved into the unfathomable silence.

With a nervous gesture he rose at last.

"It's almost two o'clock."

Jean laughed. "Frightful. What will the hallboy think?"

But Gregory did not answer the laugh. He had yet to tell Jean, and now there was no time to lead up to it. He had to say baldly: "I am going away to-morrow."

Jean was smiling at him.

"There's no need to look so desperately serious about it, Mr. Allen, I just mention it casually."

"It _is_ late, and I have to be up early." Gregory said and went into the hall for his hat. "I'm going up to Maine to-morrow for a month and I have several things to do before I go."

It seemed hours before he could pull against the force holding him where he was and turn to Jean. She had followed him and was standing near, the teasing smile still in her eyes. For a moment they looked at each other and then Jean said:

"It will be glorious up there now, but--don't forget--the contest closes the first of October."

In his relief Gregory took Jean's hands and bent cavalierly over them.

"Your command, Fair Lady, is obeyed. I promise not to forget." He did not trust himself to kiss her again and went quickly.

Was there another woman in the world like Jean? The sanity of her love made everything possible. In its light even the month ahead did not loom so gloomily. There would be happy hours playing with Puck and good, stiff work to finish the plans in time.

Jean stood for a long time in the hall and then went slowly back and sat down by the window. Something had struck her violently and stunned her power to feel. She saw it as distinctly outside herself, and at the same time it was in some way connected with her. It was like a part of her which Gregory's words had suddenly cut away.

There they lay separated from her, the deep peace and security of the summer, the assurance of her own sensations, that wonderful clarity in which she had seen their love and perfect understanding. And there had been no understanding at all. The world that they both ignored, because it was not a real world, was a real world to him. It was not only real to him, but he must believe that it was so to her. Otherwise he would have told her before.

Jean looked stupidly about the room. Last night she had come back from Pat's and found Martha reading by the table. This morning, at breakfast, Pat had telephoned, and she had helped pack Martha's few things and taken her to the Tube. After that she had rung up Gregory and they had stolen the afternoon together. It was only a few hours ago that they had come in, the first time Gregory had ever been here.

It was all exactly like a game she had played when she was a child. It had been a game of much elaborate preparation. It had required the most violent upheavals of the doll's house, terrific cleaning and washing of everything. Martha always made special cookies and Jean was given ten cents for lemons and candy. Early in the morning of the day itself, Jean began telephoning along the clothes-line to imaginary guests. But no guests ever came to the party, because no children lived near, and in the end Jean had always had her party alone.

At dawn, weary with the endless round, Jean went to bed.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

Mary had decided to stay on and work for an M. A. at Columbia. She was busy choosing courses of study and quarreling with professors about prerequisites, so Jean, by pleading extra work herself, managed to keep away from Gramercy Park for the first days of Gregory's going.

In the morning she went to the office and at night she came back. She tried to read and turned page after page with a detached sense of accomplishment in which all understanding of the words was lost. Finally, one night, when she had read from eight till eleven, and found that it was not the same book she had been reading so dutifully for days, Jean threw it across the room, and, standing defiantly in the center of the floor, faced the thoughts that she had refused entrance since the morning she had crept to bed in the gray dawn.

"Well? What are you going to do about it? What can you do about it? Why is this any different from his going away for a week-end?"

With her hands in the side pockets of her skirt, Jean paced up and down. It was the way she straightened tangles in her work, and the familiar rhythm seemed to throw this problem to an impersonal distance, beyond the haze of her own emotions.

"Well? What are you going to do? Are you going around always clouded up in this tragedy? He isn't any more married now than he was in the beginning, and you knew it from the very first. You knew he had duties and obligations. You rather prided yourself on your logical attitude toward them. You weren't being logical. You couldn't deny them because they were right there in front of you. But the first minute you got a chance to close your eyes, you shut them so tight that--that it's taken an operation to open them."

Jean stopped before the window and leaned with both hands on the sill, frowning into the night.

"He would have gone on living his life and so would you, and you would have done your work, too, if you had never met at all. Yes, you would, and so would he." The corners of Jean's lips twitched, for always before, when she had thought of Gregory's home, she had thought of it as something he had acquired by accident, not as something that he had made, an expression of himself. "We _do_ mean something to each other, something terribly real, but it won't be real, if you begin to mess it up with jealousy. That's what it is--jealousy. You know that nothing in the world could have dragged _you_ out of town this summer and you're mad and hurt and jealous clear through. There! Put that in your pipe and smoke it whether you like the flavor or not."

Jean began walking again. She went very carefully through the summer, picking up the happy hours from the scattered heap into which Gregory's going had shattered them, and built them anew.

"The trouble was that you never recognized the conditions; all you did was to ignore them, until you came to believe they weren't there." Again and again Jean dragged this fact forward from the background into which it was always slipping. "You never mentioned his wife or Puck and you slopped it all over with 'delicacy and broad-mindedness.' You were afraid, that's what you were, whether you knew it or not."

Jean came to a halt again in the middle of the room.

"Now, Jean Norris, from now on you're going to face things as they are. You are _not_ going to ignore the existence of his wife, or of Puck. You're either going to--or quit."

But the idea of quitting was so ridiculous that Jean laughed out loud.

At the end of the week she wrote a long, cheerful letter to Gregory and went to have dinner with Mary.

Gregory answered by return mail. He said he was working on the plans, which were getting along, but he was so sick of them he didn't know whether they were good or bad. He never mentioned the country nor how he passed his time when he was not working. Only at the very end there was a line clear across the paper of extremely thin and wobbly columns, under which he had printed: "These are the other boarders. Christian Scientists."

Jean kissed the letter and tore it up. "I don't want to take to 'carrying it in my bosom.'"

A week later Jean came home early one night, after a cheerful evening with Mary, to find Martha quietly mending under the lamp.

"Why, mummy Norris!" Jean took Martha's sewing and laid it on the table. Squatting on her heels, she grinned with mock reproof. "Why, Mrs. Norris, may I ask? Did I tell you you could come home?"

Martha's eyes twinkled. "You may be a very important person in the outside world, Jeany, but you're my baby yet, and I think I'll come and go a few years longer without asking permission. Besides, Pat is all right and has a thousand times more sense than you have and is far better able to look out for herself." Martha pointed to the mending on the table.

"It's not inability, mummy, it's a question of belief. It's an economic principle. Why should I mend stockings when I ought to be resting my mammoth brain for further world efforts? And if I could make you understand, think of the extra pennies some poor woman might earn."

"Economics! Fiddlesticks!"

"All right! I'll bring you home a brochure to-morrow on Conserving Mental Waste. Maybe you'll believe it when you see it in print."

"You'll never make me believe it's good economics or anything else, to wear stockings like those." Martha held up a pair run from heel to knee, with a great gap at the toes.

"And you'll never make me believe it isn't a wicked waste of time to mend them like that." Jean seized a pair from the neat pile. "You can't tell which was the original thread and which was the mend."

"I suppose it would be all right if I mended them so they would hurt your feet. After all, Jean, logic is not your strong point, whatever you or your brochures may say."

Jean hugged her. "I'm rather coming to that belief myself, mummy. What time did you get back?"

"About five. I didn't suppose you came home to dinner, but----"

"Mummy, is there some sherbet in the ice-box?"

"I----"

"_Is there some mousse in the ice-box?_"

"There is."

"And is it pineapple? Answer me!"

"I rather think I did make pineapple."

"What's the matter with my logic, now?"

Martha laughed and picked up the mending. "It's not the same thing at all, but you'll only talk me down anyhow. So go and get the sherbet. I believe I'll have some, too."

While they ate it Martha talked of Pat and the children and for some reason Jean felt that life was safe and sure again. There could be nothing very terrible in a world where little children said the delightful things that Pat's babies did, where women like Mary kept their belief and enthusiasm undimmed, and the Marthas thoughtfully made pineapple mousse as a surprise.

Four weeks to the day, Gregory wired that he would be back and to keep Sunday for a walk. The world was a nice place, a very nice place, indeed.

Sunday was a day of blue haze and golden sun.

"It was made expressly for us; I ordered it," Gregory declared, as he and Jean swung along, under arching maples that were just beginning to turn crimson, with here and there a brilliant scarlet leaf among the green. The fences were buried under honeysuckle and wild blackberries. The summer was passing in one last passionate abandonment of giving. The bare brown earth, freed from the burden of crops, like a woman released from family cares, went back to its youth. The air was pungent with the sting of sun-warmed loam. The old world frolicked in a second love.

Gregory felt that he was physically leaving the dismal month through which he had just passed, behind him. He strode along and knew in every nerve that Jean was there beside him, just as strong and unwearying as he, stepping step for step with him. He had thought of her so, very often in the last four weeks, even when he was wading out into the breakers with Puck perched on his shoulders, beating his chest with her small, hard heels and shrieking with delight.

Gregory seized Jean's hand and they shot down the green-roofed lane. Terrified birds winged with shrill calls into the blue and an old cow, chewing her cud in a quiet corner, lumbered away to safety. At the end of the lane, Gregory stopped unexpectedly and Jean spun round him like a top at the end of a string.

"Gregory! Whatever's struck you?" In the circle of his arms Jean got back her breath.

"The earth and you, a most intoxicating combination."

Between each word Gregory kissed her. Jean rested against his clasped hands. "Well, don't make me drunk too. One's enough."

"Do I make you drunk, Jeany?" Gregory whispered and leaned to the white hollow of her throat. But Jean suddenly dodged under his arms and stood off, laughing at him.

"All right. But I'll make you answer me later."

The color ran under Jean's skin and then Gregory laughed.

"But I am so awfully glad to see you, Jean. I've got to take it out in something."

"So am I." They were now in step again. "I missed you terribly." Jean paused and added, looking off over a brown field to the right. "You're lots better at drawing than at writing, Gregory. You didn't tell me a thing. How's Puck and all the wobbly row of Christian Scientists?"

"You ought to have seen her. She did her best, but Lady Jane hasn't the right kind of eyes and they wouldn't close." He bubbled over in amusement. "You can't speak to Divine Mind with your eyes open, it seems, and so Puck has to stay out."

Jean visioned Margaret going "into the silence," for evidently she belonged, and wondered which of the wobbly columns she was.

"Is everybody in it?"

"Everybody. It was a regular epidemic. If I had stayed up there another week, First Principle would have got me sure."

Suddenly Gregory realized that they were talking about Puck and Margaret and his life in that other world. He wondered how it had begun, but before he could think back, Jean was asking:

"I suppose that means an end of economics and uplift generally? I imagine Divine Mind isn't a thing one shares with garbage or child labor."

"Hardly. 'Full realization' is a terribly absorbing state."

It was strange to be talking like this to Jean. But it was a relief. He had always felt that Jean understood, but it was nice not to have to think ahead always, to loosen the curb once in a while.

"Better than Montessori or garbage anyhow."

"Heaps."

They spoke no more of Puck or Margaret but both felt that something, somewhere, had changed. What had seemed perfect before was a little more perfect now.

Gregory told her of the plans, the final week of work, and how he had mailed them at the last possible moment.

"And if I win, I'm going to see that along with the valuables buried under the corner stone, goes a picture of the one who made it all possible."

"Who might that be?"

Gregory did not answer.

"Me?"

He nodded. His hand claimed hers.

"I shall have to have one taken then, and I've never had one since I was old enough to rebel."

"Oh, no, you won't. I'm going to draw it myself."

"What will I look like? Please don't make me in two sections, like Mary."

"You're like this." Gregory sketched a tower. It was the square Roman tower, but the top was blurred. Jean pointed to the blur.

"What is _that_?"

"_That_ is a ray of sunshine."

"Silly," Jean whispered, and kissed him.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

The dead year was buried in a flare of gold and scarlet. For a little while the gray sky hung low over the earth, and chill winds blew through the empty world. Then the gorgeous dead season was forgotten and winter settled in earnest.

Jean laid away the memory of summer. Again she met Gregory in the tea-room and they were happy in the isolation of the alcove. On Saturdays, when it snowed too heavily for tramping, they went to matinées and sat through many driveling plays. They rarely spoke of Margaret, but often of Puck, and now that this ghost was no longer hidden Jean was glad of the hot, lonely nights after Gregory's going. There was nothing that could hurt because there was nothing unknown.

The old feeling of power ran high in her. She was rapidly centering public interest in her work. Compared to the mighty tree which she and Mary had pictured in moments of enthusiasm, the Congress was a tiny root, but it was striking deep and in good soil. Jean was happy. She came sometimes to meet Gregory so radiant that even he, who had seen Jean in many radiant moods, was startled.

"You look like a Gloucester fishing boat under full sail," he said once, when Jean came hurrying up late for a matinée.

"Well, I can't say that you flatter."

"But a Gloucester boat is the finest thing that floats. It has wonderful lines, and when it comes down the bay with all sails set----"

"But tearing along Broadway to get to a theater! Besides it sounds horribly overpowering. Doesn't the thing ever sink?"

"Never."

Between the acts Gregory drew a Gloucester boat and Jean insisted that she was going to pin it up in her room where she could see it on waking and get the conceit knocked out of her for the day.

But in the mornings when she woke, warm under the blankets, with the sharp air pricking her face, she liked to lie looking at it until she could hear the whistling of the wind through the rigging and feel the heave of the sea under the keel. Standing in the prow, she and Gregory went out to sea, leaving behind the echoes of a waking world, the banging of doors, the rattle of the elevator, the running of bath water from the apartment across the light-well, the whir of coffee-grinders, gearing the world to working strength for another day. Her own power to slip away on these trips with Gregory amused Jean and she wondered if Martha felt the same physical sense of cutting loose, and going out into space, when she left her body crouching in the last pew and went up to talk to God.

Christmas and New Year passed and February came in a black rage of cold, that exhilarated or depressed to the breaking point. It depressed Gregory and he came to the office one morning of black cold, late in February, convinced of the uselessness of all things. Nothing mattered, neither happiness nor pain. If one did manage to seize a little happiness, it was only an interlude. What was the good of a few moments of exhilaration and the sense of personal power, when it went before you could make it really yours?

Gregory threw the mail about on his desk and lit his pipe. He felt old. He tore open the envelopes and sorted the contents and knew that he was going to go on doing this for the rest of his life. Margaret had been exasperatingly cheerful this morning, and as Gregory recalled the gentle sweetness of her voice as she had said, when she kissed him good-by: "There is all the success and prosperity we want right _now_, dear," he tore open the last envelope so violently that the letter within was torn in half. The incident loosened the tension and Gregory laughed at his own childishness as he laid the pieces together and read them.

He read them once. Then he read them again. He looked round at the walls, the floor, the water-cooler in the corner, and read it again. He got up and opened the window. The freezing air rushed in and, after a moment, the world adjusted itself. Things stopped spinning and came out of the blur, but still the impression persisted that it was a joke. Gregory brought the two pieces of the torn letter to the open window and read them for the fourth time.

He had won the Chicago contest. He had covered paper with lines and figures and sent it a thousand miles away, long ago, before the leaves turned. He had never let himself really hope and, for days together, had forgotten all about it. Even Jean had not mentioned it for weeks. The thought of Jean steadied him. Jean had always said: "You will win." She had never doubted, or, if she had, had hidden it under a seeming faith that had been a comfort, even if he had not always shared it.

Gregory reached for the telephone. How should he tell her? Should he read the letter itself, or keep her guessing? To be kept guessing made Jean angry and he did it sometimes to tease her. Gregory stood with his hand on the receiver, composing a beginning. But he would have to get to the point some time and he could hear Jean's: "Oh, Gregory!" Then they would go out somewhere and tramp for miles in the pitiless cold, because it would be absurd even to try to go through the day's grind. Gregory took the receiver from the hook.

Slowly he hung it up again. He went back and sat down at his desk. After a few moments he got up mechanically and closed the window.

He had won the contest. He was no longer the fairly successful architect, bitter, in lonely moments, at forgotten dreams. He was "made." Everything had changed the moment he tore the letter in anger at the sameness of things. There was no doubt about that. Nothing would be the same any more. He would have to live in Chicago. The building would take several years and he would have to be on hand all the time, if he was to get all there was to it. He would have to leave Jean. He would no longer be able to ring her up when he wanted to. There would be no more long walks. No more dusky hours at the little French roadhouse, hours when the need of parting drew them so near together, Jean would no longer be there in the background of his life, so that he always felt that he could reach out and touch her.

Gregory jammed his pipe between his teeth and began walking up and down. Was there never a spot in life, never one short hour that was perfect? He saw the future that might have been, had he and Jean belonged legally to each other. Love, success, accomplishment. He and Jean--and Puck.

Gregory's face was drawn when he sat down at his desk again. He drove his mind through the day's work as if it had been a slave.

At four he closed his desk and went to meet Jean. She was already at their table, sitting partly turned to watch a group in the large room beyond. She was smiling, and when she caught sight of him the smile deepened.

"Do look at that old peacock over there. I have been watching her for the last five minutes and she's never stopped preening once."

He had come, still uncertain how he was going to tell Jean, and she asked him to look at an old woman. But he turned and then he laughed too.

"Well, what's happened exciting to-day?"

"Oh, nothing much. Nothing that will surprise you terribly."

Jean put down the teapot. "Gregory Allen, out with it!"

Gregory seized the alternative of banter, which had not occurred to him before.

"If I'm bursting, as you so impolitely suggest, it must be terribly important, and if it's terribly important you--you ought to guess it," he finished lamely.

"Now, Gregory, don't tease. Besides, I haven't an ounce of sense left. I've been struggling with a Tammany politician until I'm limp. What is it?"

Gregory took the cup she was holding to him. He felt that as long as the cup was in transit a choice was left open. But once it was beside his plate, he would be obliged to say, in the only way he had been able to frame it at all: "I've won the contest, and I have to go and live in Chicago. They want me there to talk over some slight changes by the middle of March and--I might as well stay on, because I'm going back there to live anyhow."

"Gregory, don't be silly. Please, what is it? I know it's good, because your nose is wrinkling up at the corners."

"It is good." Gregory put down the cup. "I've won the contest."

The old peacock cackled a shrill note and Gregory heard her say: "Just fancy, at her age, a deep pink, my dear, I----"

"Gregory--my dear...."

The blood rushed to Gregory's eyes so that Jean blurred to something white and shining, near but impossible to touch. He looked down.

"I shall have to go to Chicago. They've asked me to be there by the middle of March."

"Of course. Why, I'd want to take the next train and rush out, whether they'd asked me or not. Oh, Gregory! I always knew it but--I feel all wiggly inside."

Her hands moved to him across the cloth but Gregory's did not come to meet them.

"But I shall have to live there, Jean, for good; for several years anyhow. It will mean so many things. Here I should only be "that fellow who's building the Auditorium out in Chicago." I'm not young. I've got to get it all now, every scrap of it. I've got to, Jean. I've got to!"

Afterwards, Jean knew that in that moment she crossed a line and left something of herself behind forever. But now it must be the same as it had always been, until she was alone. If she yielded an inch, she would go plunging down into the emptiness.

"You do see, don't you?" Gregory's voice pleaded for her courage, but she did not answer, and he hurried on.

"If there were any other way, ... but there isn't. It will lead to all kinds of things. I've got to be there. Don't you see, dear?"

Why did he keep on saying that, over and over, as if she were a child? Why did he sit there, looking into his plate, as if he were hurting her only and against his will? Jean drew her hands back into her lap.

"Jean," he whispered, "Sweetheart, don't make it hard."

"I'm not going to. After all, you know,--Chicago's only eighteen hours away."

He looked up. "Well, I'll be damned! Do you know, Jean, I never thought of that?"

And he had not. It had seemed so final, such a complete upheaval of the present that he had pictured no thread running to the future. It would. Of course it would. Why shouldn't it? Jean would be the same. He would be the same. Each had his work. Their meetings would be farther apart, but freer. He would never have to leave Jean because he had promised to be home at a certain hour, nor invent explanations for Sunday tramps. In a way it would be more perfect, not less. And as soon as he had things going he would come back for a few days. Later he could come for longer. In summer, if he had a vacation, he would spend it with Jean.

"Jean, I'm coming straight round this table and kiss you."

"No, don't."

But he was already there beside her, and under pretext of adjusting the curtain, kissed her quickly. Jean wanted to strike him. Then he was back in his own place, talking again. All the first joy of his success rushed over him. Jean felt it, the hidden power that she had fanned with her belief and love. It was burning away her own forces and Jean felt cold.

They had a second serving of tea. The rooms emptied. Gregory was still talking, rushing away beyond her reach.

It was almost seven when she threw her crumpled napkin on the table and rose.

"I've simply got to go. Besides we could never get it all talked out, if we stayed until midnight."

"I know. I feel like a kid parading his bag of tricks. I believe I've been standing on my head for the last hour. Have I, Jean?" He was near, helping her on with her coat. His fingers touched her cheek. "Why didn't you set me right end up with a thump?"

"Oh, I adore small boys on their heads. I--I always want to do it, too." Jean wondered why he did not grip her shoulders and shake her back to consciousness, but he only laughed and they went out, past the groups of pretty waitresses resting now in the empty room.

It had turned warmer and snow was falling in great white flakes.

"I believe I'll walk. I'm not going home to dinner anyhow." Her courage was gone. She could not go down into that stifling Subway, talk nothings above the roar of the train, feel Gregory close among all those strangers.

"But it's going to be a regular blizzard. Look! It's getting thicker every minute."

Jean turned up her fur collar. "I don't mind. Maybe it's the last blizzard we'll have. I always wallow in the last blizzard. It's a kind of rite."

"Well, then, if I can't stop you...."

They were standing so close that Jean could feel his warm breath on her face. Muffled figures, bent against the driving snow, pushed by them and disappeared into the black hole of the Subway entrance. Automobiles shot noiselessly through the whirling whiteness. The world itself had changed.

"To-morrow then about four?"

"No, I can't to-morrow. I've got a meeting. Friday."

"All right." Gregory held out his hand, but Jean raised her muff to keep off the driving flakes and only smiled across it.

She went back to the office. They had all gone. There was a note tacked to the lid of her desk and Jean read it. She tore it up and threw it into the waste-basket but some of the pieces fell upon the rug and she bent to pick them up carefully. She opened a window, and covered one of the typewriters that had been left uncovered. Then she telephoned to Martha that she would not be home to dinner. Martha urged her not to work too late and Jean hung up the receiver.

Now she was alone, utterly alone, with the thoughts she had beaten back.

Gregory was going away. He was going out of her life for months at a time. Three short weeks and it would be as it had been before his coming--empty, work-filled days. Jean bowed her head on the desk.

"You fool, you fool, you helped to do it."

She had been so glad to give and give and give. Never to falter in her faith, or let his courage drop below the standard she had set for it. He had needed her and now he did not need her at all.

Jean slipped to the floor and clutched the cushion of the chair.

"Don't let me feel like this. Don't let me," she begged, but there was no answer. The reasonable machine of her universe held no God. It ran itself.

When she was sure that Martha would be asleep, Jean went home.

* * * * *

During the next two weeks they saw no more of each other than usual. Jean was busy, and Gregory had to leave things in order for Benson, who was to take on the office. Besides, it kept up the fiction of there being no big change. But on Tuesday, the day before he was to leave, Jean did not go to work.

It was a day of sparkling sunshine and hard snow, packed firm. They went into the country. They talked of little things, rested, made snowballs and glided, hand in hand, over the ice of a small pond. It was a day like many they had had.

It was almost dark when they stopped at the French roadhouse. There were no other guests, and Madam Cateau lumbered forward in her felt slippers to greet them as old friends.

"It is a long time that you do not come. I think you forget me. Then I remember and say--But the chicken they do not forget. Me, yes, but not the chicken." She shook with laughter and waggled her great red forefinger under Gregory's nose. "I am right? Yes? The chicken you do not forget. Two plates it was. Three, maybe?"

"Three at least. I wouldn't swear that it wasn't four."

"And to-night I have the same, with the mushrooms. Why do I make it this morning? It is not the right day. Le bon Dieu, maybe?"

She waddled off and Jean took a table close to the fire.

It was impossible that they were doing this for the last time. The fire burned with a deep glow. Outside the bare trees, ladened with snow, creaked in the wind that came creeping with the dark from hidden places. In the kitchen Madam Cateau scolded the waiter. Dishes rattled and finally the perspiring Gustave came running with the soup. It was rich and thick, and across the table, so near that she could see a tiny black speck on Gregory's white collar, he was eating it, smiling at her between spoonfuls, his face damp with the soup's heat and the reaction from the long walk in the cold.

When dinner was almost through, Madam plodded in again.

"The same room? Yes? Perhaps a smaller one is warmer."

"No. The same. Make a good fire. It will be all right."

They drank the coffee in silence and smoked, listening to the woman's feet plopping on the floor above. It was quiet in the kitchen now. A loosened shutter creaked and ashes fell softly in the grate. Upstairs the door closed. Madam came thumping down and they heard her settle with a grunt into her chair by the parlor stove.

They went upstairs. The room was just the same. They might have been away only an hour. The same colored print of Napoleon stared above the dresser; the same stiff, white tidies covered the chair seats. The same red and white counterpane spread over the bed, with its nosegay of red and white embroidered roses in the exact center. The curtains were drawn half down, but below, through the spotless panes, the field stretched bare and silent under a clean young moon. Gregory went over and pulled down the shades.

Jean took the plush rocker that Gregory dragged to the hearth. He sat on the floor, his head against her knees, and together they listened to the breathing of the fire, the whispering wind, and the branch scraping on the glass. Gregory drew Jean's hands down and held them against his lips.

The little noise outside died in the throb within. His lips pressed hot in her palms. With a sob, Jean bent and drew him into her arms.

In the morning they went silently back to the city while it was still early. The wind had risen in the night and blown the last snow from the branches. The trees cut thin and black in the new day.

Gregory was to come back in May.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

Spring was late, but when it came, it came with a rush. In a day, the trees swelled in buds and blades of grass pricked the frozen earth. Jean woke one morning, late in April, to the feeling of a new force in the world and in herself. It was as if she had been walking through a tunnel, and now, unexpectedly, stepped into the light. Time had somehow slipped its leash; it no longer strained behind but ran forward. Jean jumped out of bed and went through the morning exercises that she had neglected for weeks. Raising and lowering herself on her toes, she drew in deep breaths of the spring air and with every breath the last two months receded, the future brightened, until, her whole body glowing, Jean came to a final halt, planted firmly on both feet.

She entered the dining-room humming, so that Martha, who was shirring eggs in the kitchen, poked her head through the swing door, as if she expected to see a stranger.

"Why, Jean!"

"Why, mummy!"

Martha smiled. "All the problems in the universe must be solved this morning."

"Not exactly. But I confess they don't seem quite so hopeless. I guess it's the spring. Who could be altogether miserable on a morning like this? In the spring tra la!"

Martha went back to the eggs. Such a sudden change of mood was beyond her, for it was weeks since Jean had come humming to breakfast and, although Martha had said nothing, she had worried. But there had been nothing to worry about, since Jean could hum because the sun shone and the earth-smell came through the open windows. Martha wondered why intelligent people gave way to moods, when they must know what a little thing in the end would dispel them.

