THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES 
 
 IN MEMORY OF 
 EDWIN CORLE 
 
 PRESENTED BY 
 JEAN CORLE
 
 THE BOARDWALK 
 
 BY 
 MARGARET WIDDEMER 
 
 AUTHOR OF "THE ROSE-GARDEN HUSBAND," 
 
 "THE WISHING-RING MAN," "THE OLD 
 
 ROAD TO PARADISE," ETC. 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 HARCOURT, BRACE AND HOWE 
 1920
 
 COPYRIGHT, IQ20, BY 
 HARCOURT, BRACE AND HOWE, INC. 
 
 THE QUINN a BODEN COMPANY 
 RAHWAY. N. J.
 
 Co 
 
 DOCTOR JAMES FRANCIS ACKERMAN 
 BEST AND KINDEST OF DOCTORS AND FRIENDS 
 
 2039041
 
 FOREWORD 
 
 THE BOARDWALK 
 
 IT begins by the Allenwood flume, where the little 
 boys go to catch herring in the spring. It stretches 
 tfown for about two miles, diving through the 
 Arches Pavilion, where the young lovers go to look 
 at the water on lonely days when they hope they will 
 not be disturbed. 
 
 Further on it passes Knockers' Row, where the 
 middle-aged women sit and tell each other their 
 thoughts about the passersby. Then comes Wesley 
 Pavilion, circled with booths and full of dancers in 
 summer, most desolate of all places in the winter. 
 Jhen it goes in a wide outward circle, as if it were 
 not over-religious, around the roofed place in the 
 Grove where the praise meetings are held; more 
 lumpily and bumpily, for the Grove authorities are 
 canny souls. They do not replace their part of the 
 Boardwalk as often as the Park Council, which 
 handles money not its own and hence votes it away 
 royally for improvements. 
 
 After that it passes the Grove pier, where the 
 vii
 
 viii FOREWORD 
 
 old men sit fishing benignantly, not so much inter 
 ested in their catch as pleased to be out in the air 
 with the sun and the sea. 
 
 It is like a pattern of life. 
 
 In summer it is crowded. The gaily dressed people 
 surge up and down it in a long, sauntering proces 
 sion. It is strung with colored lights that from sea 
 look like a long necklace of jewels. " It's a lovely 
 Boardwalk," the summer people say with all the rap 
 ture of their two weeks off. We, waiting a little 
 impatiently for them to go, answer with a trained 
 courtesy for are summer people not our liveli 
 hood ? that seems a trifle bored. 
 
 We are not bored; blase, a little perhaps, with 
 the tawdrily exciting summers we have known since 
 babyhood. But the Boardwalk is our life; and 
 one doesn't make amiable compliments about one's 
 life.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 CHANGELING ...... ... 3 
 
 ROSABEL PARADISE ........ 60 
 
 DON ANDREWS' GIRL 77 
 
 BLACK MAGIC . IO 
 
 THE CONGREGATION I 2 5 
 
 THE FAIRYLAND HEART . . . . . 14$ 
 
 GOOD TIMES 175 
 
 OH, MR. DREAM-MAN IQ^ 
 
 DEVIL'S HALL 22O
 
 THE BOARDWALK
 
 CHANGELING 
 
 BACK in the days when Theodora Woods and the 
 rest of us were growing up, the Park was less the 
 tawdry Shopgirls' Delight it is now. It was still 
 known as an excellent place to bring up the children. 
 [There were daisy fields and sand meadows between 
 the jewel-like little lakes, and in these grew enchant- 
 ingly wild strawberries and white violets and dog 
 roses and goldenrod and anemones, at their proper 
 seasons, for the children to pick. You never needed 
 to think of children, though, from one meal to the 
 next, for the place was so safe then that you could 
 send a twelve-year-old daughter on an errand at 
 night through a lonely mile of closed summer cot 
 tages, down to the little cluster of living lights that 
 were the village shops, knowing that she would meet 
 nothing worse than loneliness coming or going. 
 
 The Woods family settled there, like most other 
 all-the-year-round people, because their past was a 
 failure, and because the Park was a new little sum 
 mer resort with a future. Mr. Woods had tried a 
 half-dozen things, from salesmanship to grocery- 
 storekeeping, without exactly putting anything 
 
 3
 
 4 CHANGELING 
 
 through, and the Park offered him a fresh chance. 
 He was always beginning fresh chances; he was a 
 rather pompous, ineffective little man, Theo's father, 
 strutting over any trifle that came his way, very 
 proud of his position as head of the family (it really 
 belonged to his wife), and especially proud of his 
 wild flame of a fifteen-year-old daughter. He might 
 well be, though she never seemed to be in the least 
 his doing. But his attitude apparently was that her 
 attributes were merely a development and setting 
 forth of his own. She seemed to the rest of us like 
 a princess in a peasant's hut. But then there is no 
 adoration like the adoration you give some wonder 
 ful friend at fifteen. 
 
 The eldest of four in a maidless family may well 
 be a drudge, and often is. But Theo wasn't. She 
 did her full share of the housework, but she whisked 
 it through much more competently than did Avalene, 
 the next sister, though Avalene was a plain and 
 patently industrious child who stayed lumpily at 
 home and seemed to toil a good deal. Theo, on the 
 contrary, never seemed to be doing anything hard, 
 though she stood high in her classes in a way that 
 tempted her teachers to drive her. But work, school 
 or home, to gay, vivid young Theo, was some 
 thing to be hastened lightly through and forgotten.
 
 CHANGELING 5 
 
 The real business of her full and interesting life was 
 having a good time with the boys. 
 
 It was an innocent, if vulgar, good time that Theo 
 and her mates had with their lovers at Juliet's age. 
 They never touched indeed, they scarcely knew 
 about the lower stratum of girls, those who went 
 to the school across the track, and whose good times 
 sometimes descended below vulgarity. The little 
 Radnor Beach girls, or the dingily-gay little souls 
 who lived in " flats " in the business district you 
 crossed such every day on the boardwalk, but you 
 did not think about them. You kept very proudly 
 to your own " set." 
 
 Theodora, and a string of girls belonging to the 
 carefully demarked " set " of that year, would 
 march down to the boardwalk after school, shoulders 
 scornfully back and arms linked, laughing excitedly 
 and chattering about the " boys." They would meet 
 these, friends or acquaintances, linked in a like row, 
 patrolling the boardwalk in an opposite direction, 
 likewise with a certain scorn in their demeanor. 
 There would be a lifting of shoulders, or a louder 
 giggle than usual, at the encounter, and some brave 
 spirit would cast a mocking word to the row of the 
 other sex. After the second, or perhaps the third 
 crossing, the linked rows would fuse, stretching all
 
 6 CHANGELING 
 
 across the walk or breaking into pairs, as the fashion 
 of the moment happened to be for " crowds " or 
 " twosing." 
 
 It was " twosing " the June before Theo was six 
 teen, the time when her life was at its highest tide. 
 
 "* 
 
 To grown people a girl of fifteen and a,,half is a 
 child still ; to herself she is very old and very real ; 
 more real, perhaps, than ever before or after, even 
 the average girl of that age. And Theodora was 
 not average. She was like a girl of eighteen, physi 
 cally and mentally. Her personality made an impact 
 that you could not forget. 
 
 She was something of a marvel to most people, 
 coming from her rather dingy, middle-class small 
 town family; but the probable explanation is that 
 she was a throwback. There was in the family a 
 strain of very good and vigorous English adventur- 
 mg blood. 
 
 Gramma Coburn had run away with Grampa Co- 
 burn, she being a Squire's daughter of Devon, and 
 he what the Squire referred to until death as " that 
 damn bagman." They had, of course, come to 
 America, where the English used to suppose caste to 
 be non-existent, and drifted finally into farming. 
 The two old people, with an old-maid daughter, 
 dwelt on a farm near Red Bank, very much of a
 
 CHANGELING 7 
 
 piece as far as outward appearance went. Some 
 times Gramma scolded Grampa, but on the whole 
 they got on as well as the average. Gramma was 
 tall and very brown and gaunt and wrinkled, with 
 false teeth and an unashamed devotion to red flan 
 nel, and Theo and Avalene found it much easier to 
 be romantic about her when she was out of their 
 sight. She did not look like the aristocratic old 
 ladies in English novels. 
 
 But one thing she had done for Theo, at least; 
 her authentic Elizabethan forbears, the Sir Ralphs 
 and Captain Basils and Mistress Theodoras, all ad 
 venturous and arrogant, world-wanderers and court 
 beauties before their twenties were near, had come 
 alive again in this Theodora. She had a whip of 
 yellow hair in the wind, long sapphire-colored eyes 
 that were insolent when they did not laugh, and the 
 tall, straight, beautifully-built body that most Park 
 girls had for a heritage, living as they did outdoors 
 between wind and water all summer. Theo had also 
 the Elizabethan combination of brilliant intellect and 
 brilliant gaiety. Mind and body, she was all alive, 
 and the world was hers to play with. She stood 
 out in our minds like an electric light among candles, 
 and carried us along like a gay, ruthless young 
 whirlwind. Her attitudes, her mannerisms, stuck in
 
 S CHANGELING 
 
 otir minds and set the copy for us. She knew it, 
 &alf consciously, and it made her gayer and more 
 princesslike. She ruled still as the winter came on, 
 thrilled with her own triumphs. 
 
 Her father, eyeing her, felt a little uneasy, and 
 as if anyone so exultant as that with life must be 
 in the wrong. Her mother thought, doubtless with 
 wisdom, that Theo must be overtiring herself. So 
 one evening, after a long discussion, they spoke to 
 her about il. That is, her father did in quite the 
 wrong way, of course. 
 
 "You been running around with the boys too 
 much," he said, crossly, over his paper, when she 
 came in from a party, calling back a gay good-by 
 to an unseen boy at the door. " That's what it is. 
 You'll get talked about. Why can't you behave 
 decently, like Naomi Ainslie or Olive Jardine? 
 You don't see a string of boys chasing around 
 them." 
 
 There was a half -reluctant pride in his girl's 
 prowess even in her father's snarl. Theo felt it, 
 though the warning in his words pricked her sensi 
 tively-clean mind uneasily, and sowed a little terror 
 there. She flung back her victorious young yellow 
 head and answered as pertly as any Mistress Marian 
 behind her :
 
 CHANGELING 9 
 
 " They'd be glad enough to have the boys if they 
 got a chance. I don't see why you need to worry, 
 I'm going to be valedictorian when we graduate 
 from High this February, if you call that neglecting 
 my lessons. I'm way ahead in my classes. I'm 
 making my graduating clothes, three dresses. And 
 I do lots more round the house than Avie, and you 
 don't nag her." 
 
 This was all so true that her father flew into one 
 of his quick little nasty tempers. 
 
 " I forbid you to go to any more parties, or be 
 out of this house after eight, any more till you 
 graduate. Your health won't stand it, and, anyway, 
 I'm not going to have folks talking." 
 
 Her mother, heavy, judicial and kind, backed up 
 her husband at this point. All the studies and par 
 ties and the sewing were telling on Theo. 
 
 " You got to stop burning the candle at both ends, 
 dear. Come, you've lots of time ahead of you. Yon 
 can afford to wait till you're grown up for your 
 good times." 
 
 It was all so old so stale ! Theodora, vibrant as 
 an overstrained violin string, vivid as a flaring 
 candle, was all the more rebellious because she knew 
 that when her mother took a hand rebellion was 
 useless.
 
 io CHANGELING 
 
 " I may never have another good time as long as 
 I live," she fought, backed against the big old en 
 graving of Washington crossing the Delaware, 
 which decked the dining-room where they sat. Her 
 eyes and lips burned bright. Youth and sex-power 
 and life were at their height in her, and she wanted 
 to go on using them. She meant no evil she knew 
 nothing much about evil. Only our Northern con 
 vention of deferred youth pressed hard upon her, 
 and she wished to continue her innocent, exciting 
 conquests of High School boys, her rule over the 
 girls. And her people talked about having her wait 
 to grow up ! 
 
 She looked angrily from one to the other of them, 
 sitting dully at the red-covered dining-table. And 
 she felt inarticulately, without knowing that she felt 
 it, that she was alive and they were not. Her father 
 was twitching in his sandy, irritable nervousness, 
 jerking at his shabby mustache with one blunt- 
 nailed, knotty hand. Her mother sat steadily sew 
 ing at little Milly's new petticoat, stolid and tidy in 
 her dowdy brown henrietta with its tatting collar 
 and steel buttons. Avalene, over in her corner, stolid 
 apparently also, and gabbling principal exports half 
 aloud, was gloating, Theo knew, behind her shel 
 tering geography. Theo stood among them, a de-
 
 CHANGELING 11 
 
 fiant young princess. But she had to give in, and 
 she knew it. 
 
 " I have to do what you say," she conceded sul 
 lenly. " I suppose I can go over to Naomi Ainslie's 
 to get my Latin in the evenings? Our room's cold 
 as ice, and everybody makes such a noise down here 
 I can't think. You can take me there, if you like, 
 to see that I don't misbehave on the way," she ended 
 defiantly. 
 
 " No impudence, miss," snapped her father, as 
 Theo flung out of the room. The sense of bright 
 ness that her presence always brought went with 
 her, and the room was suddenly a less interesting 
 place. Her father, his gust of temper over, smiled 
 at his wife across the red-checked tablecloth. 
 
 " Smart as they make 'em ! " he said proudly ; 
 and Avalene jerked her clumsy shoulders resent 
 fully. What was the use of being good and obedient 
 and hardworking if ... 
 
 But she was as much under Theo's spell as the 
 rest, and the next night, when Theo came back from 
 her Latin studies, wind-flushed and warm, though 
 Avalene heard the muffled clink of skates in her sis 
 ter's school bag, she never thought of telling on 
 Theo. But she very well knew where her sister had 
 been.
 
 12 CHANGELING 
 
 When the ice on the lake bore, every boy and girl 
 in the Park spent every free moment on it. It was 
 especially modish in Theo's set to go skating at 
 night, and everything of importance that befell you 
 happened then. Avalene, by the way, had no temp 
 tation to go ; her especial friends skated in the after 
 noons. She could see that it was asking a good deal 
 of Theo to deprive herself of the principal pleasure 
 of the time merely because of a silly ukase from 
 Grown People. Clarence Griggs, the druggist's son, 
 and Naomi Ainslie and Martha Atchison, respec 
 tively the doctor's and the Lutheran minister's 
 daughter, did, it was known, stay home because they 
 were told to. And girls like Catherine James and 
 Corinna Goldthwaite, little daughters of a remnant 
 of aristocracy over on the outskirts of Allenwood, 
 came down decorously with governesses once in a 
 while for us to look at with a careless curiosity. 
 But we gave such, when we thought about them, a 
 scornful pity on account of their trammels, which it 
 was suspected they felt. They were removed en 
 tirely, to our mind, from life and living. They were 
 " out of things." 
 
 Theo, skimming down the ice, hand-in-hand with 
 her chum, Leila Graves, was in things. She was in 
 things up to the hilt in fact, she was a large part
 
 CHANGELING 13 
 
 of them. Leila Graves was her second in command, 
 red-cheeked, black-ringleted, sophisticated and self- 
 assured as only a hotel-keeper's daughter can be at 
 fourteen, but withal good natured, honest and a wor 
 shiper of Theo's. She had her own train. So when 
 Theo deserted her for Ethan Ferrier, after the first 
 tingling half hour of stars and ice, she promptly 
 stole his brother, Quincy, from Hetty Christie; it 
 wasn't difficult, because Hetty was only in that set 
 on sufferance, being on the borderland that led to 
 the despised " across-the-track " girls. The boys 
 took her about because her muddy skin and scarlet 
 lips had a strong charm of their own, and the girls 
 tolerated her because she was very demonstrative 
 and very meek. But she knew her place, and merely 
 went home with fury in her heart, Tommy Brock 
 tagging in her train. But Tommy was of a still 
 lower caste, being a Radnor Beach boy. We had 
 many distinctions in our world of the Third Year 
 High. 
 
 Love reigned on the ice that night, the child love 
 that people laugh at, watching, and sigh over, look 
 ing back. Everyone set to partners, more or less. 
 But it was a very real love love at first sight be 
 tween Ethan Ferrier and Theodora Woods. He 
 was seventeen then and she fifteen, but they
 
 14 CHANGELING 
 
 never either of them knew anything like it after 
 wards. 
 
 The Ferriers were newcomers in town. Ethan 
 was a tall, shy boy with a face that seemed stolid 
 till you saw his eyes. They were the blue, sharply- 
 intelligent, deep-set eyes that go with the New Eng 
 land conscience. His people were impoverished New 
 England gentlefolk, relatives of Dr. Ainslie, the 
 Lutheran clergyman; they had come to the Park, 
 like most of its citizens, for a fresh start. Every 
 body wondered why Theo, who could have had any 
 body for a beau, preferred silent Ethan, with his 
 shy ways and little courteous stammer, to his 
 brother, Quincy, an airy and charming lad with 
 handsome features and much manner. Ethan prob 
 ably wondered about it himself. Theo did not give 
 her reasons, any more than princesses-regent ever 
 do. Perhaps it was the innate straightness and chiv 
 alry of the lad, contrasted with the roughness of the 
 less well-bred boys she had known before. Perhaps 
 it was the deep faithfulness she divined under his 
 inarticulateness. Or it may have been merely the 
 law of contrasts. 
 
 It did not occur to the other girls that the Ethan 
 affair was any more important than Theo's earlier 
 ones. She had possessed beaux ever since she was
 
 CHANGELING 15 
 
 tiny. Her high spirits, her self-possession, her reg 
 nant little way of taking admiration for granted, 
 had made the lads trail after her sheepishly even in 
 the girl-scorning stages. She liked it intensely, of 
 course. If you didn't have boys crazy over you, you 
 lost caste with the other girls. When you had a 
 " case " in the grammar grades you found your 
 name and his name written derisively in chalk on 
 the pavement, and the rest called loudly after you, 
 walking self-consciously home from school together. 
 As you got older the other girls still teased and tried 
 to make you blush, and said, " E'e ! She's blushing! " 
 gleefully or angrily, according to whether they 
 wanted your special boy or not, themselves. If 
 your life was boyless you were beneath contempt. 
 They were simply sorry for you. 
 
 Theo had enjoyed her small beaux, and kissed 
 them and held hands with them matter-of-factly 
 enough always, under the impression that she was 
 making love. But up to the time she met Ethan she 
 had really only been having a good time in the man 
 ner recommended by the conventions she knew. 
 She would have been very crestfallen if anyone had 
 told her so, of course. Her secret ambition, like 
 that of all the rest of her friends, was to be a dupli 
 cate of Airy Fairy Lilian in The Duchess' work of
 
 16 CHANGELING 
 
 that name, which, in torn paper covers, had devas 
 tated the Set that fall. Theo was considered, except 
 for her height, very like Lilian. Well, perhaps more 
 like Molly Bawn, when you came to discuss it care 
 fully. 
 
 But the case of Ethan was more unlike the 
 rest than Theo herself knew. They had fallen 
 desperately and honestly in love during one Latin 
 period, and become formally and thrillingly engaged 
 in the course of the week. Theo made the most of 
 the advances, though neither of them would have 
 believed that if they had been told. They said 
 nothing to their families about it, of course; they 
 would have been laughed at. Naturally they did 
 not give each other this reason, but exchanged vague 
 impressive hints of opposition till each nearly be 
 lieved the other. They didn't intend to marry right 
 away, anyhow. 
 
 " You'll have to go through college first, and I'm 
 going to be a famous artist," Theo laid down the 
 law, and Ethan assented gravely. He never even 
 talked as much as usual when he was with her, be 
 cause he was so busy thinking about her wonderful- 
 ness. She, on the contrary, talked more than usual, 
 because she was so excited at being with him. 
 
 Ethan never came to the house ; they always met 
 elsewhere. That was nothing against him. Your
 
 CHANGELING 17 
 
 beaux never did come to the house, except with " the 
 crowd." Your family was all over it, for one thing, 
 and would tease you afterwards. And Theo would 
 have preferred death to being teased about the most 
 beautiful and wonderful thing she had ever known. 
 
 It was that high and white First Love which is 
 nearly too sacred to tell the lover about. The first 
 night after they had kissed each other Theo went 
 home and burned up the sample box of pirik powder 
 that she'd kept hidden under her silk stockings in 
 the bottom drawer. She wanted to be worthy of 
 him. Under the stimulation of her love for Ethan 
 she gleamed brighter than ever. She got higher 
 marks at school, she flew through her home tasks 
 more efficiently and speedily, singing " The Sweetest 
 Story Ever Told " in an ecstatic voice over the 
 broom and the dishpan. Her cheeks were burning 
 bright all day long, and her jewel-blue eyes were 
 bluer than ever. Her very hair fluffed out more 
 electrically from the short, looped-under plait that 
 she had lately made at the back of her neck. 
 
 They went on skating together and walking home 
 from school together, and going off for long hand- 
 in-hand visits in the little glazed-in kiosks along the 
 boardwalk, those places tacitly reserved for love- 
 making. They dreamed and laughed and built fool-
 
 i8 CHANGELING 
 
 ish beautiful plans; and Ethan's people, the brave 
 little overworked mother and languid gentlemanly 
 father and small adoring sister and the big invalid 
 one, and the gay and poised Quincy, all noticed that 
 Ethan was looking older and carrying himself bet 
 ter, and working harder in and out of High School. 
 All the money the Ferriers could scrape together or 
 borrow was for Quincy, who was to be sent to 
 college. He was the star member of the family. 
 But for a while there was actually some talk of hav 
 ing Ethan try for college, too. The idea died gradu 
 ally, but he always remembered it of them with 
 gratitude, though when the time came he worked 
 his way through medical school unaided. Ethan was 
 of that burden-bearing type which is seldom planned 
 for by its nearest and dearest. 
 
 Once he did begin to tell his mother, a little shyly, 
 about the wonderfulness of Theodora; but she did 
 not pay much attention. It is possible that she was 
 a little jealous. Ethan had always been hers and 
 nobody else's; her only aid in the planning and fore 
 thought necessary for the happy-go-lucky others. 
 
 " Wouldn't it be a little better if you gave all that 
 time to a boy friend? " was all she said. 
 