At the office Jean found a letter from Gregory. It was the longest she had had and the writing of it had stretched over a week.

"It's the only way to do," Gregory wrote, "because if I don't, things pile up to tell you until there are so many I can't tackle them all. Sometimes I want to get right on the train and come over, when something very good happens. And it's just the same when something bad happens, so you see I want you pretty much all the time."

At this point, Jean rang for Josephine Grimes and told her there would be no dictation ready until eleven. When Josephine had gone, Jean locked the door.

"I don't care if it is silly. I have to be sensible enough the rest of the time."

Jean came back to the desk and read and re-read Gregory's letter until she felt that they had been together through the days of its writing. They were interesting days, filled from morning until night with new impressions and new people.

"At first it felt queer and unreal, to have millionaire pork packers and mayors and things like that consulting my convenience. I felt about the way Puck does, just before Galatea comes to life. Not that I want to convey that a pork packer is like a Greek statue. It felt like this----"

Here followed a marginal drawing of himself standing before a group of pedestals at various angles of motion, but the flagstone on which he stood was anchored at the four corners with the words, _I did win the contest_.

"I'm afraid I'm getting too cocky about winning, as if I had done it all by myself, when it was you, more than half. Yes, it was, and you needn't smile as I am positive you are doing, and insist it was all my great ability. Of course I have ability, tons of it. Does that satisfy you? But when I look back now on the hopeless, dreamless creature you rescued, I want--well, I never claimed to be any good at words, and even drawing fails me here. I want you close. I want your arms round me and that glorious cool hair hiding all but your eyes. Why do you come so often, dear, just at dawn, and wake me that way, as you did that first morning at Morrison's? It was just about a year ago, wasn't it? Maybe that's why I've been thinking of them lately, or maybe it's because you came every morning last week. You shameless, brazen----" Here was the figure that he usually drew instead of writing her name, the Roman tower with the shaft of sunlight across the top.

The division for that day stopped here and the next was about some changes in the plans that he had decided to make. The description was brief and technical but Jean knew the old design so well that she could reconstruct it without an effort. Evidently he had been interrupted, for he broke off short and when he began again it was about Puck. Puck was delighted with Chicago and as far as he could judge it was because she would never again have to be nice to Squdgy.

"I believe Squdgy was your Dr. Fenninger and my Amos Palmer to her. I hadn't any idea that she really disliked him so much. Funny little entities children are, changing right under your eyes every minute. Sometimes she looks like this and the next day she's this."

Jean's lips quivered. How closely he must observe Puck! It hurt in a way and yet it made her very tender, too.

There was no direct mention of Margaret but in the last division, written the day before, Gregory said that she need not think New York was doing everything. Chicago had an institution, a group rather, whose motto was The Ultimate End.

"So what's the good of fiddling with any little by-products of social uplift or religion? Fascinatingly logical, isn't it? You dive straight at The End. It's the weirdest yet, a lot more simple than garbage or the Divine Mind."

And Jean could see Margaret, slim and blonde and graceful, diving to The Ultimate End.

There was only one sentence more.

"From the way things look now, I believe I can make it before the fifteenth. So 'put your house in order.'"

Jean folded the letter and laid it in the drawer with the others. Then she called Miss Grimes and dictated steadily for two hours.

Ten days later, Jean took down the receiver to hear Gregory's familiar: "Hello! You see I made it."

"So I see. But where are you?"

"At the Grand Central, where you will be in about ten minutes--unless you want me to come over."

"No. I'll come down."

Afterwards they laughed, but at the time there had seemed nothing else to say.

* * * * *

Gregory stayed three days. Two of his business appointments and one of Jean's took part of their time, and made it impossible for them to go to Morrison's as Jean had hoped they would be able to do. But she tried not to think of it, and held firmly to what they had.

During these two days the feeling Jean had so often experienced in the past, of having to beat through an outer covering to get at the real Gregory underneath, was gone. At moments, Jean felt as if some subtle atomic process had taken place, regrouping the elements of the man, without changing them in their nature, but re-combining them in such a way that the effect produced was quite different. But it was not a permanent feeling, or rather, it was true only at times. In the close hours of the second afternoon, which they spent at Madam Cateau's, there was no room for analysis in the content that held them, and Jean felt that Gregory had never been away at all. But coming back, he told her of a possible commission, the first that had come through his new connection, and Jean felt the difference again sharply. And simply because it was a change, Jean resented it until her sense of justice and humor conquered. She had always known and believed Gregory had it in him to do big things and now that he was proving it she had a queer feeling of hollowness inside.

"You're going to be disgustingly successful, Gregory. You ooze it already."

"Do you mean that I really act conceited?" He asked it with such desire to be answered honestly that Jean laughed.

"I didn't say that. Of course you don't. But you--let me see how to put it. Here, give me a pencil, maybe I can draw it."

Gregory watched with a grin while Jean constructed figures unknown to geometry.

"Words are clumsy, I grant, but those things! Which is the 'is' and which the 'was'?"

"That's the 'was.' It's one of the Egyptian pyramids, with curlycues. Those are the moods when the spirit inside got away from you."

"And the 'is'?"

"That's a geometric eagle."

"With the curlycues become audible in one horrible screech."

"That isn't his mouth open. It's his under-beak where the pencil slipped."

"That's better. You had me quite scared." Gregory took back the paper and pencil and Jean's hands with them. "For which I am going to punish you."

Again and again, in the soft dusk, under the budding elm, he kissed her, and then he held her close and they did not speak at all.

When they began walking again they were serious.

"You see, Jean, you don't really know how it feels, because you never quit on the game as I did. I did honestly believe that it was all over for me and that I was never going to get anywhere. I felt like a little cog in a huge machine, whose place could be taken by any other little cog just as well. That's a damnable feeling. I felt at the mercy of whatever power kept the machine going."

"But we are all cogs, in a way."

"Look out. You'll be an Ultimate Ender yet."

"Is being a cog the ultimate end of everything?"

"Something like it. We are all specks in a cosmos that's more complicated than a Chinese puzzle. You reincarnate and reincarnate for millions of cycles, and when you get through you're only a sphere with a face in the middle. Did you know that? Your spiritual you, when it's been perfected through a billion æons is going to be a kind of gas bag with features in the center. The latest discoveries in all occultism prove it."

Jean laughed. "I believe I'll stop off half way. The Ultimate End doesn't appeal to me."

"I'll stop off in that place, too,----" Gregory did not finish, and Jean did not ask him what he had been going to say. Hand in hand they walked along, until they came in sight of the brightly lit station.

"It's been a glorious afternoon, hasn't it?"

Jean nodded.

On the next night, which was the last of Gregory's stay, they had dinner at The Fiesole. Jean did not want to go there, but when Gregory proposed it, she could think of no good reason and so they went. Gregory filled their glasses, and across the raised rim of his, smiled to Jean.

"Amos Palmer!"

"To the Turkish lanterns and Japanese wind-bells!"

And Rachael. Should she say it? It was such a long, long time ago. Jean did not know whether Gregory remembered that the night he had told her of Amos and the pergola, was the night they had gone to Rachael's. What a big thing it had seemed at the time and now it was so little. Was the course of all human relationships just that--a series of steps, from one desperate need, to a temporary peace, and then on to another need? Did one never come to a lasting peace, a flat, restful spot with no more steps? Or did one just step off at last into nothingness?

"What is it? Are you yearning for Japanese wind-bells and an electric pergola?"

"Was I looking like that?"

"Rather abstracted, Jeany. And----" Gregory was on the point of adding--"and this is our last night," but changed it. They both knew that well enough. So he said: "And besides it's rude."

"I was just wondering whether she has outgrown the pergola yet or whether Amos is still happy."

"I don't know. I saw in some paper not long ago that an English Duke was one of the guests on a yachting trip with Mr. and Mrs. Amos Palmer. From what I know of the Duke's reputation--Good-by wind-bells and maybe Amos."

They kept the talk at this level until they had almost finished dinner. Then, in spite of their efforts to hold the mood, it slipped from them. Brief silences fell, which were hastily dispelled as soon as either one could think of something to say, sufficiently unimportant. But they came again, until at last Jean made no effort to escape them, and Gregory sat rolling breadcrumbs in the old way and frowning into the tablecloth.

He did not know when he could come again. The months ahead were going to be busy ones and he would have to snatch an interlude when he could. And yet, going without the definite point of a return, left these days unfinished. He wished Jean would ask him.

But Jean said nothing. If Gregory knew he would tell her and if he did not know she did not want to be told that this, for which she would wait alone, week after week, as she had waited, was to be left to chance, thrust into an unfilled moment.

"Let's walk to the station, up Second Avenue and across, I haven't been down this way for ages." There was an hour yet before train time and Jean knew that she could not sit here, filling the lessening hour with nonsense and silences.

"All right." Gregory signaled the waiter and paid the bill. He was disappointed, but what had he expected? He did not know. He only knew that he had not thought of spending their last hour sauntering among pushcarts. But if that was enough for Jean----And he succeeded so well that Jean's heart grew heavier and heavier and she kept back the tears only by a desperate effort.

But when the reality of separation detached itself in a concrete crowd, in long lines waiting before the ticket windows, the starter booming the trains through a megaphone, and the red-cap who hurried up for Gregory's grip, Jean's pride slipped beyond her hold. She stared ahead and her lips trembled. His arm slipped under hers and drew her closer.

"Jean," he whispered. "Jean, dear." His fingers closed about her bare wrist above the glove.

The hand of the huge clock jerked itself forward another minute. And there was nothing to say. Less than if they had been strangers. With another jerk, the hand touched ten. Gregory dropped Jean's arm. Without a word he hurried through the gate and it closed behind him.

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

The summer passed. Once in September Gregory came on a flying business trip and left the next day.

Winter closed early with a jealous grip, and Jean worked as even she had never worked before. She managed committees, lobbied bills, spoke at meetings and drove her plans through all opposition.

Dr. Mary was busy with her final thesis. Evening after evening Jean and Martha sat reading quietly as they had done in the old days, and Martha was happy.

Just before Christmas Gregory came unexpectedly, solely to see Jean. They went out to the French roadhouse where he had ordered dinner by a wire to Madam Cateau.

It was a Christmas dinner. The table was already laid in their old room, when he threw open the door and ushered Jean in with a flourish.

"Merry Christmas."

He closed the door and would have taken Jean in his arms, but the look in her eyes stopped him.

"Why, Jean, what is it?"

For Jean stood staring at the table and fighting desperately not to cry.

"I--thought----"

Jean turned and buried her face on his shoulder.

"What is it, dear? Can't you tell me?"

Jean fought fiercely to stop, but she wanted to shriek, to laugh, to let down utterly, to sob out all the hurt, the suppression of the last ten months, close in Gregory's arms. And all the time, at the back of her brain, her burning eyes pressed into Gregory's coat, she saw the gay little table with the wine glasses and the white chrysanthemums and the ridiculous turkey, with the foolish paper frills about its brown legs.

Gregory held her gently, stroking her hair and wondering what had happened. For he had expected Jean to be as surprised and delighted as he had been when the idea occurred to him.

Slowly Jean's nerves relaxed and the sobs lessened. She must be happy now, while they were together. In a few hours Gregory would be gone and if she spoiled these hours there would be nothing, not even the memory, in the months ahead.

Jean raised her head and smiled. Gregory smiled too with a warm little feeling deep inside for this sudden, unexpected weakness.

"Whatever was the matter, Jean girl?"

"Nothing--only--I was wishing--we could have--Christmas and--we've got it."

Gregory laughed so that down in the kitchen Madam Cateau heard and laughed, too.

"Of all things to cry about! Because you get something you want. I'm glad it doesn't affect me that way." He punctuated the words with kisses and then, lifting her bodily, carried her across the room and put her down at the table, a little out of breath with the effort.

"You're no feather-weight, Lady of My Dreams. Or maybe I am hungry."

It was a good dinner and Gregory enjoyed it, although they had to hurry at the end to get back to the city in time for him to catch his train.

Jean waited behind the iron grill until the train pulled out and she could no longer distinguish Gregory waving his hand from the Observation. Alone she turned into the months ahead.

Weeks of waiting, snatching, losing, waiting again. Years broken by flying visits, some longer, some shorter. No calm, no peace, no sureness. Their lives would touch, run close for a few hours, a few days at most, and part. No foothold, no smallest spot their own, no door they could close against every one but each other. And it would always be like this. The happiness of the moment must be clutched, until the force of the holding almost strangled it to death, just as to-day's dinner had done.

It would go on and on. Their meetings would grow more and more the result of circumstances, be wedged in the unfilled places between the world's demands.

She would fill her days, fuller and fuller, to keep the thought of Gregory away. She would do bigger and bigger things, and people would speak more and more admiringly of her. While she struggled not to wonder when Gregory was coming again!

Or he might never come again. An accident in the lives of either might separate them forever. Gregory might be called to the ends of the earth and she could not follow. He would go with Margaret and Puck and she would remain behind.

They would grow older. They would hold to the small, common interests of each other's lives by an effort. A little while, and they would no longer talk of this person and that without elaborate explanations. Gregory's little sketches of people she did not know would grow meaningless. Their lives would run two paralleled streams, mingling only in the moments snatched together. And what would these moments hold? No shared interests, no mingled hopes. Their hands and lips would cling, on to the very end, because something in Gregory would always call and something, beyond her brain or will, would always answer.

The white face of a clock peered at Jean through the snow. It was almost twelve. After all, she would have to go home some time.

* * * * *

The holidays passed and a new year began. Jean took long walks through the snow and believed, sometimes, when she came back tired and hungry, that she had left the tangle behind. There were moments when, whipped by the cold to an almost drunken ecstasy of health, the old sureness returned. Her love and Gregory's was clean and big, like the open, eternal as the earth.

But the snow went.

It grew warm again on the upland, cool in the hollows, as on the days she and Gregory had stolen two springs before. Jean battled to hold her peace but it slipped from her as the grass pricked the earth again and buds swelled on the branches.

She proposed a national campaign to awaken interest in other states, and link the women of the country in a common bond. But, while she listened to the applause that greeted her first suggestion, she heard beyond it the wailing gramophone wrapping the rebellious Mattie and her mother in sensuous peace. She worked until far into the night on this new project, but the old apple trees rustled in the orchard and dogs barked from farm to farm across the fields. She went to special luncheons to meet important people, but Uncle John was always there, eating his porridge in the blue willow bowl. And at night, when she lay alone in the dark, too weary with the crowded days to sleep, there was always a baby's dark, fuzzy head and wet, groping lips. Jean tried to push it away, but it would not go. In the morning, when the coffee-grinders set the world in motion, it was always there, smiling and pummeling with its fists.

And in the end, Jean let it have its way.

It came and went with her, at home, in the office and to Mary's.

Jean thought of Amelia Gorman and the gray house on the windy hills. If she had a child, nothing ever again could shut her off from the current of life. It was the only real thing in all the world. It was the past and the future down to the end of time.

Jean weighed the price. A child of hers and Gregory's against a national congress of strangers. Any one of a dozen other women could manage that, but her job, her very own job, no one else could do. Before the miracle of her own power Jean was humble.

A strange new softness came over her, so that Martha wondered, but Mary referred to it outright, one night during her last week in New York when they sat talking before the open window as they had not done for months, with Madame la Marquise budding to youth before them.

"Jean Herrick, I wish to goodness you'd stop looking like a large blonde angel, just about to fly beyond mortal ken. It makes me feel a hundred years old, and as if I hadn't accomplished a single thing the whole time I've been here."

Jean laughed. "I'm sorry that I look like such a foolish thing as a large, blonde angel, but I'd rather you felt a hundred than I, Mary."

"But I'm not stuck on it myself, Jean."

"Then don't. It's all in the mind, anyhow. No one needs to grow old."

"Piffle. There's a lot of rubbish talked like that these days. There's no need to grow grumpy and useless, but, after all, we can't turn back the hands of the clock. We do grow out of one possibility into another--and they don't come back either."

Jean shrank a little, as if Mary had touched the glowing spot inside.

"Then--live every possibility up to the hilt and take the next."

"Logical and doubtless true. But I wish you wouldn't look so much as if your next was an ascent straight into Heaven. It makes me feel old--and a little lonely, Jean."

"Don't, Mary; please don't, I don't want you to feel like that."

"Oh, it's not as bad as all that. But, really, Jean, I never did think of the difference in our ages until lately. We always seemed to be walking along at the same gait, but these last few weeks you look as if you had been doing it out of politeness, and if you really wanted to you could pick up your skirts--and run forever."

"I do feel like that, Mary; exactly as if I had wings."

Dr. Mary looked up, but the joke on her lips did not come. There was a short pause and then Jean said:

"Mary, I'm going to tell you something that I believe I've wanted to tell you for a long time."

And she did, looking out over the Park while Dr. Mary sat silent.

Jean went back to the beginning, to the sense of a fuller world because Gregory was in it. Calm and unashamed, she spared nothing.

"I was glad when you went away, Mary. It was wonderful having this place, like a home all our own. And then you came back." Jean smiled, thinking of the tragedy of the discovered vegetables, and how miserable she had been.

She told of sending Martha away, of Gregory's going to Maine, and of her own readjustment toward Margaret and Puck; of Gregory's winning the contest, his removal to Chicago and of the long months since, trying to hold intact the beauty of their love, through hurried meetings, flying trips, moods of forced gayety clutched tight against the force of circumstance always tearing them apart. And the terrible white light of logic illuminating the end.

"It will come, Mary; it must. I can see it like a wall, standing there at the end of--one year, two, five perhaps. But--it will end."

For the first time Jean's voice shook. Nor was Mary's steady as she said, after a long pause:

"But you've _had_ it, Jean. Nothing can take it away."

Jean shook her head. "I know, Mary. But that's like the rubbish that's talked about not growing old. It's the theory of those who have never had a thing--that the memory of it can be enough."

Dr. Mary winced and lit a cigarette. "Maybe it is."

"When you've had a thing and--it goes--you have two pains, because the memory and the happiness hurts as much as not having it any more. And then--there's a third--the nothingness of everything else. That's the worst, that awful, dead emptiness, where nothing counts and you just go on because there's not even the will to stop. And the terrible, empty future."

"But he isn't dead, Jean. And you have your work. You can write, and even if you can't be always together, there----"

"I know. Those things are a lot when they're a part, but they're nothing at all when they're all. I have less even than Margaret has. Yes, less even than that. She has the shell and I have the kernel, but the kernel has to have its own shell or it dies. No marriage certificate in the world could make her really his wife, but no blindness in the world can keep our love what it is really--like this. I don't believe that society invented marriage because a man wanted to keep one woman as his property or because women wanted to be supported. They were just groping blindly to keep love alive, to bind it fast, that biggest, freest thing in all the world, and keep it safe for itself."

"Well, they've made a sad mess of it."

"I know. They didn't mean to build a prison, but they have. Some day there will be no state or church locking people in--but there will always be walls around real love--like ours. It makes its own and grows stronger and stronger behind them. And when it can't, it just withers and dies and--there's nothing left. I can't have it that way, Mary, I can't. I can't watch it grow less, and I know it will--and I can't shut it out forever. There is only one way, Mary--I want a child--terribly."

Dr. Mary dropped her cigarette so that it smoldered into the rug and burned a small, black hole.

"But, Jean----"

"I know, Mary. I've thought it out--everything, every single thing. I won't lose my job, because, of course, I shall give it up. I'll go away. I shall have to lie, right and left and all the time. I shall lie to the world and I shall lie to mummy. That will be the hardest, lying to mummy. But it would kill her, and I don't want to hurt mummy, but I am not going to let her stop my life, withhold the biggest thing in it. No one has a right to do that. It is _my_ life and _my_ job, Mary; the job of every woman when she really loves a man. And nothing else matters."

The little doctor gulped twice, and rapped out:

"Then go ahead and have it."

Jean slipped to the floor and laid her head on the other's knees.

"Mary, do you think--I'm--very----"

"No, Jean, I don't. I'm--I'm green with envy."

The tears ran down the doctor's cheeks and she made no effort to wipe them away.

After a while Jean looked up.

"I'm going to write to Gregory and tell him. I don't want to see him--till he knows."

Dr. Mary snuffled. "Here endeth the Congress."

Jean smiled. "Mary, a dozen other women can run the Congress and I don't give a whoop who goes on with it. Josephine Grimes can take it over if she likes."

Through the tears the blue eyes twinkled.

"Jean, you're the--most glorious--fool in the world--and I'd like to shake you."

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

"How do you like it?" Margaret turned, looking back over her shoulder to Gregory. Her fair hair and white shoulders rose from a swathing of cloudy fabric that showed now palest pink, now mauve, now faintly blue.

"It's ripping!"

Waltzing slowly the length of the dusky room, she moved with a flower lightness, a spirit-like unreality that touched the artist in him.

"You look like an orchid come to life in the depths of a forest."

Margaret stopped and swept him a curtsey.

"Thanks. To affect one's own husband like that is an achievement."

Gregory smiled. This new manner of Margaret's, half flirtatious, half cynical, amused him.

"Then what will happen to old Burnham? He'll be downright dizzy."

"Don't be coarse, Gregory. I don't like it. Besides, you know I do it for you."

"Oh, I'm not jealous. Not a bit."

"You may laugh, but it _is_ good business. Weren't you asked to join The Meadow Club after our last dinner?"

"I was."

"Well?"

"I thank you." Gregory doffed an imaginary hat and swept a bow. "What have you in mind this time?"

"Don't be silly. Besides, it's every hostess's duty to look as well as she can."

"You've done that. Maybe Burnham will resign in my favor and I'll be president of the Architectural Society of America."

"There's no reason that you shouldn't be some day, if you go about it right. It has to have a president, doesn't it?"

"Absolutely essential." Gregory chuckled and switched on the lights. In this mood of helping-wife Margaret was delightfully naïve.

"Well, I'm doing my part. If you do yours----"

"There's no knowing to what heights I may not climb."

"But you can't get anything without some trouble in this world. You've got to work for it, in every way." Margaret spoke as if she were enunciating a divine decree, and moved with stately coldness to the door.

"Very well. I'll work to-night. You've put me next to Phyllis Henshaw, haven't you?"

"Yes. And it's Gothic Cathedrals. She's mad about them lately. That ought to be easy for you."

"I can take that trick with my eyes shut."

"But don't make her feel that you know more about it than she does. Let her talk. She loves to."

"I'll remember."

"And please get dressed. The Phillips always come too early and you're not even shaved yet."

Margaret floated away and Gregory went into his dressing-room.

This was to be the last and most important of the Allen dinners which Margaret had begun early in the winter. The guest of honor was to be James Burnham, President of the Architectural Society, with eight lesser luminaries. It would be a success because these dinners of Margaret's always were a success. Sitting beside some eminent man, whose conversation she could not follow, Margaret reached her climax. As wife and companion, she was one being, as hostess another. In the act of presiding over a dinner table, Margaret found a clarity of vision that kept her in safe paths. Men whom Gregory admired and for whose good opinion he was anxious, never refused an invitation to one of Margaret's dinners.

As he dressed Gregory smiled to think what a chasm lay between the first dinner and this. Graceful and surefooted, Margaret had scaled the social cliffs, picking with unerring instinct the right spots. The dinner to-night was to mark the apex.

And it did. Looking about the table, at the soft lights, the exquisite flowers, the well-gowned women and alert men, Gregory felt that only a sketch of the Taj Mahal would do it justice. While he talked Gothic Cathedrals he drew one mentally and sent it to Jean. The subdued abundance, restrained success, the perfect balance of personal accomplishment and concealed consciousness of it, rose in delicate spires and minarets against a background of inexhaustible possibility, Eastern in its opulence.

On Margaret's right sat James Burnham, white-haired and charming, but knowing to a hair's weight what it meant for any hostess to secure him. Yankee in the shrewd appreciation of his own value, Southern in the charm of its concealment, and Latin in his attitude to all women, the famous man bent to Margaret with undivided attention. Margaret vibrated in harmony to his note. Her eyes sparkled and she had the manner of a beautiful woman withholding an advance she perfectly understood and had full power to reciprocate. Gregory looked on amused, while he followed instructions and let Phyllis Henshaw rhapsodize among the Gothic arches. He speculated about Margaret as if she were a stranger, and wondered why men with wives like that were ever jealous of them.

Coffee was served in the living-room, a method of Margaret's for redistributing her guests. By the new adjustment, Phyllis Henshaw fell to James Pelham and Gregory could not help smiling at Margaret when he caught her eye. Skill like this amounted to an art. From time to time he glanced at the white-haired president, listening with a mechanical smile to the Gothic ravings and wondered whether any man, except perhaps a Jesuit diplomat, could have achieved his purpose better. At the first opportunity, Gregory edged his own partner to the rescue, and then realized that he, too, was weaving a pattern of the evening to Margaret's design. He had an almost irresistible impulse to call across the room to her:

"Is this the way you want it? Or have I made a mistake?"

There was neither bridge nor music, and yet most of the guests stayed until almost twelve. It was even a little after before Phyllis Henshaw kissed Margaret effusively and assured her that it had all "been simply perfect." When the front door closed behind them, Margaret dropped into a chair and yawned.

"People can say what they like, but there's absolutely no other way to do it. A dinner is the only thing."

"Q. E. D."

"But next winter I'm going to do it a little differently. We won't begin quite so early in the season--now that I know who's who. We won't give more than six either. That's enough to cover all the people that really matter."

"A kind of inverse ratio? In time, at that rate, we'll have to eat alone."

"I suppose that's awfully clever; but, really, I'm too tired to follow."

Gregory realized that he was being petty. For the evening had been just as much of an accomplishment, in its way, as Bobby Phillips' engineering miracles in the Orient, or the Auditorium itself, for that matter.

"It was all right, Margaret, and I'm sure if Burnham wrote sonnets he'd be sitting up at this minute."

A dreamy smile touched Margaret's lips. "He's perfectly fascinating. I don't wonder women fall for him." She moved toward the door. "I let Nellie go to bed, Gregory, so you put out the lights. And please don't make your usual racket in the morning. I'm all in."

Gregory finished his cigar and then went upstairs. He stopped for a moment in Puck's room as he always did. She was sound asleep. Lady Jane sat stiffly on a chair. Of late, Puck often forgot to take Lady Jane to bed. Puck was growing up. Gregory laid Lady Jane softly on the coverlet and tiptoed out.

Bunched on the dresser was the last mail that he always had sent up from the office when he left too early to get it. He tossed it aside, picked up Jean's with a thrill of pleased surprise, for Jean usually wrote once to his twice and he had not yet answered the last, and made himself comfortable to enjoy it.

Gregory read the letter from the abrupt beginning, "I want to talk to you, dear," to the ending "that's all," and laid it down. There was no haze to be cleared away by a second reading, no doubt of Jean's meaning, no possible misunderstanding. Into the three pages Jean had compressed the wonder of their love, the nuances of its beauty, the impossibility of continuing like this. She made no claims nor recognized any on her own part. Only, she could not go on. She stated it as simply as she might have said: "I cannot meet you to-morrow. I have a meeting."