 So after that Ethan said nothing at all. He was 
 too happy to be chilled, but he fell back on the old
 
 CHANGELING 19 
 
 axiom that grown people never understand, anyway. 
 
 They had two months or perhaps more of rapture 
 " walking on air " is the formula that describes 
 it best, perhaps. Then their chances for meeting 
 began to seem insufficient. When you are deeply 
 in love it is hard to be denied long hours alone to 
 gether. Ethan and Theo grew restive. 
 
 One afternoon they had to part an hour before 
 Theo's supper time. She had something to do at 
 home which was inescapable. And they had not 
 half finished what they wanted to say. They agreed 
 to meet on the ice that night and slip away to a 
 rustic seat in the little island which broke the bridge 
 in the middle of Sunrise Lake, and talk some more. 
 They had sat there so much of late that it had be 
 come prescriptively their own. It was sheltered 
 from the wind, and you could sit with anyone's arm 
 around you, and not be seen. 
 
 After supper Theo was in such a hurry to escape 
 that she was impatient with Avalene, ponderously 
 and thoroughly washing the dishes. And Avalene, 
 stirred to anger in her turn, retorted on her in an 
 incautiously loud voice across the kitchen. Theo 
 was standing at ease by the dresser, ostentatiously 
 waiting to come back to the sink, which she had 
 cleared of dishes, till more should be ready to dry.
 
 20 CHANGELING 
 
 " Course you're in a hurry, with your beau wait 
 ing for you! If I was you I wouldn't chase off like 
 that every time he lifted his finger! How do you 
 know he wants you? " 
 
 Theo was about to reply crushingly, when she saw 
 her father crossing the dining-room to the kitchen 
 door. She pushed it to as if she had not seen him. 
 
 " Now you've done it," she said bitterly. " I 
 suppose you're glad." 
 
 " Oh, he didn't hear ! " answered Avalene, rather 
 frightened. " Not but what he ought to know," she 
 ended virtuously. " But he didn't. See, he didn't 
 come in, nor be cross." 
 
 Theo caught her breath, and went on with her 
 dishes, subdued for the moment. Both girls began 
 to talk loudly about the sins of Avalene's teacher, 
 a noted and terrible landmark in school, Theo com 
 paring her past performances with the tales of this 
 year which Avalene had to tell. Their father did 
 not appear, however, and Theo, reassured, washed 
 her hands and furtively dabbed them with violet 
 perfume, collected her Latin books, put them in the 
 school bag above the muffled skates, and went to her 
 tryst. Under the exhilaration of her mood was the 
 little stirring of irrational fright which the high- 
 strung and overworked know. Her father's " Why
 
 CHANGELING 21 
 
 can't you behave decently? " of two months before 
 pricked her from the hidden place in her mind where 
 it had been thrust down. She did so want to be the 
 best girl in the world, for Ethan's sake. She wanted 
 to be dreadfully good. 
 
 " I feel as if you were a star," he had said to 
 her haltingly that afternoon. When he said things 
 like that it shook her all over, and made her feel 
 grateful and unworthy. It was so hard for him to 
 say things at all. 
 
 Then all the nervous dread and overstrain were 
 lost in the rapture of having Ethan skate up to her 
 from where he had been restlessly circling the ice 
 alone, and, after he had knelt and put on her skates, 
 pull her up to her lithe height and sweep with her 
 across the lake. 
 
 They circled the lake a couple of times, then made 
 for their nook on the island. The electric lights on 
 the bridge were merciful, and did not shine directly 
 on the bench. It was as near to seclusion as they 
 ever attained, except once in a while in the board 
 walk summer houses. They kissed each other 
 swiftly and long, cold young cheek against cold 
 young cheek, and then, still interlocked, with their 
 skates flung down beside them, began to talk 
 ardently about their love for each other, and what
 
 22 CHANGELING 
 
 they should do about the long stretch of years 
 before them. 
 
 " I can't wait ! " Ethan broke out. " Let's get 
 married next year. I've worked before, in vacations. 
 There are lots of things I can do." 
 
 He had risen and was standing before her. Theo 
 sprang up, too, and answered him ardently. 
 
 " I can work, too, Ethan ! We can do things just 
 as well after we're married ! " 
 
 She laughed out in the excess of her happiness, 
 and he laughed down at her. Then he sobered, and 
 bent over to kiss her very slowly. 
 
 " You angel ! " he said. " I'm not good enough 
 for you." 
 
 And as he straightened himself from that reverent 
 kiss, Theo's father caught his shoulder from behind 
 and jerked him aside, snarling at him. 
 
 " Go home, you young pup! " was all he said, and 
 turned to attack his daughter. 
 
 It is possible that he did not realize himself to be 
 saying much worse things than usual to her. Or 
 perhaps he felt that it needed such words to make 
 an impression on dominant young Theodora. He 
 was just a common, uncontrolled little, bad-tem 
 pered man. And then, of course, he was used to 
 having his rages discounted ; he was like a child who
 
 CHANGELING 23 
 
 is bad because it knows that it will not be taken 
 seriously. 
 
 But at all events the things he said to Theo in 
 his unbridled petty rage at having been tricked so 
 long were such as cannot be said to a good girl with 
 out breaking her, or making her hate you for life. 
 He stopped his shrill and outrageous abuse pres 
 ently, because Theo lay so laxly in his clutch, never 
 answering. It may have taken him aback, for he 
 had expected, of course, defiance, or at most an an 
 swering burst of temper. Instead his daughter stood 
 all slumped together, staring like a dead woman, 
 with her face, under the rays of the light, where 
 he had jerked her, wax-white and incredulous. She 
 looked as if she were drowning. Presently her stiff 
 lips moved a little. 
 
 "Ethan, Ethan, I'm not ..." she tried to 
 plead, and could only whisper. And then she saw 
 that he had gone, and shuddered from head to foot. 
 Everything was gone, then. 
 
 He was only seventeen, and he had acted auto 
 matically; terrified, perhaps, as Theo was terrified. 
 The habit of obedience was probably strong. But 
 he had gone, at that first sharp command. That fact 
 was changeless. And it made Theo certain that he 
 accepted her father's belief that he had deserted
 
 24 CHANGELING 
 
 her because she really was bad. She was innocent 
 enough to accept the fact herself, this much having 
 happened. She must be wicked if her father told 
 her so before her lover. And if her lover had gone 
 from her, it was because he, too, saw that she was 
 wicked. 
 
 Perhaps the crux of the matter lay in the moment 
 her father had taken ; a moment when, overtired and 
 overdriven physically and mentally, she was at the 
 highest tension of excitement. Anything pulled taut 
 is more likely to snap. 
 
 At any rate, when her father led Theodora home, 
 walking heavily beside him with her head drooping, 
 and the forgotten skates clinking over her arm, it 
 was a changeling he handled. It was still heavily 
 that she went up to her room at her father's surly, 
 relenting, " There, go to bed." 
 
 She walked through the open doorway, still dazed 
 with her weight of shamefulness, undressed slowly 
 and with a curious clumsiness, and lay down beside 
 Avalene. She even went to sleep. But ir an hour 
 Avalene was awakened by her sister's terrified sobs. 
 Theo was clutching her and moaning that she was 
 afraid of the dark 
 
 " Light a light please light a light! " 
 
 " I suppose that's why you went down cellar Hal-
 
 CHANGELING 25 
 
 lowe'en night backwards without any candle," 
 Avalene answered, sleepily sarcastic. 
 
 But Theo sobbed on, and presently Avalene took 
 the alarm and called their mother, who, being a 
 sensible woman, lighted the lamp immediately. Theo 
 quieted down at that and slept again, though it was 
 an uneasy sleep which disturbed Avalene to the point 
 of annoyance. Next morning Theo was in the same 
 unstrung state; her father's voice, floating up from 
 the dining-room as he made his usual querulous pro 
 test about the oatmeal, threw her into a fresh 
 paroxysm of terrified sobbing. Finally they sum 
 moned the doctor. It always cheered you up to 
 have Dr. Atchison come in the room. He made you 
 laugh so when he said things about your being sick. 
 Theo looked at him, wondering why she couldn't 
 laugh, and hoping he didn't know how bad she was. 
 It seemed to her strange that he talked to her in as 
 friendly a way as usual. 
 
 " Valedictories and parties altogether too much, 
 eh? " he ended, smiling at her. " You must take a 
 rest, child. Mustn't think because a horse will go 
 till it drops, that it won't drop, you know, Mrs. 
 Woods! She's high-strung, and she'd come to a 
 place where all she needed was one more party. I 
 suppose you had it, didn't you, Theo? "
 
 26 CHANGELING 
 
 Dr. Atchison's views on too many parties for the 
 adolescent were all the more keen because his own 
 Martha was going to win out in her struggle to go 
 to all the Junior dances, and he knew it. 
 
 Theo looked at him dully, and as his cheery voice 
 touched the hurt place in her consciousness the 
 place her father's outrageous words had lacerated 
 tears began to slide helplessly down her cheeks once 
 more. After which the doctor patted her, rallied 
 her again, told her that she would be all right soon 
 and might get one party in by May if she was a good 
 girl and kept off the boardwalk for a while; and left, 
 to talk seriously about breakdowns from overstudy, 
 where only Mrs. Woods could hear him. He coun 
 seled a stopping short of everything work, play, 
 excitement for a while; and a trip away some 
 where. The shock of being irrevocably disgraced 
 before the person who mattered most in the world 
 was something he could not bring into his calcula 
 tions, of course. He might have discounted it, any 
 way. As Theo or Ethan would have said, he was 
 grown up. 
 
 But even Theo herself, wincing at her father's 
 footstep in the days while she was being made ready 
 to go up to Grampa Coburn's and rest, never knew 
 that it was her father who had broken her. She
 
 CHANGELING 27 
 
 only expected every unhappy day to be all right to 
 morrow, and like her old self; and she watched 
 breathlessly and agonizedly for Ethan minute by 
 minute and hour by hour. She lay on the little rep 
 sofa in the front room and stared ceaselessly out of 
 the window, no one but herself knew why. 
 
 But Ethan never came. 
 
 . . . So he did think she was wicked. . . . 
 There was no hope that he would ever think any 
 thing else. . . . She would never have a chance 
 to make the long appealing self-justifications she 
 made in her mind, and said over and over again to 
 herself, changing the phrasings and the beginnings 
 and endings to make it more likely he would accept 
 them. ... It was wicked to kiss boys, and flirt 
 with them, and be shameless and a hussy that lied 
 to everybody, and that no decent man would ever 
 believe in. ... When the other girls, the ones 
 boys didn't like, like Eloise Gahegan, said she was 
 forward, they had known. It hadn't been cattiness. 
 . . . She cried weakly on her sofa when the time 
 came about twice a day that she could bear 
 watching for Ethan no longer. All the spirit and 
 the self-respect was beaten out of her. She went 
 gratefully to the bleak little Red Bank farm, grate 
 ful for the chance to crawl off and hide.
 
 28 CHANGELING 
 
 They were very kind to her there, of course. But 
 they puzzled over her, the gaunt old English people, 
 pottering about the little rooms. All she would do 
 was to lie on the sofa by the window, as she had at 
 home, and watch, or, as she became stronger, lean 
 at the gate watching. No, there was nobody she 
 expected, she told them which was as well for her 
 self-respect, because nobody ever came. She had 
 wild dreams how Ethan would come dashing to the 
 door to tell her that it was all a mistake; that he 
 hadn't heard anything her father had said; that he 
 didn't believe any of it; that he had found a way to 
 make lots of money, and soon, when she was sixteen, 
 they should be married. It kept her from going to 
 pieces all over again. But all the while she knew 
 that it wasn't true; that it never would be true. 
 Ethan knew her to be disgraced and worthless and 
 forward. He would never come. 
 
 And he never did. 
 
 Gradually she got better. Her body was tod 
 strong for her not to. Her co-ordination was bad ; 
 it never became really good. She dropped things 
 and moved clumsily long afterwards, and she was 
 afraid of the dark, and listless. And she began to be 
 imitative of any one she was near. This, however, 
 led to a good result; she picked up her grand-
 
 CHANGELING 29 
 
 'mother's still beautiful, throaty, English voice and 
 accent, instead of the flat New Jersey provincialism 
 she had known before; and despite her struggles 
 not to " put on airs " she never lost it. Finally 
 she went back home, just in time to help pack for 
 another of Mr. Woods' sudden purposeless moves; 
 purposeless, that is, unless a vaguely constant wish 
 to do better somewhere else is to be counted a pur 
 pose. They trekked to Jersey City. 
 
 The family, when it took time to observe, found 
 her curiously docile. It also felt that she was not 
 interesting any more. When one of the lads of her 
 old suite, greatly daring, came over with his sister to 
 say good-by, she was stiff and shy with him. She 
 was ill at ease, too, with another worshiper encoun 
 tered down town on an errand. She giggled and 
 jerked out stiff phrases and colored up uncomfort 
 ably. The light of her had gone out. 
 
 One of these boys simply forgot her noiselessly. 
 The other, being more interested in his emotions, 
 decided that he must have matured greatly without 
 knowing it, to have recovered so completely from his 
 little affair. He was very cocky about it among 
 his mates after the Woods had moved away, and 
 the other boys, not having seen the changeling 
 Theo, envied him. Some of them cherished memo-
 
 30 CHANGELING 
 
 ries of her long after they were grown and married 
 and should have been very wise. 
 
 As for Ethan Ferrier, he went his way, rather 
 more quietly than usual. He said nothing about 
 Theo to any one, and as he was not of the type with 
 which liberties are taken, no one said anything to 
 him. He went on working in vacations to help 
 support the family, and keeping his mouth tighter 
 and tighter shut. And presently the Ferriers, too, 
 moved from the Park. That was the way of the 
 Park; every one moved away sooner or later, though 
 they were equally sure to be drawn back again. 
 
 Life went on in a rather small and uninteresting 
 fashion so far as the Woods family were concerned. 
 Theo got older and forgot about Ethan and didn't 
 jump if her father spoke suddenly, and presently 
 took a business college course at the increasingly 
 sensible Avalene's instigation. Avalene herself 
 went successfully through library school and secured 
 an excellent position, while Theodora got a book 
 keeper's place in New York. By the time they were 
 twenty-four and twenty-six they were supporting 
 the family, as Avalene had foreseen they would have 
 to, because Mr. Woods became several more kinds 
 of a failure as the years gave him opportunity.
 
 CHANGELING 31 
 
 Somewhere along those years he was moved to 
 relate one day as a good joke that he had burned 
 a dozen letters to Theodora, and, finally, to himself, 
 from Ethan Ferrier, about the time Theodora had 
 her breakdown. 
 
 " Why, papa, you shouldn't have done that ! " his 
 wife said, and Theodora felt a shadowy sense of 
 injury, and said, 
 
 " Well, I think I might have seen them after I 
 got well, anyhow ! " 
 
 Avalene said competently, 
 
 " Nonsense, what would you do with a pack of 
 kid love-letters? " and Theo answered shamefacedly, 
 " Well, they might be funny." 
 
 The family discussed the question a little 
 while longer, for small things were of interest in 
 that uneventful household, and forgot about it. But 
 the general opinion was that Avalene was right 
 as it usually was. She had taken the helm of that 
 rather inefficient home. 
 
 She had matured into a poised, loud-voiced, 
 dogged person, with much of her mother's heavy, 
 just kindness. The efforts she had made to keep up 
 to Theo in the days of Theo's brilliance had given 
 her a capacity for hard work which made her a 
 success in her own line. She was contentedly un-
 
 32 CHANGELING 
 
 nfarried, rather jolly and auntlike already with men, 
 by the time she was twenty-six and Theodora a 
 couple of years older; and by this time every one 
 considered Avalene much the elder. Time made 
 little mark on Theodora, who had tacitly become one 
 of the younger sisters, to be run by Lena, as they 
 were trained to call her now, for their own good. 
 She was as much and as willingly under Lena's guid 
 ance as little Milly. More, indeed, for Milly was 
 twenty and engaged, and her ring made her feel 
 independent. 
 
 Theo had no such claim to respect. So she took 
 pullings up with meekness, knowing herself to be 
 absent-minded, and apt to " do things in a dream," 
 except for her fierce mothering of Pussy, the 
 youngest sister. Indeed, Theo's whole attitude to 
 life had become meek. She still had a sort of in 
 dependence which was self-respect, but beneath it, 
 too palpable, was that pathetic eagerness to please 
 which you so often see in gentle-natured, neglected 
 women. Theo had learned before she was twenty 
 that if she wanted people to like her she must pay 
 by doing things for them to buy a little gratitude. 
 She scarcely expected even that from men. A man 
 would meet her and talk to her for five minutes, on 
 the strength of her long blue eyes and yellow hair
 
 CHANGELING 33 
 
 and Diana-figure; then he would discover that the 
 something which makes women interesting simply 
 was not there ; and go as soon as he decently could. 
 Women did the same in a more courteous way. 
 
 Theo looked a little hurt and wistful sometimes 
 when some man or woman would show all too 
 plainly that they thought her uninteresting; but 
 she never said anything. That much of the old 
 Elizabethan gallantry was left to her. She carried 
 herself straightly and proudly still, though there was 
 nothing left of the old lissom, unconscious challenge 
 in her bearing. People would turn to look at her 
 walking from the ferry to her office every morning. 
 But they never looked twice. The something that 
 holds the eye had gone. And that was in spite of 
 the fact that she had changed so little as to be 
 more like a statue of her former self than anything 
 else. 
 
 It was to this unchangedness that she owed her 
 recognition by Leila Graves. She was walking 
 swiftly from the ferry as usual, intent on shopping, 
 for it was a holiday for her, when somebody's motor 
 pulled up sharply, and she heard a voice calling her. 
 She turned, and saw an opulent rose of a woman, 
 furred to the eyes, waving a white-gloved hand at 
 her.
 
 34 CHANGELING 
 
 " Theo Woods ! It is Theo ! " said the lovely lady 
 delightedly, and swept her impetuously into the seat 
 beside her. Theo came, with the dazed docility of 
 her older years, but it was a full minute before she 
 had the clue. " Leila Graves don't you know me, 
 goosie! Oh, don't say I'm changed as much as 
 that! " 
 
 Then Theo placed her; and remembered hearing, 
 indifferently as she heard most things, that Leila 
 had married a rich man whom she had met at her 
 father's hotel, and lived in New York now. 
 
 Leila laughed; the same honest, gay laugh Theo 
 remembered, and it turned her somehow into the girl 
 she had known, in spite of the careful dressing of 
 the black curls, and the film of powder over the rosy 
 cheeks. Leila looked her age as Theo didn't. But 
 she was ripe and alive, so alive that her dangerous 
 skirting of overplumpness was a thing you liked. 
 Theo vaguely felt the difference between them, and 
 wished that Lena was there to tell her what to do. 
 Nobody ever overawed Lena. 
 
 Meanwhile Leila talked straight ahead in the old 
 way. 
 
 " I'm going to let everything I'd planned go to the 
 winds. It was only a hen luncheon and a silly old 
 tea anyway. It isn't every day you discover your
 
 CHANGELING 35 
 
 long-lost chum. Just think, Theo, it's fourteen years 
 since you went away. And all this time I've won 
 dered about you and where you were and what you 
 were doing and here you are ! " 
 
 " It's very kind of you to give up your engage 
 ments for me," Theo answered lamely, feeling the 
 stiff inadequateness of her words as she spoke. But 
 Leila had never been a very sensitive or observant 
 person. She went on talking to Theo, carried along 
 by her own excitement. For a minute Theo's 
 cheeks colored in the old way, and she felt a spark 
 of the old self come back, in the echo of Leila's 
 belief that it was there. Then it faded, and she was 
 again the inarticulate Theo of today. 
 
 Whether Leila felt the difference in her or not, 
 she went on pouring out chatter about such of their 
 schoolmates as she had kept in sight. Wanda Bailey 
 was a musical comedy star that shy little thing with 
 the eyelashes ! Hetty Christie, after getting herself 
 talked about in every way known to the scandal- 
 loving Park, had married the boy next door to her, 
 and was a leading soprano in the church choir. 
 She had three children. Gypsy Donovan was a com 
 mercial traveler of all things for a girl to be! 
 Naomi Ainslie wrote books, all by herself in a 
 studio. Clarence Griggs was in the paper business,
 
 36 CHANGELING 
 
 and Anderson Gray had died of typhoid just as he 
 got back from his honeymoon. The Ferrier boys 
 were doing splendidly till the war started; Ethan 
 had put himself through medical school and all. He 
 was in the medical corps now, of course. Quincy 
 had made heaps of money as a broker, but he was 
 in Europe when the war broke out, and stayed there 
 to enlist. (This was all before the war suddenly 
 sat down flat and ended. Just a little while before.) 
 She would get some of them up to see Theo. She 
 never met any one of them without having them ask 
 about Theo and wonder what she was doing. 
 
 Did Theo remember the time when she and Gypsy 
 and Leila had written Clarence Griggs a note, and 
 then made him wait outside her door three hours in 
 the rain, for her to wave a handkerchief at him? 
 And the time Anderson Gray was caught by the 
 teacher kissing Leila's Geometry where she had 
 touched it. ... 
 
 Theo's eyes brightened as she listened. Those far- 
 off childish triumphs were comforting to hear about, 
 though she couldn't make them seem ever to have 
 been her own. The audacious and all-conquering 
 child who had led a half-dozen wild other children 
 through a dozen wild adventures seemed to her 
 somebody else some young princess ancestor of
 
 CHANGELING 37 
 
 whom she might be dimly proud. No more. She 
 tried desperately to be that girl through luncheon 
 with Leila at a fashionable restaurant, after which 
 they went up to Leila's lovely little apartment and 
 sat by the wood-fire. She tried still as she was 
 motored down to the ferry, picking up Leila's hus 
 band, whose name was Billy Minton, by the way. 
 'And she tried to make herself think she had 
 succeeded. 
 
 She reported it all to her family, of course, at 
 the supper table. So little happened to any of them 
 that everything had to be recounted at length, and 
 was usually discussed for a week afterwards. This 
 counted as a great adventure. 
 
 " You make a fuss over that Leila Graves, Theo," 
 her father advised, wagging his sandy-gray head 
 wisely. He had grown a little foolish as he became 
 older, and less conscious of his own mental proc 
 esses. He didn't feel the necessity of hiding his 
 motives from himself so carefully. " You don't 
 know what you may get out of it, if she's as rich 
 as all that." 
 