Before the simplicity of Jean's mind, Gregory was helpless. With one clean blow, Jean had cut away all the elaborate superstructure of ordinary human intercourse. The scaffolding was stark before him.

Step by step, Gregory went back over the past year. There had been hours of longing that not even his work had stilled. Days when Jean had moved beside him, enjoying his triumphs, memories that had helped him through temporary difficulties. She was always there, more or less vivid, according to his need. The visits to New York he had planned weeks ahead. The Christmas dinner he had snatched at the risk of business loss. The perfect walk through the snow to Madam Cateau's; the tenderness of Jean's tears; the gay meal and Jean's cheery smile as the train pulled out; his pride in Jean's courage; desperate moments of his own rebellion, stifled in shame before her greater strength.

And all the time, Jean had been beating against this "ugliness." It had been one thing to him, another to her. He did not know her. Perhaps he had never known her.

He went back to the night he had come in with Puck to find Jean standing by the living-room window, and the storm that had raged in him through that intolerable hour of Margaret's chatter and the need that had driven him to leave the house with Jean. Again Gregory felt the silence of the street about them, then the clatter of the taxi as it stopped at his signal; and the dizzy moment when Jean had said quietly: "Gramercy Park." It was Jean who had said it. Again Gregory felt the reverence and gratitude that had stilled his passion through that dark, silent ride.

Love had meant to her what it had meant to him and he had gloried in her honesty. She had brought back the courage that the weary round of years with Margaret had almost killed, and kept it alive. She had been glad of his success. Again he felt her leaning to him across the table and heard her say:

"It is only eighteen hours away."

It was Jean who had said it, just as she had said: "Gramercy Park."

And now she said, just as quietly and simply: "I can't go on."

Cold damp broke out on Gregory's forehead.

She could not go on.

She wanted it to stop. She would fill her days without reference to him. He would fill his with no thought of her. He would make no more flying trips to New York. Never again. Not even once more, unless----

Gregory rose. If he did not get up now and move he would always sit there, staring at the three pages covered with the clear black writing, on the table beside him.

Jean with a child. A child of hers and of himself. She had weighed the price and was willing to pay. The fences that society had put up, Jean was willing to throw down. The conventions they had scorned in secret, Jean would scorn openly. Unconfused by all the little noises of the world, Jean heard the clearest call and answered.

"She doesn't realize what it would mean. She----"

The last sentence of the letter moved before him.

"I have thought it all out, dear, and I know. It's the one thing against everything else, the one thing that counts against all the things that don't."

Gregory's chin dropped to his breast and he walked up and down like an old man.

Jean with a child. A child of hers and his. Jean and their child, alone, one thousand miles away. Another human being, part of himself, just as Puck was a part.

Another Puck. The best of Jean and of himself, a fearless little Puck, whom he would see at long intervals, scarcely know, whom he could not acknowledge, but who would always be near, tearing at his heart, claiming his love. Gregory's lips went white.

"My God," he whispered, "I wish I had never seen you."

Then he began walking again, up and down, up and down.

The stars were white in the morning sky when he went back and sat down once more beside the table. He put the three sheets of Jean's letter carefully together and tore them across many times. Then on a single sheet he wrote:

"I am not brave enough. I haven't the courage. I cannot pay the price."

He took the torn bits of Jean's letter and his own and went out. He dropped his into the green box on the corner. The chill wind of dawn seized Jean's and carried them away.

He closed the front door softly and went slowly up the stairs, past Puck's door and Margaret's, back into his own room. The pen was still wet with ink. Gregory opened the window and threw it into the street. In a few moments an early milk wagon clattered along and scrunched it into the dust.

PART III

CHAPTER FORTY

"Are you sure you feel all right, mummy? You don't look as if you had slept very well."

"Nonsense, dear. I slept at least five hours straight off and you know----"

"Oh, yes, I know. Napoleon never had more than four hours and Saint Catherine or Winifred or somebody else did mighty works on ten minutes. But they're not you."

Jean laid her arm across her mother's shoulders and drew her close. "You won't be silly, will you? If you don't feel well you'll 'phone me? There's nothing very special to-day."

Martha's face, smaller and frailer than ever, glowed with love satisfied, and for a moment she closed her eyes in the old spirit of humble gratitude. But Jean, looking down, saw only the thin hair, white now, and her throat contracted.

"Jean, sometimes I feel as if all my life, this last year has been waiting for me, one whole year, just exactly as it has been. Now that I waste so much time just sitting round, I think of it a lot."

The lines along the corners of Jean's mouth deepened and she looked old and tired. But her voice had the same brusque quality with which she had always forestalled any emotional demand. If the year had been wonderful to Martha, it had not been useless, and Jean was grateful.

"Of course, if you are trying to tell me, Martha Norris, that I used to bore you to death----"

"Don't be flippant, Jean. You know perfectly well----"

"There. That sounds more natural. I guess you're all right. But don't go and overdo. Will you promise me that?"

"I never do. I'm a regular parasite."

"Well, it agrees with your disposition, so keep it up." Jean bent and kissed her. "You're really much nicer than you used to be, mummy. Pneumonia must be good for the soul."

"Got me into line at last, haven't you? But remember, even the effects of pneumonia wear off."

"Then I'll take my innings while they're going. Remember, if you go to service this afternoon you are to call a taxi. Do you hear? You are not to take any of those 'nice, quick walks' you are so addicted to. There's a wind like a knife blade to-day. Will you promise?"

"I'll use my judgment, dear."

"I leave you in peace. You are yourself. I don't believe you ever had pneumonia. Mummy, you've been faking."

Jean gave her mother another quick kiss, and went. From the street below, she looked up and waved. Martha waved back.

But when Jean was out of sight, Martha crossed to the side table where Jean had laid Mary's letter. Part of it Jean had read aloud, the first two paragraphs and on from the middle of the third page, but the part unread she had returned to twice, and when she slipped the letter back into its envelope, Martha had seen her hands tremble. Martha's own hands shook as she unfolded the pages, scrawled with the doctor's heavy black writing, vigorous and violent as Mary herself.

"Now listen, Jean, it's one chance in a million and you can have it if you want. I shall expire with envy, but I've just enough sanity left to know that I'm too old. To go to China and organize a kind of Red Cross--Associated Charities--Relief of the Poor, with trifles like directing the education of feminine China thrown in, because, years ago, little Wong Lee used our gymnasium and I treated him half way decently! He is now minister of something-or-other in New China and he throws this pearl at me. I would give twenty years of my life to do it, but I haven't twenty left, not ten even of any great use in such a big undertaking. But you! The old courage would come back. Things would be worth while again. You would----" Here a word had been scratched, but Martha bent long and close over the paper and at last she made it out. "You would forget."

After the third effort, Martha succeeded in folding the sheets and getting them into their envelope. Then she went back to the chair by the window and sat down. Dampness came about her lips and temples and she closed her eyes.

It would be a new life for Jean. Jean would forget.

Why did Jean need a new life? Had this wonderful year, so full of peace to Martha, been stagnation to Jean? Had the deep gentleness and understanding which had come to Jean been only a masque? Had it been possible only with an outlet of confidence to Mary? What was it that Jean was to forget? Back and forth through the last eighteen months Martha's memory went, gathering forgotten looks, stray phrases, quiet evenings when Jean lay on the couch reading, evenings so full of contentment to Martha, that she had thanked God for each one.

Twice the maid came to the door to clear the breakfast table and went back to the kitchen on tiptoe. The third time Martha heard her.

"All right, Katy, you can clear away now."

At twelve o'clock Jean telephoned, as the habit had grown since Martha's illness in the early winter. Martha assured her that she felt all right and would go and take her nap "as ordered."

"Be sure you do. And I'll be home early. It's Katy's afternoon out, isn't it?"

"Yes. I think I'll tell her she can have the evening, too, because she wants to go over to Montclair to see her cousin."

"But don't you do a thing for supper. I'll stop in at a delicatessen."

Martha went back to her room and lay down. The effort of answering had exhausted her, so that now she shook as with a chill, and her heart thudded sickeningly. When Katy came to call her to lunch, Martha did not want any. She heard Katy eat a hurried meal in the kitchen, clear the dining-room and go. After a while the perfect stillness of the house rested Martha a little, and she got up and went into the kitchen. Usually, she enjoyed these afternoons when Katy was gone and she was free to putter about and make little delicacies, for which Jean always scolded her, and ate with tremendous relish. But to-day, Martha had to rest often as she made the chocolate cake that was Jean's favorite, and she did not ice it at all.

In her private office, Jean made her third effort to write to Mary. In the outer room two typewriters clicked and from across the hall, through the open transom, she heard Jerome Stuart, of the Men's City Club, dictating.

"I will take the matter up with Mrs. Herrick of the Women's Civic League, as it seems to me both organizations working together can accomplish better results."

Mrs. Herrick of the Women's Civic League. That meant herself and the eighteen busy, empty months since Gregory's letter.

Jean's hands dropped to the keys and she sat looking down into the street. The wind had swept it almost clean of people and the few who had to be out, beat along, muffled in clothes, like unthinking bundles propelled against their wills.

"If only mummy could stand it. But she couldn't, and she would be so utterly miserable."

Across the hall, Jerome Stuart was talking again:

"It seems to me that this is a matter for women rather than men. I will refer the matter to Jean Herrick of the Women's Civic League, and can assure you of prompt action."

Jean ripped out the paper and closed the machine.

"Nothing in the world is worth making mummy miserable for, and, besides, Mary would see through me in a minute, if I wrote in this mood. She'd know that I'd rather go to China than do anything else in the wide world. Never to see these streets again, nor the river, nor the people. To go where there are no memories unless I call them up. But mummy----"

Jerome Stuart was crossing the hall now, coming to consult with Mrs. Herrick of the Civic League. This tall, quiet man, with his unshakeable faith in humanity, would look at her with his deep gray eyes, eyes too gentle unless one had seen them flash against injustice, and, in a few moments, she would find herself starting some new piece of work. Jerome Stuart had done this often in the six months he had headed the Men's City Club, and Jean had been glad. But to-day she wanted no burden of another's enthusiasm forced upon her. She wanted nothing except to get away by herself. She heard the secretary tell Jerome Stuart that she was busy and she heard him go back again to his own office and close the door.

A little before five Jean left. The wind had reached a point of cold fury that made it almost impossible to breathe.

"I do hope she hasn't gone to service, even in a taxi." The possibility worried Jean all the way home. "I wish Lent came in the summer." As she let herself into the apartment she called gayly:

"Hello!"

There was no answer.

"Oh, mummy, it _is_ silly. If God's everywhere, why can't you talk to Him here?"

It was half past five now, and, at the latest, Martha would be in by six. Jean put the kettle on the gas and the cold chicken and ham into the ice-box. The chocolate cake stood on the lowest shelf of the pantry.

"It's no good. I can never change her. I might just as well let her go peacefully on."

She turned the gas low under the kettle and went into her own room to take off her things. The connecting door to Martha's was ajar, and the wind, whistling down the light-well, rushed at Jean, striking like a hand.

"Whew!" She threw her things on the bed and hurried to close the window.

Sitting in the rocker by the bed, one shoe on, the other by her side, her hands quiet in her lap, her head back, tilted a little as if listening, and with a terrible smile on the open lips, sat Martha. Jean swayed on the threshold, and then moved slowly and heavily toward the chair. The curtain blew in and the end flapped against Martha's shoulder. Jean put it aside. Without a sound she dropped beside the chair and her arms closed about her mother. The little figure lurched sideways and the cold cheek lay against her own. As cold and still as the dead, Jean knelt.

The mechanism of her brain had stopped, back there ages ago, on the threshold. Her will, her power to feel, had dropped into an abyss of nothingness. Jean knelt, knowing that her mother was dead, that she had died in the act of getting ready for service, that she must have died about three hours ago, while she was trying to write to Mary, that there were many things to do and she would have to begin doing them. But she could neither move nor think of what they were.

All her life came to this point and stopped. Tiny incidents, forgotten to consciousness, rose from the mass of memories piled upon them. They had neither relation nor sequence, but tumbled chaotically in the void. Martha making a dress for her doll; Martha on graduation day; Herrick and their Sunday dinners with Martha; Tom and Elsie; the months with Gregory in which Martha had no part and the night she had come home to find Martha mending and had been glad. The two terrible weeks she had passed alone by the sea, after Gregory's letter. The return--Mary gone West and Martha happy again in the solitude with Jean. And the long months since, when her mother was the realest thing in the world and Jean had felt the narrow binding bands of Martha's love and been a little comforted.

Now the band had snapped and she was alone.

Across the light-well, a woman put a child to bed. It knelt and said its prayers, just as she had used to do, and afterwards the woman tucked it up, opened the window and turned off the light. The elevator clanked from floor to floor. Children scampered across the apartment above. Dishes rattled in the kitchens. Men were coming home to dinner. The great building was vibrant with the sounds that mark the definite closing of a day. That small period of finite time, man's working day, was ended. But here, there was no light, no sound in the still rooms. The small, intimate ending of the hours was lost, engulfed in this tremendous ending of all things.

A sputtering noise broke on Jean's consciousness. It had been going on a long while. She laid the little head gently against the chair back and rose. A strange odor filled the apartment. She went out into the kitchen. The water had completely boiled away and the solder had melted from the kettle. Jean turned off the gas and went back.

There were so many things to do, and now she would have to begin doing them. Death, the most silent, private thing in the world, necessitated many outward offices, the presence of strangers, an official routine. Jean lifted her mother's body and laid it on the bed. She closed the parted lips and bound them. Then she began to undress her. Never, in her whole life, had Jean done such service for Martha, and now it seemed as if, from some vast distance, her mother was watching, embarrassed and reluctant, so that Jean felt awkward and ashamed. One by one she took off the garments, noticing with detached numbness the beautiful mending in Martha's stockings, the neat tying of the corset laces. Jean had never seen her mother undressed, and the youthful quality of the skin astonished her. She felt inhuman, perverted, to notice this, but the feeling ran only on the surface of her brain, as if she had taken an anæsthetic, strong enough to deaden sensation, but not strong enough to kill consciousness. Suddenly she recalled Herrick passing his fingers over the smooth satin of the painted canvas and she covered the little body hastily in a white night dress, as if shielding it from stranger eyes.

How small and still she looked like that, and, at the same time, so terrible! A little while before and she had been Martha, her mother, narrow in her beliefs, jealous in her love, full of obstinate faith and human weakness. Now she was part of the universe, of the terrible law of life and death. What tremendous finality to be centered in that small body! And how young she looked! Only the white hair seemed to have marked the years. A few short hours before and Jean had felt her throat tighten at the frail body and the thin white hair. And now, in a moment, Martha had outlived time, defied human laws. Age was a cloak imposed by Time and removed by Death. At some distant spot, Martha, young and happy, was talking to her God.

The mechanical movement of lifting and undressing her mother stirred Jean's consciousness, and she realized now that the window was still open and the freezing wind blowing in. She reached for the comforter at the foot of the bed and drew it up. This covering the small body was one of the useless, sentimental things people did with their dead. But she had no power over her actions. Years of association with the flesh had created habits that fulfilled themselves mechanically. A lifetime with the shell of the body had given it an existence of its own, and although the closed eyes and bound lips proved Martha beyond the need, the very flesh and shape had created demands of their own.

Jean covered the body snugly and stood looking down. With this, her work was done. Never again would she do anything for her mother.

Jean shivered and then something beat its way through the numbness of the last hours and she dropped to her knees. With her face on the small, still breast she sobbed, dry, tearing sobs that ripped the last eighteen months to shreds and buried her beneath them.

She was alone in the world. There was no one now to consider. No need to pretend. No one in the whole writhing mass of humanity belonged to her nor she to any one.

The desperate emptiness of Gregory's going rose in a gaunt specter from the grave where she had tried to heap it to stillness by the small duties of loving and caring for Martha; trying to make up, out of her own realization of loneliness and pain, some of the empty years of her mother's life. Now the need was over. She would never again have to take a book and pretend to read in order not to worry the patient figure sewing under the lamp. She would never again have to take the image of happy hours and lift it from her brain, that it might not claim the moments that were Martha's. There was no need to do anything, anything at all. She was alone, free in a terrible freedom, alone in an infinity of emptiness.

The front door opened and Jean heard Katy come down the hall into the kitchen. She got up and went out and told her. Katy began to cry, and although Jean knew that Katy had been fond of Martha, there was something so officially appropriate in these instant tears, that Jean frowned. Katy choked her sob into a sniff.

"If you would make some strong black coffee, Katy, I should like it." Then she went into the hall and telephoned to the doctor who had attended Martha during the pneumonia of the earlier winter. He lived nearby and came in a few moments. He pronounced it death from heart disease and told Jean that her mother's heart, weak for years, had never recovered from the strain of pneumonia.

"Did she have anything special to worry her? Any shock to-day? Still, there was no reason that it should have terminated so soon."

"Not that I know of."

"No special shock to-day?"

"No. We live very quietly and there would be nothing without my knowing it."

"Um. Sometimes these things take sudden and unexpected turns. There is not always a definite explanation." He stopped as if something more personal and sympathetic was expected of him. Taller than he, Jean looked down coldly. He was used to women crying or going into hysterics, and although he was always scornful of such procedure, years of habit in meeting these emergencies had given him a tactful gentleness of which he was vain. But now there was going to be no need for restoratives or sedatives and so he took his hat.

"If there is anything that I can do to make it easier, please feel----"

"Thank you. There is nothing."

When the doctor had gone, Jean drank the black coffee that Katy brought.

"Could I be seein' her, Mis' Herrick?"

Jean did not want Katy to see her. But she could not refuse, for the feeling persisted that Martha was no longer her mother, her own special human property. She was part of the law of life and death, day and night, the seasons. She had entered the cosmos. Personal preference was washed under in this tide of law.

Jean heard Katy go into the room and drop to her knees. There was a moment of sobbing and then a mumbled prayer. In a few moments the girl came out. Jean heard her muffled sobbing in the kitchen.

"If you would rather go home to-night you may, Katy."

"And leave you?"

"Certainly. I do not mind. There is nothing to be afraid of," she added more gently.

"I know." Katy took advantage of the gentleness to sob openly. "The dead can't hurt us--God rest their souls--and such a gentle sweet lady--but it does give me the creeps--it always done----"

"Then, Katy, I would rather you went. In fact I would rather be alone. You can come early. Be here by seven-thirty."

Jean went into the living-room. Martha's chair stood pushed back from the window, as she had left it when she had gone to get ready for service. Her glasses lay on the window-shelf. Jean sat down in the chair. In a few moments she heard Katy tiptoe out. The streets were empty, except for the wind. It moaned about the corners of the big building, shutting Jean in from the rest of the world. And beyond the wind, the black river ran swiftly to the sea.

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

"I am the resurrection and the life."

Alone in the church, Jean sat upright in the first pew. The stained windows, the fine linen of the young priest's cassock, his deep-toned chant, the odor of incense, the satin-grained wood of the pews, the exquisite lace of the altar cloth, impressed themselves in a setting warm and intimate for the small gray coffin resting at the altar rail.

Jean sat dry-eyed, as if she were witnessing a rite in which the priest and Martha had a part. They belonged. She had handed Martha over to this young man, and now he and Martha and God were carrying on some ceremony. She was an outsider.

The stinging sweetness of the incense rose in a blue cloud as the priest incensed the coffin. His voice ceased. He looked inquiringly toward Jean. Alone in the apartment, just before the undertaker had come, Jean had kissed her mother for the last time. But in the depth of the waiting silence, a need to look once more on that restful little face gripped her, and she rose and went slowly to the casket, Against the white satin of the pillow, so lightly that even in death she seemed resenting this comfort, Martha was resting. It seemed to Jean that the eyes under the thin, veined lids were quietly happy and that the mouth, so oddly young now, smiled. In the beloved atmosphere of prayer and adoration, Martha had gained consciousness. Loosed from the flesh, all the emotional capacity, the power of love and devotion and joy suppressed had been freed at last by the cessation of earthly cares and prejudices to express itself and claim its own. In the interval of rest below the altar, Martha had come to life, a life in which the body had no part.

Jean touched the thin hair on the temples. "You're happy, dear, aren't you?" And, afterwards, Jean often had the feeling that the little head had moved in acknowledgment.

She went back to the pew. The cover was screwed down. The young priest preceded the coffin to the door. In stole and surplice he stood beside the open grave. "Dust to dust." The earth and dry snow powdered upon the lid. It was all as Martha would have wished--calm, beautiful, alone with Jean and God.

Jean came back to the apartment. The trees on the Palisades were hidden under a burden of white. Thick white snow muffled passing footsteps. She was alone, absolutely alone in the still, snow-muffled universe.

The next day Jean went back to the office. Jerome Stuart made no conventional reference and Jean was grateful. He suggested their getting to work on a new Child Labor law and they talked over details for an hour. When he had gone back to his own office, Jean wrote a brief note telling Mary. But even Mary was not real, She, too, was off beyond the barrier that shut Jean from the rest of the world.

At the end of the week Katy returned. The routine of life settled. Trained by Martha, Katy duplicated to her best the comfort that Martha had infused. Each night as Jean closed the door behind her, she felt it claim her, this grotesque, terrible duplicate of Martha's devotion. For thirty dollars a month, Katy created a home, followed the small customs that had sprung from Martha's love.

As the days slid by, one exactly like another, Jean felt as if she were being walled forever in Katy's ordered emptiness. She left earlier in the morning and returned later at night, but it was there waiting, until the day came to center in the moment when she would have to turn the knob and enter the warm, lighted vault; sit alone at the well-prepared meal and afterwards try to read in the silence. All day she was conscious of it waiting.

Strange fears rose in Jean and she was helpless before them. Sometimes she left the office in the middle of the afternoon and went home to face and conquer the terrible emptiness, and sometimes she walked in the night until she could scarcely stand, and it was there waiting for her. Gradually in the depth of the emptiness, something formed, a shadow-shape that Jean could neither annihilate nor grasp. It was as if, in her going, Martha had left a door open behind her, a narrow crack through which Jean could neither see clearly, nor quite close. And the thought of death began to sift down through life, absorbing its reality.

Jean saw herself, her work, her smallest act, as a pebble in the conglomerate mass of time. Like a gigantic rock crusher, Time reduced all effort to powder. In the vacant hours of the night, under the gleam of the cold, gold stars, the endings of things came to obsess Jean. Everything ended, everything. No matter how deeply indented the surface, the ending washed it clean again. Separation washed out human relationships, old age washed away physical effort and interest, death washed away all. Everything ended, books, buildings, days, nights, work, rest, love, life. Everything lasted for a while and then stopped.

Hour after hour Jean sat, staring out to the river, stifled by the fact of death, that great ending containing within itself all the ends of one's smallest acts.

Where was Martha now? Was there nothing anywhere of that patient little figure that had trotted so busily through its daily rounds? Were all the habits and preferences one built up through the years, but things of flesh? Was there nothing left anywhere, in any form, of that gigantic faith? Did man impose upon himself this sentence of life? Summon himself from nowhere, to struggle for a moment, and go back to nothingness again? In his terror of the immense quietness of Death, had he invented Heaven, an escape from the inconceivable peace he had never known in life? Had he invented God because he dared not be alone beyond the grave? And if Man had not imposed his own sentence, who had? Martha's God, the Tyrant who hurled us into life, whipped us through the years, snatched us away at the end, never for one single moment, revealing His purpose. Or was it all some huge machine set going in the unthinkable beginning of Time, grinding purposelessly on to an unthinkable end?

The door would neither open wide nor close, and Jean's hair whitened above the temples.

In April, when the trees began to bud, she gave Katy an extra month's wages and dismissed her. Jean had reached another ending; the ending of the senseless battle that had once seemed so worth while. She was going back to the gray fog, to the wide still spaces, back to the warm sands and cool salt winds and the sea, that neither sought nor promised peace but had it.

When the details of her going were arranged with the committee, Jean went to tell Jerome Stuart. Now that she was leaving, this quiet man with the stooping student shoulders and the thick gray hair, always ruffled to disorder, stood out for a moment, against the background of their work together, and Jean felt, as he sat looking at her, that he was surprised and disappointed. But it did not matter. Nothing mattered.

"You are really leaving for good?"

"Yes. I never expect to come back to New York. I've turned in my resignation and it's been accepted, with a provision of their own invention that, if I change my mind within a year, I am to return." Jean smiled. "And I let it go at that."

"Then all the schemes we've talked over are not to be? No one else can take your place and carry them through."

For a moment Jean felt them dragging at her, holding her back. To what end? What would they give in return? Greater comfort, for a time, to a few people whom she would never see. A few patches put in the social fabric.

"Oh, yes, they can. Why, Charlotte Stetson's so anxious to try her hand she could scarcely be decently regretful!"

Jean tried to speak lightly but Jerome Stuart's expression stopped her.

"Please don't be insincere, Mrs. Herrick."

Jean flushed. She was destroying this man's conception of her and she had valued it.

"You are acting on a lessened impulse and it is wrong," he added quietly. "It is always wrong and so--it is always a mistake."

"Not always," Jean defended, and rose abruptly. If she stayed she might ask him of life and death and the aimless muddle of the whole. "I've thought it over carefully. I am not acting on impulse. It is a decision."

He said nothing as he followed to the door and rang the elevator bell. But as Jean stepped into the cage, he held out his hand and said with the look that had often made Jean feel that, in spite of his forty-eight years, his grown daughter, and all the years of public service behind him, he had kept unspoiled the sweet cleanness of a little child.

"Think it over again--and come back."

She shook her head. She did not want to lie again to Jerome Stuart.

The next day Jean stood in the empty apartment that had been her home for five years. With the removal of the furniture it seemed to have changed its spirit. The bare walls stared back indifferent to the pain and happiness they had encompassed. Before another twenty-four hours were gone, some one else might be looking down into the tree-lined street where, later, the fat white babies would be wheeled, and where now the trees were beginning to leaf, not as they would in the full eagerness of a few weeks hence, but in the meager, timid fashion of a chilly spring, a little leaf here and there.

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

The porter dimmed the lights for the night. In the berth above a man snored, and across the aisle an old woman breathed in gasping squeaks. Jean pulled up the blind, and, propped on her pillow, stared into the night and tried not to hear. But the breathing of the crowded car was persistent and grouped itself into strange rhythms and chords that stripped away spiritual differences and leveled the sleepers to a common physical need.

Jean remembered how she had lain so, her first night in a sleeper, ten years before, and how the hot, dark intimacy had excited her. How near she had felt to some mystery, as if she were just about to penetrate some exciting secret. Even the blackness of the prairie had quivered with it. The red and green semaphores, uncannily obedient to a hidden power, had winked their inclusion in the great adventure. The lonely little stations, specks of light in the night, had been so friendly and knowing. Now they hurt, so bravely and uselessly battling against the engulfing darkness, the thick, limitless blackness of the prairie.

Late in the evening of the fourth day, Jean stepped from the train, and Mary put her arms around her. As they crossed the Bay, they sat very near together in the bow and watched the city lights, diffused in the high fog, glow a red mist over the hills. But it was not until they stood in the small room opening from the Doctor's, that the armor Jean had raised for her own protection loosened, and then she dared not speak for fear of crying.

A gong sounded.

"We meet every night in the Assembly Hall for half an hour or so," Mary said huskily and Jean nodded. "This is going to be your room. Don't wait up for me."

When Mary was gone, Jean switched out the lights and went to the window where she had stood so often in the old days, relieved at Herrick's going, wondering at her own lack of wonder; and a year later, tingling with excitement at the offer from New York. Almost ten crowded years. And now she was back.

When the gong of dismissal sounded, Jean went into her own room and closed the door. She heard Mary come and light the light but she made no sound. After a while the light went out, but from time to time Jean heard a match strike, and she knew that the little doctor was lying there smoking. It was strange to have Mary smoking and thinking about her, as if she were "a case," but there was comfort in it too, as if she had come home and some one was watching over her. At last Jean slept.

In a few days, Mary spoke tentatively of China. But the hour of rekindled interest did not return and they did not mention it again. Jean took on a few cases and attended to them mechanically in the mornings. But no misfortune or sorrow penetrated below the surface of the mind trained to handle them. The real hours of the day were the afternoons, when Jean walked for miles alone against the clean sea wind, or through the gray fog, that now seemed to be filled with the souls of the dead; helpless things that had not been able to get through this grayness into the joy in which they had believed; or lingering souls, loath to leave the only world they had ever known.

In the evenings, Jean took some classes, and tried to mix cheerfully with the other workers, women like those whom it had once so stimulated her to feel working at the tangle with their thin, white fingers. But now they depressed her, sheltered from personal emotion behind their diffused pity for the world. Often, she left them to walk in the Latin Quarter until night emptied the streets of the dark men, forever arguing and gesticulating, and the frowsy women, terrible in their fecundity, nursing their babies from big, brown breasts. The tremendous vitality of these people rested Jean, so that watching, she herself seemed to be accomplishing.

But the days slipped into weeks and the weeks to months and she still stood aside watching. She wrote no letters to New York and received none. Sometimes she felt that she ought to write to Jerome Stuart but when she tried to think of what she would say, she could find nothing.

It was a week before Christmas, a blue, clear day between rains, that Jean sat by the sea and tried to face the coming year. What was she going to do? The waves lapped the sand, fishing smacks scudded by, and white gulls circled overhead. Jean's thoughts went round and round in an ever narrowing circle, and when she tried to slip through this closing space and grasp the coming year, Gregory, on the sand beside her, stirred. Her fingers touched his crisp, dry hair. The beach was crowded with people, but they were alone. The sand was littered with papers, and broken piers jutted into the water and the air was heavy with summer heat. But she was alive with every nerve in her.

Jean got up and began to walk back across the dunes. On and on over the shifting sand, past the straggling cottages of workmen, on through the well-kept streets of wealthy homes, dwindling again to middle-class flats, until finally, at dusk, Jean stood on the last hill looking down into Chinatown. She was tired at last, so that the weariness in her muscles corresponded to the weariness in her soul, and she had the temporary peace that comes of physical and mental accord. The odor of sandalwood and opium and strange eastern things rose to meet her as she went forward down the hill.

Stolid women pattered along, making their ridiculous purchases, haggling over a leek, a single pork chop, a wing of chicken. Calm men sat smoking long pipes in their dim shops. She might have left it the day before. The vast stability of it mocked her. It was like the ever moving, never resting sea--this human necessity to eat, to buy and sell, to move about. Hundreds of people had died since she had walked these streets with Herrick. Death had touched her own life. Thousands of walking, talking units had been taken, thousands of the little empty spaces had lasted for a second and then the moving mass had closed in again.

A woman came from a dark doorway, a rainbow bundle strapped to her back. From the bundle a small brown face with almond eyes looked calmly on the confusion of living. The mother stopped to bargain for a fried fish and Jean touched the smooth, brown cheek.

"A silly mess, isn't it, baby?"

The mother turned instantly and moved farther into the familiar safety of her own people. At the corner Jean stopped again, looking toward Portsmouth Square, the benches filled with men and boys, the familiar refuse of Babary Coast. She was still looking when a man, hurrying round the corner, brought up so suddenly that he seemed to have been thrown back upon his heels.

"I beg your pardon."

She turned quickly and looked at Franklin Herrick.

Jean spoke first. "I don't know why it is so surprising. I suppose it would have been stranger if we hadn't met."

"But I didn't know you were here."

"No, of course you didn't."

They stood looking at each other. Herrick had grown heavier, his features had coarsened. He looked untidy.

"I--I am really glad."

Jean smiled. The implication of possible regret on _her_ part was so Herricky.

"Why, no, why should I?" She answered his unspoken thought, but Herrick did not notice. The interest of the thing claimed him as nothing had done for months. He had once been married to this large, prosperous-looking person, the one woman whom he had never been able to influence, to swerve a hair from her own path. And here she was after eleven years, looking at him with the same straight look, throwing aside all sentiment, going violently to the bottom of every little question, as if it were a matter of importance.

"Could we go and have tea somewhere? Unless you are in a hurry."

"It was you who seemed to be in a hurry."

"Well, I'm not, now. Tea, then?"

They turned, and Jean knew that Herrick would go straight to the tea house where they had had their first tea, but when he ordered the same little almond cakes and preserved ginger, Jean laughed.

"What is it?"

"I knew you would do that."

"Did you? But you always did know what I would do. I think that was the trouble, I could never feel masculine and superior. I always felt like a window with you, as if you were looking straight through me."

Jean's eyes sobered. She must have hurt deeply, more often than she had known.

"That would have pleased me terribly once on a time. I should have adored making people feel like windows."

Herrick waited until the waiter had shuffled away for more hot water.

"Doesn't it make you feel that way now?" This was going to be really interesting.

"No. It wouldn't. But then one changes a lot in eleven years."

"Less two months," he added softly.

Was he actually going to set a stage? But he looked so seedy and heavy and bored, that Jean's annoyance melted in pity again.

"When you think of it as more than a tenth of a century, there seems plenty of time, doesn't there?"

A tenth of a century! It was horrible put that way; an eternity. And so like Jean. A flush crept up to Herrick's eyes and he looked away.

"_You_ have made good. Your tenth of a century has not been wasted."

And Jean saw, as if he had told her, the sordid sequence of the years to him. The knowledge of that dreary waste saddened her.

"I have worked. The East is full of opportunity."

Work, opportunity. The old worship of effort for its own sake. Herrick forced back the words that rose to his lips.

"Yes. I saw that you had done some big thing about tubercular tenements. The papers here had quite a bit about it. I think some one tried to start a movement like it."

Jean shrank. She could not talk of that to him.

"Yes," she said shortly. "I had something to do with it, but so had a lot of other people."

But she would lead. It was her way to lead and then to share the credit. It was the old, maddeningly generous way. No, she had not changed, not really, no matter what she said. Her life had gone as she had planned it. Nothing had swerved her from her ideal of work and success. Hard and cold and intrinsically selfish, she had forced life to her will. And he: a cloying affair with The Kitten, more and shorter affairs, always seeking, never finding, wasted through his own capacity to feel, dragged down by the biggest thing in him, the weakness that might have been a strength.

If Jean had cared! It would have taken such a little from her store of patience and faith in herself. She had been niggardly, hoarded it for herself.

"You have had a lot," he said at last, "everything you ever wanted."

From the tragic emptiness of his eyes Jean turned her own. Before his, the emptiness of her days stood clean and filled with happy memories.

"I _have_ had a lot."

The grotesquely carved balcony vanished into the tea-room of the upper thirties. Instead of Herrick, heavy and soft with regret, Gregory sat, strong and happy in his success, and she had wished for a moment that he had not won, and had been proud and miserable and weak with love. Tears rushed to Jean's eyes and she bit her lip to keep them back.

Herrick started. Not even to Jean could work alone bring that look. Slowly the color left his face.

"You--have found out what love is, too."

Jean nodded. Herrick covered his face hastily with his hand. He had been right then, right in his first analysis, so long ago, by the camp fires in the sandy coves. It had been in Jean always. In those silly, idealistic first weeks of their marriage, when he had been content with so little. It had been there the night he had seized and kissed her and she had pushed him away. It had been there, hidden so deep from his touch, that he had ceased to believe in its existence.

And some one else had touched it to life. He sat with his shoulders bowed, his face hidden. After a long time he said:

"You are married, then?"

His hand still hid his face. The hand, too, had coarsened and grown thick. There was black hair along the joints and the nails were ill-kept. And once Jean had liked Herrick's hands. They had held hers so surely, racing along the sands.

"No," she said quietly. "Not legally. He was married and had a child." After all, it was not much to give in atonement, this little confidence, but it was the best she had.

For a moment Herrick did not move. Then his hand came slowly down. He stared, puzzled. Amazement and finally understanding flashed across his face. Herrick leaned back in his chair and laughed aloud.

"Good Lord, Jean. _You_--an affair!"

Jean rose. Her knees were shaking and she was cold.

"Don't," she commanded in a whisper, and Herrick, half risen from his chair, sank back. Seeing nothing, Jean crossed the balcony, walked swiftly through the great banquet hall and down the stairs to the street.

Herrick sat where he was until the waiter came and asked him to move his table to make room for a group of long-coated merchants in gowns of silk. Then he paid the bill and went. It was night.

In her room at the settlement, Jean walked up and down, her hands gripped behind her in the old habit. Twice Mary came to the door and listened to the even stride, and went back to her book and tried to read. It was close on one o'clock when the door opened and Jean came in. Instinctively, Mary rose as if to meet a crisis. At the movement, Jean laid her hands on the doctor's shoulders and forced her gently down. Then, just as she had done on the night she had left The Kitten standing by the greasy table, and on the night when she had told Mary of her desire for a child of Gregory's, Jean dropped to her knees, and, sitting back on her heels, said quietly:

"Mary, I'm going back to New York just as fast as a train will take me. I'm a weak, cowardly idiot."

"Really? I don't know that I would put it quite so strongly myself."

Jean smiled. "That's not strong enough, Mary, not by half."

"Maybe not. But why this sudden realization?"

"I had tea with Franklin this afternoon."

"Well?"

"Poor Boy Blue! Poor, weak, vain, longing Begee!"

"Jean!" Mary gripped her shoulders. "What fool thing are you contemplating now? You're not going to tow That back East, are you?"

"Good Lord, no!" Jean laughed as Mary had not heard her laugh since her arrival. There was a silence so long that the doctor drifted down a dozen false paths of conjecture before Jean said:

"Mary, do you remember that vacation I took suddenly, after telling you that night--just before you left? You knew, didn't you?"

"Yes. I knew. I would have stayed, Jean, only it wouldn't have done any good."

"No. I was glad you weren't there. It made it easier, in a way. And I was glad when Pat went, too, and the children. I had only to deceive mummy, then--and keep going." Jean stopped and Mary smoked two cigarettes before she began again.

"And then mummy died and there was no need to pretend any more, no need for anything. Mary, it wasn't true that I came West for a vacation. I didn't come to see you. I came to leave it all. I let go."

There was another long pause, before Jean went on.

"I had loved a man so that his going took all the meaning out of life. And I went on for a while through a kind of inertia and because, from a baby, mummy had beaten a sense of duty into me. It was no force of my own. I had jumped into a stream, and when the current was too strong for my strength I went down, just as Franklin and Flop and The Kitten, and all those whom I used to despise, went down when their particular current was too strong for them. Why, on the night I got Gregory's letter, if I could have gone to him I would have. I would have had it all back, under any conditions, at any price. Nothing mattered, nothing in the whole world, but to feel his arms about me, to know that it had not finished. I would have gone to her, just as The Kitten came, and asked her to give him to me."

"But you didn't, Jean."

"No. Because something in me, that I hated for its clearness, saw that if it had been to him what it had been to me, he would never have written that letter. I had had nothing, Mary, or such a little part of what I had believed I had."

Jean shivered. Mary's hand moved to comfort, but did not.

"And then, this afternoon, when Franklin said I had had everything, and I saw him sitting there heavier and coarsened and so empty--Mary, he's so tragically empty--it came to me suddenly that I had had a lot. I have always had friendship, Pat and you, and unshakeable love like mummy's, and I had those wonderful months with Gregory, and not even the ending of it can really take them away, and I wanted to give Franklin something, so I told him that I had loved a married man and that we had never been legally married."

A little smile twitched the corners of Jean's lips.

"And he leaned back in his chair and laughed and said: 'Good Lord, Jean--_you_--an affair!' and I have been listening to that laugh and hearing that '_you_--an affair?' ever since. And in a way, he is right."

"Jean!"

"Yes, he is. You see, I had never thought of it like that, stripped of all the personal element, just bare and stark as it would sound in a court of law. It was _me_, and so it was different. What is an affair, technically? It's a love, without legal bonds, that breaks up or dies of its own accord. Never mind what it is to the parties concerned, that's what it is to the world. That's what my love for Gregory is to the world, to Franklin; what his and The Kitten's and Flop's and The Tiger's was to me."

"Jean, you're crazy. Isn't the spirit anything?"

"Everything. But I am trying to make it clear what it was to Franklin----"

"Of course it would be that to him."

"And what he made me see. How do I know the measure of the force that drove him to The Kitten? We have no measure but our own needs. Fifteen years ago, would I have thought it possible, when the days wouldn't pass fast enough to get me into life and work, that a day would come when success, achievement, the chosen work of years, would all shrivel to nothing because one certain man had gone out of them? Three years ago, would I have believed that Gregory could fill his days without me, could have gone on without my sympathy and love and understanding? That he could have nothing deeper in his life than that chattering doll? Mary, there's only one thing that I am sure of, and that is that we don't know a single thing about any one else, or ourselves, either."

Jean rose and stood looking down at Mary.

"And so you are going back?"

"Yes. I am going back. I am not going to drift, here, beside the sea and hills, which are my Kitten, my succession of sordid loves, my easiest way. I am going back. It won't be easy. I know that. There will be times--Mary, you don't know what it means to die inside, to see and never to feel, not even anger, to have nothing sharper than memory."

"And you don't know, Jean," Mary spoke slowly and rose from her chair as if she had grown very tired, "what it means to have been emotionally comfortable all your life. Never to have gone down nor up. Never to have died nor been alive. To have grown old in comfort. A kind of paradox, isn't it, to have been always so comfortable that sometimes it hurts."

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

It was late in the afternoon of a cold, clear day two weeks later that Jean stood outside the Grand Central Station and looked at the moving streams of strangers, all touched to faint friendliness by the accident of being in the same city, on the same street, at the same hour as herself. She felt as if she knew them all, but had slipped back noiselessly without warning among them, and as yet they had not seen her.

Jean was smiling to herself, when one of the moving units escaped the stream, and came to a halt beside her.

"Well, Jean Herrick, of all people! I thought you were in California."

Jean turned to encounter the sharp face and mouse-bright eyes of Catherine Lee, whom she had neither seen nor thought of for years, although, during the first winter in New York, Catherine had been the center of a group that met every Sunday evening for tea, usually at Jean's.

"I _was_!"

"When did you get back?"

"About ten minutes ago, and I feel as if I had been dropped from a parachute. I was just debating the Y. W. C. A. or the Martha Washington. I loathe hotels----"

"I say, do you mean you have no plans at all? Because we can put you up at our place if you care to--ten rooms down on Grove Street, a garden the size of a handkerchief, a fountain the size of a lemonade straw, four, free, feminine souls, and an empty attic. Yes?"

"It sounds like a Demonstration. Till I get my bearings, and thank you a thousand times."

"Come on. We'll walk, unless you're tired."

"Of sitting still for a week!"

They swung away, Jean shortening her step to the quick patter of Catherine's. As they went, Catherine told of her work and Jean listened enough to make out that Catherine had built herself a firm place in this city she had once hated: that any woman with brains and grit could force New York to recognize her and that managing concerts and readings paid "like the devil" if you got in right.

The patter of the crisp voice went on until, as they turned into Grove Street, Catherine broke off so sharply, that Jean feared her inattention had been discovered, and was just about to apologize when she caught a flush on Catherine's dry, brown cheeks, and followed her eyes to the heavy-set figure of a man, standing on the curb, throwing pennies into the slush, while a horde of street urchins shouted and fought for them. The man's clumsy body was convulsed with laughter, and he made false motions of throwing, with ungainly sweeps of his arms.

Catherine hurried forward and Jean felt that she wanted to reach the man and put an end to the spectacle. But as they came to the red brick house, with white window facings and green window boxes, the man turned and crossed to them.

"Jean, let me present Philip Fletcher, Nan Bonham's cousin and the nearest thing we possess to a male inmate. Philip, Mrs. Herrick of the Women's Civic Leagues."

Philip Fletcher ripped off his hat with absurd exaggeration and made a low bow. Now that she looked at him closely, Jean saw that the man's features were well cut, his eyes were clear, blue and kind, a trifle too far apart, and that his mouth was weak. Jean's first impression that he might not be quite normal mentally, vanished. He was evidently a simple soul, without dignity, but of a vanity that demanded attention even at his own expense.

He followed them in, and as Catherine led the way up to the attic, Jean heard him go on laughing down the hall and into a room at the end. She was sure that he had often thrown pennies before and would often do it again, and be overwhelmingly amused each time.

"Well, how do you like it?"

The attic ran the whole length of the house and had a big open fireplace at one end. The original windows had been replaced in the front by leaded glass doors, opening on a small balcony. The walls were burlapped and the furniture upholstered in gay chintz. It was a woman's room but it reminded Jean in a way of Flop's, as it might have been if The Bunch had never entered it.

"It's glorious!"

"I'll have a fire lighted right away and the bath's across the hall. There's sure to be plenty of hot water, because the old souse that Philip's wished on us for the last furnace man, nearly explodes the furnace every day." She was at the door, when she turned and added, "Phil's in one of his annoying moods to-night. Don't take it too seriously."

Jean laughed and promised that she would make allowances. But she fancied that Catherine flushed again at this, and wondered why _she_ took him so seriously.

An hour later, refreshed by her bath, Jean heard the dinner-bell and went down with a pleasant sense of curiosity to meet the "four, free, feminine souls." They were seated when she entered and Catherine made the introductions, by pointing each out with her forefinger from the head of the table.

"Beth Marshall, that healthy blonde who looks as if she did Swedish exercise every morning, private secretary on Wall Street. That dark, artistic being next, Gerte Forsythe, magazine writer, and furnishes our emotion. Nan Bonham, deceives the world with her white hair, has the soul of a baby and runs the Presbyterian Relief in Brooklyn. Girls, Jean Herrick, head of the Women's Civic Leagues. It's stew, again."

"And, verily, I say unto you, the stew shall follow the roast, and the hash the stew, until the third and fourth generation of them whose parents come from New England."

"Shut up, Phil. Nobody invited you to come to-night, anyhow." Nevertheless Nan's blue eyes twinkled and Jean knew that she found her cousin's humor amusing.

As Jean spread her napkin, she felt Philip Fletcher sizing her up and she knew that Catherine was watching. She tried to think of something flippant that would show she could enter the mood, but before she could think of anything, more to reassure Catherine than from any desire of Philip Fletcher's approval, Gerte claimed his attention, and Catherine, in evident relief, was talking easily again of her own work, as she had during their walk from the station.

Nan joined with Gerte and Philip. Beth ate in placid silence. With this grouping of interests the meal continued, until coffee, which was served in a small basement room, cozily furnished, before an open fire.

Immediately after the coffee, all but Catherine went their way. No one said good-night, or made any mention of seeing Jean again, although Jean was sure that they had liked her. Their "freedom" had hardened to a ritual of incivility. If she stayed for a week or a month, she would see these women, tired, gay, bored, happy, and they would see her in these many moods too. They would call each other by their first names. But, if she left to-night they would probably never think of her again, nor she of them.

Jean stared into the fire, and a little of the feeling that she had had long ago on Flop's balcony, of there being so many people in the world with the threads of their lives all crossing, came back. She thought how strange it was that a few hours ago she had known nothing of these women or Grove Street, and now she was there, and Catherine was explaining the community plan on which the house worked and, finally, asking her if she wanted to come in.

"Of course we'll take a vote on you, it's part of the charter, but it's only a form." She hesitated and added, almost shyly, "I think you would be comfortable and we would really like to have you."

But as Jean began to thank her, Catherine's manner changed.

"Matter of business and--general comfort," she said in her short, snappy way. "Such a lot of people wouldn't fit."

"Then I'm a candidate for the vacancy?"

"We'll notify you formally but I guess, if you want to, you can be one of The Theses?"

"The Theses?"

"As against the rest of the world, The Theses. Gerte's distinction."

Jean laughed remembering the Tiger, not so unlike the thin, dark Gerte, and wondered why people who dabbled in the arts needed these meaningless distinctions between themselves and others.

But later, as she lay on the couch drawn close to the open window in the attic, and looked out across the buildings, rising in the outline of a fever chart as far as she could see, Jean was glad that she had met Catherine and that she was going to live here with them. And although she knew that, at any previous period of her life, it would have been impossible to her, now, contrasted with the lonely nights staring out to the river after Martha's death, the paid hominess of Katy's effort, the smoothly running indifference of these women would be pleasant. She was beginning a new life, in a new manner. And as she dropped to sleep, Jean had a hazy notion of owing something to Franklin Herrick.

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

The next day Jean went back to work. Charlotte Stetson, who had taken her place, tried to evince genuine pleasure but could not quite convey it. Jean felt that she had been suitably mourned for as dead, and that this sudden and unexpected resurrection was an intrusion in questionable taste. So it was with mingled amusement and curiosity that, about eleven o'clock, Jean knocked on Jerome Stuart's door, and, at his short "Come in," entered.

"Well--I'll be----" he had risen, but dropped back into his chair with an amended "Thank God."

Jean laughed, "Now I _do_ feel like a returned corpse. I suppose I ought to have written but it never occurred to me."

"I'm glad you didn't. Nothing exciting has happened for weeks, and I always did like a surprise."

"I'm glad you take it that way. Charlotte Stetson made me feel that I ought to creep back into my tomb. She----"

"Oh, to----" Jerome Stuart broke off, realizing that he was about to say aloud what he had so often said in the last eight months, "To the devil with Miss Stetson," and added clumsily, "To be quite honest, you know, it was only a kind of surface surprise. I've always known you would come back."

There was no conceit of assurance in the tone. This quiet man who did things quietly had learned. Perhaps he, too, had run away from life once and come back.

"Thank you," Jean said, following her own train of thought, and Jerome Stuart seemed to understand. There was a short pause and then he said, smiling:

"Well?"

"Well, begin at the beginning. What has been going on in the world?"

"How much do you know? I suppose you know about the Sweat Shop law?"

"No. Did it go over? I am glad. No, really I don't know a thing that's been going on."

Jerome Stuart handed her a bunch of clippings, but Jean could not focus her attention on them, because she felt that the man before her was studying her quietly. He might have known that she could return because he knew that one didn't quit unless one were a coward clear through. But the details puzzled him.

She handed back the clippings. "Great. After all California _is_ a long way off and they have their own problems out there."

"Of course. What are they doing?" Jerome accepted the implication, as Jean intended, that she had been working. She began to sketch the Hill House, what they were trying to do, and Mary. But the doctor bulked larger than any of it, and Jerome knew that this woman meant much to Jean. He had never thought of Jean with the emotional feminine associations of most women, with the "best friends" his daughter Alice had had since babyhood, and this new point of view held him to the exclusion of any interest in the Hill House or its accomplishments. It was a new background against which this large, unemotional person moved in human intimacies. So that, when a chance remark of Jean's introduced some young college girls who were working with Dr. Mary, Jerome found himself talking of Alice, her approaching marriage, her amusing frankness about life, the mixture of old-fashioned love and modern feminism that Alice called "seeing life clearly and seeing it whole."

It was after one, when the stenographer knocked on the door for her afternoon batch of letters, and recalled to Jerome that he had an appointment at two-thirty and had not yet been to lunch, He gave the girl her work and turned to Jean.

"I haven't even begun on our latest and I have an appointment at half- past two. Couldn't we have lunch somewhere? I want to tell you about Mike Flannery. He's the alderman who's going to give us the most trouble."

The suggestion fitted in with the intimacy of their long talk, so that Jean did not realize she was doing anything unusual, until Jerome drew out her chair in a corner of an attractive tea-room. Then all the teas and luncheons she had had with Gregory in just such rooms marshaled before her, and Jean wished she had not come. In time it would be easy, but now it was difficult to keep her attention fixed, and the luncheon began in a restraint that Jerome felt, but whose origin puzzled him. It was not until the meal was over that, in the relief of its ending, Jean's mood lightened to its earlier cheerfulness.

"We'll give Mike Flannery a run for his money and the surprise of his life," she said, as the waitress departed with the bill.

"I suppose you'll want a few days' grace to get rested and set up the lares and penates."

"There's not a penate to set up. I am sharing a house with four other women and all the lares are in place. I'm with Catherine Lee and Nan Bonham, Brooklyn Relief."

"Grove Street!"

"Yes. Do you know them?"

Jerome laughed until Jean demanded:

"Why? Are we very ridiculous?"

"I beg your pardon. No, of course not. But Grove Street is the skeleton in my family closet. You give teas during the winter."

"Do we?"

"Yes, indeed, large teas where celebrities and semi-celebrities are handed about with the cake. Alice adores them, drags Sidney to almost every one, 'to keep his social viewpoint broad,' and nags me to death to go too."

"I take it that you don't often oblige."

"Not if I can escape, although, as teas, they are the best of their kind. Catherine Lee's a hustler and she does manage to root out talent. She gets her business tied up with her social life and so, when she wants anything, she can generally put her finger on some frequenter of the teas who can get it for her."

Jean laughed, and together they went out into the street.

"To-morrow then? And Mike Flannery."

"To-morrow."

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

The machinery of the house on Grove Street moved smoothly and Jean was more physically comfortable than she had been at any time since Martha's death. And although, at first, she sensed very keenly in the lives of these women the undercurrent of loneliness that had drawn them together, and the accidental nature of their intimacy, in time, she accepted it without analysis. It would have been tragic if they had been conscious of it, but Jean was sure that Catherine alone ever felt a quality of chill in this perfect freedom of which they were so proud, and without definitely wording it, felt, in this perfection of adjustment, the harmony of indifference.

Philip came often to dinner, and soon Jean accepted his boisterous manner. It so fitted the man's nature that it was perfect in its way, like the capers of a puppy. It was only when Philip, in his unconsciousness of the fitness of things, capered before others, as he had on the night of her arrival, that one objected to his clambering over strangers. Jean saw nothing humorous in Philip's performances, but when she could, pretended an amusement that delighted Nan. Still, she always felt that in these moments Catherine was watching and was never quite deceived. Nor was she sure that her kindly tolerance of his horseplay deceived Philip. Often, before a more than usually outrageous effort, Philip seemed to single her out with a defiant glance as if to say, "There goes your stupid pretense of dignity. It isn't worth keeping." He was always talking about the "big, simple realities" and urging marriage and babies, but he knew no women outside the household and seemed quite content. He laughed at Catherine's affection for Tony, a musical protégé of recent discovery, thereby annoying Jean greatly, until she discovered him making Tony promise not to tell who had given him the new suit. He did not want Tony to tell, but he would have liked the house to find out. He often did things like this and then resented it when no one knew. He annoyed Jean without interesting her, but at the end of a month she found she had summed him up more definitely than any other member of the house--he had big impulses, small thoughts and no will at all. After Jean had reached this decision her manner changed toward him. She treated him with greater patience and at times with respect.