 Theo colored up. 
 
 " I don't want to get anything out of it," she 
 answered. " She was lovely to me." 
 
 " Then it's only decent for you to be nice to her.
 
 38 CHANGELING 
 
 I remember how she used to tag round after you. 
 She'd probably be as crazy over you as ever, give 
 her the chance," said Avalene more gracefully than 
 her father, but to the same general effect. 
 
 " Lots of rich people in New York don't have any 
 friends," chimed in young Milly wisely. " I've read 
 stories about it. Like as not she was awful glad to 
 see a face she knew." 
 
 Theo, remembering Leila's careless mention of a 
 tea and a luncheon dropped for old sake's sake, was 
 not so sure. But the family, to whom less happened 
 than even in old years, went on discussing the en 
 counter in all its phases, and deciding individually 
 what Theo should proceed to do in order to keep 
 Leila's friendship, till Theodora almost wished she 
 hadn't dutifully reported her day. 
 
 Meanwhile warm-hearted Leila was telling her 
 Billy all about it, and trying to discover why Theo 
 had left her so unmoved. 
 
 " I tell you, Billy, she was wonderful ! " she in 
 sisted plaintively. " I think I must have turned into 
 a horrid heartless person, or grown awfully old, not 
 to have any feelings about her." 
 
 Her husband shook his practical, close-clipped 
 head. 
 
 " Never saw a stupider girl. Didn't even walk
 
 CHANGELING 39 
 
 right jerked. Good looking enough if you like that 
 rangy kind, but a fearful bore." 
 
 Leila sprang to the defence of her old idol. 
 
 " Why, whenever I run across anybody from the 
 Park the first thing they say, nearly, is, ' Have you 
 heard anything of Theo? I suppose she's made a 
 brilliant match, or had some sort of a wonderful 
 career.' ' 
 
 He shook his head again, and reached for the 
 matches they were finishing dinner. 
 
 " You can't convince me. You were a little girl 
 with a schoolgirl crush on her. She was never 
 really anything like that." 
 
 " I could bring a dozen people to prove it," said 
 Leila spiritedly. " I know she isn't even interesting 
 now. But she's turned into something else. She 
 was wonderful." 
 
 " You're dreaming, honey. There isn't a sane 
 human being in the world who would back you up. 
 It's just your own nice way of looking at things." 
 
 " Is it a bet? " demanded Leila unexpectedly. 
 
 He nodded calmly. 
 
 " The furs you want against well, I'd have to 
 pay for both sides. The furs against your letting 
 me have my way the next time you want yours !" 
 
 " Fair enough," said Leila, as she rose and walked
 
 40 CHANGELING 
 
 defiantly to the telephone. " I'll get Naomi to start 
 on. And she can help me get someone else in a 
 hurry, because she's a celebrity, and Park people 
 hunt her up because they knew her then." 
 
 Naomi, the celebrity, answered with an awed thrill 
 in her ordinarily unimpassioned voice. 
 
 "Theo Woods? Of course I'd come miles! 
 Who shall I try for ? Clarence Griggs ? But there'd 
 have to be his wife." 
 
 Mrs. Griggs had been married for money, and 
 showed it too much. One did not invite her unless 
 expediency impelled. 
 
 " Do you think you could get your cousin 
 Ethan?" suggested Leila. "He hasn't gone over 
 yet, has he? " 
 
 " Not yet, I think. Aunt Lucina says they keep 
 him pretty busy, but I'll try for him at Upton. He 
 knew Theo pretty well, didn't he ? " 
 
 " M'hm. He had a wild case on her." 
 
 " Did he ? " said his cousin indifferently. " I 
 didn't know. Well, then, I'll get Ethan if I can, 
 Clarence Griggs if I can't. I'm afraid it will have 
 to be Saturday night. They work him very hard." 
 
 " Good ! " said Leila, and hung up the telephone 
 with triumph in her eye. 
 
 Theo was invited, and came duly on Saturday
 
 CHANGELING 41 
 
 evening. She was not specially moved by the 
 prospect of seeing Ethan. The circumstances of 
 the old hurt, so far as her conscious mind went, 
 were entirely buried. When Avalene recalled that 
 Ethan had been crazy over Theo, the girl's only 
 feeling was the old dread of not measuring up to 
 her princess-self of the old time. She was much 
 more excited at the prospect of meeting Naomi, 
 whom she had never known well, but whose books 
 she had seen of late. She had never met any one 
 who wrote before. Her father was more excited 
 still. 
 
 " I don't see why you can't drop bookkeeping and 
 sit down and write a novel. You were a lot smarter 
 than Naomi Ainslie," he insisted about once a day 
 till the moment when she went, and Theo answered 
 him patiently each time, " All right, papa, I'll try." 
 
 Her tone dragged a little the last time she said it, 
 for she was tired from being up the night before, 
 letting down and taking in Avalene's black dinner 
 gown to fit her. It was a wispy thing, but it looked 
 well on Theo's tall slenderness. Considered in the 
 abstract, she was beautiful as she came out from 
 Leila's bedroom, having left there her raincoat, and 
 walked nervously into the little room where the 
 others waited. But the feeling of pleasure that
 
 42 CHANGELING 
 
 beauty must give to be recognized as such was so 
 lacking that they scarcely thought her pretty at all. 
 
 For her own impressions, she admired at first 
 sight, most, a negligible Celtic poet whom Naomi 
 had brought along so that there should be an even 
 number of men and women. He had drifting black 
 hair and was in evening dress, and possessed a 
 supercilious air. All these taken together awed 
 Theo for quite a little while until she discovered 
 that the others were merely amused by him, indeed. 
 
 Naomi, little changed from the smooth-haired, 
 nervous-featured child of old except for eyeglasses 
 and a capacity for laughter, and Ethan, big and 
 immobile in his khaki, did not frighten her as much 
 as she had expected. They seemed easy and natu 
 ral, and just like folks. 
 
 Leila's husband looked after her throughout 
 dinner, telling her little jokes with that excellent 
 semblance of frank enjoyment which is a part of 
 the American business man's equipment. She en 
 joyed the dinner and the jokes as a child enjoys; the 
 light and the good food and the laughter, and the 
 fictitious feeling of being in things for the moment, 
 which the whole party gave her. 
 
 As the meal went on she noticed Ethan a little 
 more; perhaps because of some glimmering that he
 
 CHANGELING 43 
 
 was secretly watching her. She looked at him with 
 a little curiosity. 
 
 He was tall and broad, as he had promised to be, 
 and rather impressive. He had acquired poise, 
 conversation, and a deliberate, kindly manner which 
 was very likable. Altogether an ordinary, courteous 
 gentleman, with the mark of professionalism al 
 ready on him; not strikingly different from others 
 of his type, except for the slight, winning stammer 
 which he had never lost, and for his remarkable 
 eyes. They were still, when he was off guard, the 
 burning eyes of the New England mystic almost 
 fanatic of one who would go to any length for 
 conscience' sake. Theo saw nothing much of all 
 this. She had never thought about people a great 
 deal. 
 
 Through the dinner and the rest of the evening 
 Theo, unconscious, of course, that she was under 
 any special scrutiny, behaved very nicely. She was 
 quiet, that was all; a little shy of the poet, and 
 formal with the others. 
 
 She had to go early, because her father was still 
 severe if she stayed out late, rarely as her outings 
 happened. The other daughters ignored his nag 
 gings by now, but Theo was still affected by them. 
 So Naomi dispatched her well-trained poet to the
 
 44 CHANGELING 
 
 ferry with Theo, as she and Leila had planned be 
 forehand. This left the clear field that Leila wanted 
 for discussion. 
 
 Leila returned from hospitably following them to 
 the door, and sank down again with an unconscious 
 sigh of relaxation. The others, too, leaned back, in 
 freer attitudes. Relief was in the air. 
 
 Billy, the irrepressible, voiced it. 
 
 " Gee ! I'm going to put on more wood to take 
 the chill out of the air ! " 
 
 Naomi spoke next, musingly. 
 
 " Now I understand why people used to believe 
 in the existence of changelings ! " 
 
 Ethan said nothing at all. Only his deep eyes 
 looked straight at Leila, with a puzzled question in 
 them. 
 
 "And that's your childhood charmer!" Billy 
 went on, between puffs of his pipe. "Ferrier 
 Naomi there's a bet on, as you know. Now, be 
 fair. Can either of you sit there and tell me 
 honestly that the wooden image we've just been 
 pleased to part with ever made anybody have any 
 emotion but pleasure at seeing the last of her ? " 
 
 Ethan had been leaning forward, chin on hand, 
 staring at the rug. He spoke without moving or 
 looking at any one, in a dull, uninflected voice.
 
 CHANGELING 45 
 
 " When Theodora came into a room it was as if 
 a light went on. ... When she spoke you re 
 membered everything she said until you saw her 
 again. . . . She was like a princess, and we all 
 worshipped her. I am very sorry to have seen her 
 again." 
 
 He ceased speaking, remaining immovable, star 
 ing at the rug still. When he was done there was 
 a little uneasy pause. 
 
 Billy threw off the spell first. He laughed a 
 little. 
 
 " Lord ! I can't believe it ! " 
 
 Naomi reinforced her cousin. Her small pale 
 face was rather moved. 
 
 " Oh, yes, Billy, it's quite true. Something curi 
 ous seems to have happened to her. When she was 
 between fifteen and sixteen she was the most bril 
 liant girl in the place, and the most charming. She 
 was a leader, and adored." 
 
 Billy's great boyish laugh boomed out again. 
 
 "You win, Leila! But I think you stuffed the 
 ballot box " 
 
 He was interrupted by Ethan, rising decisively. 
 
 " If you people don't mind, I'll go. Camp makes 
 you used to early hours. I'll drop you at your 
 place, Naomi, if you hurry and get your things on."
 
 46 CHANGELING 
 
 He spoke almost brusquely, but Naomi, watching 
 him under her eyelashes, thought he eyed her with 
 a furtive appeal. She rose and went obediently 
 with him. 
 
 " There's time to walk, if you don't mind," he 
 said, drawing a long breath of evident relief when 
 they were outside. 
 
 " I'd like to," she said gently. 
 
 He wanted to talk; she was sure of that now. 
 She let him hurry her along silently for a couple of 
 blocks. She wondered what was coming. But she 
 was not braced for the note of horror in his voice 
 when he did speak. 
 
 " Naomi ! It was a profanation that being our 
 Theodora!" 
 
 She had wondered if he was going to be in love 
 with Theo again. Apparently not. The note in his 
 voice was nearly one of hate. She tried to answer 
 him lightly. 
 
 " It isn't our Theodora. She is in a green hill 
 somewhere, having the old wild good time till the 
 day of Judgment. This is a changeling the Good 
 People have left to mock us." 
 
 " Don't! " he said passionately. " I can't bear it. 
 . . . Don't let's talk of it at all. I wish I could 
 forget seeing That."
 
 CHANGELING 47 
 
 " But, Ethan dear ! " she began wonderingly. 
 
 He burst out again passionately. 
 
 "I worshipped the ground she walked on!" he 
 said. " It was never like a boy's love. It was all 
 the love any man ever has for any woman. I've 
 never cared for any one since. I've always told 
 myself with certainty that I'd find her again. I 
 believed it like gospel. No matter how old we were 
 no matter how long it was I'd find her and it 
 would be all right. . . . And now this this piti 
 ful Thing with its jerks and its meeknesses and its 
 anxiousness to please and its stupidity. . . . And 
 the damned creature daring to wear the mask of my 
 Theo!" 
 
 " I wonder," said Naomi inadequately, " I won 
 der what did it." 
 
 " For heaven's sake, don't try to find out ! " said 
 her cousin savagely. " And if you have the slightest 
 consideration for me, Naomi, never let me see that 
 creature again." 
 
 He did not ask her to keep his confidence. He 
 knew she would. Somehow people never minded 
 Naomi's knowing intimate things about them, even 
 her relatives. She seemed so a spectator at life that 
 it scarcely mattered. So they said no more about 
 it. Naomi spent the rest of the way home quietly
 
 48 CHANGELING 
 
 bringing Ethan back to his usual unemotional, 
 kindly self, and succeeded perfectly well. 
 
 But Naomi herself wondered a great deal about 
 Theo. It did not seem such a happen-so to her 
 as to the others; it was her creed that when some 
 thing happened it was because something else even 
 though the something else were very small and very 
 remote had made it. And affairs of the mind and 
 soul interested her. She wanted the answer to 
 Theo; she was nearly sure that there must be one. 
 So she asked the girl to have dinner with her at 
 the little studio apartment a week later. 
 
 Theo by herself was not so nervous or so shy 
 as Theo at a party. She even tried to be enter 
 taining, which gave Naomi a ghastly feeling as if 
 she were seeing a Barrie play very badly done by 
 daylight. She told Naomi a number of stories 
 about her sisters' performances, wonderful, clearly, 
 in her eyes; she even essayed a funny anecdote 
 Avalene had brought home, ruining it completely in 
 the telling. 
 
 Naomi watched pitifully the limping mind which 
 had been so swift and effortless, with its submissive- 
 ness where there had been bright defiance, and its 
 struggles where there had been delight in achieve 
 ment. And she watched herself, and the feeling
 
 CHANGELING 49 
 
 that Theo produced in her. It was distaste; a dis 
 taste and weariness that was the complement of the 
 eagerness she had once felt to be with her. So she 
 watched her friend more undisguisedly than she 
 thought, and the girl, none too deft at best, moved 
 uneasily, dropped a spoon on the floor, and then 
 smiled in nervous apology. 
 
 "I'm always doing that," she said. "Avalene 
 says I'm the clumsiest thing she ever saw." 
 
 " Did you ever have a bad nervous breakdown? " 
 Naomi asked with quick irrelevancy. . 
 
 " Why, how queer you could tell, or did you hear 
 about it ? Yes, but not for ever so many years. I'd 
 almost forgotten about it. I studied too hard my 
 last year in High, and I had to go off to Gramma 
 Coburn's for two months till I was all right again. 
 Avalene " 
 
 Naomi deflected the inevitable reference to Ava 
 lene, Pussy, Milly, or Pussy's or Milly's beaux, 
 which she knew was coming, and set Theo's ram 
 bling mind again on the track of the nervous break 
 down. It was hard at first. Something under the 
 surface automatically jerked her away from the 
 topic of herself when she had gone a certain dis 
 tance, and took her to Milly, or her great pride, 
 Avalene, again. But Naomi persisted, and at last
 
 50 CHANGELING 
 
 Theo, under the spell of that almost forgotten thing, 
 an interested auditor, told about it; the affair with 
 young Ethan, which she seemed to feel herself 
 bound to belittle; and presently even her father's 
 brutality over it. 
 
 It was not until almost the end of the story that 
 Naomi got a clue from an unmeant word. 
 
 Theo had believed herself to be a shameless girl. 
 Her father had managed to stab into the very depths 
 of her consciousness the certainty that her gay ways, 
 and her harmless flirtations with boys made her dis 
 graced and wicked. No matter how she might push 
 it away from her own surface knowledge, funda 
 mentally it was there. 
 
 And her shamed underself , agonized for the sense 
 of Tightness at any cost, would hold her, no matter 
 how she suffered, from any word or look or vibra 
 tion which could or would attract man, woman, or 
 child. 
 
 She tried to show this to Theodora as she divined 
 it, but she found that she was speaking an unknown 
 language. 
 
 " We were all just kids," Theo would repeat with 
 her little awkward laugh. " It was all of it awfully 
 silly it didn't have anything to do with my nerves. 
 Why, I'd forgotten about it! Mother said I must
 
 CHANGELING 51 
 
 put it all out of my mind, and I did. I guess I 
 was pretty fresh when I lived in the Park." 
 
 So Naomi only said, " Have some more candied 
 fruit, won't you, Theo? Did you say it was Milly 
 who made such good fudge, or Avalene?" 
 
 Theo responded gratefully, eating the sweets with 
 a child's pleasure. They must have meager fare at 
 the Woods' house, Naomi meditated. And she had 
 the key to the enigma, which was a thing she always 
 liked. It seemed a pity, though, a cruel pity. But 
 then, reasoned Naomi, most things were. She was 
 very nice to Theo the next few weeks, especially 
 nice; something in the spirit in which you cover 
 graves with flowers. 
 
 Therefore Ethan, with a message from his 
 mother, ran into Theo at Naomi's one afternoon. 
 He entered as she left. Naomi saw his darkened 
 'face, and apologized. 
 
 " I'm sorry," she said. " I wouldn't have had 
 her, of course, if I'd expected you. But really it 
 seemed to me so horribly tragic " 
 
 She pulled herself up, and he did not ask her what 
 she meant, at least not then. He prowled around 
 the studio for a little while, lifting things and 
 putting them down. 
 
 Finally he came to anchor before the chair where
 
 52 CHANGELING 
 
 she sat watching him. " You might as well talk to 
 me about it," he said doggedly. " What is there 
 that's tragic about that girl ? " 
 
 Naomi was interested in her own deductions. 
 She forgot herself entirely in her interest in them, 
 as she poured them out to Ethan. His mind was 
 always a pleasure to her ; they were alike in a habit 
 of ruthless straight thinking, and liked to think to 
 gether. And Ethan's distaste for Theodora blinded 
 her to any bearing his own part in the case might 
 have on his attitude to the story. 
 
 She had been knitting as she talked, with her eyes 
 down on her work. She looked up at him at the 
 end, triumphant over what she had deduced; and, 
 seeing his face, gasped into silence. It was white 
 and tense, and there was horror in it the horror 
 of something dreadful faced ahead. 
 
 " What is it, dear? Oh, what is it? " she asked 
 in terror. 
 
 " Then then it was I who killed her ! " he said 
 jerkily, still with that look of faced horror. 
 
 " No, no ! " cried out Naomi. 
 ' " I killed her," he repeated. 
 
 Naomi had been so carried away by her profes 
 sional interest in the thing that its connection with 
 Ethan had slipped from her entirely. In her mind
 
 CHANGELING 53 
 
 all the blame of Theodora's shaming was at the 
 door of her father. Ethan had only done what most 
 boys would do, obeyed when a man of his own 
 father's age ordered him. But she saw now how it 
 had flung itself at Ethan. And it was too nearly 
 likely to be true to be denied easily. There had 
 been doubtless a half-dozen factors in the quenching 
 of that light which had burned in Theodora. But 
 the belief that her boy-lover had despised and de 
 serted her Naomi had no certainty that it hadn't 
 been the final wrecking. Still, Naomi fought it, 
 denying as best she might against her own belief. 
 
 " Ethan dear, don't feel so exaggeratedly about 
 it. Put it out of your mind there's nothing to be 
 done about it, now. Most people have a shipwreck 
 or so before they die; only Theo's happened to be 
 a bit more spectacular than the common run." 
 
 " I I wrote her," was all he said, in a vague 
 way. 
 
 " Of course you did ! " affirmed Naomi. " It was 
 the silly old father who held up your letters. Theo 
 said so. At least she said he told her so a few years 
 ago. She didn't seem to bear him any malice. 
 Ethan, Ethan, don't look that way! I tell you 
 there's nothing to be done." 
 
 " There is something to be done," he turned on
 
 54 CHANGELING 
 
 her almost angrily. Then, in little broken phrases 
 as he walked up and down, " I ran away ... I 
 left her to it . . .1 took away her only chance 
 of not being smashed. Just like a clock my God, 
 just like a clock with its works all scrapped! I owe 
 it to her to marry her. Yes just as if I'd ruined 
 her. . . . Ruined her! Heavens, what would 
 that have been beside the thing I did do! . . . 
 That soulless, jerking wreck I made it ! " 
 
 Naomi, almost frantic over him, snatched at the 
 phrase he had flung out. 
 
 "Marry her! Oh, Ethan dear, don't! You 
 wouldn't straighten out her life, and you'd ruin 
 yours. You can't bear her. You'd be unhappy " 
 
 She stopped, conscious of the inadequacy of that 
 or any other argument, to this man, with his streak 
 of mysticism, fanaticism, mad conscientiousness. 
 Call it what you would, she knew it, and what it 
 would make him do. His happiness had ceased to 
 concern him. Finally she tried for a little comfort 
 for her own feelings. Perhaps he cared for Theo 
 still. She had hoped that Ethan would marry a girl 
 he loved, and perhaps this way, after all 
 
 " But you do care for her a little still ? " she ven 
 tured. " It's come back a little ? " 
 
 He shook his head.
 
 CHANGELING 55 
 
 "No. . . . But in one way it will be all right. 
 In three weeks we'll be going over. I'm nearly sure. 
 Four at the outside. I'll marry her in a day or so. 
 I can stand that much of it. And then she'll have 
 insurance, and there may be a child. She'd like a 
 child, and it might straighten her out. . . . 
 Thank God I hadn't learned to care for anybody 
 else!" 
 
 Yes, there was still that to be thankful for. 
 
 There was no pretense between them that Theo 
 might refuse to marry Ethan. The girl's pitiful 
 mortification over her unattractiveness showed in 
 spite of her gallant efforts to hide it. Her helpless, 
 confused gratitude for the commonest attentions 
 was naked to the world. And she had been Princess 
 Theo! 
 
 Ethan tried Naomi still further. 
 
 " You'll have to get her here let me see I can't 
 get away again till Friday afternoon. Have her 
 here, and I'll speak to her. She's like a child. 
 She'll think it natural enough that I never forgot 
 her, once I tell her so." 
 
 Naomi bowed her head. She had pulled the 
 thing down on Ethan herself. If she did not do as 
 he wished he would find another way, and this was 
 easiest.
 
 56 CHANGELING 
 
 " Very well," she said. And then, impulsively, 
 " Oh, I wish there were miracles ! " 
 
 " There aren't," said Ethan succinctly. " About 
 four, then." 
 
 Theo fidgeted a little at finding herself alone with 
 a man for an hour to come. Naomi had made her 
 promise to wait there till she came back, and left 
 her, crossing Ethan as she went out. 
 
 " Must you ? " she implored hopelessly as she 
 went out. 
 
 He nodded, patted her arm in a brotherly fashion, 
 and went in, steadily smiling. 
 
 He went at it in a sufficiently courteous fashion, 
 though a girl more used to lovers than Theo might 
 have felt that something was missing. He had 
 never forgotten her, he told her. He had never 
 cared for any one else. He had always loved and 
 respected the memory of her. . . . 
 
 She heard him through, fidgeting more than ever 
 as he went on his slow, forced way. She laughed 
 her little awkward laugh, and he hated her for it 
 as he completed the voicing of his reparation. 
 When he was done he sat silently a moment, bracing 
 for what more he must do. Presently he looked up 
 at her, sitting across from him.
 
 CHANGELING 57 
 
 She had stopped her little restless movements. 
 She was rigid, and her eyes stared. She looked like 
 a sleepwalker. He watched her, arrested. Pres 
 ently from the base of her white, masklike face 
 there began a flush which spread up to the roots 
 of her yellow hair, and faded suddenly, leaving her 
 white again. Unmoving, she spoke. 
 
 " Like a star," she said in a voice that was like 
 a sleepwalker's too. 
 
 He did not know what she meant at first. Then 
 he remembered. He had said that, the afternoon 
 before her father broke in on them, long ago. 
 He had not thought she would have remem 
 bered. 
 
 " Yes," he said, " like a star. You were like a 
 star to me. I always remembered you so. I wor 
 shipped you." 
 
 " Always ? You you never thought I was a 
 wicked girl? " 
 
 For the first time he felt a thrill of pity for her. 
 It was almost as if he was giving a message to be 
 carried to that Theo he remembered. 
 
 " Never never, Theo ! I went off because your 
 father sent me; because I was a young coward. I 
 never even heard the things he said to you. I tried 
 to see you afterwards, and write, but he wouldn't
 
 58 CHANGELING 
 
 give me a chance. I worshipped you, as we all did. 
 Only I cared more." 
 
 She made no answer. Her head drooped. He 
 could not see her face; and for a moment the 
 illusion came to him of that old Theo. There might 
 be other moments of that illusion, he thought, to 
 make the weeks of their marriage bearable. He 
 looked no further than that, because he never in 
 tended to come back from the war. 
 
 While that blessed illusion was still with him he 
 took courage to go on to the next thing he must 
 do. He knew that he must touch her, kiss her 
 do something to show her that the lie he was acting 
 was not a lie. He slipped down on one knee by 
 her, putting his arms around her and drawing her 
 face down to his, as they had been that last 
 night when they were children. He repeated the 
 words he had said, desperately, and kissed 
 her. 
 
 " You were like a star to me," he repeated. 
 
 Her lips felt cold under his, and she was rigid for 
 a moment more. Suddenly her arms, which had 
 been lax, closed strongly around him, and she re 
 sponded to his kiss. He felt her begin to sob help 
 lessly. 
 
 " Ethan Ethan " he heard her say brokenly,
 
 CHANGELING 59 
 
 and yet with a depth in her voice that he had for 
 gotten. " So many years " 
 
 His heart leaped suddenly. He pushed her head 
 back, unbelieving, so that he could look into her 
 eyes. And at what he saw he drew her close again. 
 
 Naomi re-entered at the end of two hours, heart 
 sick still. She stood unseen for a moment in the 
 dusk of her doorway. 
 
 " The war is going to end, they say, in a little 
 while now," she spoke across the room. 
 
 " Thank God! " said Ethan, lifting a face of joy 
 ful adoration from bending above the girl in his 
 arms. 
 
 And as Naomi still stood, glad yet unbelieving, 
 Theo came swiftly across to her with her old sweep 
 ing, swift step. Her face smiled vividly at Naomi, 
 and her hands were outstretched. 
 
 " Thank God ! " said Naomi. " Oh, thank God, 
 Ethan ! Miracles do happen sometimes ! "
 
 ROSABEL PARADISE 
 
 WE were not a gentle, fussy, little old-lady town 
 any more. We had a charter, and we were a raw, 
 young, ill-bred citylet which wanted to forget lead 
 ing strings as violently as a deacon's son in the city 
 for the first time. We had thrown off our tutors 
 and governors, forty-five stingy, businesslike, but 
 thoroughly good, old gentlemen, and we were being 
 as blunderingly devilish, corporately and individ 
 ually, as we knew how. We had been a camp-meet 
 ing association. We were now a full-fledged 
 summer resort. Our ex-rulers sighed over their 
 plump balances, and quoted hymns about every pros 
 pect pleasing and only man being vile. 
 
 This was really not a bad description of the 
 Park from one point of view. 
 
 Whatever point of view yours might be, if you 
 lived in the Park all the year round there was one 
 thing you were sure to say with conviction, sooner 
 or later : 
 
 " This is no place to bring up a child." 
 
 The feverish, tawdrily gay summer, when you 
 couldn't do a thing with the children, alternated 
 
 60
 
 ROSABEL PARADISE 61 
 
 with the emptily idle winter, when there wasn't a 
 thing for the children to do. If our people had any 
 money they sent us to boarding-school. If they 
 hadn't, or didn't worry, we spent fourteen hours a 
 day and all available change on the boardwalk in 
 summer, and made precocious love to each other 
 there in winter after school. 
 
 Rosabel Paradise was not of the little flock who 
 were exiled to boarding-school or convent. Her 
 mother hadn't the money and would never have 
 thought of it, anyway. 
 
 Her name sounds as if it had been her own hasty 
 manufacture, but it was hers legally. Some of 
 our elders remembered dimly a Bill Paradise who 
 had been her father and a carpenter, and who had 
 fallen off a ladder and broken his neck back in the 
 dark ages. Rosabel's first name was probably out 
 of a book of Miss Libbey's. Her mother read them 
 a great deal. She was a thin, voluble woman, with 
 occasional teeth and an aimless intensity of manner. 
 She was a dressmaker of the less skillful kind; the 
 sort you engaged at a pinch when your pet many- 
 dollars-a-day genius was promised haughtily far 
 ahead, and Margie's pink frock had to be done by 
 next Tuesday night. 
 
 Rosabel herself was a scrawny, sallow child of
 
 62 ROSABEL PARADISE 
 
 fifteen, with big, heavy-lashed black eyes and a fur 
 tive manner. She was little for her age, and she 
 dressed always in heavily trimmed blue and magenta 
 cashmeres that her mother made for her. There 
 was a pathetic elaboration about the colored cash 
 meres and about the wide ribbons on the child's 
 lank, black hair. You could see that her mother 
 petted her in a fierce, making-up sort of way, as 
 women pet children who are deformed though 
 Rosabel was not deformed in the least. She might 
 have been even pretty if she had been graceful and 
 clear-skinned and had had a different expression. 
 If Rosabel had been deformed the chances are she 
 would have been happier. It was not that. Two 
 years ago Things had happened. 
 
 It's easy to say who are to blame for Things 
 mothers and self-will and such but putting blame 
 where it accurately belongs is much harder than 
 pigs-in-clover. And when an ignorant, excitable 
 woman has to earn her living by being a dressmaker- 
 by-the-day she cannot be as thorough in her child- 
 training as if she had had a governess, or could keep 
 her child in the convent where they sent little Leila 
 Graves and Wanda Bailey. 
 
 And then it might not have made so much dif-
 
 ROSABEL PARADISE 63 
 
 ference if Rosabel had had that desirable, if some 
 what annoying, thing our elders called " good home 
 training." Because at thirteen Rosabel acquired a 
 bosom friend, and from about ten to seventeen a 
 bosom friend has more power over you than all the 
 law and the prophets. 
 
 Nellie this special one was the kind to use 
 power to the limit. She was two years older than 
 Rosabel, and very clever. She was not afraid of 
 any one, not even grown people or policemen. She 
 was softly plump and blonde and wide-smiling, and 
 she painted her cheeks pink and darkened her eye 
 lashes. She was very wise in all the things little 
 girls wonder about. Rosabel often marveled how 
 she came to know so much. But Nellies are born 
 knowing. They are the material of which are made 
 certain types of vaudeville players and ladies who 
 marry aged millionaires slightly before they die. So 
 when Nellie got a position with the man who had 
 the concession for the Mystic Turkish Grotto, she 
 had no trouble getting Rosabel one as well. Rosa 
 bel's mother was quite willing. It would not only 
 mean money, but, as she said, it would keep the kids 
 off the boardwalk. 
 
 It did, of course that is, it kept Rosabel, which 
 was all her mother cared about Nellie's hours were
 
 64 ROSABEL PARADISE 
 
 from ten to three. Rosabel Paradise had the after 
 noon-evening shift. They sat behind a little wicket 
 in their best dresses and took tickets. The man who 
 ran the Mystic Turkish Grotto stayed mostly in a 
 little room opening off the one behind the wicket, 
 so he could keep tabs on the audience and also on 
 the honesty of the girls. Their pay was sure and 
 high, as pay for temporary positions always is. 
 Altogether, as Nellie boasted to her " pick-ups," it 
 was a soft snap. 
 
 Nothing happened to Nellie. The reputations of 
 Nellies are permanently dingy at the edges, but 
 somehow they never seem to get black all over. 
 When fall came and the Park closed all at once like 
 a stage city, Nellie drifted off somewhere else, out 
 of Rosabel Paradise's life. So did the man who had 
 run the Turkish Grotto. That is, if you want to 
 call him a man. He was really a brute beast : more 
 especially because he was over fifty, married, and, 
 they said, had grown-up daughters. 
 
 Poor women cannot take their daughters off on 
 six months' trips to vague somewheres for their 
 health when Things happen. Rosabel Paradise 
 stayed at home in the little four-room red-plush flat 
 over the Johnson dairy. And the women in the flat 
 below heard Rosabel's mother screaming at her, and
 
 ROSABEL PARADISE 65 
 
 Rosabel crying, crying, crying as only a heartbroken 
 child can cry. And when Rosabel fell quickly ill 
 they knew it and said things about her mother; 
 and when Rosabel got better, white and little 
 and broken-spirited, they said things about her. 
 And they asked the doctor leading questions, so 
 that he was rude to them, and they talked 
 more. 
 
 After that none of the girls would speak to Rosa 
 bel. Oh, we were very wise at thirteen and four 
 teen, we of the Park ! 
 
 Rosabel seemed very lonely not that you could 
 stop for that. She used to sit and play jacks on 
 her doorstep, and cringe when people passed. And 
 she used to steal up and down the boardwalk alone, 
 in her brilliant, cheaply-elaborate dresses, listening 
 to the band and hungrily watching other people 
 having good times with each other. No one ever 
 spoke to her, except the ministers and one or two of 
 the middle-aged women in her mother's insurance 
 society. Not even the boys bothered her; she was 
 too forlorn and dingy a little figure for their notice. 
 She was too young to make friends with a grown-up 
 bad element, even if she had wanted to. And ap 
 parently she did not want to. She helped her mother 
 around the house and kept on playing jacks on the
 
 66 ROSABEL PARADISE 
 
 doorstep. The other girls of her age graduated to 
 postage-stamp plates and cigar-band cushions, but 
 it's difficult to follow the fashions if you are an 
 outcast. There's no one to go by. 
 
 Rosabel Paradise must have been just around fif 
 teen the April Miss James got up the fan-drill for 
 the Second Lutheran Church. It was a curly, com 
 plicated drill, not worth half the practice it took, but 
 drills were sweeping the country that year. This 
 was to be the piece de resistance of an entertainment 
 with a red church carpet as its goal. Miss James 
 was more or less of an outlander; a cousin of the 
 Jameses across the lake in Allenwood. There were 
 old houses there, and people who lived something 
 like the ones in the Duchess novels. They had serv 
 ants instead of a " girl," and their children couldn't 
 do as they pleased. Little Catherine James even had 
 a governess. We envied her a little, but we were 
 sorry for her, too. 
 
 Miss James drilled earnestly, but by the fourth 
 rehearsal her soul was weary within her. Twenty- 
 four girls of assorted sizes and romantic names, 
 with not a scrap of enthusiasm among the twenty- 
 four, are very hard on a trainer. We of the Park 
 were blase with a boardwalk sophistication which 
 could give Miss James points, for she was not much
 
 ROSABEL PARADISE 67 
 
 over twenty herself and a newcomer in town. The 
 first wild, careless rapture had gone from the girls' 
 hearts, and by this time they were dropping un 
 ashamedly out, or sending impudent messages about 
 not needing so many rehearsals. 
 
 So when Rosabel Paradise, dingy and furtive as 
 ever, with a wad of soiled embroidery crushed in her 
 hand, slid into a seat at the bottom of the Wesley 
 Avenue Pavilion where the girls rehearsed, Miss 
 James eyed her with interest as a possible recruit. 
 The number that day was uneven, and they could 
 not finish properly without another girl. At the 
 first pause Miss James skimmed down to the door 
 with the darting, swallowlike movements that all 
 teachers of gymnastics acquire. 
 
 "What's your name, dear?" she asked breath 
 lessly, alighting at Rosabel's side. " Wouldn't you 
 like to come into the drill ? Come, try it once, any 
 way, won't you ? " 
 
 Rosabel Paradise flushed scarlet. There must 
 have been a great deal of dumb, lonely horror in 
 cluded in all the months since Things had happened, 
 but you have to be to a certain degree grown-up, 
 or very clever, to have horror make you wiser and 
 older. Rosabel was only a little girl still; all the 
 more childish, perhaps, for Things having happened
 
 68 ROSABEL PARADISE 
 
 and shut her up in an invisible, shameful prison two 
 years before. It must have seemed very wonderful 
 to her, the chance of being in something once more, 
 after watching everything go mockingly by her for 
 so long. 
 
 " My name's Rosabel Paradise," she said, bring 
 ing it out with a jerk of effort. She looked down 
 at her grimy embroidery in the old hangdog way, 
 and wriggled her shoulders. " I'd like to join very 
 much," she finished, flushing darker and tugging at 
 the embroidery. 
 
 Such willingness as this was not the custom of 
 the country. Miss James beamed with pleasure and 
 carried Rosabel off to the head of the room. 
 
 " This is Rosabel Paradise, girls," she announced. 
 " She'll fill in Thelma Petty's place." 
 
 Nobody answered, but neither Miss James nor 
 Rosabel noticed it, they were so busy getting Rosa 
 bel placed. She was handed over to Catherine, Miss 
 James's little cousin, because Catherine had attended 
 all four rehearsals and could best manage a new 
 comer. 
 
 Catherine did not live in the Park, so she did not 
 know all we did about the evils of this wicked world. 
 She was a gentle little thing with fair, straight hair 
 and a sweet, serious little face; rather an Alice-in-
 
 ROSABEL PARADISE 69 
 
 Wonderland grown to be fourteen or so. She had 
 been brought up, said our elders with the incompre 
 hensible approval of elders, to be a little girl. This 
 seemed to us an advantage taken of Catherine by her 
 people for their own purposes. It certainly wasn't 
 useful to Catherine. We pitied her tentatively while 
 we held her in awe for her pretty manners, and did 
 not dare come so very near. But Catherine, hand- 
 in-hand with Rosabel Paradise ! The girls eyed the 
 pair of them silently, whispered a little, and went on 
 drilling. You could not make a row in the middle 
 of things, and as long as you were there, you might 
 as well practise. It was the best day's work the 
 girls had put in, and Miss James told them so. 
 There had been no giggling, no dashes to the door 
 to see boys stroll by : nothing but dense silence and 
 dogged marching. 
 
 At last the ranks broke. Rosabel went away 
 quickly and silently, after her usual custom. Most 
 of the other girls lingered. They broke into little 
 knots and talked earnestly. Presently Miss James 
 became aware that they were pushing each other, 
 with " You go, Pearl ! " " Naw, you go, Leila! " 
 Shyness in the Park was as much a portent as 
 enthusiasm, and Miss James awaited events with 
 interest. There was a final whisper of : " You go,
 
 70 ROSABEL PARADISE 
 
 Beryl ! " and Beryl went. She walked up to Miss 
 James and spoke. 
 
 " Miss James," she said, " we got something to 
 tell you something you oughta know." 
 
 "Well, Beryl?" 
 
 Beryl's hard, handsome little face hardened still 
 more under the stress of the message. 
 
 " That girl, Rosabel Paradise, she ain't fit for us 
 decent girls to go with," said Beryl. 
 
 Beryl seems always to have had a strong sense of 
 virtue; she had procured divorces from two hus 
 bands by the time she was twenty-three. She was 
 fourteen at the time of the Paradise affair. 
 
 " What do you mean ? " asked Miss James, stif 
 fening; and Beryl explained explained with the 
 hideous clarity and detail of country towns. You 
 see, we had only had our charter such a very little 
 while ! 
 
 " An' if she stays in the rest of us will just hafta 
 drop out," she wound up. " My mamma, she says : 
 ' Beryl,' she says, ' you're too young to learn evil. 
 You keep away from that there girl.' ' 
 
 Catherine clutched her cousin's hand, half horri 
 fied, half thrilled, and her cousin, remembering her, 
 cut the thing short. 
 
 " We'll see what the Ladies' Aid says," she tem-
 
 ROSABEL PARADISE 71 
 
 porized. But she knew very well what the Ladies' 
 Aid would say. It is all very well to stand up 
 for the oppressed, but one oppressed all by herself 
 won't make a drill any more than the one swallow 
 we have heard about makes a summer. So the end 
 of it was that a very gentle, kind note was sent to 
 Rosabel; as kind, that is, as such a note can be. 
 To be sure, that isn't saying very much. And 
 Rosabel's mother came out and made a trying and 
 unavailing row at the minister's house. 
 
 This was entirely the wrong place. She should 
 have chosen the Ladies' Aid. She took a great deal 
 of time which the minister could ill afford from his 
 sermon, and went into hysterics and had to be sent 
 home. But that was all. 
 
 All, at least, till the next Monday night. 
 
 It seems curious that this one incident should have 
 had so much effect on Rosabel Paradise. There 
 must have been others at least a little like it in those 
 long eighteen months since Things had happened. 
 
 Perhaps she just couldn't stand anything more. 
 There do come times like that, even to fifteen-year- 
 olds. Or perhaps it was because she was only fifteen 
 that she took it so hard. The world is so much 
 larger when you are fifteen than later; so much 
 blacker or more golden, more heavenly or inexorable
 
 72 ROSABEL PARADISE 
 
 a place. Its colors haven't softened down. There 
 are beautiful rose-and-gold promises only waiting 
 till your skirt is a little longer before they are 
 realized. Or there are great horrible blacknesses 
 that never will lift never, never, never ! And espe 
 cially if you are cowed and ignorant, and little for 
 your age, the blackness and inevitableness lock tight 
 around you, like one of those nightmares where you 
 are walled into a little, little suffocating place, and 
 never can get out, and know the nightmare is true. 
 
 You never can tell anything, after all, about the 
 way people really work inside. The fact remains: 
 on Monday night about eight o'clock, while her 
 mother was out at a sociable of the Daughters of 
 Rebekah, Rosabel took gas. She did it rather 
 clumsily and unsuccessfully, but still with the most 
 serious intentions. She had evidently bathed and 
 dressed, and tidied the bedroom carefully before she 
 turned the gas on. It was not her fault that her 
 mother got back before she was quite dead. The 
 time she had taken cleaning up was what delayed 
 her so that they managed to save her. 
 
 They made a terrific fuss, running in and out, 
 bringing her to, and there was a whole column in 
 the " Ocean Star " the next day. " Playmates 
 Scorn Her: Child Attempts Life," it was headed.
 
 ROSABEL PARADISE 73 
 
 It was very pathetic about the pink note with the 
 embossed forget-me-nots in its corner, on which 
 Rosabel had written her brief, ill-spelled reason for 
 wanting to die. The " Ocean Star " also gave her 
 age as twelve instead of fifteen, and did not explain 
 accurately why the " playmates " had ignored Rosa 
 bel. It gave a general impression that it was a 
 paper-doll or hoop-and-marbles quarrel. 
 
 The little red-plush parlor of the flat, and Rosa 
 bel's own room, were filled with flowers and wreaths 
 and jelly and other appropriate things which the 
 drill girls sent Rosabel while she was recovering. 
 They were almost as sorry for her as they were 
 thrilled by the melodrama of the affair. Rosabel 
 lay happily getting better among the wired bouquets, 
 playing with the tin- foil from their stems. She 
 would not disturb the flowers to hold any of them. 
 She did not say much Rosabel never did seem able 
 to say much, which makes her story harder to tell. 
 But once she clutched the doctor's wrist as he bent 
 cheerily over her, and asked in a passionate whisper : 
 "Will the girls go with me when I get well, 
 doctor?" 
 
 " Of course, of course, little girl," he answered 
 confidently doctors learn to say things confidently. 
 He lifted her up on her pillows a little more.
 
 74 ROSABEL PARADISE 
 
 " Would would Martha ever come to see me ? " 
 
 The doctor patted her hand compassionately, and 
 in his pity had almost promised to bring his Martha 
 down to see poor little wrecked Rosabel, big-eyed 
 and desperate and helpless among her pillows. 
 Then he remembered quickly, as fathers will, that 
 pretty, dainty Martha was hard enough to keep 
 away from the boardwalk as things were : that she 
 was coaxing to be allowed to stay out after ten 
 o'clock: that there fcad been a little box found by 
 her mother, labeled " Rouge Dorin," tucked into 
 the back of a drawer. It was only a phase, as it 
 happened. Martha grew up as well-bred and 
 straightforward as she was pretty, and married an 
 out-of-town man, like all the better-class Park girls.; 
 Still fathers are fathers. The doctor patted Rosa 
 bel's hand again and made a vague, kindly reply that 
 promised nothing. 
 
 But Rosabel was rapturously counting the number 
 of bouquets on washstand and bureau and sills again 
 and scarcely heard. They may have been a comfort 
 to her mother afterwards, those four or five days 
 when Rosabel lay getting over the effects of the gas 
 and smiling and counting her flowers. 
 
 Because in a little while she was able to be up 
 and put on her magenta cashmere, and steal up and
 
 ROSABEL PARADISE 75 
 
 down the boardwalk in the old way. It may have 
 been the second day she was about that she met 
 Beryl, surrounded by her followers. There was a 
 clan of them, about eight, who hunted together. 
 Rosabel halted, half -confident, half-frightened, 
 nervously smiling. 
 