In the evenings, Jean had many appointments to organize working women's associations or speak at meetings. The idea of a national Congress of women, which after attaining the dimensions of a group of civic leagues, had lain dormant in the bitter loneliness of Jean's personal life, woke again. A certain quality of excitement and vigor was gone from Jean's conception of it but she accepted the change. She knew that no plan would ever have the same keenness as in the days before Gregory's going. Something had gone out of her then, and now all purpose was calm and subdued, like the staid friendships of middle life against the idealization of youth. She never willingly looked back to Gregory's letter. But she no longer viewed it as a terrible pit into which her life had dropped. It was a wall dividing the past from the present; turning her back upon it Jean faced the future. And the surest measure she had of her reward was the feeling that came again into the earth and sky and hills. Now, on the out-of-town trips she had sometimes to take, she found the old, living, personal spirit in the earth come back. It was as if, in the days of her loving, the earth had withdrawn its unneeded comfort. Now, the old, old earth, kind and understanding, came back into its own.

On Sundays, Jean took long walks, most often alone, sometimes with Nan when she could not refuse. But at forty-two, freed from dependent relatives for the first time in her life, Nan had an excited childish exuberance about her that rather bored Jean. She often wanted to urge Nan to snatch at life before it was too late, grasp some reality besides her love and admiration for the clumsy, capering Philip. But when she thought about it seriously, she did not know what it was she would urge Nan to snatch. The knowledge and disillusion of experience, where now Nan had curiosity and, perhaps, hope?

Catherine, Jean rarely saw except at meals, and Beth's engagements with men, mostly younger than herself, kept her away a great deal. But, on the few evenings that Jean was home, it came to be the custom for Gerte to drop in to the attic. And no matter what the subject, Gerte soon led it to her own work, burbling on about her plots, clothing the meager incidents in long words. Jean often wondered why Gerte wrote or how she sold what she did, she had so little insight, no imagination, and was so empty of any deep experience of her own. At thirty-two, Gerte was pitifully curious about love and sex and marriage, and Jean was sure that she thought almost constantly about these things. She pitied Gerte but never quite liked her.

Twice Jean had dinner at the old Stuart farmhouse on Staten Island, and these evenings stood out from all other evenings in a warm glow. She and Jerome united to tease Alice, so sure of herself and so untried, but she was almost as glad as Jerome of the girl's indestructible optimism. Sometimes she and Jerome referred to it afterwards in the office, and this happy comradeship between the quiet man and the big, blonde girl, seemed to Jean one of the most beautiful things she had ever seen. It made her feel nearer to Jerome Stuart than the successful accomplishment of any plan and softened the resentment toward her own bleak girlhood. She often wondered how Jerome would stand the loneliness of Alice's marriage and sometimes, for a moment, Alice's going so eagerly out to the happiness Jerome's loving care had made possible, seemed cruelly selfish, until Jean thought of Martha and smiled. How imperceptibly one's viewpoint glided from youth to age, and how alike was all youth and how alike all age. In middle life the wandering paths of youth met, and when one reached that spot, one picked up the waiting burden of loneliness and understanding and staggered away with it, groaning or smiling according to one's pride. She rather thought that Jerome would smile.

Early in April she and Jerome began to plan a summer campaign against the cheap dance-halls and mediocre concerts on the piers that furnished the principal recreation of the poor in summer. Sometimes Jerome got quite violent about it.

"There's no reason there shouldn't be something worth while and we'll give it to them."

"We will that--whether they want it or not."

Jerome laughed. "When you take that tone you make me think of Alice planning Sidney's future. I always feel so heavy and masculine and unnecessary. You make me feel as if my greatest privilege will be to trail along behind such energy."

"And when you take that note, you make me feel flippant and feminine and superficial."

"Not a bit of it. You just feel Machiavellian and subtle. I know."

"Solomon! Well, no matter what your feelings are, you're not going to shift any responsibility because of them."

"I don't want to. I'm perfectly willing, eager even, to pilot the way from pier to pier, dance-hall to dance-hall. I may even make small, tentative suggestions, which will tickle me to death to have considered." Jerome Stuart's eyes twinkled in a way that had once reminded Jean of Gregory, and had hurt. Now she liked it.

The teas, dreaded by Jerome, Jean easily escaped. No one took offense at her preference nor made a personal matter of it. If there was no consideration of each other in this scheme of freedom, neither was there any claim. It was not until late in April that Catherine put the matter of the last tea as a personal request.

"It's the yearly Round-up," she explained, "and is really a matter of business. This year it's specially important to me, I have several protégées I want to launch and now I've got the woman who can do it. Mrs. J. William Dalton----"

"Who!"

"Exactly, if she makes you feel like that. There could not be two. Besides, I hear that hers used to be The Poor. Now it's Art, but when she gets them both combined, she just runs amuck. That's what I intend her to do. Tony Rimaldi is fourteen, the oldest of ten in a Mott Street tenement, and if you had come to the other teas you would know that Tony is a genius. He plays the violin so that even I get woozly inside, and Philip has been known to cry. Peter Poloff's nineteen, and although he will never equal Tony, he has enough of the real thing to make him a worth-while pianist, and he's never had a chance. Dalton's going to be the motif of this round-up and afterwards she's going to sponsor a concert for my prodigies and, _zip_, their future's settled! But every one of you has got to help. Dalton simply can't function without a back-drop, and we're going to give her one."

"Willingly, but what can I do?"

"Come. She hasn't forgotten her sociological days yet and, besides, the publicity you and Stuart are creating about legalizing illegitimate children hasn't escaped her. He has to come too. We'll give her the whole shooting match, sociology, art, pedagogy, science, society, _anything_ we can get our fingers on. You will, won't you?"

"Certainly."

"And that Stuart hermit? His daughter can't persuade him, but perhaps you can."

Jean laughed. "What Alice can't do with her father hasn't much hope for any one else. But I'll try."

And for the next ten days Jean tried to think of some way to trap Jerome into promising. But Jean's social tact was most unsubtle and she could think of nothing but a point-blank request. To her relief, Jerome brought up the subject himself. It was only a few days before the tea, when he said, with a mischievous grin:

"Well, how's the Round-up coming on?"

"Famously. The branding irons are heating. We've got you all corralled."

"Not a loophole in the stockade. I know that."

"Not a wire loose. Don't try to find one."

"I haven't the least intention. I wouldn't miss it for the world."

"What!"

"To tell you the truth, it's no longer the distinction it was to have no opinion on Tony's genius. You haven't heard him either, have you?"

Jean leaned back in her chair and they laughed together in the way that had come to make them both feel that somehow they had outwitted the world together.

"And I was commissioned to gag and bind you and drag you there! I feel cheated. I must do something. How about that person with the theory on The Concentration of the Point of Interest, who did those weird wall paintings for the Educational Exhibit? And that psycho-analyst? I don't think Dalton's got to psycho-analysis yet and it would tickle her to death. Could you get them?"

"Perhaps. All right. I promise. Only you must promise that Dalton won't get at them too heavily. I like the men, both of them, and I don't want to spend the rest of my life paying up the obligation of this tea."

"I'll rescue them personally, if I see them in danger. I can't promise more."

"That will do. Only don't neglect me in your kind offices. I still labor under the delusion, in spite of Alice, that the main interest of a tea is the food."

"Don't worry. I'll watch over you and your digestion, too; the refreshments are going to be a wonder."

"On those conditions I expect to enjoy myself." And with the Gregory-grin Jerome went back to his own office.

But on the following Sunday, when Jean entered the already crowded rooms, she saw only Alice and Sidney in the group gathered about Tony. Jerome was nowhere in sight. Jean had deliberately waited until she had heard Tony tuning up, so that now, as the room rustled to expectant silence, she slipped into the shadow of the heavy curtains drawn to assist the candle-light and took in the scene with quiet amusement. They all looked so different somehow: Gerte in a slithery green thing that would have delighted The Tiger; Nan like a lovely duchess in palest lavender and Catherine in severe and expensive black. Jean recalled Mary's "humans functioning socially" and she felt as if she were watching some distinct psychological process.

"Fine show, isn't it?" Philip stepped from the deeper shadow of the curtains unexpectedly, but the understanding in his eyes merged so with Jean's own thoughts that his being there did not surprise.

"Really, clothes are ridiculous," she whispered back, feeling a comradely nearness to him in this identity of impression. "Perfectly harmless material cut and slashed into the wildest shapes. Take any one of those gowns and look at it long enough and it gets screamingly funny. Look." In her own interest and Philip's understanding, Jean laid a hand on his arm, turning him slightly toward a friend of Gerte's, a red-haired, slender girl in a tunic embroidered in green and gold dragons, fastened with cords and blobs of coral beads. "Now, why is that rig necessary because she sculps, and what, in Heaven's name, did it start out in life to be?"

Philip looked as Jean directed, but his eyes moved independently, for the rest of his body was concentrating at the point where Jean's fingers rested lightly on his arm.

"Li Hung Chang's combing jacket," he offered after a moment, when Jean had removed her hand. Jean laughed and was just going to ask him what he thought of some one else, when Tony began to play.

Jean still stood close to Philip, almost touching him, but after a few bars she forgot him, the crowded rooms, the too strong fragrance of expensive flowers. She forgot that she did not really like Tony, petted and spoiled by over-attention. She did not see the look of satisfied accomplishment on Catherine's face, nor Felix Arhn scowling his deepest foreign scowl of approval; nor Mrs. Dalton sitting quietly, her jeweled hands in her lap. She did not even hear the music distinctly. It created about her a medium into which she dissolved in feeling; and when her brain registered, it was not notes or present impressions, but memories of the first happy days with Herrick, and deep moments of love with Gregory. Her face softened, so that Philip, stealing glances, felt his throat tighten, and his eyes were hot and moist. He wanted the music to go on forever, to keep Jean close with that look on her face. And he ached for it to stop, before his hands should reach to her. When it stopped, Jean would be again the hard, clear-headed woman who scorned him and tried so hard sometimes not to show it. He had hated her often for her conceited assumption of superiority, but he knew now that he could never hate her again. That slightly quivering mouth had taken his weapons from him.

The music ended. Philip turned to Jean, but she was acknowledging the efforts of a tall man with gray hair and smiling eyes to negotiate the buzzing groups and reach her. In another instant Jean was introducing him.

"Mr. Fletcher, let me present Jerome Stuart."

As they shook hands, Philip felt Jerome size him up and dismiss him. For a few moments Philip stood where he was and then, unnoticed either by Jean or Jerome, moved away.

Tony played twice more and when he laid aside his violin, Jean and Jerome looked quietly at each other.

"It makes me feel like two cents," Jerome whispered and Jean nodded.

"It's usually the way, isn't it?"

"Nearly always, I haven't enough conceit left even to tease Alice. I shall confess."

"Come and do it now. I should like to hear you----"

But, before they could reach Alice, Mrs. Dalton spied Jean and billowed down upon her. In vain Jean tried to insert Jerome between them, dragging in every public effort in which he had been concerned for the last year. Mrs. Dalton heard none of it. Catherine was right. She had not forgotten her sociological days.

"It had such definite results," she cascaded, quite lost in this renewal of acquaintance with the head of the Women's Civic Leagues. "Such definite, concrete results, don't you know. While this other--heredity is such a factor, don't you think? One never knows what strange strain will crop out. Genius has so many strands intermingled. Now, take our own little Tony. _What_ are we going to do about that impossible family of his? We _must_ rescue him. We simply can't let him smother there in those hideous rooms."

"They are pretty impossible," Jean conceded with a frown. "But it's the very best possible thing for him at present. How long it will be, I don't know, and in the end, of course, he will go. He would, even if no one did anything for him. But now, he is just one quivering plate for impressions and, although he may never realize it himself, it will mean a lot--the hot, crowded rooms, the crying babies, the fierce fight for life and the inherent joyousness of his people that nothing can quite kill. Out of this jumble Tony ought to draw into himself something that nothing else could give. He comes from the People and he ought to give his gift back to them."

"Oh," Mrs. Dalton gasped, but Jean went on impatiently: "There's such a lot of talk these days about The People and their Power and most of us don't know what we mean by it. We hear such a lot about the Will of the People, and the Spirit of the People, and the Literature and Soul of the People, and we are beginning to hear about Music of the People. But here in America it seems to mean negro melodies or Indian lyrics, the plaints of a dying race. Why shouldn't there be modern, industrial music, not the blaring of factory whistles, but the spirit of industrialism, the life of the immigrants, the economic fight, the whole struggle of this great Melting Pot--sound etchings, like Pennel's skyscrapers and bridges. Tony ought to be able to do it. He has the genius, the heritage and the environment."

"Oh, my dear Mrs. Herrick, you must come and talk to the Lost Art. You put it all so vividly, but then you always did. Do you remember, in the old days----"

"Pardon me," Jean interposed hastily, "but Miss Lee is signaling me," and, feeling that she was not playing fair, Jean escaped. A few moments later she looked back and saw Jerome, whom Mrs. Dalton had at last connected with the Sweat Shop law, being drowned under a similar cataract, to the great amusement of Alice, who stood by, making not the slightest effort to save him.

It was Catherine who released him at last. The next moment, Jean was barricaded between two tea trays and Jerome was looking at her in real reproof.

"Well, have you any decent excuse? Is that the way you keep a promise?"

"Promise? Did I make a promise?"

"You certainly did. You let me suppose that I was not to be thrown to the lions without a saving effort on your part. And then you went and threw me yourself."

"But she would have gotten you in a little while, anyhow."

"You can't prove it. I've dodged that kind for many years now, long before you knew what a Civic League was."

"I thought this was your first tea," Jean parried.

"All the more reason for seeing that I enjoyed it. I may come to others."

"You know you're safe on that score. This is the last."

"Well, you've got to atone, in some way, for that performance. Will you come to supper?"

"Supper!"

Jerome smiled. "I don't care if you've eaten a whole cake. I hope you have. Your punishment will be no worse than mine. I promised Alice that I would trot along with her and Sidney to a little joint they always go to after these functions. How much longer will this last? The music is over, isn't it?"

"It is. But this may dribble along till almost eight and there are always a few to stay and eat the scraps. I believe Catherine expects you and Alice and Sidney to be among the chosen few."

"Don't tell Alice; I rather fancy the little joint." Jerome's raised brows indicated Mrs. Dalton, and Jean nodded.

"How soon can you slip away? In ten minutes?"

"I'll try. Go over and keep Dalton anchored where she is and I'll start my escape."

Jerome obeyed and Jean began to make her way out, stopping only when she was forced to. Once she was halted close to where Philip Fletcher stood, apart, silent, his mouth drawn downward like a hurt child's. As Jean passed close, he moved toward her, but some one else claimed her attention, and Philip went on into the hall. He watched for Jean but she went upstairs by a back way, and when she came down he saw she was ready to go out.

"Will you tell Catherine that I'm going out to supper? I tried to get at her but she is too busy."

"If I see her," Philip replied and knew that Jean, already joined by Jerome Stuart and Alice and Sidney, did not hear. They left the house together and Philip stood staring at the door Jean had closed so quietly, like a child slipping away on an adventure. Across the threshold of the living-room, Catherine caught the look on Philip's face, broke off a sentence in the middle, then grasped the thread almost instantly, and went on.

When the household and the Chosen Few sat down to the scraps, there was much speculation on Gerte's part as to what had become of Philip. But Catherine said nothing.

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

Philip did not come for a week. Every day, after the first three, Nan rang up the office, but either Philip had just left or had not yet come. Every night Gerte wondered why, until Catherine finally advised her to write if she was so anxious. And then, on the second Wednesday, Philip appeared. He came late, in his most boisterous mood. Gerte fussed over him, touched him, patted his shoulder, insisted that they had been worried to death about him. Even Beth showed a slight sense of restored comfort, as if some special piece of furniture to which she had grown accustomed had been replaced. Nan was almost as exuberant as Philip. Catherine alone refused to confess any anxiety or relief.

Jean fancied that Catherine's attitude interested Philip, and that in some way he had changed. His hilarity was still diffused to include them all, but when he spoke to Jean directly, he seemed to clear a little space of this boisterous litter, to enter with her an interval of reality. Jean was too busy, however, with her own work and helping Catherine with the coming concert to give it much attention.

The concert was to be on Friday and on Monday Jean had her secretary send out a list of complimentary tickets. Jerome came in while Jean was dictating names, waited until she had finished, and, when the girl had gone, said:

"Well?"

"Well?"

"I didn't hear mine; don't I get a ticket?"

"Do you want to go?"

Jerome smiled. "You can't make me mad that way, not a scrap. You're in league with Alice. I can see that, but you can't get a rise out of me that way. I'm going to the concert because----"

"Never mind. Don't bother to invent a reason. You're going because you want to."

"Oh, feminine intuition, deep, unfathomable and always right! Exactly. I'm going because I want to. Do you know a better reason?"

"None. What did Alice say?"

"She doesn't know yet. I can't reform all at once. I'm going to appear and astonish her."

Jean took a ticket and handed it to him.

"Where is it?"

"Between Alice and myself."

Jerome fingered the ticket as if he were about to say something, didn't, and slipped it into his pocket.

"But please don't forget that some one has to be responsible for me. With Tony I guess I shall be safe, but with that Poloff person there is danger. I _never_ know when the end of one of those classical selections has arrived and I may disgrace you by clapping at the wrong place."

"Never fear. I'll see that no harm comes nigh thee."

"See to it better than you did at the tea," Jerome shot back from the doorway as he left.

On Friday, Jean did not go to the office at all. Gerte had left some alterations on her dress until the last moment, and all afternoon an excitable French seamstress buzzed about the house like a gnat, getting in every one's way, calling incessantly on Le Bon Dieu for needles of the right size, her thimble, for Madamoiselle. Catherine, maddeningly calm in any confusion caused by others, went quietly about, saying bitter, sarcastic things in a gentle voice, and only the realization that this evening was something of a trial for Catherine prevented them from retaliating in kind.

Not until the pickup supper was over, and the French gnat gone, did peace descend. Then, stretched on the couch before the open window of her attic, Jean looked up into the soft spring dusk and let its peace wrap her. The little stars still twinkled with some of the crisp, business-like twinkle of winter, but spring had already come. Down in the narrow streets it was warm. Soon summer would be there. In a short while, a few weeks at most, the house would be empty and still as it was now. The others would be gone on their summer vacations. Jean felt that she would like the house, alone in the silence.

There was barely time to dress when Jean at last jumped up and turned on the light. It was three years since Jean had worn an evening dress and that had been a very simple affair compared to this. Nan had insisted on the lowest possible neck and not the vestige of a sleeve. As Jean hurried into the filmy chiffon, the intricacies of its hooking amused her.

"I feel exactly as if I were a puzzle putting myself together."

She was preening anxiously before the glass, making sure that she had solved the puzzle correctly, when, without waiting for an answer to her knock, Catherine hurried in.

"Just this one hook, please. I simply can't manage it and Gerte--why----"

Catherine stopped and took Jean in from top to toe and back.

"Jean Herrick, _are_ you going to wear your hair like that?"

"Why, what's the matter with it?"

"It's the way you talked to that labor crowd last Monday."

"Surely. I always do it that way."

"It's impossible with that gown. Nine-tenths of you looks like the real thing and the other tenth----"

"You've got it twisted. One-tenth looks like me and the other nine-tenths are somebody else. I feel--like an idiot--in this thing."

"You come darn near looking like it with your hair that way. Fluff it up some."

"Oh, come on, Catherine, and get hooked. I don't know how to fluff it and wouldn't if I did. What difference does it make, anyhow?"

Catherine looked at her queerly. "None--I guess."

Jean finished the hooking. "There, you're gowned enough for the whole bunch." Catherine's dress was very simple and apparently made no effort to be anything but a covering. In reality it was a frame and shadow box, that softened the sharpness of Catherine's face to piquancy, made her thirty instead of forty, mischievous instead of caustic.

"You're ready, then?" Catherine spoke as if she were giving Jean a last chance to redeem the hair, drawn back in the low, tight knot.

"Been ready for hours and mapped out a whole summer waiting."

Catherine, standing near the switch, turned off the light.

"Do you mean that, too, about not going out of town all summer?"

"Yes, except, perhaps, for week-ends."

Catherine did not answer, but Jean had the feeling of something moving between them in the darkness. Then Catherine passed into the hall.

"Come on. There's Philip with the taxi."

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

The others had already arrived when Catherine, Jean and Philip took the three vacant seats on the center aisle. From her box, Mrs. Dalton, resplendent in black lace and diamonds, recognized the arrivals and waved graciously.

"Thinks she's slumming, I suppose. We're a cross between Mott Street and Society. What do you suppose she'd do if I fingered my nose at her?"

"I haven't the least idea. Why don't you try and find out." Since the tea, Jean often considered Philip's foolish suggestions amiably.

But before he could say anything more, Alice leaned across the vacant seat.

"Who on earth is this one for? We've been guessing for the last five minutes."

"Why waste so much energy? Whoever it is will probably be here in another five and then----"

Standing in the aisle, Jerome included the entire row in a welcoming nod, took the vacant seat and looked inquiringly at Alice.

"Any objections, kiddie?"

"Daddy Stuart, you are the most annoying male thing in captivity."

"Now, Alice, if you will think back, slowly, carefully and logically--a most difficult performance for you, I own, you will remember that I never actually said I would not come."

"You nice old fake--I don't care why you came as long as you're here. Everything's going to be wonderful to-night, I feel it in my bones."

"Perhaps it will be beyond me altogether."

"Never mind. I'll take care of you. Don't applaud on your own initiative and stop the moment I do."

"Oh, you're not going to be burdened with the responsibility. I've arranged to be tutored through this already."

"You have, have you? Well! So _you_ were in the plot, too." Alice leaned to Jean again.

"Not exactly. I----"

"You're both as bad, one as the other. Manage it yourselves." The laugh was more a caress than a sound, as Alice turned to Sidney.

"Thanks." Jerome faced Jean, fully, for the first time, and then, almost instantly, picked up his program and began to study it carefully. For, in that passing glance, Jean had detached herself from the background of bright light, evening dress and subdued chatter into which his first general impression had plunged her, and stood apart, unfamiliar and strange. Jerome read the program through once, and then again, giving meticulous attention to each selection, but, as if there were a magnet beside him, the change in Jean kept drawing him away.

What was it? Jerome was used to the transformation of evening dress which he insisted reduced all women to a common denominator. But Jean was not at all reduced to a common denominator. Nor was she herself. She was and she wasn't, in an annoyingly confused fashion that made Jerome feel, if he kept his eyes long enough on the program, that Jean was exactly the same, except that she wore a low-cut light dress instead of the everyday high-cut dark one. But at his faintest move to verify this by a direct glance, she was somebody else altogether.

Jerome picked out certain numbers and considered these especially. He must turn and get this thing reduced to a phrase and so eliminate it. The concert would last for at least two hours and a half, and he could not sit there staring at his program and wondering why Jean Herrick was and wasn't Jean Herrick. He wanted to look at Jean, but he did not want Jean to look at him.

Then Catherine spoke and Jean leaned across Philip to answer. Her back was to Jerome, and without moving he glanced up sidewise.

There was the same heavy knob of hair, low on her neck. The same threads of gray, which Jean might easily have concealed but never did, ran through the thick mass into the tight wad. The same bone hair-pins inserted in exactly the same way. It was an unbecoming way to do her hair, ugly even in office clothes, and preposterous with a low-cut gown. Jerome studied the tight wad with puzzled intensity. He had an idea that the solution lay here somehow. He had heard Alice say that a woman's character showed in the way she did her hair and the sweeping assertion had amused him as Alice's large generalizations always did. But perhaps Alice was right. Surely such a fashion of doing one's hair was more than an exterior detail. It shrieked aloud of lack of taste, of a sense of fitness, of indifference to accepted standards. It stood for a kind of density or conceit in a way. It was a glaring discord, just as if Jean had brought her black leather wallet or worn her white chamois gloves, or carried a fountain pen concealed in the chiffon. Jerome's eye ran along the row of seats in front. That was it, that impossible wad of hair screwed into a cumbersome knob. It was so incongruous that it might well strike one, a man especially, used to taking in a woman's appearance as a whole, as something quite wrong, wrong enough to make a distinct impression. Relieved, and amused at his own interest, Jerome's eyes returned to Jean.

And then, he was suddenly and overwhelmingly aware of Jean's neck and shoulders, of the soft, white velvet of the skin, the warm smoothness of the flesh, the firm muscles molded in curves that called to every tingling nerve of his fingertips. It seemed to Jerome an interminable time that he sat so, conscious to the depths, of that velvet whiteness. Until Jean moved and released him.

The green and gold curtain drew back and Tony, clutching his violin as if it were a weapon of defense against the staring enemy, advanced to the footlights. From her box, Mrs. Dalton made comforting signals, and J. William himself, a meager black and white figure just behind her, clapped his thin, cold hands in encouragement.

Jean leaned back. Jerome could feel her relaxed, lost completely from the first notes. Jerome moved, so that in no way did he touch even the wooden arm of Jean's seat, and tried to listen. But he heard only the opening measures, and, after that, did not know that Tony was playing at all.

This was not the Jean Herrick with whom he had worked so pleasantly. It was another woman. That Jean Herrick made no demand apart from intellectual sympathy. While this--something in the very fiber of the woman, akin to the soft velvet of her skin, those definite curves, called to him. He had never even thought of Jean's age or whether she were good looking. Although if any one had asked him he would have said she had a fine face. But her body had never entered his thought at all. He might have known, if he had considered it, that her flesh would be firm and white, her muscles well molded, but ... Jerome drew still farther away. He did not want to touch her now. Instead there was a distinct repulsion, as if Jean had offered him a caress uninvited.

He was not used to thinking of women in this way. Unrestrained emotion had never played any part in his life. Other men might have moments of physical surprise like this, but he had never had them. He felt unclean and at the same time, as if the fault were not his. Jean had done something, tricked him, taken him at a disadvantage.

When Alice's hand on his arm catapulted him back to reality, he found that Tony had played entirely through the first division of the program and disappeared.

"Aren't you glad you came? Isn't he wonderful?" Alice was pinching him in her enthusiasm.

"Yes ... of course ... yes, he's wonderful."

"Then apologize like a little man and confess that you've been bigoted and silly and will never be so obstinate again."

"I ... apologize."

"Forgiven. Now apologize to Mrs. Herrick."

Jerome turned reluctantly to Jean, and away again, without speaking. For Jean was staring straight before her, and although he could not see her eyes, he knew they were full of tears.

Jean Herrick crying! What reserves of emotion she had! What reactions he had never glimpsed!

The applause was tumultuous now but Tony did not come back. After a short interval, Peter Poloff, all very black hair and violent gestures, appeared and fussed about, having the piano moved this way and that. At last it was arranged to suit; he perched on the edge of the stool, pulled up his cuffs, and crashed down upon his instrument in pitiless technique.