 " H'llo, Beryl," she said, almost inaudibly. But 
 Beryl 
 
 " Well, I couldn't speak to the kid just 'cause 
 she tried to c'mit suicide," she defended herself to 
 her followers and perhaps her conscience. And the 
 followers chorused, though a shade doubtfully: 
 " Naw, 'course you couldn't ! " 
 
 Rosabel did not move for a minute after Beryl 
 and her following had passed on, head in air. She 
 stood still, a shaking, awkward little figure, till they 
 were gone by. Then they heard the loud patter of 
 her feet, suddenly, and heard her crying aloud, as 
 she ran across the boardwalk and fled underneath 
 it. You could hide and cry under the boardwalk 
 as long as you liked in those days. It's been done 
 over since, and you can't get under now. But then 
 there was plenty of room for Rosabel to cry in. 
 
 The Park was a prohibition place, which means 
 that all the drugstore keepers had to be regular 
 physicians, so that they could give you prescriptions
 
 76 ROSABEL PARADISE 
 
 for anything else you asked for, and they did. 
 There was a great deal of competition. So it was 
 quite simple for Rosabel to get all the laudanum she 
 wanted, crawl back under the boardwalk, and take 
 it unmolested. 
 
 This time she succeeded. 
 
 They found her two days later, coiled up like one 
 of our hurt animals. Our cats and dogs always 
 went there to die, poor beasts ! and there were other 
 reasons why men searched under the boardwalk 
 often. They had to guess at why she did it, for 
 there was no note this time. I suppose Rosabel 
 thought, rightly, that one explanation was enough. 
 
 There were no paroxysms of repentance on our 
 part this time, either, nor any flowers. We had 
 done that once, and it's difficult to warm over emo 
 tions. People said that really it sounded hard, 
 but the poor child had done almost the only thing 
 she could do, if it wasn't for losing her immortal 
 soul. Of course, if you think of our attitude to 
 the child while she was still slinking around with the 
 soul inside her, able to be saved, there is a great 
 deal to be said for people's viewpoint. But for the 
 first time in some years nobody's viewpoint worried 
 Rosabel Paradise.
 
 DON ANDREWS' GIRL 
 
 WHEN Don Andrews was little his playmates 
 adored him. Girls and boys alike, we would do 
 anything on earth he wanted us to do. Only the 
 boys adored close by, the girls from afar. When 
 he grew older we continued to adore. Don was of 
 the stuff of one's imagined heroes. He was like 
 a knight of old, strong and simple and chivalrously 
 single-minded. That may have been the trouble. 
 Most of us are so annoy ingly complex nowadays, 
 even the women. In the days of those knights Don 
 was like, women were content to be prizes some 
 thing given away at the end of a contest, like a cup. 
 Nowadays they insist on being individuals, and it 
 throws things out horribly. 
 
 But to come back to Don : he was tall and grave 
 and gentle and strong, with a vivid smile that lighted 
 things. He was perfect physically, too, and the 
 strongest boy in the Park, with that unusual muscu 
 lar development which looks like mere grace. You 
 would say, to look at him from a trainer's view 
 point, that he was well-built enough, lithe and hand 
 some certainly, very fine as far as an illustrator's 
 
 77
 
 78 DON ANDREWS' GIRL 
 
 ideas went, but nothing above the average. Then 
 you saw him wrestle or row or swim or box, and 
 you realized that it was the perfection of strength 
 concealing strength. 
 
 The queer thing was, nobody was ever jealous of 
 the boy. You might feel sore for a minute when 
 he easily outclassed you at the thing you did best. 
 But when he spoke to you afterward, gently and a 
 bit apologetically, in that sweet, deep, cheering-up 
 voice of his, you forgot all about your soreness. 
 Then he smiled at you and you loved him. 
 
 There isn't any way to describe that smile of 
 Don Andrews. But it loved you and trusted you 
 and admired you and braced you up all in one flash 
 of light, and you went off feeling as if somebody 
 had given you a valuable present you'd been wanting 
 a long time. 
 
 He was straight, too, Don; the cleanest, 
 straightest fellow we knew. He kept in training all 
 the time, not because he had to, especially, but be 
 cause he preferred it. Take him all around, he was 
 one of the men you do come across once or twice 
 in life, but in whom nobody believes when you try 
 to tell about them afterward. They sound too good 
 to be true or comfortable. But Don was real. 
 There was never anybody like Don Andrews!
 
 DON ANDREWS' GIRL 79 
 
 Naturally, the strongest fellow in town has to be 
 a bully, or a Lord Protector; but Don carried his 
 magnanimity, it seemed to us all sometimes, to a 
 point of fantastic chivalry. He was the small boys' 
 guardian angel. Also if you wanted a thorough 
 whipping that was as swiftly effortless on Don's 
 part as it was swiftly over on yours you had only to 
 pick a quarrel with some one your physical in 
 ferior. But for himself for himself Don was 
 maddening! Anything short of a straightout inso 
 lence he would meet only with gentleness, and that 
 imperturbable charm of his. To be sure the ag 
 gressor, who was always, of course, a newcomer, 
 was certain to succumb to Don's flashing smile and 
 his steady, kind charm. Also Don's known strength 
 made fights a rare necessity for him. But it seemed 
 that his knowledge that he was bound to win made 
 him feel that it wasn't fair for him to play the 
 game at all. Oh, it is hard to make you see how 
 everybody loved Don, how he drew love out of you 
 as if there was some curious force in him that took 
 it. I suppose it must have been that his own nature 
 was love, that he had so much loving-kindness to 
 give away that the merest acquaintance, perhaps, got 
 as much as most of us have to give our own. And 
 then his gallant Northman good looks, and the
 
 8o DON ANDREWS' GIRL 
 
 swift, gentle strength and bravery of him! You 
 had to love Don ! 
 
 Of course the girls were wild about him, every 
 last one. But, as I told you, they had to adore from 
 afar. There was a very simple reason : Ida Fitz- 
 brien. Even since Don had been twelve and Ida ten, 
 they had " gone together," through our winter vil 
 lage life and our summer visitor-whirl. They were 
 as true to each other, from the time they were little 
 children, as if they had been married. 
 
 Ida was a silent, slim little thing, an ordinary 
 type enough of the pretty American girl, with brown 
 hair and blue eyes and not much color. She had a 
 caressing, clinging sort of way when she did speak, 
 but there was not about her anything especial that 
 you could notice, except that she was Don Andrews' 
 girl. 
 
 That was the way they pointed her out at the 
 canoe races and the meets and the ball games. She 
 sat silently in the reflection of Don's glory and let 
 herself be envied by the rest of the girls. She never 
 interfered with anything he wanted to do, or 
 dragged on him at all, or showed the least jealousy 
 of his friends. She was simply always there, un 
 obtrusively in the background, quietly owning him; 
 " Don Andrews' girl." To be sure, a girl has very
 
 DON ANDREWS' GIRL 81 
 
 little chance to stray when she is marked out as 
 belonging to the strongest boy in the place. But 
 Ida seemed perfectly content to watch Don ador 
 ingly as he went his worshiped way. And he gave 
 her in return the first and best love he had. And 
 think what that must have been ! 
 
 And still he went on his way, bound to his fan 
 tastically high standards by the responsibility of his 
 unconquerableness, as a knight is bound by his vows. 
 Quincy Ferrier, who would have been a bit of a 
 bully in Don's position he was a sort of second- 
 in-command as it was, and Don's chum expressed 
 it crossly once. He had been raging at the Golden 
 Rule fashion by which Don had won some especial 
 brute to friendliness, instead of knocking him end 
 wise as we had all yearned to see done. 
 
 " Humph," he growled, " Don's mind's muscle- 
 bound, that's all it is. He just physically can't be 
 mean to people, any more than a coal-heaver can 
 play tennis." And Quincy softly invited Don's 
 newest friend out into a soothing place behind 
 Allen Lake, where there were pines and little birds 
 and things, and reduced him to the state of the 
 unspeakably licked. And we all felt better. 
 
 Well, Don grew up and went to work, and mar 
 ried Ida. They weren't rich, of course, but he had
 
 82 DON ANDREWS' GIRL 
 
 a good position. His gift of handling men would 
 have always made it easy for him to get anything in 
 the way of work he wanted. 
 
 Ida and Don were twenty and twenty-two when 
 they married. They were young, of course, but no 
 younger than many of the other girls and boys who 
 had dropped High School to settle down, house 
 holders and proud owners of plump babies. They 
 built a nice little bungalow over on North Sixth 
 Avenue, where the young married people settle, and 
 started in to live happily ever after. 
 
 They did, as far as anybody ever knew, at first. 
 They had a baby, a splendid little fellow, the copy of 
 his father, as all first sons should be, and Don was 
 wild over him. Ida was fond of the child, but Don 
 was simply wrapped up in him. And Don went on 
 winning cups all up and down the coast, and Ida 
 went on watching him, as she had done for ten 
 years. That is all there is to tell about them for the 
 first year and a half. 
 
 Then by and by, no one knew exactly whence or 
 how, rumors began to slide around that Ida wasn't 
 staying at home as much as she should. But this 
 was at the beginning of the summer when every 
 body and everything is standing on its head getting 
 ready for the summer people, so nobody had time
 
 DON ANDREWS' GIRL 83 
 
 to pay much attention. But later, when we had 
 rented our houses and got our hotels in running 
 order, and had time to meet breathlessly between 
 summer people, we began to hear more about Ida. 
 We didn't believe it, even here in the glad-to-believe- 
 anything Park. Ida had been silly enough to 
 peroxide her hair, and she was rouging too heavily; 
 perhaps, we thought, that was why people said 
 things. Because what would she do it for married 
 to Don! 
 
 Next season she began to be seen about in queer 
 places with summer men of the cheaply-sporty sort, 
 and, finally, nights when Don was known to be busy, 
 she appeared alone on the boardwalk, " picking-up." 
 After that, unfortunately, there were no two ways 
 about believing things. 
 
 When conviction first was forced on us we 
 gasped. Ida, of all girls! If it had been Dollie 
 Valentine nobody would have been surprised 
 black-eyed, excitable little Dollie over at Radnor 
 Beach, where all they could do was work summer 
 men for good times. Or nobody would have been 
 astonished if Leila Graves had gone under Leila, 
 whose happy-go-lucky father kept the fastest hotel 
 in town. But Ida! Shy little caressing Ida Fitz- 
 brien, who had never lifted her eyes from Don for
 
 84 DON ANDREWS' GIRL 
 
 ten years, who had followed him about like an unob 
 trusive dog Ida, who was married to Don, our 
 Don, with a baby the very copy of him ! Ida, with 
 her hair bleached staring yellow, and her cheeks 
 painted a shrieking pink, dancing till all hours at 
 the Casino with any cheap man she could pick up 
 on the boardwalk! Ida, with Don worshiping the 
 ground she trod on Don, who had never even 
 kissed another girl Ida trying clumsily to attract 
 flashily well-off rounders to pay for a few drinks 
 and dances and roadhouse dinners ! 
 
 The first thing we thought about was not so much 
 Ida's wickedness as her amazing idiocy. The next 
 was a feeling of resentment. To think of her doing 
 such a thing to Don! Little, quiet Ida, who had 
 been going around in Don's reflected glory these ten 
 years, and glad to get the chance ! It was more than 
 wicked it was downright impertinent! We felt, 
 we who loved Don, as if she had slapped us in the 
 face. And it was so incomprehensible. 
 
 It could not have been Don's goodness that she 
 cared for, we thought, nor even his good looks, nor 
 his charm. What had attracted her in the man she 
 married must have been his great strength, that 
 Arthurian prowess which had made him a notable 
 figure all up and down the coast. She must have
 
 DON ANDREWS' GIRL 85 
 
 taken that prowess as an earnest of some thrilling 
 domination in him, some masterfulness or brutality. 
 And Don, unfortunately for his married happiness, 
 was exceptionally far from being a brute. He was a 
 very perfect, gentle knight, who could no more 
 have " done any despite fulness to a lady " than Sir 
 Launcelot. Most girls think they want masterfulness 
 till they marry. Then they are glad enough if 
 they find their wills unbruised by irrational lordli 
 ness. But Ida, little animal that she was, seemed to 
 have needed, and indeed longed for, the excitement 
 of the whip. And she was married to a man whose 
 gentleness and courtesy were as unshakable as his 
 own great power. 
 
 Of course she couldn't understand Don's attitude 
 toward her in her misbehavior. Neither could we, 
 at first. But it was the old Don-attitude. That 
 strange inability to be anything but magnanimous to 
 any one in his power held him still. He guarded 
 Ida as if he were her father. He kept her from 
 what he could, and when he could not he went with 
 her to her questionable places, to give her at least 
 the shelter of his presence. He learned to dance so 
 that he could be seen at the dance-places with her. 
 He went to the drinking-places with her and her 
 men. You would see him sitting there with them,
 
 86 DON ANDREWS' GIRL 
 
 like a big brown statue in the middle of a lot of 
 silly wax figures, always gravely courteous. 
 
 Also he did his own man-work and Ida's mother- 
 work. He would come home from his office at 
 night and care for the boy, whom Ida had tired of as 
 casually as if he were a doll. And our hearts 
 broke. 
 
 Quincy Ferrier, who loved Don more than he 
 did his own people, went over to see him one hot 
 night when he knew Don would be at home, work 
 ing. He found him in the little mission living-room, 
 figuring at a table. His boy lay fast asleep on the 
 table on couch-cushions, shaded from the drop-light, 
 with both fists curled up under the little face so 
 absurdly like his father's. Don looked up with his 
 vivid smile as Quincy passed in through the open 
 door, set wide to let in the night breeze. 
 
 " Hello, old boy ! " he said cordially. " What are 
 you doing so far from the electric lights this sort 
 of anight?" 
 
 Quincy's throat hurt as he looked at Don he 
 was so splendid, and so cruelly young to be sitting 
 there alone under the weight of his sordid tragedy, 
 guarding his boy. 
 
 They slid into commonplaces for a while. Quincy 
 had the hardest work ahead of him that he had ever
 
 DON ANDREV 7 GIRL 87 
 
 done, and small blame to him if he dallied a little. 
 Finally Don threw his arm over Quincy's shoulder. 
 
 " What is it, Quincy ? " he asked. " Anything I 
 can straighten out for you ? " 
 
 " I don't know," Quiney burst out, " but, oh, 
 Don, I'd give anything in the world if you could ! " 
 
 " Tell me about it," said Don. 
 
 Quincy Ferrier stared straight ahead at the green 
 art-glass light that thrust out over the shiny, empty 
 new fireplace. 
 
 " It's it's Ida, Don," he began desperately. 
 
 Don's hand clasped down a little heavier on 
 Quincy's shoulder. 
 
 " I know," he said gently, " I know, and it's like 
 you to care, Quincy. But you can't help things 
 nobody can. I married her, so I've got to look after 
 her the best I can. I'm responsible for her, you 
 see. Now don't let's talk about it any more." 
 
 So they did not talk about it any more. When 
 Quincy went away that night late, -Don was still 
 sitting under the bright light, working, with the 
 sleeping baby among the litter of his papers ; young 
 and gallant and alone. 
 
 And there was no way to do anything to Ida. 
 That was the tough part of the whole thing. 
 
 It was scarcely a month later that Ida planned a
 
 88 DON ANDREWS' GIRL 
 
 party which was to have an extensive alcoholic feast 
 at as late an hour as possible, in as yellow a cafe 
 as could be found in the vicinity. Don went with 
 her. She had not wanted him to know about it, but 
 she made a sulky best of it. 
 
 They were a creditable enough crowd as far as 
 appearances went. Ida's latest was the kind whom 
 dissipation makes hollow-cheeked and deep-eyed, not 
 red and puffy. In fact, he was a cocainer, by which 
 you may see that Ida didn't much care, so it was a 
 good spender. Ida herself was always a pretty little 
 thing enough, in spite of her heavy hand with the 
 make-up. Her shoulders were half out of her 
 orange satin, and she was making crude but rather 
 effective play with her man. The girl next Don was 
 a slim, scarlet-cheeked affair with black hair and 
 long eyes and a floppy scarlet frock that matched 
 her cheeks. She was being nice to Don and he was 
 being about as responsive as a man on a magazine- 
 cover. That is, as his scarlet-cheeked partner prob 
 ably counted responsiveness. He was pleasant 
 enough to her, of course. Whether he loved Ida 
 still or not, nobody knew. It didn't seem likely. 
 But neither, to us who knew Don, did it seem likely 
 that he would ever care for anybody else. But the 
 scarlet girl couldn't know that, I suppose. As for
 
 DON ANDREWS' GIRL 89 
 
 the other two couples, they were the background 
 kind, fillers-in. 
 
 We looked at the party sitting there laughing in 
 the lights, and looked hastily away. It hurt to see 
 Don guarding that worthless little thing, and fet 
 tered to a course of action as far above her under 
 standing as it would have been above a spaniel's. 
 
 A little laugh and whisper that ignored Don went 
 round their table. The scarlet girl braced indig 
 nantly, then, seeing Don had apparently not noticed, 
 went on hurriedly talking to him. Ida was ridi 
 culing him, of course, scoffing at his patience. Don 
 went evenly on with his talk to his partner, with his 
 drink scarcely touched. 
 
 " Sure," Ida had whispered, giggling hysterically, 
 " he isn't among those present 'cause he likes good 
 times. He's chaperoning me, that's what he's doing. 
 Wish he'd cheer up a little bit! Makes me tired, 
 sitting there like a mummy." 
 
 " I can liven him up, I bet you," whispered Ida's 
 man. "Want me to?" 
 
 "M'hm," said Ida expectantly. "Bet you 
 can't!" 
 
 " Can't I, dearie ? " he whispered back, " just you 
 watch!" 
 
 It was really admirably clever, the way he slid
 
 90 DON ANDREWS' GIRL 
 
 a thick pinch of powder from some hidden pocket 
 into Don's cocktail, where it sank and dissolved. 
 
 " Now, get him to drink it, and if he doesn't cheer 
 tip right away, I'm a liar ! " he said. He cheered 
 himself behind his napkin with the like powder fur 
 tively as he spoke. " Make him drink it," he told 
 Ida, " and the coke'll do the rest." 
 
 Ida wasn't feeling any too kindly to Don that 
 night. Sometimes she was willing enough to have 
 him around, for the sake of the respectability his 
 presence gave her. But tonight he interfered with 
 her plans, and she was cross accordingly. She felt 
 malicious, and like doing any little thing to Don 
 she could. She sent another whisper around the 
 table, to watch the fun, then set the whole pack on 
 him. 
 
 " Don isn't drinking his one little cocktail, 
 bunch," she called out to the tableful. "Little 
 Donald, the temperance advocate ! Go on, Don, be 
 a sport ! Finish it ! " 
 
 She brought the whole of them, warned of the 
 joke, swooping down on Don, demanding shrilly 
 that he drink his cocktail. That is, all but the 
 scarlet girl. They had learned that it wasn't much 
 use to invite her to help in a joke on Don. 
 
 It didn't matter especially to Don whether he
 
 DON ANDREWS' GIRL 91 
 
 drank his cocktail then or not, so he finished the 
 howlings as swiftly as possible by swallowing it. 
 Ida leaned back to her man, the other women leaned 
 back to theirs, and the whisperings and drinkings 
 went on again, all of them watching Don expec 
 tantly at intervals. There was no perceptible effect 
 on Don. The scarlet-cheeked girl leaned to him 
 again and moved her white shoulders at him, and 
 lured him, the only way she knew, with lips and 
 eyes and hands and provocative whispers. He an 
 swered her, as gently courteous as before. That 
 was all. 
 
 The others, watching, felt cheated. So did Ida, 
 especially. 
 
 "What sort of livening up do you call that?" 
 she taunted her partner. " What did you give him, 
 Mellin's Food? Thought you were a regular little 
 devil that used real cocaine." 
 
 But the man's sense, drug-sharpened, felt some 
 thing wrong. 
 
 " Better be careful," he said. " He may get ugly 
 or paralyzed. We'd better beat it for the car." 
 
 " Aw, piker ! " said Ida, and leaned farther to 
 ward him. He shrank away. He had awakened to 
 the fact that Don had turned from the girl in scarlet, 
 and was openly, silently watching Ida, the pupils of
 
 92 DON ANDREWS' GIRL 
 
 his yellow-brown eyes dilated like a cat's. Don 
 watched a long minute. Then he spoke softly, 
 clearly : 
 
 " Cut it out, Ida," he said. 
 
 Ida laughed and leaned nearer the other man. 
 
 "Did you hear me, Ida?" Don asked, still 
 quietly. 
 
 " Oh, yes I heard you ! " she said. She laughed 
 shrilly, turning her bare shoulder to him, and flung 
 her arm around the other man's reluctant neck. 
 
 The next thing that happened was that Don sprang 
 straight at Ida's man like a big cat, and threw him 
 on the floor as if he were an old coat. He struck 
 Ida aside in passing only in passing but the force 
 of the blow sent her hard against the next table, 
 where a glass, breaking, cut her face. She picked 
 herself quietly up and sat down again, pressing her 
 cheek with her napkin and watching Don. She 
 looked for all the world as she had always looked, 
 sitting still and complacent in a good place on the 
 sidelines, watching Don at some feat which re 
 flected its glory on her. 
 
 It looked ghastly Don Andrews making a brutal 
 scene in public Don Andrews savagely punishing 
 a man who had no chance whatever with him ! 
 
 There is a thing the doctors tell you about, called
 
 DON ANDREWS' GIRL 93 
 
 inhibition. A muscle, or perhaps a kinked nerve, 
 closes down on some other muscle or nerve, and 
 locks it. The locked muscle is all right perfectly 
 well and strong but you have no more use of it 
 than if it were not there. 
 
 I think Don's self-restraint and magnanimity, all 
 the years he had been stronger than anybody else, 
 too powerful to use his power without selfishness, 
 had locked the strength down. He literally had 
 not been able to let go and be self-interested, even 
 when his life-happiness was in question. It was an 
 inhibition. And the cocaine had broken it for a 
 while. The knight was released for a little from 
 his vows. 
 
 The amazing part of the whole thing was the 
 quietness of it, and the way we all stood back in 
 our ring like people at a play and let it happen. 
 Except for Ida's half-cry and the slight crash of 
 glass at the beginning of things there had been 
 scarcely any noise. You see, the majority of the 
 people there that night were townspeople who knew 
 Don and his story. We would not have lifted a 
 finger if Don had killed the man outright yes, and 
 beaten Ida, worthless little painted animal that we 
 held her ! The other two men of the party had left 
 unobtrusively at the first possible moment. As for
 
 94 DON ANDREWS' GIRL 
 
 the other girls, they stood and watched the fight 
 almost with Ida's expression of pleased admiration. 
 Only the slim girl in scarlet was opening and shut 
 ting her hands and breathing so you could hear her. 
 
 You cannot break a broken man, but Don came 
 near accomplishing the impossible. The man 
 cringed and jumped if he was spoken to or touched 
 suddenly, for months afterward. 
 
 " You come with me," Don flung to Ida when he 
 had made an end, turning from the stained and 
 crumpled thing on the floor. He used precisely the 
 tone you use to a disobedient dog. And Ida, her 
 face still lighted with the rapture of his fight, fol 
 lowed with a dog's swift, worshiping abjectness. 
 
 The people from the tables went softly back to 
 their places, taking the long breath one draws when 
 a thrilling play is done. The proprietor came and 
 began zealously to pick up the pieces and help the 
 policeman who drifted in to hunt for people to 
 arrest. He looked contented, in spite of his spoiled 
 glassware. He knew Don, too. 
 
 Don walked rapidly home, never looking at Ida. 
 She had trouble keeping up, but she toiled along 
 bravely, never asking any halt or mercy. When 
 they reached the bungalow she was too spent to do 
 anything but drop on the living-room couch and
 
 DON ANDREWS' GIRL 95 
 
 pant for breath. But she never took her watching, 
 adoring eyes off Don. 
 
 He sat down at his table and looked at her in the 
 old quiet way. The cocaine had died out of him, 
 leaving no particular after-effects. 
 
 " I'm going to divorce you, Ida," he said slowly. 
 " I don't think I can stand any more of this. I'd 
 let you get the divorce, but you might be given the 
 boy, and I can't risk that. Better go upstairs now 
 and get some sleep. You have a lot to do tomorrow, 
 getting packed." 
 
 "You're going to get rid of me?" she asked. 
 He nodded. " Well, I don't blame you," she said, 
 getting wearily off the couch, " and I forgive 
 you." 
 
 Don looked as if she had taken leave of her 
 senses, and as she crossed the room she laughed a 
 little, a mournful little attempt at a laugh. " You 
 think that's the finishing insult, don't you? I sup 
 pose it is and yet I've a good deal to forgive you 
 for, Don!" 
 
 Don did not answer. It seemed scarcely worth 
 answering, of course. Ida stopped where she was, 
 at the door, and turned on him, speaking now with 
 a fire he had never seen in her before. She looked 
 straight at him and her eyes held his.
 
 96 DON ANDREWS' GIRL 
 
 " Oh, yes, I know very well you've kept straight 
 and I haven't and that mighty few men do. But 
 that it wasn't fighting temptation for you. 
 You're better than most people. And I'd rather 
 you'd have done something like that than what you 
 did to me it'd have been kinder ! " 
 
 "What do you think I have done?" he asked. 
 He wondered if she were partly insane if all her 
 behavior since their marriage had been, after all, the 
 action of a deranged mind. Ida straightened her 
 self against the door. Her tears had dried, and 
 streaked the rouge, but there was a dignity in her 
 expression that he had never seen before, as if she 
 felt right to be on her side. 
 
 " I've never had any chance to be happy," she 
 said, " that's all ! You were the biggest and best 
 and strongest boy in the Park when you picked me 
 out to go with. I was ten and you were twelve. Of 
 course I was proud anybody'd have been. And of 
 course, after that, I belonged to you, so far as 
 everybody felt, as if you'd bought me as long as 
 you chose to keep me. You chose to keep me 
 always. I didn't like you more than any of the 
 others. I never loved you. I went because I was 
 little and docile and proud of being noticed. There 
 wasn't any choice. And I might as well have
 
 DON ANDREWS' GIRL 97 
 
 walked into a jail because I thought it was a pretty 
 building. After that there wasn't any me just 
 Don Andrews' girl." 
 
 She stopped for breath. " Go on," said her hus 
 band quietly. 
 
 " It sounds like nothing to you," she said, " but it 
 was everything, all the time, for me. No other boy 
 ever thought of asking me to do anything. The 
 girls, even, left me out of things rather, because I 
 belonged to you so entirely I might as well have 
 been a married woman since I was ten. You were 
 so strong, and every one worshiped you so why, 
 they envied me, all those twelve shut-up years, as if 
 I was a queen! And there wasn't anything to do 
 but go on being a queen. I never even thought of 
 breaking away. I thought when we were married I 
 would find all the things and all the happiness I'd 
 been missing, and feeling as if it was my fault 
 I missed all those years. I didn't. I liked having a 
 house of my own, for a while, and a baby. But 
 pretty soon the old dreadful empty feeling came 
 back I wasn't me. I'd never had a chance to be 
 me, or to be young, or free, or have a good time of 
 my own. I'd never been in love. I'd never been 
 courted. And now there wasn't any marrying to 
 look forward to nothing to look forward to!
 
 98 DON ANDREWS' GIRL 
 
 Then I found out that there were men who'd look at 
 me there were good times I could have, I, Ida, 
 not Don Andrews' girl ! I'd never had a lover, nor 
 any freedom any girl good times. You kept me 
 out of all that with your ownership. Oh, it wasn't 
 very funny, after all but I was me, anyway. 
 Those brutes I went with, they treated me as if I 
 was a separate human being, not your household 
 goods. I went with brutes because only brutes 
 would have done it. Love them! I tried hard 
 enough to, but I've never loved any man never 
 been given the chance. And then well, tonight, 
 when you smashed things up so and acted for the 
 first time as if I was worth defending I felt as if 
 I loved you. I never did before. I don't see why, 
 because you were just rubbing in all the own 
 ership I'd resented so long but I did and I 
 do. 
 
 " Funny, isn't it, that I should forgive you, and 
 love you, just when you're hating me and putting 
 me out of the house? And it would sound funny 
 enough to anybody to hear me talk about forgiving 
 you! Well, I do. Only remember I wasn't ever 
 me. I was just Don Andrews' girl. And it's me, 
 of my own free will, that loves you now, if that 
 helps you to get back at me more. I've messed
 
 DON ANDREWS' GIRL 99 
 
 everything. You've more than a right to get rid 
 of me " 
 
 Her face worked, and she turned hastily and ran 
 out of the room. He could hear her flying feet on. 
 the stairs, and her sobs as she ran. Then, move 
 ments overhead, and after a while, silence. 
 
 Don sat still where she had left him. He sat 
 there rigid for half an hour, staring straight ahead. 
 Suddenly he rose and went upstairs. 
 
 Ida, clad in her street clothes, was kneeling by her 
 locked trunk. Her head was down on one arm. 
 The other hand, out-thrown, was clenched on some 
 thing. He laid his hand on her shoulder. 
 
 " Ida," he said, " do you want to try again? "
 
 BLACK MAGIC 
 
 KAOMI AINSLIE looked out the window thought 
 fully. It was half-light in her studio; her friend 
 Leila Adair, watching her, could scarcely see more 
 than the outline of her head, with its smoothly 
 brushed hair and colorless, regular profile. They 
 had both been quiet for a long time. 
 
 " I'm glad Ethan's happy," she said finally, 
 though they had not been talking of her cousin 
 Ethan, nor, indeed, of anything, for half an hour. 
 " But it seems strange that it should be Ethan, not 
 Quincy. It was always Quincy who had everything 
 on earth that people could give him, like the prince 
 in the fairy tales. And Ethan has always carried 
 the burdens and been in the background." 
 
 " I think that's all the more reason why Ethan 
 should have a chance," protested Leila vigorously. 
 She had been lounging luxuriously in Naomi's 
 big chair, plump and duskily pretty in the fire 
 light; now she sat intently forward. "I haven't 
 seen Quincy for years. But he was always a 
 charmer ; the gayest, handsomest thing you ever saw. 
 
 100
 
 BLACK MAGIC 101 
 
 He could get anything he wanted, out of anybody, 
 and yet he played fair." 
 
 " Both the boys play fair," said their cousin 
 loyally. " And I only wish there'd been enough 
 happiness to go around. But of course there isn't 
 much, most places. There's fun, thank goodness! 
 And there's consciousness of rectitude, or what 
 ever you call it. That's really a lot of help, when 
 you happen to have been brought up to be good 
 whether or no." 
 
 When Naomi began to talk Leila generally let her 
 philosophize as long as she wanted to, because it 
 wasn't often she would do it. And she had an un 
 canny way of learning things about people which 
 most don't get told. 
 
 " It was because Quincy always did get the most 
 out of life that it seems strange he isn't going on 
 with it," she said. 
 
 " What was it ? " demanded Leila plumply. 
 "Was it anybody's fault particularly?" 
 
 " Well," Naomi answered slowly, " of course 
 nothing in the world is absolutely one person's 
 fault. Sometimes it seemed to me more like black 
 magic than anything else. But any amount of 
 people and things and environments, most of them 
 well-meaning, are to blame every time something
 
 102 BLACK MAGIC 
 
 breaks. Yet it does seem to me that if Catherine's 
 own people had been just a little more fantastic in 
 their point of view nothing need have happened. If 
 they hadn't tried to make a conventional young 
 lady out of a woman who could have been the 
 leader of a great movement or the prophetess of a 
 faith 
 
 " But there it is again. They saw things as most 
 fathers and mothers in the world would have seen 
 them, from the sensible, walled-in cell of middle- 
 age; as Catherine herself might have seen them 
 if she had married and had daughters of her 
 own." 
 
 " Catherine ? What Catherine ? " asked Leila. 
 
 " Catherine James don't you remember little 
 Catherine over in Allenwood? Her people never 
 let her play much with the Park children. They 
 made an exception of me on state occasions, I sup 
 pose because I was the minister's daughter." 
 
 "I think so," said Leila slowly. "She had 
 long fair hair, and a sort of surprised look. And 
 she never talked much." 
 
 ".Yes. I lost sight of her after mother and I 
 moved away. Then we came back on business, 
 years later. We were all grown up then. Cather 
 ine was about twenty-six, I think. She was thirty
 
 BLACK MAGIC 103 
 
 the last time I saw her and the last time Quincy 
 saw her. Do you know Mira Doremus ? " 
 
 " She acts Ibsen, doesn't she ? And they say she 
 throws things at her maid," said Leila, taking the 
 abrupt change coolly. 
 
 " I can't imagine her doing anything else," said 
 Naomi, coolly also. " Incidentally some one told me 
 that she's a nervous wreck; that she can't act much 
 longer. I can't say I'm sorry. Oh, well Mira 
 couldn't help being what she was, either ... I 
 suppose. . . . She always reminded me of some 
 destructive natural force. She mayn't have been 
 normal, but she was amazingly dynamic, and people 
 say now that the way your brain is built is respon 
 sible for whether you are kind-hearted or not. She 
 was always a little afraid, herself, of going mad, I 
 know. No, I suppose in a way it was nobody's 
 fault. But I always wanted to have Mira punished 
 for it. Such as she usually got poisoned in the end 
 by some anonymous person, in their proper habitat, 
 the Renaissance. Those good days are over, alas ! " 
 She turned to face Leila, almost invisible now in the 
 gathering winter darkness, and swept ahead with 
 her story. 
 
 " Catherine James was the stuff from which are 
 made saints and martyrs and perfect mothers. She
 
 104 BLACK MAGIC 
 
 was strong and single-hearted and there are very 
 few people to whom the word really applies noble- 
 minded. I have never known her to believe even 
 the most obvious evil of any one. Yet strong? I 
 scarcely know. Perhaps I should have said strong 
 to endure. It was never a strength of aggression. 
 
 " She grew up clipped into conventional shape by 
 a mother and governess who were even more afraid 
 of * queerness ' than they were of undesirable 
 friends. If you have fine enough material you can 
 twist it into almost any shape, and Catherine at 
 twenty must have been as good a semblance of your 
 sensible, narrow-interested, pleasure-loving girl as 
 heart could wish or break over. All the wild white 
 dreams had been laughed down and scolded under 
 and hushed out of sight. Catherine was the kind 
 of girl your own people hold up to you as an 
 example. 
 
 " If she had been the ordinary romantic, senti 
 mental dreamer it would have made no difference. 
 She would have enjoyed not being understood, and 
 married somebody on the strength of it, and every 
 thing would have been all right. But she was great- 
 minded, which means humble-minded, and when 
 they told her that to be unusual was to be wrong 
 she believed it. The little people around her said
 
 BLACK MAGIC 105 
 
 she was silly. They were older than she, so of 
 course they knew, she thought; and she crowded 
 under all the wild, innocent, noble wishes and desires 
 and struggles and beliefs that go to the making of 
 heroines, and hid her Shelley and Kant away, and 
 dutifully read young-girl books that bored her 
 piteously. At twenty one will do almost anything 
 not to be different. Of course all the realities in her 
 were burning hard, ready to break through at a 
 touch. 
 
 " Well, the touch came through a perfectly 
 proper, meritorious church-work errand. The 
 Girls' Friendly, or some such thing, sent Catherine 
 to visit, among others, a girl named Mira Doremus. 
 Mira was sixteen then, and she and her aunt had 
 just come to the Park flotsam, like the rest. She 
 is a great actress now, Mira, married to a foreigner 
 with a title, her second husband, I think : but then 
 she was merely a thin, wistful-looking child with 
 hungry black eyes and a mop of incongruous light- 
 brown hair. Nine years afterward Catherine told 
 me about their first meeting, dwelling on the little 
 details as a mother dwells on the things a dead 
 child has done. 
 
 " ' She was sitting quite alone in a high green 
 chair in the very middle of the room, like a little
 
 io6 BLACK MAGIC 
 
 princess,' she said. ' She rose and took both my 
 hands, and said in that wonderful voice of hers, 
 " So you are the Catherine they said I should love ! 
 I think they were right." 
 
 " I don't know what Catherine answered. I don't 
 believe she knows. But Catherine had met 
 Romance. 
 
 "Of all Mira's gifts the most subtle and wonder 
 ful is her capability of making you feel that to you, 
 and you alone, she is most attuned. And you know 
 that Catherine had never found any one like herself 
 in all of her life before. Can you imagine the 
 stifling loneliness of it? And can you think what 
 Mira seemed to Catherine ? All the things they had 
 told her were foolish, the things that were every 
 thing to her, Mira divined and echoed and made 
 great. All the questionings and breaking of con 
 ventional idea and belief that Catherine had 
 dreamed and wondered over secretly, Mira played 
 with unafraid. And Mira, wrapped in that subtle 
 quality, magnetism, charm, personality call it what 
 you will exerted every scrap of power in her to 
 hold Catherine. She loved her genuinely for a 
 while. She's still fond of her in a way, I think. 
 Catherine is a very lovable person. She was even 
 more lovable then, according to Mira. ' A Gabriel
 
 BLACK MAGIC 107 
 
 Max Madonna with a touch of Brunhild,' is Mira's 
 description of what Catherine was at twenty. Mira 
 always speaks in hyperbole she sees things that 
 way. Life is all Turner sunsets and Ibsen dramas 
 to her. But Catherine at twenty must have been 
 very lovely, for she is sweet-faced now. She had 
 the coloring of apple-blossoms, Mira told me, and 
 her fair hair was so heavy that it massed naturally 
 around her face, like a halo. The ' touch of Brun 
 hild,' the height and straightness, the boyish, aus 
 tere impatience of shams and sentimentalisms and 
 pettinesses she has them still. 
 
 " Some people cannot give all of themselves to 
 any one, even if they want to. Catherine has never 
 been able to give except entirely. Such people as she 
 always do throw down everything at once. They 
 would be glad if their love were returned, but if it 
 isn't why, that doesn't stop them from giving. 
 Mira, with her wonderful gift of feigned likeness 
 of soul, drew out of Catherine, or was freely given, 
 everything. Then she began to hurt Catherine as 
 much as she could, to see how much power she had, 
 and just how far Catherine would bear. I suppose 
 power was a new plaything for her in those days, 
 and she wanted to see what she could make it 
 do.
 
 io8 BLACK MAGIC 
 
 " She did everything to Catherine's soul that an 
 ingenious mind, interested in proving its own power, 
 could suggest. You know how people can hurt you 
 when they know everything about you, and your 
 least, most noble (which can be made most ridicu 
 lous) inward feelings. They have what Holmes 
 calls the ' back-door key ' to your soul, and they can 
 enter at will. The better you are, the larger- 
 minded, the more forgiving, the happier hunting- 
 ground there is for people with a fondness for soul- 
 vivisection. Mira knew that whatever she did to 
 Catherine's feelings, for very loyalty's sake Cath 
 erine would pretend not to be hurt. 
 
 " It may have been good for Catherine, in a way. 
 I know that she thinks it was. Mira boasted to me 
 once that she had ' developed and strengthened the 
 range of Catherine's emotions.' Doubtless she told 
 the truth. She did make out of her a most wonder 
 ful instrument for the registering of fine shades of 
 feeling. Like her predecessors in the molding of 
 Catherine, she had fine material to work in. She 
 had Catherine's nerves trained at one time to the 
 thrilling, fine responsiveness of violin-strings, and 
 Mira played the violin. No one took what went on 
 with any particular amount of seriousness. They 
 were both so young, you see. By the time any one
 
 BLACK MAGIC 109 
 
 noticed, and it took some years, it was too late to 
 do anything. 
 
 " So when I knew the girls, Catherine was 
 beyond the most acute suffering-point, or was 
 trained to a very wonderful stoicism. I think my 
 self that the vibrations were deadened, spoiled by 
 overuse. You can't suffer, even at the hands you 
 love best, beyond a certain point. 
 
 " It was at Mira's I met Catherine again for the 
 first time since those visits of state in our child 
 hood. I remembered her, of course, but I scarcely 
 noticed her at first, I was so under the spell of 
 Mira's slow, thrilling voice and passionate person 
 ality. Gradually she became a real figure to me, the 
 smiling blonde girl who was always in the back 
 ground, smoothing down the sharp things Mira said 
 and showing off the flattering ones. Something, 
 finally, in her attitude, a certain determined light 
 ness of manner at variance with a natural placidity 
 and dignity, attracted my attention sharply. Any 
 where else I would have seen nothing incongruous, 
 but at Mira's one was in a state of heightened 
 mental tension which took note of morbidly small 
 things a sort of clairvoyance. Mira's atmosphere 
 well, some one described her once as a ' mental 
 cocktail,' and it wasn't bad. You would spend a
 
 no BLACK MAGIC 
 
 tense evening talking to her, and go home with mind 
 and body keyed to the height of their powers, as 
 if you'd been taking a drug. Indeed, the next day 
 you would be quite as exhausted as if the drug had 
 been a physical reality. 
 
 " The first time I saw anything real of Catherine 
 was a night when Mira kept me too long for me 
 to be able to get home. Catherine volunteered to 
 put me up for the night All the way back to her 
 house and for hours afterwards, we talked of Mira, 
 how wonderful she was, what a living force 
 
 " ' But she's cruel, isn't she ? ' I asked timidly. 
 I was young, and not quite sure, as yet, how much 
 one might speak of emotions. But I had to emo 
 tions were what Mira exhaled. She played on your 
 nerves, and deliberately woke for her own interest 
 all those elemental feelings you had supposed were 
 only in book people not you. 
 
 "'Cruel?' said Catherine with her little laugh. 
 ' Yes, I suppose so, but don't you think she's worth 
 it ? She can give you thrills. Thrills are all that's 
 worth having don't you think so ? ' 
 
 " This was what Mira had done to her in four 
 years. 
 
 " We went on talking talked late into the night. 
 Both our tongues were loosened by the strong stimu-
 
 BLACK MAGIC in 
 
 lant of Mira's personality. Catherine showed me, 
 little by little, all the soul of her : the amazing loy 
 alty, the honesty and innocence of purpose, the 
 thwarted instincts of protection and motherhood 
 and the cruel havoc, too, that Mira had wrought. 
 Mira had made Catherine so that her chief desire 
 
 was for emotional excitement ' thrills ' She 
 
 had taught her to analyze herself as she analyzed 
 others, and to find her greatest interest in people's 
 feelings. It sounds overstrained, I know, but it 
 reminded me of the superstition that if a vampire 
 sucks your blood something of the vampire nature 
 is left in you. Mira had laid Catherine's soul out 
 and dissected it till the girl herself learned to take 
 an interest in the process. Mira could not kill the 
 gentleness, nor the instinct of motherhood, the guar 
 dianship of anything weak or hurt, nevertheless, 
 she had taught Catherine something which was 
 a passionate, selfless sympathy, but which still 
 watched your soul hungrily for signs of its work 
 ings even while she helped it through some black, 
 terrifying place. 
 
 " She was trained, too, to a curious scorn of men. 
 Mira had the Brunhild austerity of her to work on 
 in the beginning, of course. The love and protec- 
 tiveness that goes with the type Mira diverted to
 
 H2 BLACK MAGIC 
 
 herself; the mating instinct, of no use to her, she 
 tried to crush out. Mira's own attitude to men, at 
 that stage of her development, was inevitable. She 
 did not attract them, then; she alarmed them by 
 oddness ; so she hated them, and trained her devotees 
 to hate them too. It was a self-defensive, automatic 
 thing. You couldn't like a man and Mira at the 
 same time. So Catherine crystallized Mira's mood 
 of the time, and despised men with her whole inno 
 cent, serious mind. 
 
 "The more you knew of Catherine the lovelier 
 she was. Long after I had seen all that was neces 
 sary to conviction of Mira's temperamentalisms, 
 Catherine and I were very close to each other. 
 Mira's schooling had made her the ideal friend; I 
 suppose she knew what not to do to the last iota. 
 But she never spoke of herself, only of yourself r 
 and Mira things you were interested in and Mira 
 music and books .and pictures and Mira. She 
 talked wonderfully, wisely, with a tolerant sympathy 
 and interest for everything, but Mira was the con 
 tinuous overtone of it all. I don't mean that she 
 spoke of her so much. It was, as well as I can 
 describe it, that Mira was in the air when you were 
 with Catherine, affecting your senses as vividly as 
 the faint wood-violet scent Catherine always had on.
 
 BLACK MAGIC 113 
 
 She was a part of Catherine's life in the literal sense 
 of the phrase. 
 