Jerome drew deeper into his chair and made no effort to listen. If he did not get this matter straightened in his own mind before the concert ended, he felt that to-morrow and the next day and always after, whenever he spoke to Jean, he would see, under the high-cut, ugly clothes she wore to the office, those calling curves and that white flesh.

But he had settled nothing when, with a final crash, Poloff extricated himself from the keyboard, received the applause with exaggerated bows, and, most patently jealous of Tony, walked off the stage.

Jerome picked up his program and so escaped Alice's claiming enthusiasm. But he knew every pressure of Jean's fingers. He felt her move as if she were going to speak to him and hoped she would not. He did not want Jean to speak to him yet.

Then Philip whispered something and she leaned away. The buzzing of Philip's voice continued until Jerome wanted to reach across Jean and strike him. To his taut nerves it was like the sting of a pestiferous insect. When he felt that it was beyond his silent endurance, it stopped and Jerome wanted more than anything else for it to continue, anything to keep Jean from turning to him yet. But when she did not, only settled quietly in her seat, waiting for Tony to come again, Jerome was angry. And then Tony was back for the last time. From sun-soaked vineyards across the sea, the music called in folksongs and old dances of the people. The simple, plaintive things stirred Jean to the depths, interpreted all the inexpressible beauty in the sky and sea and earth and human love. Jerome knew that her lips were quivering and his own were parched and dry.

Not a sound broke the stillness until Tony drew the bow in the last note. Then a clapping and stamping forced him back again and again, until, forgetting his pose of grown-up artist, Tony stamped his foot in childish rage and shook his head. There was no mistaking that. The audience rose laughing and went out.

A few moments later they were all together on the street, and Myra Cohen was explaining about "eats" at her studio to which they had promised to go en masse.

"But you must come, Mr. Stuart; please don't break the party, it's been too utterly lovely." With one eye on Gerte and Felix, who already showed signs of starting off by themselves, Myra made a last effort. "Please, Miss Stuart, won't you make him, and you, Mrs. Herrick?"

"Don't count on me. But Mrs. Herrick is a miracle worker." Alice shrugged her incompetence before Jean's superior influence, and as Myra dashed away to intercept Gerte and Felix, she and Sidney moved after them. "Put it over," she called back to Jean, "and you'll go down in history with my thanks."

Jean looked at Jerome with understanding. Neither did she want to go to the studio and eat unhealthy messes until weird hours. But she had no good excuse.

"It really won't be a long affair, and you can leave when you want."

"Sorry. But I can't. To-morrow I leave early for that St. Louis convention and have a dozen things yet to do."

Jean smiled. "I wish I had one half-as-good as that. But I guess I'll have to go."

Jerome did not answer the smile. Jean thought he looked annoyed for some reason and offered no further suggestion. With a short "good-night" he left. When she turned she found only Catherine and Philip waiting.

"What's the matter with your friend?" Catherine demanded.

"A good excuse. Twice as good as I'd need myself to escape."

Catherine stopped. "You don't have to go, if you don't want to."

"Please don't desert us," Philip said, with the genuine courtesy that was his at unexpected moments. "It won't be the same, at all."

"Flattered, I yield." Jean swung to step beside him.

But at the corner of the street, Catherine brought them to a sudden halt. "Excuse or no excuse, I'm dead tired and here _I_ quit."

She left them staring after her.

"I don't believe Catherine's well," Jean said, troubled, as they started again. "Sometimes lately, she looks so terribly tired."

Philip did not answer.

* * * * *

Three times in the few hours remaining before dawn, Jerome awoke, each time to full and instant realization of the thing that had happened. It was incredible, ridiculous, disgusting. Each time Jerome reached this conclusion, he turned over, thumped his pillow to momentary coolness and forced sleep. But each time, before he quite succeeded, a small, shamed relief crept over him, that he would not be seeing Jean again before he left and that he was to be away three weeks.

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

A week after the concert Catherine gave up hope for Poloff. Mrs. Dalton did not like him. Some reason, connected with an absconding Russian maid who had once stolen some jewelry, had cut all Russians from her interest. She was very gracious about it and very obstinate.

"But Tony's another matter. She's sickening about Tony. If I didn't really love him she would make me hate him. Then, why can't she come out and say what she intends to do? How do I know she won't go off to Europe or Asia or Africa for the summer, and every week makes a difference to Tony."

"Why don't you ring her up?" Jean advised. "She's already spoken about it you say, it wouldn't be like attacking her from the blue. It would be easy to make a reasonable excuse."

"Would it?" Catherine asked in such a suddenly changed tone, that Nan and Gerte as well as Jean stopped eating and stared. Jean flushed, but Catherine had not been herself since the concert and now her sharp face looked almost drawn and her lips were a tight line.

"I think so. I'll do it, if you like, drop the seed anyhow. I used to have to do a lot of indirect managing of her in the old days."

"Thank you," Catherine said after a pause, "but this is my affair. You don't love Tony and I do."

Catherine did not wait for dessert and left the table. As soon as the door closed, Gerte burst out:

"What in the world is the matter with Catherine? She's been like a loaded pistol ever since the concert and now she's just about ready to go off."

"She's tired out," Nan said shortly and then began, in a most unusual fashion for Nan, to talk about her work. Neither Jean nor Gerte paid much attention, but it bridged the gap, and Jean felt, that for some reason, this was all Nan wanted it to do.

But the next day, when Mrs. Dalton rang up and begged Jean to help her manage the Rimaldis, Jean at first refused. It was not until she saw that it was either a question of doing as Mrs. Dalton asked, or having the whole matter dropped, that she at last reluctantly consented to see Giuseppe Rimaldi and force him to reason.

"I'll see him this afternoon and let you know," Jean promised and Mrs. Dalton hung up.

The arrangements took longer than Jean expected and the others were at the table when she came in, a little excited and triumphant, as the contest with another will always left Jean. Giuseppe Rimaldi had been hard to handle, and it was only by threatening him with the law, which would take away from him both Tony and the new violin presented by Mrs. Dalton, that he had yielded and promised to let Tony give up selling papers and have this time for practice. In her success. Jean forgot Catherine's rudeness of the night before, and launched into a picture of Giuseppe Rimaldi, surrounded by wife and children, all except Tony, defending his poverty.

"Like a captain defending a fortress," Jean explained. "No wonder Dalton couldn't handle him."

"It was a miracle that _you_ were on hand to do it," Catherine said in a cold, detached tone, each word like the prick of a knife.

Jean's eyes flashed. "If there had been any other way, I should not have interfered."

Catherine pushed back her chair. "You needn't apologize. But from now on you can have Tony--as well."

Gerte made no comment this time on Catherine's going, but Jean saw Nan's face flush scarlet. As soon as the meal was over, Jean went up to her own room.

What had Catherine meant by that "as well"? What unfounded hurt to her own vanity was she harboring? There was something more than temporary fatigue, or nerves, the matter with Catherine, and whatever it was, Nan knew.

The days passed, a sultry spring moved toward a scorching summer, and Jean did not change her mind. Catherine was different, so different that it was impossible to seek an explanation, even if Catherine had allowed the opportunity. Her wit, always sharp, stabbed now with a venom that penetrated even Gerte's imperviousness. She dipped her slightest remark in a well of hatred, and sent it tipped with personal animosity straight to its mark. Nan alone escaped. It seemed to Jean sometimes that Nan was mentally tiptoeing through this tension, as a nurse moves with a patient.

All the old charm of the winter was gone now. The meals were disagreeable interludes of forced effort that grew more and more difficult to make. The only nights in the least approaching the pleasant dinners of the past, were the nights when Philip came. Then, for some reason that Jean did not seek to analyze, they all united to drag together the tattered shreds of the old gayety to cover this ugliness. Catherine did not help, but neither did she hinder. On these nights coffee was served on the tiny lawn under the full-leafed ailanthus. The lights in the rear tenement shone through the leaves like low-hung stars, the fountain was turned on to the full capacity of its trickle, and there was a definite feeling of relief in the air. But Philip did not come often. Not nearly so often as he had in the winter.

Jerome's three weeks lengthened to four, then five. Jean did not hear from him. The original date of Alice's wedding passed with a hurried note from Alice that her father's return had been delayed, she herself was going to the mountains, and the wedding would take place whenever he got back. Then she, too, dropped into the silence.

Gerte went to the Berkshires. Nan took a cottage with a co-worker at Rockaway; Beth went to Maine. Catherine and Jean were alone. Catherine made no explanation of why she was staying beyond her usual time in town and Jean did not ask her. There was little talk between them. Jean's efforts at meals rebounded from the wall of Catherine's mechanical replies like rubber balls.

At last in mid-June Jean reached the snapping point of her endurance. Either Catherine would have to force a pleasantness she did not feel, or else Jean would take her meals out. She could not eat another dinner sitting opposite Catherine's bitter, cynical eyes and tight lips.

It was a suffocating evening, threatening thunder, and the air, like hot wool soaked in glue, crushed Jean's last scrap of strength to keep up this senseless and annoying pretense. They had finished dinner, and Jean was standing by the French window opening to the garden, while Catherine still sat at the table.

"Suppose we eat out here after this." At least the sky would give a feeling of space and freedom, and the trickle of the fountain and noises from the tenements fill the strained silence. Jean passed into the tiny garden and took the steamer chair by the fountain. Catherine came as far as the window and stood looking at her curiously.

"Why? Do you object to the dining-room?"

"It seems empty for just two--as if the others had died."

Catherine shrugged. "Rather sentimental, mourning three able-bodied women gone on their summer vacations."

"You know very well it's not that." Jean looked at Catherine framed in the window. She was dressed in white and now, in the twilight of the unlit room, her thin face was strained and gray. Jean broke off and turned on the fountain. The little tinkle rested her when she was very tired.

"It's so stupid to care--about anything," Catherine murmured, as if she were not talking directly to Jean. "If you never let any one in--you don't have to drag them out."

"But that's too high a price to pay for anything," Jean said more gently. "It would take such a lot of happiness to pay for such little escapes."

Catherine laughed harshly. "You don't pay for it all at once. You string it out over the years--all through your life--like buying peace on the installment."

The last words she seemed to hurl at Jean and went. Jean watched her disappear through the farther door; heard her go up the stairs and close the door of her room.

Jean sat on alone. The misunderstanding of the last few weeks spread through the heat. Catherine's bitterness saturated the heavy air and it seemed to Jean that mystery and bitterness were pressing down upon her physically. Nothing was the same as it had been. The clean precision of the winter was gone. Motives were no longer clear. Every one and everything was confused and blurred in the water-sogged air. Jerome stayed away, long after the supposed date of his return, without an explanation. Things were piling up in his office and every day his secretary wanted to know if Jean knew when he would return. Catherine was almost ill with bitterness and hatred of something concealed. Philip came rarely and then he, too, was different. And since the others had gone, he had not come at all. Everything was shrouded in a thick mist of misunderstanding, and Jean felt that it was, somehow, all meshed together, Jerome's unexplained delay with Catherine's bitterness and Philip's strangeness with Alice's postponed wedding.

The leaves hung motionless in the breathless night. Jean felt that if she did not get up and out into a wider space, she would be walled forever in that ridiculous garden. As she passed Catherine's room on the way to get her things, she saw that there was no light. The silence reached through the paneling and Catherine's bitterness was a living thing, with which she was closed in alone in the darkness.

Jean passed quickly on her way down again, and opened the front door quietly.

As she stepped out she almost collided with Philip, his hand stretched toward the bell button.

"Why the get-away? Will you divide the loot?"

"Did it really look as stealthy as that? It's this weather, all messy and heavy and silent, a thunderstorm gum-shoeing about, afraid to come out into the open."

Jean stood aside and waited for him to pass. "Catherine's upstairs, but I don't think she's going out."

Philip paid no attention and closed the door behind Jean. At the click, Jean thought she heard a noise at Catherine's window, but when she looked up there was only the white curtain, limp in the heat.

Philip did not ask whether she objected to his coming but strolled along beside her in one of his quiet moods, so that, after a few blocks, she did not mind his being there. From time to time he made some quiet comment, surprising in its keen appreciation of the color and drama about them. He saw none of the squalor and dirt and tragedy in the swarming streets, but like Herrick, long ago on that first walk through Barbary Coast, a beauty, that Jean, too, saw when it was pointed out.

Suddenly, as if they had risen from the litter, a gnarled old man and a woman with an orange handkerchief about her withered brown face came dragging a hurdy-gurdy. The man dropped the shafts and began to turn the handle. "Back To Our Mountains" wailed to the night. As the old woman fawned forward with her tambourine, Philip dropped in a dollar.

"Do you always do things as rash as that?"

"Sometimes," Philip answered quietly, and Jean was ashamed. Perhaps there was some memory connected with this melody for which Philip would pay any price. The man had hidden spots of sensitiveness like this love of music, especially thin, tuneful music, for pictures of simple scenes, and poetry, the lyric poetry of emotion and beautiful sound.

Jean surprised Philip by sitting down on the nearest step. He took a place on the step below; children gathered about them, dirty, dark-eyed children of another race. Philip and Jean were far away in another land. He scarcely heard the tunes wheezed out, one after another, twice around the repertoire. It was a mist through which he moved with Jean. He wanted Jean as he had never wanted anything in all his life, and his hour was come. It frightened him a little.

At last the old man got between the shafts of his cart, the old woman pulling feebly on one. Smiling and nodding to the two on the steps they stumbled away. The children plunged again into their games.

Half an hour later, Jean found herself sitting opposite Philip in an East Side tea-house. The table was covered with dirty oilcloth and the sawdust on the floor reeked with sour dampness. Shabby men with broad Slavic faces drank Russian tea from tall glasses and argued of life and death and government. In one corner a black bearded Russian in peasant clothes strummed a balalaika, and a small boy in flaming red and with a tinsel cap, stamped and writhed in a Cossack dance.

"It's great, isn't it?"

Jean nodded. "I often used to wish that I could draw or paint when I first came to New York." And although she knew that she would have striven to get on canvas the battle in the souls of these aliens and that Philip would have painted the picturesque clothes of the balalaika player, and the tinsel cap of the dancer, she felt nearer to him than she ever had.

"I used to try it, but I could never get it. I'll show you the sketches if you like." Jean knew that Philip was proud of these things and glad to show them. "I should like to see them."

It was after eleven when Philip paid the check and they turned homeward. The air was broken now with little puffs of hot wind. Philip took off his hat, so that the puffs of air stirred his hair, and made him look like a contented baby in a draught. But the evening had been pleasant and Jean was ashamed of noticing how his fine hair, leaping suddenly erect, made him look foolish. As they turned into Grove Street, the first heavy drops splashed, and before they could reach the door, were coming in a steady patter.

Philip followed Jean into the dark living-room, now filled with a mysterious cooling breeze like a presence. In a rush the storm broke, lashing the ailanthus in the garden, beating out the breeze, and the air stung with the smell of rain and the little square of earth. Somewhere above, a window slammed. "Catherine," she whispered, and Philip felt that he and Jean were alone against the world, with all its silly notions, like shutting windows in a thunderstorm.

Jean moved toward the garden and Philip stood beside her. The rain beat like shot poured through the opening between the tenements. A little strip of earth held fast between bricks; thunder, crashing against tenements; a jumble of majesty and squalor.

"I bind the sun's throne with a burning zone And the moon's with a girdle of pearl. The volcanoes are dim, and the stars reel and swim When the whirlwinds my banners unfurl."

The lines slipped in between the crashes and Jean felt the clouds racing across mountain peaks.

"It would be wonderful," she said in the same low key, as if they alone were articulate in a world lashed to silence. "I have never been in the real outdoors in a big storm and I have always wanted it. It would be glorious----"

"With you," Philip whispered. His face was white, as if the lightning had touched it, and his eyes blazed. Jean stood silent before them. And while she stood looking at him, the thunder broke in a deafening roar that rocked the earth and smashed all subterfuge, all petty social pretense at misunderstanding; so that when the last reverberation died away and Philip said softly: "You know, don't you?" Jean nodded.

"Well?" he said with an effort. The sternness of his lips weakened in nervous twitching, a pitiful betrayal of the thin veneer of his composure. Jean turned to the garden and leaned her forehead against the frame of the window. Weariness weighted her, weariness too heavy to struggle with explanation, too deep to resent this demand so unexpected and unwelcome. Philip did not move. Jean's bowed head was more eloquent than words, the dejection and weakness of her strong body more cruel. In mockery of his momentary hope, a faint echo of the thunder rolled out to sea.

"Never?"

Jean shook her head.

Philip stared at the thick knot of hair, the broad shoulders, the long, strong lines of Jean's body, and the blood rushed into his eyes. His hands clenched on her shoulders and he swung her round, gripping her beyond the power to move.

"You think I'm weak and silly, and you try not to laugh at me. Laugh if you like, you couldn't hurt me, neither you nor any woman like you. You think you're terribly honest and straight, don't you, and you never tell the truth, not even to yourself. You know how I feel when you are near me; you must know it. You've got it in you, the call of a woman to a man and you pretend, you smother it all up under a sham of companionship and interest, and it's a lie."

Jean tried to release herself, but the fingers dug deeper into the muscles of her shoulders.

"I think you'd better go."

"I'll go when I'm ready, not before. Nobody has ever told you the truth about yourself."

"Don't say any more, please," Jean begged.

But the pity in her voice fanned the rage in Philip.

"You're successful in your little fiddling two-by-four job, but if you died to-night, the silly interfering would go on. You haven't got a spot in the whole world that really belongs to you. You've got nothing. Nothing at all----"

Jean shivered. "Don't," she whispered pitifully, "oh don't, please don't!"

Suddenly tears filled Philip's eyes. "I want you so; I want you so. It isn't enough, is it? It's only outside, isn't it, sometimes, now when it thunders, and the earth smells? I'm not worthy of you, Jean. You're the most wonderful thing God ever made. You want it too, don't you, something near and close, the thing in the thunder and the sweet earth, and I can give you that, Jean, even if you can't--give so much to me. But just tolerate me, Jean, I will ask so little, just be kind and----"

The tears ran in tiny globules down Philip's cheeks.

Jean shivered with nausea, and stepped back. Philip's hand clenched and his face became evil in its baffled longing.

"You----" His voice broke in a squeak.

Jean raised her head and looked with white, set face at him. Then she made a motion as if to pass and leave him standing there, but he stepped before her.

"You fool, you poor blind fool. You can draw men now," in his pain his eyes clung to her body, "but in a few years you won't. I'm coarse. I know it. You're so damned honest, but you don't like the truth any better than any one else. For a few years you'll be a woman yet and then--you'll be hungry and furtive like--like--Catherine."

With a quick motion Jean passed him, and without looking back walked out of the room. Philip heard her go quickly up the stairs and then the house was absolutely still. The rain dripped from the ailanthus, and a single light high up on the fifth floor of the tenement went out. Philip took his hat and went slowly, like an old person, from the house.

Staring down from her attic Jean saw him turn the corner and his bent head and sagging, unexercised body made her feel ill.

It was a long time after that when she heard Catherine pad away from her window to her bed.

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

A little before dawn Jean got up. The narrowness of the couch, the heat of the sheets, the motionless air of a scorching day cramped her. She tried to hold her mind with unaccustomed attention to the details of dressing, but everything was different, the walls, the feel of the room, the furniture, even the toilet articles that she had had for years. They no longer formed part of an unnoticed background, but stood out as distinct points, drawing her attention. They thrust themselves into her consciousness, as familiar things do when seen again after a long absence or a serious illness. Between yesterday and to-day something had happened so that the person who was handling the comb and brush, moving the clothes from one chair to another, turning on the bath water, was different from the person who had done these things yesterday.

When Jean thought of Philip gripping her shoulders, disgust rushed over her in scorching waves that left her cold and quivering with anger. All night she had grown hot and cold at the memory. She had gotten up to escape it but now as she dressed she felt it stronger even than she had during the night. The thing was not a grotesque exaggeration of the darkness, but a reality persisting into the light. And as she put on her clothes she tried not to know that she was doing it hurriedly, covering from some need to her own peace, the white arms and neck.

She never wanted to speak to Philip again, nor see him, nor hear of him. The thought of Catherine creeping back to bed, her gray hair in two plaits down her back, sickened her. Catherine, stealing about catlike in the night, and Philip weak and angry in his baffled desire, and she, Jean, so far from desire and jealousy and need like this, all mixed up in this unclean situation. Jean felt that she would never be able wholly to free her shoulders from Philip's clutching fingers, or forget the things he had said. She would never again be exactly the same person who had opened the front door and found Philip on the landing, Philip, with his flat jokes, his heavy, flabby body, his grotesque caperings.

"For a few years you will be a woman yet."

Jean's face flamed. She wanted to go downstairs and out of the house and never come back. She did not want to see Catherine, and yet, if she went out at this extraordinary hour of the morning, the need of an explanation, or some reference to it, would bulk between her and Catherine when next they met. And for her own sake and Catherine's they must pretend. They would drag through breakfast together. Perhaps Catherine would even refer in some way to Philip, as if their coming in late at night had disturbed her. She would do it casually and well, better than Jean could meet it.

The sun touched the tips of the flagpoles on tall buildings, and another day crept out from night.... It was not true. None of it was true. And yet, the words sounded as clearly in her ears now as they had when Philip had hurled them at her. "You've got it in you, the call of a woman to a man."

Nothing personal, nothing her own, part of her conscious choice. But something hidden, impersonal, something that she shared with all the pitifully weak victims of lust and their own senses.

The breakfast bell sounded. Jean went slowly across the room and opened the door. She stepped into the hall and heard Catherine come out from her room below. She stepped back and closed the door quietly.

When she was sure that Catherine had gone, she went downstairs. The stairs and the hall had the same quality of strangeness as the familiar toilet articles and her own attic. As Jean took her usual seat at the table, the quiet dining-room seemed to retreat and Jean felt physically smaller in it. And as she closed the front door, the whole house seemed to be whispering about her. She turned and looked up at the mellow red bricks with cool spots of ivy grown window boxes, the white curtains of Catherine's windows, up to her own attic. The whole house was strange, inimical, self-righteous in its aloofness, as if she had betrayed its trust.

It would be impossible to go on living there. She could not stand living under pretense to Catherine and, besides, Philip would no longer come. It was the nearest thing he had to a home and it had been his long before she came. And if Philip stayed away, something would go out of the days for Nan, and Nan had so little. Nan's life seemed emptier than ever now, when Jean thought of it in relation to Philip, all possibility of love and warmth centered on the fat body slouching away into the night.

Jean stayed at the office only long enough to attend to the most important matters and left before noon. The rest of the day she spent looking for a place to live. But it was difficult to find. She walked all that day and all the next and the next, going home long after the dinner hour, when she was sure she would not meet Catherine. And then, on the fourth day, she found it, a four-room apartment, a penthouse on the roof of a quiet, middle-class apartment house in Old Chelsea. High above the street, it perched on a secluded corner of the roof, and faced the Jersey shore.

Jean scarcely looked at the rooms as she followed the caretaker and even while the latter was still pointing out the usefulness of a drop-table in the kitchen, Jean was back in the little living-room, facing west, just where the widest space between distant factory chimneys opened to the Jersey shore. The roar of the city below rose in a pleasant murmur that gave an added feeling of peace and a deep security, as if nothing dangerous or violent, no matter how it tried, could ever reach up to this sun-drenched peace. For the first time in five days Philip's hold loosened and he slipped back into a roaring vortex that could not reach her.

That night Jean went home to dinner. She had determined to wait up in case Catherine was not there, but Catherine was, and they had an uncomfortable meal during which Jean made repeated efforts to introduce the subject of her moving and could not. At last she said abruptly, just as they both rose and Catherine moved toward the living-room as if afraid Jean was going to suggest the lawn,

"I've taken an apartment, Catherine."

She waited a moment for some comment, but none came. She could scarcely throw the statement at Catherine and walk out of the room, so she began to describe her wonderful new home upon a roof. But Catherine's silence made her uncomfortable, and she stopped as suddenly as she had begun.

As if she had been waiting for Jean to clear away this ornamentation of enthusiasm, Catherine said:

"When are you going?"

"This week, I think."

"I suppose that means we will not see you again."

"Not if it rests with me." Jean fancied that Catherine smiled, but it was too dark to see. If Catherine was going to be nasty, there was really no obligation to consider her any longer. Jean went on toward the hall, but Catherine's next statement stopped her.

"I suppose Nan will be the next. She's getting the home-bug, too--and she has a tremendous respect for you."

"I don't see how even Nan's energy could keep house and work with the hours she has."

"Nan might give up her job--if the home-bug gets bad enough. Philip is always suggesting that she keep house for him and Nan only needs a starter. Funny, isn't, how fashionable it's getting--to want a home? Do you remember those old teas at your place that winter? Perhaps we've all gone as far as we can."

Jean resisted the longing to switch on the lights and say, "I'm sorry, Catherine. It was the last thing that would have entered my mind. I've been happy here with you, but it's best for me to go." Instead she moved away across the living-room, for she felt that Catherine's eyes were actually touching her in the murky light.

"Perhaps we've gone so far we're coming clear round on the other side again--if you're right about it's being fashionable to want a home."

There was a faint noise as if Catherine were laughing. "I'm not accusing _you_ of any such weakness, but Nan would like it. There have been times when Nan has been perfectly frank about it, and I recognize the symptoms coming on. Besides--Philip wants one--and Nan would do anything for--'Philly.'"

"I don't believe that Philip really wants a home."

"Don't you? Perhaps you're right. It would be tragic, wouldn't it--if he meant all he says about a home--because there's something undeveloped and silly about Philip that would keep--any woman whom he might care about from caring for him."

"I don't think that Philip is silly," Jean said quietly.

"Perhaps not. But he makes a good bluff at it then."

In spite of the darkness, Jean felt something moving between them, just as she had felt it, without understanding, on the night she had hooked Catherine before the concert.

"Perhaps he does. But then, I think that men, as often as women, make pretenses and--hide behind them."

"I don't doubt that, but they don't put it over--any better than most women do."

As Catherine passed and went quickly out of the room, Jean wished that she had not forced her to that last. Catherine's voice had trembled so.

The next morning when Jean came down, the maid said that Miss Lee had gone on her vacation.

On Friday Jean had her things taken from storage and by Saturday night, her new home was in order. Jean cooked her own dinner and ate it on a small table in the shadow of the house, where she could watch the sun sink over the Jersey hills.

CHAPTER FIFTY

The evenings from early dusk until late, Jean spent upon the roof, and her first feeling, of being high and safe from all turmoil, deepened. Its peace was tangible. Something within herself reached out to meet it, as something within had reached toward the spirit of the hills and sea in the blue days with Herrick. Something within herself was part of a universal spirit, and here upon her roof, the spirit was one of peace.

On Friday a note was forwarded from Alice. The wedding was to be on Saturday afternoon at four o'clock. "Don't forget, four means four because we have to catch the seven boat," Alice wrote, as if she were inviting Jean to a tennis match and four o'clock marked the limit of the entries.

Jerome must have returned. The wedding was to take place. Things were going to be as they had been, untangled and proceeding logically. Jean was happy. The last miserable days on Grove Street, dimmed by this wonderful week, high on her quiet roof, faded to sincere pity for Catherine, bitter, caustic, and slyly watching from windows; and Philip, weak, servile, lonely Philip.

On Saturday, a little before four, Jean entered the Stuart living-room, and then stood wondering whether, after all, she had not mistaken the hour and the ceremony was not over. Alice, in a pale yellow dress, a favorite of Jerome's, was laughing with the minister, a venerable, white haired person with twinkling, merry eyes. Sidney and two friends were moving a victrola and Jean caught Jerome's voice arguing with Malone about the supper seating. The next moment, Alice caught sight of her and hurried over.

"Awfully glad you made it. We're just about to begin."

"I'm glad it's not over."

"It would have been only Sid forgot to tell the minister and so we had to scratch round and get old Dr. Gillet. Isn't he a dream?"

"Made for the part."

"Looks like one of the Prophets after a good dinner, doesn't he? The old duck!"

Just then Sidney joined them.

"Ready, dear?"

"Yes. If dad's through. Oh, there he is. All right, come on."

Passing through the French window Jerome saw Jean standing a little apart, the smile at Alice's flippancy touched with sadness at the thought of what Martha would have felt at having to "scratch round" for another minister who looked "like one of the Prophets after a good dinner."

In the six weeks of absence, Jerome had settled the matter of the concert night to his own satisfaction. Away from Jean, he had analyzed it thoroughly and was glad, by the time he had put a few hundred miles between them, that it had happened as it had. It would never happen again and it had taught him much. Now, as he saw her standing, a little lonely it seemed to him, with that look of mingled amusement and sadness on her face, he felt a deep tenderness, almost as if she were Alice, a tenderness which had in it no room for passion. He was crossing the room to stand beside her--Alice absolutely forbade being given away--when the minister opened his book and the short service of the Episcopal Church began. Jerome stood where he was, and after a moment forgot Jean.

Standing aside from the group of young people, all strangers, Jean listened and, as she listened, the room faded into the walls of the little western church at the foot of the Berkeley Hills. In the pew behind, Martha stifled her sobs and Elsie dabbed with surreptitious slaps at the fidgeting Tommykins.

What a dreary affair it had been. Jean felt again her rebellion and shame at the sordid ugliness of Martha's sobs and Elsie's whispered rebukes.

"Do you, Alice, take this man, to be your wedded husband ... to love, honor and obey, in sickness and in health, until death do you part?"

"I do."

She, too, had promised, firm in belief of herself, of Herrick, of any test the future might hold. And she had understood nothing, nothing at all. It was a terrible promise to make in one's youth, untried.

"Do you, Sidney, take this woman, to be your wedded wife ... succor and cherish in sickness and in health, until death do you part?"

Franklin had promised, just as clearly, and she had thrilled with the safety of his protection. How awed she had been, almost grateful, for this opportunity to build a life together, not a life with all beauty drugged to nagging duty, but a free life, brimming with opportunity, overflowing with beauty. And even while he promised--she knew now what had been Franklin's mood as he stood beside her--desire, throttled to control until the effort whitened and sharpened his face to the Galahad look.

Jean's head drooped.

And with Gregory, no open honesty like this, but smothering secrecy that she had tried to glorify.

To love, honor and obey, till Death do you part.

To seal the truth openly before all, as Alice was doing. In all her life she would never have a memory as this would be to Alice.

"In the name of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost, I pronounce you man and wife."

There was a moment of deep silence, in which it seemed to Jean that these two people as individuals, were effaced in this Thing they had just done, and that, never till the end of time could they again be two.

Then every one was crowding about, laughing and talking and trying to kiss the bride. But Alice fended them all off and Jerome took her in his arms. Jean saw his face twitch as he let her go.

"How he is going to miss her," Jean thought and then Jerome was crossing the room to her.

"Well, I thought you had decided to live in St. Louis. How did the conference go? I'm dying to hear."

With this flippant greeting, Jean pushed memory from her.

"Great. And I'm dying to tell about it. I tried to get over to the office this morning, but Alice discovered me. You haven't any idea what a lot of people and how much effort it takes to keep a wedding simple. I saw only the tag end of proceedings but if I had another daughter she should have everything from organ march to flower girls. It's a lot easier."

While he spoke he looked about for a quiet spot in which to tell Jean of the conference. The garden offered the only chance and he was just going to suggest it when Alice swooped down upon him.

"No, you don't, Dad Stuart. This is _my_ party. Look over there at Mrs. Cather. Belle said she couldn't vouch for her mother not crying and she's just about ready to begin. Beat it. I will not have a single weep at this wedding."

"Can't I wait till she begins? I haven't seen--I want to tell Mrs. Herrick----"

"Run along. She _is_ beginning."

Alice watched until he was safely landed by Mrs. Cather. When she turned back, Jean saw with surprise that the blue eyes were misty.

"Do you know, Mrs. Herrick, that's the only spot that hurts in the whole business, having to leave Dad. He's going to be lonesome, whether he knows it or not."

"I'm afraid he is."

"He'll just stay over here by himself and putter with bulbs and things and get into a rut. I know he'll never go to a place except to the office when I'm not here to prod him."

"Well, the office is a pretty absorbing thing."

"Yes, I know it, but--don't you think that as people get older their work just kind of goes along without all of them that there is, and the rest gets into a groove?"

"Good gracious, what an uncomfortable thought!"

"He's gotten used to me in a whole lot of little ways he doesn't know anything about, and I'm afraid," she hesitated, took a quick summary of Jean and added hastily as she saw Sidney coming to her, "Would you mind, sometimes, just prodding him along a bit, Mrs. Herrick, till it all settles down again?"

"I'll prod to the best of my ability, but I'm afraid it isn't promising much."

"Oh, it's only for a little while. I'll be back in October to tend to the matter myself."

"Till then, perhaps I can manage it." Jean laughed, too, but she had a tenderness for this big girl who was afraid that Jerome Stuart would get into a rut.

In spite of the pleasant informality of the supper, it seemed a long-drawn-out affair to Jean, and try as she would, she could not share the gayety. With the exception of Mrs. Cather and Sidney's aunt, the rest were Alice's age, and there was a feeling of perfect assurance and untried strength in the air, that made Jean feel old. Seated between a young man interested in subnormal children and a girl cubist, who was advancing an intricate argument from which Jean could not gather whether Cubism was subnormal, or subnormality was misunderstood Cubism, Jean struggled to give her attention, but her thoughts drifted farther and farther away, and at last withdrew from the discussion altogether.

From his end of the table, Jerome snatched glances at Jean, and it was only the necessity of keeping Mrs. Cather amused that prevented Jerome, too, from sinking into a like silence, but he felt the mood, a strong wire, binding them together. He was as relieved as Jean when supper was over, and while the girls struggled with Alice to let them "do the thing as it ought to be done" and the young men began clearing the room and the veranda for a dance, he sought Jean again. As he reached her, Alice's clear voice rose above the laughter.

"Now quit it, Belle. I wasn't decorated for the sacrifice, and I'm _not_ going to be 'started on life's journey.' I'm going to wear that tan raw-silk you've all seen a dozen times, and it would be idiotic to help me get into that. Besides, the snappers are almost all off, and nobody but myself knows the trick of pretending they're not."

Jerome smiled. "This generation's a scream, isn't it?"

"I was just thinking--do you suppose it is or that we're just older?"

"No. It _is_ different."

"Yes, I suppose it is." Jean looked about at the young men clearing the furniture to the veranda and the girls grouped about the victrola, choosing records. "But I don't think I ever realized before, quite so clearly, anyhow, that there is a 'this generation.' I always feel as if _I_ am this generation, and children like Tony are the future."

"Delusion, terrible delusion. But, then, you haven't a daughter Alice's age, who discusses her own children even before her marriage."

"Frightful," Jean agreed, pushing away a strange, new wish that she did have a daughter like Alice. "To be menaced with two generations at once--that would take the pep out of me."

Alice was back now, ready to leave. She sent Sidney on an errand, and joined the girls round the victrola.

"They're so terribly afraid of not being reasonable, or being sentimental, and they go to such lengths to prove their independence. Why, Alice would rather die than blush, even if she could accomplish that feat. She would think it was indecent."

"Maybe it is," Jean said lightly, hoping to keep the talk from dropping altogether to the depth of her own seriousness. For this wedding was full of intruding revelations that wearied and saddened her.

A daughter like Alice. If she had had a child. A child of Herrick's. It might have been ten or eleven years old, now. It was very strange to think of a child of Herrick's. She had never wanted a child of his, never for an instant. She remembered, vividly, the Sunday she had lain under the trees and thought of the possibility of a child that would have Herrick's high laugh. How queer it had made her feel! That was the same day she had asked her mother about the scene in the old Webster Street house, and Martha had let the match burn her fingers.

And Gregory's child. It would have been a little thing, scarcely more than a baby yet, not nearly as old as Puck the day she had told Puck stories and waited for Margaret to come home.

Franklin's child. Gregory's child.

For the first time Jean linked the two in the possibility of their fatherhood of her child. And for the first time, a child stood out as a separate entity, a distinct individual, owning its own existence. Her child. A part of herself, yet more its own self. A unit of "this generation," the generation in which she had felt, until this moment, that she herself belonged.

But she did not belong. She had no part in it. There was a chasm between it and herself. Forward across the chasm there was nothing. Back, there was Martha's grave.

"What do you think Alice told me?" The intonation caught Jean's attention and brought it to the man beside her. "I suggested that if she wanted to be really logical, she should have no ceremony at all. She said it was so inconvenient when you went to hotels, or among people who didn't understand. Imagine! Advancing that as a reason. I suggested that, under such pressure, she might lie about it, and she said, 'Lying always smothers things up. It isn't clean.'"

"She's right."

"Of course she's right. But how modern it is! She doesn't logically believe in a ceremony. She doesn't believe that marriage has anything to do with religion and she thinks, or thinks she thinks, that in time even the civil ceremony will vanish."

"It will."

"Of course it will. But nothing would induce Alice, or any of the young people here, to say honestly that they are afraid. Fear is a terrible bugaboo. They're too young to know that it is the deepest rooted instinct in the race. And so they wiggle out of the dilemma by an exaltation of--cleanliness. Terribly modern, like cold baths and exposed plumbing."

"I don't know that that's it," Jean said thoughtfully. "I feel, at the present moment, as if I could put up a perfectly sound argument on either side. That's the trouble with analyzing too hard, you always come clear round the circle and end in conservatism again. When they stood there, before the God in whom they do not believe, and promised in the old, narrow way, in the form for which they have no respect, to love, honor, and obey, till death does them part, it _did_ seem to be more than a ceremony. For a moment it did seem to reach down below any passing desire, down into an eternal reality. I suppose it's because we have no substitute yet for the old-fashioned God, and so, in big moments, we still stand up and promise things out loud, as we used to do, when we were children, to our parents." She turned suddenly to Jerome. "Would you have liked Alice to go away without _any_ ceremony, the useless ceremony that some day will be done away with?"

"No," Jerome answered slowly, "I don't believe that I would. No, to be honest, I would not. We haven't eliminated it yet and till then it's--safe."

"Safety--and weakness--and a fear-filled age."

"Don't! You make me feel like Methuselah in his last illness."

Jean laughed, but she was glad that Alice appeared just then. As she took the girl's hand in hers, she answered the signal that Alice sent, and her lips motioned, "Don't worry about that. I'll prod."

Then Alice put both arms about her father's neck and toned down the strain of the moment by instructions concerning the management of Malone.

"If it's any comfort, remember that I managed several housekeepers while you were in pinafores."

"I suppose you did. But maybe you've gotten out of practice." Alice gave him a last swift kiss, Sidney shook hands without saying anything, and, with a general good-by thrown among the guests as if they were going on an errand next door, Alice and Sidney were gone.

In the confusion of starting the dance that followed, Jean slipped away and got her things. She had intended to go unnoticed, but Jerome was waiting and walked to the gate. He looked grave now, as if the forced gayety of parting had taxed his pretense. Nor could Jean throw aside the seriousness of her own mood. The wedding had saddened her; against all the logic of her beliefs, against what she knew were her fixed deductions, something persisted, a fine, thin thread of regret, a sense of waste, of loss. A terrible clarity seemed to possess her, as if she could see the indestructible skeleton of all human dependence and weakness, under the conventions and forms with which society had clothed it. And Jean wanted the healing solitude of her roof.

They stood looking out over the empty field before them, each full of suppressed thoughts, each conscious of the other's absorption, very near in their understanding.

"Good-night." Jean opened the gate before he could do it for her and passed out.

"Good-night." Jerome watched her swing away, fainter and fainter through the dusk.

He did not go back again to the house, but to the farthest corner of the garden, beyond reach of the noise and lights. Here it was still and peaceful among the growing things, so still, that he seemed to be the only thing in motion on the earth, poised in ether. Time took on a quality of space, and incidents, some quite forgotten, rose near, like objects close to hand. He could see through time, all about him, back down the years, to his own wedding night. And, as he had not been since then, he was alone again with Helen.

How adorably clinging and frightened she had been, trusting in his wisdom, so little more than her own. What wild emotions had gripped him, almost as frightened as she, what longing and what desire and what denial all bound into a wonderful exaltation to make Helen happy always, to keep her trust! To hold her safe in the great love that throbbed and beat in him almost beyond his power to calm to the degree of Helen's white shyness.

He had done his best, even when the exaltation had gone, and only deep affection and tender loyalty were left for the clinging little thing who had remained to the end, the least reluctant and fearful.

The day when Alice had been laid in his arms. He had scarcely noticed her, because Helen was slipping so quietly away. And the months afterwards, stabbing remorse as if he had killed Helen, and long periods when he had forgotten her altogether, been quite absorbed in his work, Alice, and the wonderful fact of living.

Years since then. Happy years full of work and Alice.... Now Alice had gone and Sidney was only another man like himself, with all the weakness and hidden places in every man.

Then he thought of Jean, as she had looked at supper. She, too, was full of hidden places and contradictions. There was nothing simple, no absolute unity anywhere. Suddenly Jerome felt chilly. He looked at his watch. It was a quarter past one. He stopped and listened. The house was silent. They had all gone, then, while he walked in the garden.

Jerome went back. The victrola was in the middle of the floor, the records scattered about on top of the piano. The room was littered with scraps of bonbons and crushed flowers; dirty saucers, half filled with sherbet, marked a second supper.

Jerome turned out the lights and closed the door. Life was a little like the room, he felt, filled with the tag ends of others' leavings.

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

On the Monday morning following the wedding, Jerome was at the office earlier than usual. After the lonely Sunday behind him, the day ahead was filled with expectation. First, he would tell Jean about the trip. There were many things he wanted to tell her, things that no one else would quite get. And then they would lay out the program for the piers.

The morning passed quickly, with only a few lulls in which Jerome leaned back in his chair, smoked a cigar, made notes and tried not to listen too closely for sounds across the hall. As soon as she was free she would probably come in.

But by mid-afternoon it was not so easy to keep from listening. For one thing, it was suffocatingly hot, and for another, he was not sure that Jean had been in all day. He had not heard her come or leave for lunch, and usually her hours were punctual. At three o'clock Jerome closed the transom. It made him nervous to sit listening for sounds from Jean's office. As soon as she was free she would come in. It was the kind of thing Jean did.

But Jean did not come.

Neither on Tuesday nor on Wednesday. Thursday morning, Jerome crossed the hall almost to Jean's door, and came back. If Jean were so busy that she had not a moment for him he did not wish to intrude. And if Jean had lost her interest in the conference, or had only pretended one, still less did he wish to force her. Besides there were the piers. Jean had been as eager as he and it had been understood that they would begin as soon as the wedding was over.

On Friday afternoon, Jerome opened the transom. Jean Herrick could come or not, exactly as she liked. He would not mention the conference and if she felt obliged to inquire he would cut her short as gracefully as he could. As for the piers, if it suited his convenience by the time she strolled round, he would do them, and if it did not, she could do them alone.

On Saturday he did not go to the office at all, but stayed home and worked in the garden. He pulled down a summer house that had really been a charming place to sit, and finished pruning and clipping every shrub that had escaped in the long, empty evenings of the past week.

On Sunday he took Pips, and set out for a long tramp right after lunch. But he had lost the habit of tramping alone ever since Alice had been old enough to go with him; so, although he had intended to stay out until evening, at three he turned back. The heat was at its apex, but under pretense that it was really getting cooler, Jerome increased his pace, until Pips suddenly dropped panting under a tree and refused to budge.

"All right, old man, have it your own way."

Jerome stretched beside him. Pips snapped languidly at a few gnats and went to sleep. But Jerome could not sleep. His head felt hot and empty, and although he had accomplished nothing all day, he was exhausted with the effort of getting rid of the hours. He tried to find something interesting to think about, but there seemed to be nothing worth wasting a thought upon. The week ahead stretched as flat and monotonous before him as the week behind. There was nothing, except the problem of Jean's inexplicable behavior.

She had not gone on a vacation because she had told him half a dozen times she did not intend to take one. Summer, everywhere, was dull and he could imagine no work that would call her out of town. No. Jean was following some whim of her own, with no consideration of upsetting him.

That was the trouble with women who had brains, especially after they had passed their first youth; they got so set in their habits, that consideration for others never occurred to them. No doubt, Jean was quite unconscious of causing him any inconvenience.

And there he was wondering about Jean when he had definitely put her out of his thoughts a dozen times that week.

Queer how a thought persisted against one's wish.

A thought ought to be the easiest thing in the world to keep where you wanted it. A person could intrude, or an extraneous body inject itself into your cosmos, but a thought didn't exist apart from yourself, and if you didn't want it there, why did it come?

Interesting business, Thought, like a demon, dwelling inside and ordering you about at its will. Fascinating, if you got to really thinking about Thought. Jerome gripped the idea of Thought, dragged it along with him like a companion over the field of the Will and the Subconscious, until he brought up in a conversation he had had a few days before with the psycho-analyst he had corralled for Tony's tea.

But now, as soon as he thought of him in relation to the tea, Jean rose from nowhere, drove out the psycho-analyst and usurped his place. Jean as she had looked when he came in through the glass door, amused and a little sad; Jean at the gate: dimming in the dusk; as she had looked when they first talked of the piers, eager and alive in every nerve; standing close while Tony played, in the candle lighted room, with the thick, heavy odor of hothouse plants; as merry and teasing as Alice, at supper afterwards, in "the little joint"; at the concert--

Jerome jumped up. "Here, boy. It must be almost six."

He took a short cut back across the fields and entered the kitchen just as the clock struck five. On a table, covered by a white cloth, mysterious humps disclosed Malone's provision for his supper. It made him think of a country undertaker's, with grewsome appurtenances of death concealed under the cloth. Jerome lifted the edge and discovered cold meat and Malone's tragic efforts at a cake.

Now that he saw his unappetizing meal, he realized that he was hungry. But he certainly couldn't eat there in the kitchen, although it was arranged exactly as he had instructed Malone. In the living-room it might be better, but by the time he had partly cleared the litter of books and papers from the table the dimensions of the effort annoyed him and he threw them back in a worse jumble than before. There was a card table somewhere; that would be just the thing to set on the porch under the honeysuckle. Jerome went all over the house looking for the card table until he remembered that it was in the cellar. The cellar was unlit and he had another hunt for a lamp. He found it at last on the top shelf of the pantry, with just enough oil to make a feeble splutter and a very decided and unpleasant odor. The cellar steps led down from the kitchen, and if the kitchen was cheerless, the cellar was a vault. Clammy damp enveloped him, and the mystery and loneliness of unused places stored with unused things. It was like a deserted house from which the inhabitants had fled at a plague. Jerome located the table under the slats of what had been Alice's baby bed and a broken pedestal. He got it out with difficulty, covered himself with dust and found that the hinge had been broken and it wouldn't stand.

Jerome threw the table down and went back into the kitchen. He jerked the shroud from the humps and ate an unappetizing sandwich of cold beef cut too thick and bread too thin. The cake he had just mashed into Pips' food when he remembered some jam of Alice's. He found a single glass and spread it thick on the remaining crumbs. The cake was possible this way, but now it was all gone in the mash for Pips. While he watched Pips gobbling it up, the clock struck six. And there were four hours yet until the earliest possible bed-time.

Jerome lit a cigar and went out into the garden, but the seclusion and privacy were gone. Through what had been a luxuriant privet hedge he could see the lights of the next house half a block away. At the other end of the garden it was worse. Here he had cut back a wall of hollyhocks, to give more sun to the pansies below and then left the hose running full force until it had washed out the pansy plants, and now a mournful row of bare stems guarded the empty plot.

After all, a garden was an unsatisfactory thing. It was only in the making that the thing had any power of absorption. Once it was made you never knew how much of it you would see. Last year bugs had eaten the roses, and the year before scale had destroyed the apple trees. If the shrubs got along well, then something happened to the flowers, and if the flowers acted on schedule, then the trees didn't.

Spring hit you before you had made up your mind what bulbs you wanted in; or hung back so late that you had no time to plant anything before summer scorched what little you did have. And if spring and summer acted rationally, just about the time you began to get some comfort out of the shaded spots and the smell of things, along came autumn and stripped it bare. There was always a senseless rush and change, nothing permanent accomplished, just stupid repetition over and over, rubbing in the analogy to the impermanent accomplishment of one's own effort. After forty, a man ought to live in a climate the same all the year round, where the futility of accomplishment wasn't always being preached by this eternal leafing and blossoming and dying, round and round in a purposeless circle.

Jerome stopped under a great lilac, primed to nakedness, and glared at its hideous tidiness.

"What do you think you get out of it, anyhow? A few weeks ago you were as bare as you will be again in another few weeks. And you've been doing it to my knowledge for the last fifteen years. You've never really been young or old. You just go on and on. And the little you do do, you can't help, although every spring you look as if you had chosen to be a lilac and had it all your own way. You can't help being a lilac. It was settled for you ages ago in a little brown seed. You can't even prolong your blooming a week beyond the law. You're...."

Suddenly the lilac reminded him of Jean. It was so strong, untrimmed, and indifferent to his tirade. Jerome shrugged and went back into the house. The silence was oppressive. Malone had not returned. There was no reason that she should be in, but it annoyed him that she was out.

At nine o'clock he went to bed.

CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

And the next morning, when Jerome came into the office, Jean stood waiting for him.

"Well, when are we going to begin the piers?"

Jerome hung up his hat and sat down at the desk. He knew that Jean had asked him something and was waiting for an answer. While he shuffled his mail, he knew that the welcoming smile in her eyes was quickly hardening to surprise. He did not care. His relation with Jean Herrick was no longer the untangled thing it had been. For eight days he had thought of scarcely anything but this annoying, self-centered woman. He had destroyed a perfectly good garden and acted like a school-boy. And there she stood wanting to know when _he_ was going to begin the piers.

"I thought you had forgotten them," he said at length, still fumbling the mail as if Jean were detaining him from far more important matters.

"I don't see how you could have thought that."

"It didn't take such a stretch of imagination. We had the first scheduled for the day after the wedding--you may remember."

"Didn't you get my message?" She might have been speaking to a peevish child, so forced was the restraint of her patience.

"No. Did you leave one?"

"I told Minnie to tell you, but I suppose she forgot. Those up-state towns suddenly changed about waiting till fall to organize Consumers' Leagues. It took longer than I thought."

Jerome did not look up. Jean added no personal regret for the inconvenience she might have caused, but moved away toward the door.

"You still wish to do them then?"

"Of course. Don't _you_?" Jean wanted to add that if he were going to continue in this mood she hoped he didn't.

"Certainly, I do. How about to-night?"

"All right for me. I kept it free on purpose."

There it was, the high-handed assurance that her plans would suit others. But he himself had suggested to-night and he would have to comply.

"It won't be any use starting before nine, do you think?"

"No. Not unless we cover two in the same evening."

"I don't believe I feel strenuous enough for that. One will do. I'll call for you then, about half past eight?"

He swung round in his chair and Jean suddenly noticed that he looked tired, not so much physically, but as if something had gone from within. He was desperately lonely and his loneliness had escaped in irritation toward herself, because she happened to be the only outlet at hand. It was what Martha had called "a man's nature cropping out." It made Jean feel unaccountably tender. And besides she had promised Alice to look out for Jerome.

"I tell you, suppose you come and have supper with me. I've moved, and am keeping house now over in Old Chelsea. Cooking is not my forte and I won't promise anything but delicatessen. Will you be my first guest?"

Jerome did not answer instantly and when he did, said, with no perceptible change of tone:

"Thank you. I should like to very much."

"We'll quit punctually and gather up the food as we go. Till six, then."

Jerome continued to look at the closed door several moments after he heard Jean's shut. Then he crossed to the filing cabinet, realized after he had searched through three drawers, that what he wanted was at home, came back to the desk and sat down.

Suddenly he laughed out loud and began to work.

At six he locked the desk, thoroughly satisfied with the day's accomplishment. He found Jean just closing hers, and a few moments later they were going from shop to shop, collecting supper, with much happy, foolish comment on each other's preferences in cold meats and pickles.

Jean remembered the many times she had done this with Gregory, and now, that memory no longer stung, it brought Jerome near, extended their friendship far beyond the year she had known him, linked him closely with the past. So that it seemed to Jean that each little separate interlude of happiness in life was not really separate, but, by some hidden spiritual chemistry, was only an element in the larger, complex solution of all possible happiness.

And when, half an hour later, they stood together silent on the farthest edge of the roof, and watched the sun slipping over the rim of the West, Jean felt nearer to the man beside her than she had ever thought to feel to any one again. Nearer, in some ways, than she had felt to Gregory, for never, with him, had she for a moment been unconscious of her love. She had never for an instant been unaware of Gregory as the man she loved. He had always been stronger than any moment or any place. The deepest peace had held always, within itself, the power of its own destruction. But there was no personal claim in this silence with Jerome. In their mutual understanding of life's lonely hours, they shared the peace of the roof.

"It's another world--absolutely another world," Jerome said quietly.

Jean nodded. "Nothing's the same up here. Stillness is not empty and color's really sound. Sunrise and sunset are like tremendous chords on a great organ. Sometimes I feel that some day I am going to hear it, actually hear the old music of the spheres."

"It's like a garden, in that still space before the dawn."

"Sometimes it's almost terrible up here, then. As if the night were some indescribable vengeance that had blotted all life from the world, and as if everything were being created anew without any memory of death or pain. I have never seen anything, except the sea, wake like the city does to a new life. A new life, every twenty-four hours. And no matter how many you spoil, there's another waiting, and you can drop the spoiled one into the night."

The gold and scarlet were fading to saffron and silver. A star peeped from the edge of a pale green pool.

"It would do that--or else make you feel there was no use in anything."

"I don't think it would ever make you feel like that really, not for long anyhow. The rhythm in it is so evidently a law--you've _got_ to be a part. There's nothing else for you to be."

"An absolutely materialistic logic doesn't seem to fit, exactly, does it?"