 " Once Catherine tried to break the spell. It was 
 after a very cruel scene with Mira, who was angry 
 with some one else. She wasn't sufficiently sure of 
 the other girl to act to her as she felt. So she sum 
 moned Catherine, late at night, and spent four solid 
 hours wilfully wounding and insulting and humili 
 ating her by every means in her knowledge, all in 
 that wonderful, 'cello-like voice that Catherine loved 
 so dearly. Catherine sat under it all silently. In 
 the end she rose, dazed, and if you can believe it 
 not resentful in the least; only hurt, hurt, hurt so 
 badly that it was worse, she told me, than any physi 
 cal pain she had ever known. 
 
 " * I don't think we had better see each other any 
 more,' she managed to say in a low voice, rising to 
 go away. Mira darted after her and caught her 
 wrist hard. 
 
 " * You'll be the first to crawl back,' she said. ' I 
 may take you if you are very abject! Now, go!' 
 
 "Catherine went home physically ill. It was a 
 week before she ate or slept normally. After that 
 she held no communication with Mira for a month. 
 She sent back all her letters, and her maid answered 
 the telephone and refused her to Mira about once a
 
 114 BLACK MAGIC 
 
 day. Catherine used to lie on her couch, she said, 
 gripping its sides with both hands to keep from 
 rising and taking the receiver herself and replying. 
 But finally she fought herself to a point where she 
 could think of Mira quietly, and with no desire to 
 see her. If her mother had been willing to have her 
 go away for a while just then I think she could have 
 got free enough to hold firm, for Mira's spell is a 
 personal one to a great degree, weaker the farther 
 away she is. But for some reason it was not con 
 venient, and Catherine's mother would not let her 
 go. Fascination and the power of personality were 
 as ridiculous to the mother as a belief in ghosts. 
 If Catherine's loyalty had permitted her to tell her 
 mother some of the things Mira had said to her 
 Mira would never have been allowed in the house 
 again, I know. Unfortunately, those were just 
 what Catherine would not tell. 
 
 " The end of it was that Mira slipped into the 
 house unchallenged one day, gained Catherine's sit 
 ting-room, and fled across the room into her arms. 
 
 " * Oh, comfort me, comfort me ! ' she sobbed. 
 ' I've been so wicked and cruel to you that I can 
 never be happy any more ! ' 
 
 " Catherine, worn and blanched as she was with 
 the struggle Mira had caused, sat up and closed both
 
 BLACK MAGIC 115 
 
 weak, protecting arms around Mira and comforted 
 her. The fetters were locked on again. 
 
 " All this was a long time before Catherine met 
 Quincy. She was thirty when he came. Mira 
 was away. It was at my house they met. 
 
 " Catherine is not the kind that has many lovers. 
 Even if she wanted them, she demands a very great 
 deal, and stoops to none of the little alluringnesses 
 men desire. Any lover of Catherine's would have 
 to go all the way alone without help from her. But 
 Quincy was ready and glad to go every inch of the 
 way. He loved her as soon as he saw her. He did 
 not, or I think not, see all the high, brave soul of 
 her, under the sweetness and straightforwardness 
 that were her most visible charm. But what man 
 ever does love a woman for the things in her that 
 are most loveworthy? Quincy cared for her so en 
 tirely that whatever she did or was or said was 
 perfect because she did it, and would have been 
 will be to the end of time. He was a man any 
 girl would have been glad to marry, aside from the 
 worldly part of it, for his sheer sweetness and 
 straightforward, gay strength and charm. Any 
 girl, that is, not blinded and drowned in Mira's 
 ruthless fascination. 
 
 " Quincy laid siege to Catherine as steadily and
 
 ii6 BLACK MAGIC 
 
 swiftly as if he had been one of the knights she used 
 to dream about. Soon it seemed as if he had won. 
 I was very, very glad, but a little frightened. It 
 seemed too good to be true too happy an ending 
 for any one as strong to bear suffering as Catherine. 
 They were so youthfully, carelessly happy I never 
 remember being as light-hearted as they were. It 
 was the most beautiful thing to see them going about 
 together, Catherine flushed and serious and girlish, 
 and Quincy watching her in the unmistakable lover- 
 fashion. It was so new to Catherine to be petted, 
 and have her feelings considered and her wishes 
 watched for, that she must have felt bewildered. 
 She bought pretty, fluffy clothes and did her hair 
 to please Quincy, and for one month she was a real, 
 normal woman with a lover, and all the little vani 
 ties and foolishnesses and merriments that go to 
 lover-time. She had been living so long on heights 
 of strained emotion that this descent into the valleys 
 must have been very wonderful to her. If any two 
 people ever were brave and kind and merry, and 
 absolutely fitted to make each other's happiness for 
 a lifetime, those two were. 
 
 " Ethan and I met them one night in the lobby of 
 a theater, in the city, after a musical comedy, talking- 
 nonsense to each other like a couple of children.
 
 BLACK MAGIC 117 
 
 " ' She looks like a Christmas-card angel, doesn't 
 she ? ' Quincy said fondly, looking down at her mis 
 chievously. I looked too, and smiled. She did in 
 deed, tall and straight, and pink-cheeked with ex 
 citement, with her pretty fair hair all curled, and 
 her blue eyes laughing and childlike above the 
 swansdown of her long white cape. 
 
 " ' I'm not an angel, at all! ' she protested, 
 laughing and glancing up at him challenge-fashion. 
 He bent and whispered something that made her 
 flush and drop her eyes. 
 
 " It was all such a poignant contrast to my first 
 memory of Catherine, smiling and enduring behind 
 Mira's chair in that little room full of tense emotion, 
 that something came over me a wave of second- 
 sight, I've thought since. 
 
 " ' Oh, Quincy, dear ! ' I said, ' I do wish you'd 
 marry her soon tonight this week ! Marry each 
 other quick, before anything happens to stop either 
 of you from being happy ! ' 
 
 " ' It would be an adventure, at least ! ' laughed 
 Quincy. 'What do you say, Kitty shall we take 
 her and Ethan for witnesses, and go off and do as 
 she says ? ' 
 
 " He loved her as much as a man can, but I don't 
 think he knew what he had achieved in winning her
 
 ii8 BLACK MAGIC 
 
 through the crystallized distaste for men that Mira 
 had taught her. He was just as sure of her, natu 
 rally, as he was of sunrise. 
 
 " ' Oh, no, no ! ' said Catherine gaily. ' What 
 would happen to our lovely wedding and all the blue 
 bridesmaids? We have all the rest of our lives to 
 stay happy in.' 
 
 " * If Mira lets you/ I said involuntarily. 
 
 " The girl-look faded for a moment, and the old 
 expression of devoted endurance crossed her face, 
 followed by her little old Mira-laugh not the 
 childish mirth of girls with lovers. 
 
 " ' You always think Mira is so dreadful/ she 
 said. ' She'll like Quincy almost as much as I do.' 
 
 " But it was only three days afterwards that Mira 
 came back and the thing I had feared happened. I 
 never knew much more than the brutal fact that 
 Catherine broke off short with Quincy. Mira 
 needed her to sit behind her chair, with the old look 
 of pleasant, patient watchfulness on her face, I 
 suppose. At any rate, there were two evenings 
 alone with Mira and Catherine was back under the 
 spell. Cocaine or opium would have been as easy 
 a thing to fight. 
 
 " It was a long while since I had been near Mira, 
 but I went straight down to the Park to see her then.
 
 BLACK MAGIC 119 
 
 " ' How could you dare do what you did to 
 Catherine? Do you know that you've spoiled her 
 life and maybe Quincy's ? ' I cried out as she ran 
 into the room, childish and vibrant and seductive as 
 ever. 
 
 " ' Dare? ' laughed Mira, lighting on a corner of 
 the table like a butterfly. She always seemed poised 
 for the moment, rather than seated like other people. 
 ' Don't be melodramatic, you foolish child ! I 
 haven't done anything to Catherine the thing's 
 ridiculous. Catherine doesn't really care for the 
 man at all. She doesn't like men any more than I 
 do. She was just amusing herself with him, I sup 
 pose. He's ridiculous, too forgive me, dearest! 
 And Catherine's a free agent you know that per 
 fectly well. You always talk as if I had her in my 
 power, like a melodrama ! ' 
 
 " It does seem impossible and melodramatic, one 
 woman's complete power over another by sheer per 
 sonal influence, and Mira knew it and acted on it in 
 all her dealings with her satellites. She laughed at 
 me, and then grew angry, and denied and mocked 
 and laughed again went through her series of 
 moods artistically, and enjoyed herself very much. 
 She knew there was nothing I could do, and I knew 
 it, too.
 
 120 BLACK MAGIC 
 
 " Quincy fought hard, of course, but what could 
 any man do against Mira's powers of darkness? 
 Mira had mocked a little and appealed a little and 
 cajoled a little and the thing was done. Moreover, 
 Catherine denied in all sincerity that Mira had any 
 connection with what she had done. She was mis 
 taken, she said it was not right for her to marry 
 there were other things to do in the world that 
 was all. It would have been the same, she said and 
 believed, if Mira had never existed. 
 
 " Quincy went away, at last, out of the country. 
 He made me promise before he went that I would 
 send him word if ever Catherine expressed the least 
 desire to see him. He is away still. I wish it hadn't 
 been Quincy, of all people. Most men wouldn't 
 have kept on caring. I never thought Quincy 
 would; he was so light-hearted, and there were so 
 many girls in his life. I'm afraid that senseless loy 
 alty is a Ferrier inheritance or, rather, Ainslie. 
 Poor Aunt Lucina clung to Uncle Edward years 
 after any other woman would have taken her chil 
 dren and gone away. They can't seem to deflect, 
 once they really care. Like those poor souls in the 
 poem who found the wrong island and colonized it, 
 and had to stick to it, you know. 
 
 " Well, Catherine sat behind Mira's chair for two
 
 BLACK MAGIC 121 
 
 years more, smiling and comforting the girls when 
 Mira hurt them too much. Then suddenly the natu 
 ral, inevitable thing the thing that none of us had 
 ever thought of happened. Catherine called me 
 hurriedly over the telephone one morning. 
 
 " ' Mira's going to be married,' she said breath 
 lessly without preface. ' Married. And . . . she 
 always said marriage was dreadful and degrading. 
 ... I thought she didn't like men. . . . Isn't 
 it queer? ' 
 
 " Mira had taken Catherine from her lover. She 
 had taken her from most of her friends. She had 
 taken her youth, and deadened her capacity for the 
 enjoyment of normal people and normal things. 
 She had even taken her away from her God that 
 kind, concrete God, half Keats, half clergyman, 
 whom Catherine used to go to for comfort when 
 Mira hurt her first. She had put herself, Queen 
 Mira, instead of all these. And now she was taking 
 herself away. 
 
 " Catherine's voice was steady, and she told the 
 story almost brightly. Oh, she had learned stoicism 
 well! 'Isn't it queer?' That was all. 
 
 ' But she doesn't love him at all,' she went on. 
 I could see that there was a happiness to her in that 
 last, forlorn comfort. ' She is only marrying him
 
 122 BLACK MAGIC 
 
 because he is rich and can put her on the stage you 
 know Mira will make a wonderful actress. He is 
 mad about her you should see him ! ' 
 
 " She was always so proud when any one was 
 mad about Mira. 
 
 " There isn't very much more to it. Catherine 
 was maid of honor at the wedding. It was a very 
 beautiful wedding, and the man was undoubtedly 
 mad about Mira, and she, in spite of her assurances 
 to Catherine, was undoubtedly mad about him for 
 the time. When they went away there was on his 
 face, it seemed to me, Catherine's very set, bright 
 smile, the mark Mira lays on her chief worshiper. 
 
 " Nobody wanted Catherine any more, but it was 
 too late for her to swing to normal again. The last 
 breath of her girlhood had died when she gave up 
 Quincy. She is what is it they say of steel that 
 has been permanently warped by electricity ? ' De 
 polarized ' is the word, I think. Anyway, it de 
 scribes what has happened to Catherine. There is 
 the same set brightness about her that there was 
 in Mira's day. She devotes a great deal of time to 
 her mother, who likes being waited on. For in 
 terests, she amuses herself with little passing adora 
 tions of first one woman and then another. She 
 laughs at anything you say about loving men or
 
 BLACK MAGIC 123 
 
 children. But then she laughs a little at everything. 
 So did Hugo's Gwynplaine, you remember. 
 
 " I don't mind," said Naomi passionately, " what 
 women do to men. It's a fair game, as old as Eve, 
 and the balance has always been on men's side. But 
 to take a great white soul like Catherine's and set it 
 to playing pitiful little games in the dust with little 
 souls not worth tuppence 
 
 "If it was Catherine's mind she'd hurt but 
 that's a clear, strong, straightforward thing, as it 
 always was, and I've always understood that in any 
 life hereafter your mind doesn't count much. It 
 was the straightstanding, sweet soul of her, that 
 might have been so great, that is crippled. 
 
 " She has one pitiful comfort left, I know. I 
 don't often see her now, but one afternoon we met 
 by accident, and fell to talking what Catherine calls 
 ' insanities ' in the old way. The talk swung round 
 to reincarnation, and she said breathlessly and 
 strongly, ' Oh, but it's so it must be so ! ' 
 
 " I smiled. 
 
 " ' One likes to play with the idea,' I said, ' but, 
 dear, you don't mean that you really hold to the 
 belief, as your mother does to predestination ? ' 
 
 " ' I have to,' she said. Then she caught herself 
 up, and laughed a little in the old way, to make her
 
 124 BLACK MAGIC 
 
 words seem light. ' Mira and I have an appoint 
 ment under the walls of Babylon in a thousand 
 years, you know just we two! ' 
 
 " She laughed again, but I didn't dare to. I was 
 afraid I would cry. . . . Mira has been in 
 Europe a year now, and I don't think she writes 
 to Catherine. I shall keep my promise and write 
 Quincy tomorrow. I don't know that it will do 
 much good if there's enough of the Catherine 
 he knew left to make it worth his while marrying. 
 But a promise is a promise."
 
 THE CONGREGATION 
 
 THERE is an animal well known to the wives and' 
 daughters of clergymen, though not listed in the 
 Natural History books. It is rather a Scriptural- 
 sounding beast, as is appropriate. It has at least 
 from seventy-five to five hundred heads, and if 
 you will pardon the pun much more than that 
 number of tales. It is not highly intelligent, though 
 sometimes it displays strong affection for its 
 keeper. It is very powerful, unfortunately, for 
 those who know most about it say that it cannot 
 be depended on, any more than other semi-tame 
 wild animals. It is called The Congregation. 
 
 Ministers' wives speak to it with nervous cor 
 diality, and of it, among themselves, with a certain 
 terrified mockery. They also have several proverbs 
 about it, which they communicate only to each 
 other. 
 
 The ministers themselves, like all actual keepers, 
 don't see it that way. They feel of course this is 
 only in the smaller places, where pastor and Con 
 gregation deal with each other still by hand what 
 any good keeper feels: ownership, pride, affection, 
 
 125
 
 126 THE CONGREGATION 
 
 and a perfect confidence that their Congregation will 
 never bite them. 
 
 At least, to the Reverend Charles Ainslie, sitting 
 happily one night in his study, the idea of a biting 
 Congregation had never occurred. It was the 
 largest, most luxurious study he had ever owned, 
 for he had designed it himself in a wing of the 
 pretty new church that was the work of his own 
 hands and of his boyish, magnetic personality. 
 
 " Build a church or marry a wife and go," is 
 one of the proverbs that the smiling, anxious-eyed 
 clergymen's womenfolk quote to each other. But 
 the church was six active months old now, and the 
 Congregation still thought their minister the most 
 wonderful man that ever lived. 
 
 Mr. Ainslie thought that it was God, not himself, 
 that his Congregation worshiped; for, like many 
 another man with strongly winning powers, he 
 knew very little about his own or other people's 
 motives. He was a man of about forty-five, hand 
 some, strongly-built, and vivid enough to dominate 
 the shabby clothes he wore. A passion for books in 
 subscription sets, and a stronger one for financing 
 derelicts, prevented him from spending much on 
 dress. 
 
 It was the night Mr. Ainslie set apart for talking
 
 THE CONGREGATION 127 
 
 to those of his Congregation who were in trouble 
 and needed help. Tonight, however, was too cold 
 for the Congregational drunkard a most charming 
 and cultivated person to come over for a loan, or 
 for the most conscience-stricken old lady to venture 
 out in quest of the Unpardonable Sin and a cheering 
 chat about herself. So Mr. Ainslie had what was a 
 rare thing, a little time to himself. He let his little 
 Greek Testament slip to his knee, and began to think 
 how well his life was going and how kind it was of 
 God to let it go so well. 
 
 "We are all well and happy," he thought. "I 
 have enough salary now to manage without getting 
 into debt. And, best of all, the Congregation my 
 own dear people ! I think they love me as much as 
 I do them." 
 
 His dark, handsome eyes rested on a painted text 
 over the door it was the one about the righteous 
 never being forsaken and his face lighted up with 
 a passionate religious fervor which was as real a 
 part of his nature as his gaiety and his tenderness 
 for the people he served. 
 
 Just then somebody knocked at the study door. 
 
 The little, black-clad, blonde woman who entered 
 breathed nervously, her hand a little obviously over 
 her heart.
 
 128 THE CONGREGATION 
 
 "It's only me Mrs. Whitely," she said; and 
 laughed embarrassedly. 
 
 She fidgeted into a chair and began to roll into a 
 ball and then unroll the gloves she had jerked off. 
 For a minute she panted she did not speak. 
 
 " Isn't there something I can do ? " asked the min 
 ister pleasantly. " Is your little daughter " 
 
 Mrs. Whitely rolled her big, delft-blue eyes rest 
 lessly. They were incongruous eyes, set in her pale 
 little face. 
 
 " Oh, Mr. Ainslie," she burst out suddenly, " I'm 
 in such trouble such trouble! And I says to my 
 self, if anybody could help me my pastor could. So 
 I came, though it's cold " 
 
 She broke off suddenly and began to fidget again. 
 
 " Is it any trouble that I can help? " the minister 
 asked gently again. In the back of his mind he was 
 prepared to hear a long tale of her husband's short 
 comings. Mrs. Whitely was reputed to lead Mr. 
 Whitely something of a life. The lady hunted for 
 her handkerchief and began. But before she had 
 gone far she was on her knees beside the minister, 
 clutching him, like a third act. The trouble with 
 people like her is that they think they have to act, 
 in stress of emotion, exactly like the people in in 
 ferior plays they have seen.
 
 THE CONGREGATION 129 
 
 Her troubles, it appeared, were rather hackneyed, 
 too. They seemed to be, principally, that the min 
 ister was married, and she was married, and she 
 loved him, and she was sure he would love her if 
 he only understood her. . . . And more a great 
 deal more. 
 
 Mr. Ainslie did what was the natural thing for a 
 man with decent principles and a quick temper to do. 
 He put the lady outdoors bodily she wouldn't go 
 any other way and as he was in a hurry, having 
 lost his temper, she was set on the edge of a snow 
 drift. 
 
 She stood still where she had been dumped, one 
 foot on the walk and the other in a snowdrift. She 
 was mortified and angry and revengeful and hys 
 terically upset in short, she was that rather worn- 
 out figure, a Woman Scorned. 
 
 " I'll pay you for this ! " she half-snapped, half- 
 sobbed. " I'll pay you if I have to smash your old 
 church to do it! I'll pay ..." 
 
 He could hear her scolding shrilly at him till 
 she reached the street, where she composed herself 
 swiftly and stood still on the corner till her street 
 car came. 
 
 Mr. Ainslie held himself hard for a few minutes, 
 till he was not angry. Then he said a swift prayer
 
 130 THE CONGREGATION 
 
 for the woman ; for he talked to God all day long, 
 off and on, very much as you speak to a companion 
 who walks beside you. Then he locked up his study 
 and went home, around the corner. 
 
 Mrs. Whitely, also going home, in the car, stared 
 at her black woolen gloves and planned. She had 
 to plan how to turn her parlor carpet around so 
 the worn part wouldn't show, and how to get a new 
 hat out of her husband, and how to get back at the 
 minister. It was quite a long ride home. By the 
 time she had her latch-key out her arrangements 
 were all made. 
 
 Mr. Ainslie said nothing to his wife about the 
 episode. She worried too much about things, and, 
 anyway, it didn't strike him as an important enough 
 occurrence to mention. Mrs. Whitely was not the 
 first or second or third woman who had gone 
 through the performance. It is a part of the routine 
 for most doctors and clergymen annoying, but to 
 be expected in the day's work. 
 
 So he went cheerfully on with his church duties 
 and had a very good week, for he lured five hundred 
 dollars for the church debt out of a rich old man 
 who summered near by and liked him. He was also 
 tricked by the same old man into accepting a new 
 suit of clothes. He was vexed about this at the
 
 THE CONGREGATION 131 
 
 time, but it turned out to be just as well, after all. 
 He forgot all about Mrs. Whitely. Meanwhile that 
 lady turned her carpet satisfactorily, induced her 
 husband to buy her a new hat with ostrich tips, 
 and found her plans generally working very well 
 indeed. 
 
 Among the Congregation was a family named 
 Christie. They were not of the elite who used 
 almost good English and wore very good clothes, 
 neither were they of the have-to-be-helped poor. 
 Mr. Christie was a rarely seen, lank, grizzled 
 plumber, with a draggled mustache and discouraged 
 shoulders. His wife was little and faded and bird- 
 like, with eyes that still languished at men. There 
 were three daughters, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen. 
 The seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds were caress 
 ing, red-lipped, crudely alluring, and married swiftly 
 before they were out of short dresses. The young 
 est, Hetty, watched life from under her eyelashes, 
 and wondered when she would be married, too. 
 She was in Mrs. Whitely's Sunday-school class, a 
 slim, sidelong-looking girl with long-lashed evasive 
 eyes and scarlet lips and a muddy skin. She wore 
 her hair down her back and her skirts at her shoe- 
 tops, but in several ways she was all grown-up. She
 
 132 THE CONGREGATION 
 
 thought mostly about love, as interpreted by the 
 books she read, which had names like " Beautiful 
 Junie's Love-Test " and " Little Rosebud's Lovers." 
 They were all about lovely sixteen-year-olds who 
 loved men far above them, and secured them after 
 every one who objected had been put out of the 
 way. The principal difference between Hetty 
 Christie and her Beautiful Junies was that Hetty 
 knew a lot about men. What her mother hadn't 
 told her she had inherited. 
 