"No, it doesn't. A few dawns and sunsets shake it terribly. They make you feel like a child, listening to a fairy story, that you _know_ is true, no matter how much the grown-ups scoff."

"May I come sometimes and listen to the fairy story, too?" Jerome asked so simply, so like a child, that Jean felt her threat tighten.

"Whenever you want to. Don't bother to let me know. Just come--whenever you're blue or lonely--or just logical and materialistic."

Jerome laughed and, on the lighter note, they began to get supper. When it was ready, Jean spread the small table outside, where space opened most widely to the Jersey shore. As they ate, and Jean told of the "kind ladies" to whom a Consumers' League was still a form of charity to the workers, the last shreds of color faded from the sky. Shy stars ventured boldly out and the gray deepened to night-blue.

Gradually they fell silent. Jerome felt the peace close about him, the tangible, unfathomable peace that Jean felt. They smoked and forgot each other, looking into the night.

At last Jerome spoke, softly, as if he were interpreting something whispered to him in the stillness.

"What a lot of useless pain there is in the world. One feels it in a place like this, almost as if we chose needlessly to be unhappy."

"Do you feel that, too? Sometimes I'm afraid all my standards are going to be upset here. Sometimes I feel as if I had gotten everything twisted a long way back and that it was struggling to get right again."

"And that process itself can hurt terribly."

Jean smiled, a little wistfully. "I am beginning to suspect that it can. It used to make me furious when I was growing up to be told that all pain was 'for the best.' But, now, I believe it was only the wording of it, the tight, prim smugness of the assurance that rasped. It's not that pain is for the best, but it's simply that it doesn't matter. It's part of a whole, and, unless we can make a new whole, with no so-called pain in it, there's no credit to a deeper insight in just kicking."

"I suppose it's because action of any kind always seems the stronger part. Rebellion, in some way, seems bigger than acceptance."

"Perhaps it is. The way an agnostic always seems to be a more independent thinker than the believer in a higher power, a God, or a Spirit, or any Force, you can't prove by logic. It seems as if a believer must have inherited his beliefs ready-made, as if he could not possibly have come to them by any real intellectual effort of his own."

"But the world is swinging back, it seems to me. Perhaps æons and æons ago we thought ourselves out of simplicity and now we're thinking ourselves back. Physicists are beginning to reduce all force to one energy and philosophers seem to be working round to the one spiritual impulse, love. I wonder whether after all we've left Christ and Confucius and Buddha far behind, or whether we haven't caught up."

"I wonder," Jean said thoughtfully. "And I suppose, till the end of time, we'll go on struggling to find out whether it's an impulse pushing up from within or whether it's a condition imposed from without; whether brotherly love is an ideal we can't quite attain or whether it's a law we can't escape."

"And then, perhaps, we'll begin all over again."

"No doubt we will." Jean pushed back her chair, and leaning for a moment with both palms spread on the table edge, smiled down at Jerome. "In the meantime, there are the piers."

Jerome did not move. "Let's not do them to-night. It's wonderful up here and 'a long, long time' the piers shall last."

"But I haven't another evening this week. And you go on your vacation the fifteenth, don't you? It would be great to cover them all by then."

Jerome frowned. "I suppose it would."

The mood was gone now, anyhow.

CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

As they went through the small side door, the band at the far end of the pier was just tuning up. Two powerful arc lamps shed their hard white light on the men, and the rows of already filled chairs about the bandstand. The place smelled of rope and tar and dust, but the lower end of the great shed was open and a faint coolness from the water penetrated for a short distance. Through the opening, the red and green lanterns of docked ships winked enticingly and at the next pier a great steamer creaked on her hawsers, as the water, washing against her sides, whispered of distant lands. Beyond the range of white light, boys and girls sauntered hand in hand, while, in still darker corners, couples stood whispering or silent.

"This--after ten hours a day with your eyes glued to your machine, afraid to move in case the needle pins you to it forever! A blinding web of machinery and then a few little hours for all your suppressed youth and longing to bubble and boil, here in the darkness, a dark full of lapping water and the breath of far-away lands. Is there anything here about sticking to your job and repressing and repressing and repressing, until you grow too dull to care?"

Jerome did not answer. His eyes followed Jean's to a thin, rouged girl and a narrow-chested, ferret-eyed boy vanishing into the farthest shadow. They stopped beside a tower of bales and the boy took both the girl's hands in his. The great steamer strained impatiently like a strong lover resenting the whimpering little waves, eager for the billows beyond. Jerome suddenly felt the heat like hot fingers on his body.

"A tenement room with people everywhere and crying babies, no spot not filled with some human, crowding body. No coolness, no privacy, or this--for a few scorching weeks when you're young--and all the weary years afterwards to make up."

"Oh, please," Jerome begged with a quiver that would not stay under the forced laugh with which he tried to cover it, "don't delve down into the instincts of the whole race for this little job of ours. You make me feel as if we had undertaken to save humanity."

Jean was still looking toward the thin, rouged girl, drawn deeper into the shadow now. "But the instincts of the race _are_ what we're after."

"Well, please stay on the surface a bit more or--you'll make me want to slip away to the Spice Islands too." He had not meant to say it, but if Jean heard she took no notice. The girl's hands were gripped in the boy's now as he drew her to him behind the bales. The next moment the band started and the girl came from behind the bales, rearranging her elaborately puffed hair and giggling as she passed.

The band crashed mechanically through its cheap selections, and was applauded dully, until the director hung up the fourth placard, announcing a waltz. Instantly a kind of shiver ran through the crowd. Boys and girls jumped to their feet, crushing each other in their haste, so that, before the band had played a dozen bars, a mass of moving bodies was gliding and swaying in the rising dust. Round and round they went, the dust rising thicker about them, the tapping of the girls' high heels and the shuffle of men's thick shoes drowning the ripple of the water on the piles beneath and the straining of the ship at her hawsers. The waltz ended but the dancers stood linked, furiously demanding an encore. The music began again. The settling dust rose in a fresh cloud. The girls relaxed in their partners' arms, and the boys held them hungrily as if, with the certainty of its short duration, they must wrest from this bodily contact every thrill concealed in it.

Jerome shifted in his chair. He wanted to get up and go back to the peace of the roof with Jean. He could not look at her and yet he wanted to make some comment, say something that would drag these close-locked bodies and gleaming eyes back to the level of a civic problem.

Again and again the band yielded in its indifference to what it played so long as it filled the requisite hours. The partners rarely changed, and again and again the thin girl and the ferret-eyed boy passed near, dancing a little apart from the others. Suddenly the boy said something, the girl tossed her head, jerked herself from his hold and came to sit down a few seats away. The boy's eyes were evil in their rage. He took a step toward the girl, stopped, shrugged his narrow shoulders and came directly over to Jean.

"Say, don't yuh wanter dance?"

Instinctively Jerome moved to interpose, but Jean was smiling up into the pimply face and bold eyes, defiant of inequality.

"But I can't dance, really, not a step."

"Say, yuh're kiddin'. Why anybody kin dance. It's as easy as rollin' off a log."

"Not for me."

"Aw come on, git up anyhow. Yuh can't help dancin' wid me. Jes' listen to de music. One, two, t'ree, tra la la, it gits yuh by itself. Come on."

To Jerome's amazement Jean rose. The boy took a heavily scented and soiled handkerchief from his pocket, adjusted it between Jean's shoulderblades, clamped it fast with his grimy hand, and standing at a distance that marked his knowledge of Jean's difference, swung her into step. Jerome rose, shook his body as if freeing it from a net, and walked to the space beyond the last row of chairs.

In the moving mass he caught Jean's face. She stood a head above the pimply face smiling up to her. She was smiling, too. Jerome drew deeper into the shadow. He lost Jean in the crowd, then she glided again into his line of sight. She was still smiling, apparently unconscious of that disgusting hand on her back, and the red, pimply face below her own. The thin, rouged girl was crying now. Jerome stepped further into the shadow to escape the circle closing about Jean, the ferret-eyed boy and sobbing girl.

He tried to drag himself back to the first moments of the evening, alone on the roof with Jean, but he could not do it. Something within was pushing to the surface, dragging up from the years memories of his own youth, hours that did not concern Jean at all, moments of need baffled by Helen's fragile strength, her misunderstanding and colorless desire. And then, of Jean's white neck and arms and the thick, soft whiteness of her flesh.

The music stopped. Jean was on the edge of the dancers looking for him. He went slowly forward. When the boy saw Jerome coming, he sidled away with a grin.

"Why did you do that?"

"Why did I do it?"

"Yes. Why?" Jerome saw the surprise in Jean's eyes but his need to know drove him on. "Yes. Why?"

"Because I wanted to feel for myself what there is in it. I wanted to see what there is in sheer motion that makes it worth while to add to ten hours a day, three more of real, physical effort."

"Do you know, now?" Why didn't she move farther away? Jerome felt as if she were touching him, and, at the same time, as if his body were formed of the hot dust. "Do you?"

"You would have to try it for yourself," Jean answered coldly, annoyed at this fastidity of objection. "It _does_ get you. There's something----"

"So it seems. Does the success of the experiment demand further investigation?"

"Let's go."

Without another word, they walked the length of the pier and out again through the small door. As they walked in silence back to the apartment, through the chaos in Jerome, a little thread of shame and regret drew him almost to the point of speech. What must Jean be thinking? He could not part from her like this? And yet, when he tried to grasp and hold a thought in words, it burst like a rocket from his control, in a shower of scorching sparks, looks, the feel of Jean's cool fingers, the maddening composure of her clear, gray eyes.

They reached the door with the silence unbroken.

"Good-night." Jean made no conciliatory reference to the next appointment, as she turned to the vestibule with an impersonal smile that did not touch her eyes.

In another second she would be up there alone in the inhuman detachment of her roof.

"Good-night." He held out his hand and, for a moment, hers lay in it, strong, cool, and burning the whole surface of his palm. He almost flung it from him. "Good-night," he repeated thickly and was gone.

After a few moments, Jean began to move slowly along through the lower hall and up the stairs. She walked with strange deliberation, holding her mind to the physical motions of her body by force. At the roof door she stopped, as if afraid of what lay beyond it. And when at last she turned the handle and stepped into the full moonlight of the graveled roof, her whole body was trembling. She went and sat down on the corner of the coping farthest from the spot where she and Jerome had stood to watch the death of the day.

She understood. And the past, by which she understood, rushed down upon her: the night in the studio when Herrick had asked her to marry him: the night she had stood on the dark street with Gregory, and then, so quietly and inevitably gotten into the taxi: and the night when Philip Fletcher had cried and squeaked in his angry pain.

Jean covered her face with her hands. She seemed to be on the edge of a dark and dangerous place. Suddenly the blackness was pricked with points of light. They forced themselves between her locked fingers, until her hands dropped into her lap, and she sat very still looking into the future.

Years of companionship and shared interests. Work and understanding and tenderness. The need of being needed. The future opened about her, and Jean cried.

CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

"IT'S impossible. I'm almost fifty--and there is Alice."

Whenever Jerome could grasp the fact of Alice, the night's madness dulled to acceptance of conditions. Alice was married. She would have children of her own. He would be a grandfather. Only ten or fifteen years of real usefulness lay ahead. A quarter of a century of comfortable security, uncomplicated by emotion, stretched backward.

Three o'clock. Half past. A dog barked. A distant rooster crowed. Jerome was glad of the sounds. Soon the "terrific stillness" before the dawn would be all shot through with these safe, pleasant sounds of every day. The sun would come up. Milk wagons would rattle down the lanes. Malone would clump about in the kitchen. She would call him to breakfast and he would eat it while he read the morning paper, propped against the sugar-bowl. Then he would take the eight o'clock boat, as he had for fifteen years, and go to the office.

And there he would sit waiting and listening for sounds across the hall, inventing reasons to consult with Jean. He had done it for months, incredibly ignorant of his own reactions. But now he was not ignorant. That moment on the sidewalk, had flared into the deepest corners, burned away the ridiculous tangle of logic by which he had convinced himself, the night of the concert, that his emotion had been "biological." Good God, he had called it that, a momentary spark, struck from the cold past, by the unexpected beauty of Jean's flesh!

It was no momentary spark. He did not want to take Jean in his arms and kiss her once, as he had wanted to do that night. He wanted her for always, day and night, to share with her the years before them.

And he was almost fifty. A thousand little habits, acquired through years, locked him fast. Alice and he had walked happily side by side. Jean's path would not run parallel to his. It would cross and crisscross.

She was strong. She pulsed with life. She might want a child. He and Jean and their child. And Alice and Sidney and Sidney, Junior. Like an immigrant family with the generations overlapping. Sidney Junior grinned and gurgled at him.

The sun rose. The night dew melted. The earth awoke refreshed and younger than the youngest human thing upon it. Jerome went wearily back into the house. He felt old and confused with the night's thinking, hours of balancing between--fifty and thirty. Aching with a body-hunger his brain could not appease, blind in this storm of desire, lit with lightning flashes of self-ridicule, with amazement of the thing, with disbelief in its possibility, with the gurgling of Sidney, Junior, with strange reluctance and anger.

Milk wagons rattled down the lane. The sun rose full over the hilltops. A new day was begun, one of those new days, one of those "twenty-four hours to make into what you will." Jerome smiled feebly.

"Another twenty-four hours like this and there'll be nothing left of me to do anything with."

Malone banged about in the kitchen. At last she called him to breakfast. He sugared the cereal she set before him, arranged the paper against the sugar-bowl, and stared at the headlines.

When she thought he was ready she brought the first helping of hot waffles. He saw her look at the untouched bowl and with difficulty made her understand that he did not want it. He buttered the waffles and poured the honey on them, stacking the crisp quarters one upon the other as he always did. And there they were when Malone came with the second plate. She stood holding the covered plate until Jerome told her impatiently to stop baking them. He felt that in this unreasonable world, Malone might go on baking waffles all day.

At a quarter to eight as always, Jerome pushed back his chair. He looked at the paper still folded to the front page and the crust of the single slice of toast he had attempted to eat.

"It's fifty all right--or I would have eaten it--and not known what it was."

Then he went into the living-room. He wrote two notes, one to the office and one to Jean. He was called out of town most unexpectedly. The business would take several days, and as he would be in the northern part of the State, he had decided to go on for his vacation, without returning. The notes were brief and almost duplicates, except that he added to Jean's a regret that they would not be able to finish the piers together. He sent the notes by messenger and packed his trunk.

* * * * *

Jean took the note from the boy and laid it unopened on the desk. Twice she picked it up and put it down again uncut. It was a scorching morning but her hands were cold and although all the windows were open, she felt that the room was airless. She crossed to the window and leaned out a little way. Below, the city, like the sea beating against a cliff, washed the base of the building, where, in a high, safe niche, she stood alone with the note from Jerome Stuart. In a moment she would open it and make a decision, although she knew that when she did open, the decision would have been already made.

Jean went back to the desk and opened the envelope. She read the half sheet and tore it slowly into bits. Her body scorched, but her fingers were icy to her own touch.

Jerome Stuart had run away. There was no love in his desire. He did not want to want her. She had disturbed his peace against his will and he had gone as he might have gone to escape the contagion of an illness. And last night she had sat for hours on the roof, almost afraid to think, because of the small, eager fear that had come upon her!

When Minnie came for the morning's dictation, Jean felt that she had been sitting at her desk for weeks. Only years of habit made it possible to pick up the day's routine, but early in the afternoon, Jean left the office and went home.

The sun beat fiercely upon the asphalted gravel. Jersey was hidden under its pall of smoke. Nearer at hand, huge chimneys belched their blackness into the quivering heat. The day was still roaring at its task.

Jean went into the little living-room and lowered the blinds to a kindly softness. Then, as in the old days, before a problem, she began to walk up and down.

But the day roared to its completion, the huge chimneys ceased to send forth their black columns, the lowering sun thinned the black pall to gold-shot gray, and still Jean walked up and down.

The thing that Philip Fletcher had found, "the call of a woman to a man," Jerome Stuart had felt. That quiet man who understood so many things. He understood himself and he had gone away.

And she had not wanted him to go. She had no passion for Jerome Stuart. His nearness left her cold. She did not long to help him as she had longed to help Franklin. But she had not wanted him to go.

What tangled threads of instinct and of need bound her? The age-old woman's need of being needed? But Jerome did not need her. He had run away.

It was her own need, not Jerome's. Her need of what? Something nearer than lives she never touched? Something of her own?

It was cool now and Jean went out to the roof. Far down in the street dwarfed figures hurried by. They had finished the day's work. They were going home.

Long after the dwarfed black figures were gone, Jean sat, staring down.

As the days passed, Jean came to wish, more and more deeply, that she had never seen Jerome Stuart. The thought of him filled her waking hours, and at night she often dreamed of the moment on the sidewalk, only, in the dreams, Jerome always came up to the roof again. And in the evenings when she tried to read, in the once peace-filled stillness, he was there across the room, his shoulders, with their student stoop, bent over a book. He stopped and read her bits and they laughed together, or she saw his anger against social injustice crackling like a fire in his gray eyes.

Three times in her life, Jean had felt the old landmarks slip away. Three times in her life she had felt the old Jean die and another woman take the place: when she had left Herrick, when she had received Gregory's letter, and when she had come home to find Martha dead. Each time she had felt as if no future experience could ever reveal unguessed depths in herself. And now, at thirty-nine, because a man whom she did not love, had desired her for a moment against his own will, she felt.... What was it that she felt? Not the ending of all things, as she had felt at Gregory's going. Not the loneliness that followed Martha's. These had been like sudden death in the midst of life. Now she was not dead. She was outside life, watching it go by. And, like the old people, whom she had watched with Gregory, following the sun about the Almshouse walls, she did not want it to go.

"For a few years yet you will be a woman."

Jean went slowly across the roof, through the living-room, to the small blue and white bedroom. She turned on the light above the mirror and looked calmly into it. In the last two years the band of gray above her ears had thickened. There were faint lines, very faint, at the corners of her eyes. The eyes themselves were clear and young, but now that Jean looked steadily into their frank depths, something rose from beneath the surface, an intangible record of the years.

Jean turned, getting almost the full view of her body in the mirror. It was wonderfully strong and straight. The throat and breasts were firm and the flesh soft. Jean remembered how soft and white her mother's body had been when she had covered it against the draught.

Her own, perhaps, would keep its youth, too, a mockery of the lessening power within. In spite of all her efforts, her enthusiasm would decay, more quickly now that she had recognized her need to keep it. Her body more quickly, her brain more slowly, would obey the law. She would sink, with tragic unconsciousness of the process, into benumbed indifference. No more stress, no more impatience, no longing, no regret. Patient acceptance.

Jean snapped off the light and went out to the roof again.

Jerome Stuart had gone away. But he would come back.

CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

Jerome Stuart grinned at the red-cap who rushed forward for his bag, at the transfer man to whom he gave his checks, to the taxi driver whom he beckoned, and finally, when he found himself sitting on the very edge of the seat as if, by so doing, he could force the vehicle more quickly through the traffic, at himself.

For a little over two weeks he had managed to stay away. And, although from the moment he had entered the train to return, he could not have told why he ever went, still less why he had stayed, he was proud of the achievement. He felt that he had acquired a power of self-control that no emergency of life could ever shake. He had fished and tramped and played tennis and, one evening, alone in his room, he had even tried to do some serious reading. At the memory of that evening, Jerome leaned against the cushions and laughed aloud.

"You poor, besotted idiot."

He might be fifty, sixty, a hundred. He might have a dozen daughters and a score of grandchildren. None of it had anything to do with his love for Jean Herrick. He had run away in a kind of perverted modesty, just as a child might refuse a longed-for present beyond its just expectations,

"It would serve you right if she had gone away and you couldn't find her."

But at the thought, Jerome perched on the edge of the seat again.

"Steady, old top, steady. If you go at things like this, you'll bungle the whole business. And then you will be in a fix. Besides, you know, you can't dash in and ask a lady to marry you, when she hasn't even the least idea you're in love. Cool down, grandpa, cool down."

Nevertheless when the elevator did not instantly answer his summons, Jerome ran up the four flights to his office.

In the middle of her dictation to Minnie, Jean heard his step and stopped. She sat, arrested, for what seemed an endless time, while Minnie chewed her pencil and stared at her own new patent leather pumps.

"The usual ending--to those three last--and that will be all for the present."

"Yes'm." Still chewing, Minnie went.

Jerome Stuart was back. In a few moments perhaps he would come in. He would come in with no memory of that last moment on the sidewalk in his manner, because that was the only way the old relations could go on. And she would meet him, with careless surprise at this return, two weeks sooner than he had expected. He would tell her of his vacation and she would report the lack of any exciting developments while he had been away. Perhaps he would suggest finishing the piers.

He would sit in that chair where she would have to face him, unless she deliberately turned her back. She would listen while he talked. Outwardly they would be the good comrades they had always been. But the man who had desired her would be there, too, and the woman who had sat on the roof and cried, who had appraised her flesh and estimated her power to rouse again his desire, would be there, too. Jean shuddered. She wished he would come now, instantly, and then decided to go before he could.

She had changed her mind for the tenth time, when Jerome's door opened, and her choice was gone. He was in the outer office, saying good morning to Minnie. He knocked and Jean rose, forced by some inner need, to meet him standing. "Come in."

"Back on the job, you see. How's the world got along in my absence?"

He was coming towards her, the outer man and the other, shifting places dizzily, coming straight towards her, lit by the glare of those moments when she had considered living with him in closest intimacy.

"You certainly do look like all outdoors." She had managed to say it.

"I feel like it. I'm afraid to breathe in case I use up all the air in poor old Manhattan at one swoop."

He took his usual place without offering to shake hands. Jean continued to stand. If she relaxed her muscles, the poise she had summoned would relax too, and Jerome Stuart would know that she had weighed her power to waken again his momentary passion.

Jerome wished that Jean would sit down. It made him feel that he had interrupted her in an important piece of work and that she was waiting for him to go. Besides, standing so, the strong sweep of body disturbed him, and his resolve to proceed slowly and carefully was shaken almost beyond control.

"So you haven't taken a vacation at all. Don't you intend to?"

"I don't know. I may." Jean looked away to her desk, covered with papers.

The first impression that she had given of pleasure at his return was gone. She was frowning slightly as if she found it a little difficult to accept this interruption.

She was so strong and self-reliant. She needed no one. The thing he had felt in her had been of his own imagining, it was a projection from within. This big woman, impatient to get at her work, had no need within her. The white softness of her flesh was a lie. She was alive in her brain only.

And he, in two short weeks had lived a lifetime.

For twenty-three years he had thought of himself as Alice's father. He had touched emotion only in relation to his child and her life. He had lived in the reflected glow of others' more intense emotions. And this woman, with her ill-concealed impatience for him to be gone, had dragged him down, in two weeks, in less, in one night, down into the rushing current, back to the very Purpose of Life. There she stood, waiting for him to go.

Jerome rose. If he stayed another minute he would tell her that he loved her. Or strike her. He did not know which.

"I'm afraid you're busy and I'm keeping you."

"No. I'm not busy--not specially. You're not keeping me."

If Jerome Stuart went before she had mastered the situation, it would forever hold its whip over her.

Jean sat down but Jerome stood where he was. This reversal of position brought him nearer, so that now he was close, looking down upon her.

"The Adirondacks must be lovely now."

"They are."

"You're back earlier than you intended, aren't you?"

"Yes."

Jean was smiling up at him.

Had Jerome Stuart always looked like that, or was it some quality the had brought back from the open? His gray eyes glowed with the same light that heralded dawn. His body radiated a spiritual fire which, Jean felt, would consume any obstruction upon which he chose to direct it. It was the Galahad quality she had imagined in Herrick, made manifest; the courage she had overestimated in Gregory, raised to the limit of human possibility. Jean began to tremble.

"I--I _am_ rather busy this morning--only it didn't seem exactly courteous to say so."

"Please don't be insincere--ever--with me, even in things that don't matter at all."

Jean rose. "Well then--I won't. Will you please--go?"

But Jean was too near. He could feel her in his arms as he had felt her every night, alone in the mountains.

"You're so hard--so terribly un-needing--and I need you so."

Jean's hands gripped the desk-edge, but she still managed to keep the smile in her eyes. She could hear Minnie typing in the next room and out in the hall the elevator clanked. It had been so still in the studio the night Herrick asked her to marry him. And the night that she and Gregory had stood silent, the air had been touched with frost and the stars had been so bright. It was hot now and the glaring August sun beat in under the awnings. The city roared away to vast distances, and even the small spot where she stood was filled with little clickings and bangings.

"Don't look like that, please. Forgive me. I won't offend again."

The words drew Jean back to the moment.

"Don't you mean--that you love me? That--you want--to marry me?"

"Mean it! Of course I mean it. More than I ever meant anything in all my life. Jean! Do you? Do you care too?"

His hands were on her now, holding her with assured possession. And suddenly Jean's eyes filled with tears.

"I don't know. I don't know what I feel. I want to care. I want you to love me. When you went away like that I was angry--and disappointed--and I thought of how I could _make_ you care enough but something inside----"

Jerome's hands dropped. "What do you mean? What are you talking about?"

The tears ran down Jean's cheeks. "Something inside is dead. I do care--every way--but that."

"Then you don't care at all. You're not a child. Don't you know what love means?"

Jean's head dropped until he could see only her quivering lips.

"Yes--I know."

After a long silence, Jerome said quietly: "Then, there's nothing else to say." He turned away.

He was going. In another moment there would be no bridge to the empty years ahead.

"Wouldn't it be enough--the rest, everything, friendship--interest----"

Jerome swung round. "Would those have been enough before--when you cared?" he demanded.

She stopped, almost touching him. "No, they wouldn't have been enough, then. I didn't know their value."

Her eyes were very gentle. Jerome turned away again and walked slowly over to the window. Jean stood where she was, waiting.

Could he take less? Could he? Know that there had been more, sense it in a thousand small, intimate ways that made his blood run hot at the thought. To feel it and never to share it. Or worse, to know it corpse-like, forever beyond his reach. That, or nothing of Jean at all.

He spoke without turning. "I don't know. Truly, I don't know. It doesn't seem as if I could. And yet--when I try to think of going on without you----"

He did not speak again or move, but stood with his shoulders hunched, his hands in his pockets. At last Jean went to him. At her touch on his arm, he looked up. His face was so white and fixed that Jean's hand dropped. It would have to be all or nothing to him.

"I--I hoped it would be enough."

"Why? You don't love me."

"I don't know why--only that I did hope."

Jerome's face quivered. "Why did you tell me, Jean, that you know what love is? If you hadn't--but now I will always know that you know. Why did I have to know?"

"Because," Jean said slowly, "I do care and I want your love, very, very much."

It was a long time before Jerome turned from the window again.

They stood so, looking quietly at each other and then Jean said, with a wistful smile:

"Shall we try it?"

After a moment an answering smile flickered in Jerome's eyes.

"I suppose this terrible knowledge of values is the price we have to pay for feeling at all--at our age."

"Perhaps it is worth it. I feel somehow--that it is."

"Do you, Jean? Do you really?"

Jean nodded. "I almost know it is," she whispered as Jerome drew her gently to him.

THE END.