 Hetty cherished a very romantic and passionate 
 love for her middle-aged pastor, and her Sunday- 
 school teacher knew all about it. When Mrs. 
 Whitely had first discovered it she had wanted to 
 kill Hetty, but presently she decided to do other 
 wise. Hetty didn't know anything about that, 
 naturally, for even the cleverest sixteen-year-old 
 can hardly see through a much older and cleverer 
 woman of her own kind. 
 
 " The pastor's crazy about you, Hetty," whispered 
 her Sunday-school teacher. " Anybody could see 
 it." And she took Hetty home with her Sunday 
 afternoon and gave her certain sound advice. 
 
 " Oh, but I wouldn't dare try those on the pastor," 
 said Hetty, shivering. " Besides, he's so good it 
 wouldn't work."
 
 THE CONGREGATION 133 
 
 "A man's a man," said Mrs. Whitely. "You 
 do what I tell you, dearie, and don't you be dis 
 couraged. And act as kiddish as you can." 
 
 So Hetty, with a throbbing heart, came and of 
 fered to help make a catalogue of the Sunday-school 
 library. The Sunday-school was trying to pay for 
 a stained-glass window on the each-member-raises- 
 five-dollars plan, and Hetty wanted to make hers 
 by means of the catalogue. She thought she could 
 if the minister showed her a little. 
 
 " I I'd like to do it," she said, looking sidelong 
 at the minister from her low seat in his study. Her 
 slim ankles were crossed under her short skirt, and 
 she played nervously with the brown braid she had 
 pulled over her shoulder. She was so obviously 
 excited and terrified that the minister laid a warm, 
 encouraging hand on her shoulder. 
 
 "Of course, you may, my dear child," he said 
 cheeringly. 
 
 She eyed him sidelong again, and colored, and 
 giggled nervously. But presently she was quite at 
 ease, pattering around the place like a kitten. In a 
 day or so the minister got quite used to her pres 
 ence, and even enjoyed hearing her low, pretty 
 voice humming snatches of street-songs above her 
 books, and the useless, caressing little questions and
 
 134 THE CONGREGATION 
 
 cheap little jokes with which she was wont to inter 
 rupt him. 
 
 After a while there began to be other things a 
 girlish arm slipped into his, a childish hand laid 
 on his shoulder, a brown braid unplaiting itself by 
 chance as Hetty stooped above him to whisper a 
 foolish question. The minister found it pleasant 
 enough, though it didn't suffice to tell him what 
 Hetty thought it did. His own daughter of Hetty's 
 age was a tall, shy child who read poetry-books and 
 was innocently sentimental about Mary Queen of 
 Scots and Sir Launcelot. That a girl no older than 
 his Naomi could fall in love with a married man, 
 especially with her pastor, never dawned on 
 him. 
 
 Presently Hetty had the grippe, because her 
 mother couldn't get her to wear flannels under her 
 thin waists. She cried for the minister to come 
 and see her, and they sent for him. She lay with 
 her hair frizzled and spread loose over her pillow 
 and with a flower in her hand that she had made her 
 mother buy for her to hold. It seemed to the 
 child like the wildest and most beautiful romance 
 when the minister sat down beside her and took her 
 hot little hand in his and said kindly that he had 
 missed her. She lay in a trance of perfect happi-
 
 THE CONGREGATION 135 
 
 ness till his visit was over. When he was about 
 to go she reached up one slim, feverish brown arm 
 and pulled his face down to hers. The minister had 
 been pulled down to kiss another child that day, it 
 happened, a boy of eleven who adored him. 
 
 Hetty still lay in a daze of bliss when her Sun 
 day-school teacher dropped in a couple of hours 
 later. 
 
 " Oh, he kissed me ! " said Hetty in a hoarsely 
 rapturous whisper. 
 
 Mrs. Whitely felt another impulse to kill Hetty, 
 but " I was sure of it," she said. " Now all you 
 got to do is play your cards right, dearie, and you 
 got him." She gave more advice. 
 
 Hetty was not paying much attention, but, any 
 way, it never occurred to her that there were diffi 
 culties. She was not really grown-up all over, you 
 see. She smiled beatifically and planned a vista of 
 impossible happiness after the manner of much 
 triumphant melodrama. The other girls would 
 watch her go through a thrilling scene or so in 
 the Sunday-school room, the minister with his arm 
 around her, defying every one for her sake . . . 
 She would run the Ladies' Aid and snub several 
 chosen girls from the Junior Endeavor. . . . 
 
 "Was your mother here when he kissed you,
 
 136 THE CONGREGATION 
 
 darling?" asked Mrs. Whitely, across the tide of 
 dreams. 
 
 "Oh, yes," said Hetty absently. "Oh, Mrs. 
 Whitely, ain't he got wonderful eyes ! " 
 
 But the lady had shopping to do, she said, and 
 had to hurry off. Things were progressing even, 
 more satisfactorily than the parlor carpet had 
 turned. 
 
 The wife of the Influential Trustee was a very 
 good woman. She went on the principle, having 
 only read about temptations, that if you had one 
 you yielded to it. Her Jim, who was a boyish, 
 warm-hearted sort of person as well as an Influential 
 Trustee, had given up trying to love her, in be 
 wilderment, some years before. It was like trying 
 to scale a glass wall. He adored the minister, how 
 ever, with a love that was part younger-brotherly 
 and part hero-worship, and this irritated his wife, 
 because she reasoned that a man who couldn't love 
 her should not be able to love any one else. Mrs. 
 Whitely, who had grasped these facts, went to call 
 on Mrs. Stark. When her news was told she re 
 ceived the first welcome she had ever had in that 
 house, and Mrs. Stark even unbent enough to be 
 shocked along with her. 
 
 " Kissed her ! " she repeated, her colorless eyes
 
 THE CONGREGATION 137 
 
 hardening in her thin-lipped little face. " What 
 else?" 
 
 Mrs. Whitely went on talking. When she was 
 through the two ladies parted cordially at the Stark 
 front gate, on their way to separate rounds of 
 calls. 
 
 The first knowledge the minister had of anything 
 was from Hetty herself. Her mother, questioned 
 by various interested persons, had promptly taken 
 the wise line. 
 
 " Hetty's an innocent child," she said, " an in 
 nocent child! She hasn't no notions of the vile 
 matchinations of that there pastor. She's sick now 
 with the shock of bein' kissed by him." 
 
 Then she scolded Hetty shrilly. 
 
 " Chasin' after a married man old enough to be 
 your father ! " she snapped. " That cat of a Whitely 
 woman's settin' the whole Congregation by the 
 ears, an' you mixed up in it, as if Lillie wasn't 
 enough!" (Lillie was the second sister, married 
 a little hurriedly the year before.) "You gotta 
 stop bein' a little fool over him. You gotta tell 
 everybody you didn't know what his wicked plans 
 was." 
 
 Hetty rose up in her pink flannel wrapper with 
 its coarse lace frills.
 
 138 THE CONGREGATION 
 
 " I love him! " she declaimed, as Beautiful Junie 
 would have done it, " an* I'm goin' to warn 
 him!" 
 
 " Well, if you will be a fool ! " said her mother 
 resignedly ..." Here's your stockin's." 
 
 Hetty, thin, fever-flushed, and trembling, burst 
 into the study, where she found the minister alone. 
 She poured out her story, clinging to his arm. The 
 Congregation was going to indict him. Mrs. Stark 
 (the money was in her right) might do unspeakable 
 things. People had come and questioned her 
 mother. And Hetty begged him to fly with her 
 that night. 
 
 She did not leave him, as Mrs. Whitely had 
 done, shrieking threats. She was younger and 
 quieter, and she had loved him the best way she 
 knew. She sobbed on her way home. She crept 
 back to bed and kept on crying till her mother 
 came and sympathized, and was confided in. 
 
 " He don't love me ! " wept Hetty angrily. " He 
 says he says he never did." 
 
 " The coward ! " said her mother hotly. " Well, 
 just you tell everybody all about it, dearie, if they 
 ask you how he hunted you down, an' how noble 
 you was about it, mother's poor little lamb ! " 
 
 Hetty sobbed wordlessly on. But she was really
 
 THE CONGREGATION 139 
 
 very much wounded by the minister's refusal to 
 elope with her she tried to hide from herself that 
 he had very nearly smiled at the idea. So in the 
 end she took the line of defense or attack that 
 her mother counseled. 
 
 The minister, meanwhile, went home to his wife. 
 This time he told her all about it, as far back as 
 Mrs. Whitely. He disliked worrying her, but it 
 seemed time she knew. 
 
 " Oh, go to the Board of Trustees ! " she begged. 
 " Go to each of them personally and tell them your 
 side first. Never mind if it does seem undignified; 
 remember what a Congregation can do if it gets 
 down on a minister. Think of poor Dr. Johnston 
 last year, down in Riverton." 
 
 The things they had done to Doctor Johnston in 
 Riverton had been rather unnecessarily brutal. Mrs. 
 Ainslie's sensitive, aging face blanched at the mem 
 ory and the warning it carried, and her mouth 
 twitched nervously. But the minister threw back 
 his head and laughed. 
 
 "Why, you little goose, my Congregation loves 
 me too much to do anything like that!" he said. 
 " You act as if it were some sort of a corporate 
 wolf, instead of a body of intelligent people that I 
 love and trust and yes have done a good deal
 
 140 THE CONGREGATION 
 
 for. And, besides, it's all nonsense about the Starks. 
 Why, Jim and I are like brothers." 
 
 " But it's her money," said Mrs. Ainslie under 
 her breath. She was not only the wife but the 
 daughter of a clergyman. 
 
 " Oh, Father, is anything going to happen ? " 
 asked his daughter, springing up in quick terror 
 from the corner, and coming over to him with one 
 finger still keeping her place in " The Faerie 
 Queene ". 
 
 " Nothing at all, my darling," he reassured her, 
 putting his arm around her. " Only some little 
 church squabble your mother and I are discussing." 
 
 " Oh," she said, with a vague trouble in her 
 eyes. 
 
 She went back to her place not quite comforted. 
 To her too that strong animal, the Congregation, 
 was something to be dreaded. 
 
 Now, it may be that Mrs Whitely by herself 
 couldn't have done such a great deal. But with 
 Mrs. Stark, rich, speckless, and white-hot with the 
 zeal of purification, backing up Mrs. Whitely, a 
 great deal was done. Mrs. Stark's experience in 
 campaigning for charities proved especially useful. 
 
 So one night the minister, figuring at his table
 
 THE CONGREGATION 141 
 
 whether or no the drunkard of the Congregation 
 could be coaxed to take the Keeley cure, got a 
 letter. It was signed by the Board, and it told 
 him that he was going to have to justify himself 
 before the Congregation for the various vulgar 
 things they assumed him to have done. The Con 
 gregation, lately such an adoring animal, had turned 
 on him. 
 
 Not all of it there was a body of stanch old 
 ladies who would have followed him through hell 
 and after. Such of the poor people, too, as could 
 afford to such as had no hopes of aid from the 
 Influential Deacon's wife's many charities clung to 
 their minister. There was a large enough minority 
 to make it a long, humiliating, agonizing fight. 
 
 . There are few differences between the nerve- 
 strains and humiliations of a civil and a religious 
 trial; except that a real court may not ask certain 
 insulting things, while a body of laymen with no 
 manners and an uncontrolled curiosity and con 
 sciousness of entire mastery can go as far as it likes, 
 with excited indecency. Sometimes after the eve 
 ning's free-to-all horror Mr. Ainslie would laugh 
 gallantly and compare the Congregation's doings 
 to the Alice-in-Wonderland trial, with which it 
 really had a good deal in common. Sometimes he
 
 142 THE CONGREGATION 
 
 would go home from his star-chamber sick and 
 white. He was brave, in the main, for he believed 
 that the God he so loved would straighten things 
 out for him in the end. He never once stopped 
 believing that. 
 
 He did break down once, to be sure, one day 
 coming back from one of the forlorn house-to-house 
 canvasses he had been making, begging his Con 
 gregation separately to believe in him. He flung 
 himself down by the dining-room table, his head 
 in his arms. 
 
 " Jim Stark is on the other side, Emma ! " he 
 said. "Jim! and we were like brothers! " 
 
 He sobbed there with his head on his arms among 
 the nicked glasses. For it was hard it would have 
 been hard even on a man who had kissed a whole 
 Sunday-school class. Stark, wife-ridden, boyish, 
 affectionate, weak, had been Ainslie's closest friend. 
 When your wife is shrewish and holds the purse- 
 strings, what can you do? But it was very hard 
 for Mrs. Ainslie to comfort her husband that time. 
 
 The Reverend Mr. Ainslie and his household 
 felt, all those days of sick suspense, as if they 
 were crowded helplessly together on some scrap of 
 land that was being washed relentlessly away; that 
 the tide was gaining with a dreadful, sure swiftness,
 
 THE CONGREGATION 143 
 
 and would presently sweep them down to bottom- 
 lessness. For they had not only to expect a dis 
 grace and ostracism more entire than an ex-con 
 vict's, but if Mr. Ainslie was pulled down into the 
 deep water well, at forty-five a penniless, dis 
 graced professional man hasn't much chance of 
 earning a living. Doctor Johnston over in River- 
 ton was trying to sell insurance. But it was known 
 that he had occasionally to beg little sums of the 
 people who had turned him out. If he hadn't the 
 Johnstons mightn't have had enough for rent . . . 
 Still, Mr. Ainslie hoped desperately on, and his 
 wife pretended to, till it could not be done any more. 
 
 The Congregation tossed him his salary up to 
 date, when it had finished with him. A trustee who 
 kept a news-stand and was broad-minded threw in 
 an extra ten dollars. 
 
 " I guess he'll need it, poor devil ! " Mr. Ainslie 
 was told he said. The whole Congregation felt a 
 certain personal sense of virtue in that extra ten. 
 Ainslie took it. He had to. 
 
 They lived on in the house they had rented, for 
 it was taken till the end of the year. They could 
 see the Congregation going to church every Sunday, 
 and the pleasant times over the installation of the
 
 144 THE CONGREGATION 
 
 new minister. It was believed that Mrs. Ainslie 
 had found sewing to do for a mail-order house. 
 It was known certainly that Mr. Ainslie sold his 
 books, which he had held dearer than anything he 
 owned though indeed he never owned much else. 
 But the sale didn't help a great deal, because the 
 books were not at all dear to the unemotional 
 second-hand dealer, and theology, as he explained, 
 is a drug on the market, anyhow. 
 
 Mr. Ainslie tried to get various things to do. 
 But he did not know how, for one thing, and, then, 
 a minister whose Congregation has decided that 
 he has kissed a girl is incapacitated in the general 
 view for other professions. 
 
 But he had always said that God would be good 
 to him in the end and so God was; because after 
 six months of useless work-hunting, and of being 
 brave when the people he loved cut him and his 
 wife and young daughter, he died of what the 
 doctor explained was an over-strained heart. 
 
 He was simple-minded, and what is called con 
 ventionally religious, to the end. He talked about 
 the angels he saw in the stuffy little room, and at 
 the last spoke gaspingly to his wife and daughter 
 about forgiving people, which they had not been 
 able to do.
 
 THE CONGREGATION 145 
 
 Naturally, it was Mrs. Stark, who had killed 
 Ainslie for the zeal of righteousness, who came 
 forward to offer to bury him. This was regarded 
 by all the Congregation as a miracle of Christian 
 kindness. She came late the night after he died. 
 He was in the house still. 
 
 His wife would have accepted the money. |She 
 was poor, and she was broken. But the young are 
 improvident not having yet learned how hard to 
 come by money is and of how little account are 
 other things. \ Naomi, still in a shabby colored frock, 
 bent forward across her mother. 
 
 " Mother isn't to take your money," she said in 
 a quiet voice that was like a hard old woman's. "If 
 the county has to bury him it will be better than 
 letting you do it. You have killed him, you and 
 Mrs. Whitely and Hetty and the Congregation. I 
 don't believe there's any Christ any more, nor 
 any God. I don't think there's any Hell there 
 wouldn't be any use of one, really. You are such 
 a good Christian that I am telling you this to 
 give you a little extra pleasure you've killed his 
 body, and what he would have called my 
 soul." 
 
 " Naomi ! You are blaspheming ! " cried Mrs. 
 Stark. She was shocked, but she could not help
 
 146 THE CONGREGATION 
 
 thinking that it showed what Ainslie really was, to 
 have a daughter like this. 
 
 Naomi laughed, a hard little laugh. 
 
 " I'll give God a chance," said she, " for Father's 
 sake. Father had an interest in Him, unfortunately 
 for him. If your church goes to wrack and ruin; 
 if you are dragged in the dirt; if Mrs. Whitely is 
 made openly infamous; if every man and woman 
 in the thing all the leaders suffer; if old Gahegan, 
 who was the most insulting of them all, is brought 
 down to be a servant; if you, especially, have the 
 worst and most humiliating things happen to you 
 that could happen to a self-righteous, wicked woman 
 like you it would be losing your husband to Mrs. 
 Whitely, I think then I'll consider God's case. 
 Maybe I'll forgive Him. Not you. But that 
 wouldn't matter to God He has nothing to do with 
 you if He exists. Now, get out of the house, 
 murderess ! " 
 
 Still self-righteous but a little frightened, too, 
 Mrs. Stark went. She told herself that she went 
 because she mustn't be late for prayer-meeting. 
 By the time she reached the church she was com 
 placently angry, and agreeably conscious that, hav 
 ing offered charity to those who deserved none, she 
 would nevertheless be nothing out of pocket. She
 
 THE CONGREGATION 147 
 
 slipped into her pew and joined shrilly in the 
 hymn . . . 
 
 Naomi stood quite still at the window, listening. 
 Her mother, struggling out of a mist of tears for 
 the dead, remembered the living. 
 
 " Naomi, dear you mustn't think such such 
 thoughts." 
 
 Naomi lifted her hand quickly, her head bent a 
 little. Faintly, like a muffled muttering, the low 
 vibrations of an organ trembled through the little 
 room. The voices were too far off for untrained 
 ears to distinguish the words, but to the two women 
 the hymn was made distinct by the mere mechanics 
 of memory and association. 
 
 Blest be-ee the ti-ie that binds 
 Our hear-rts in Chri-istian love! 
 
 "Listen, mother!" Naomi laughed a hard, 
 mirthless little laugh. " I can hear the Beast it's 
 made its kill, and it's purring."
 
 THE FAIRYLAND HEART 
 
 CORINNA GOLDTHWAITE lifted her dark, intense 
 young face from its brooding over her window-box 
 of pansies, and spoke to the others, standing at the 
 far window. 
 
 " They're like the faces of strange, little dear 
 animals," she said, " little elfin animals. Look, 
 Belle." 
 
 Unknowingly her summons was to the man who 
 stood with her cousin. Belle's was more frank. 
 
 " Oh, you must come and look, too, Mr. Ray 
 mond, unless you'd rather stay where you are," said 
 little Belle coquettishly. She flung a glance over 
 her shoulder at him, and he followed, though he 
 had been standing quite untouched by Corinna's 
 eager voice and speech. And this was strange, 
 because all there was to Belle was the pink and 
 white and golden of an apple blossom, and young 
 as Corinna was she was already something of a 
 personage. 
 
 Corinna's father had been a famous naturalist, 
 their house, on the outskirts of Allenwood, where 
 " old families " lived still, though summer-resort 
 
 148
 
 THE FAIRYLAND HEART 149 
 
 houses were beginning to encroach, a place for pil 
 grimages. Corinna's own life had been what out 
 siders called a very beautiful one; her mother had 
 seen to it that her childhood should be something 
 to look back to joyously. " You can't take people's 
 childhood away from them," she said, in the old 
 country proverb. The little Corinna had been made 
 free of all her father's wonderful friends; there had 
 been trips abroad, music, beautiful pictures, an old 
 garden to dream in, and always happiness of that 
 kind mystical, some call it strained, others say it 
 is which is a product of the Puritan soul reaching 
 after beauty. Her father was a New Englander of 
 the best type; her mother less highly-bred, but 
 kindly, and worshipful of her husband and her one 
 child, both wonderful to her. Her genius was for 
 loving. It was a love which never oppressed her 
 people, earthly and anxious as it was. She sur 
 rounded them with it as if it were an ether. Co 
 rinna had grown up a wonder-child, praised and 
 cherished by all her father's famous friends. Now, 
 at twenty-one, she was a successful artist already, 
 and a woman of marked personality as well. Per 
 haps this last was a little of a pity, for it kept 
 people from remembering that she was young. 
 There was a something eager, mystical, unusual
 
 150 THE FAIRYLAND HEART 
 
 about her: something which made people who did 
 not know her for Ira Goldthwaite's daughter feel 
 nevertheless that she was some one. Nobody had 
 struck quite the note she had in her sketches; 
 fantasies and grotesqueries they were mostly, 
 strange drawings for fairy-books. Her pictures 
 made you feel that your own simple, old imagin 
 ings of yellow-haired, full-skirted fairies and hon 
 est, lumbering bears and giants were earthly and 
 futile. Her fairy-folk were unearthly, elusive 
 things ; even her painted flowers and animals had a 
 hint of 
 
 The faint light subtly shining in 
 
 . . . The other wind within the wind. 
 
 She lived half in what it pleased people to call 
 a fairy-world. It was certain, at least, that she 
 spoke of the Other People in as friendly and casual 
 a way as she did of her friends and her books. 
 The whole quality of her was unusual, fine, elusive. 
 Even from her own mother she compelled a caress 
 ing homage. 
 
 So it was with the perplexed look of a young 
 queen who sees her lady-in-waiting mistaken for 
 herself that Corinna saw Henry Raymond turning 
 swiftly at Belle's words. Belle was Mrs. Gold-
 
 THE FAIRYLAND HEART 151 
 
 thwaite's niece, a typical small-town girl. She had 
 lived in the Park, across the lake from Allenwood, 
 and found the life of hurrying change and cheap 
 gaiety in the summers and of longer flirtations on 
 the deserted boardwalk in the winters, all that a 
 life should be. But now that the Goldthwaites, 
 after Ira Goldthwaite's death, had returned to Al- 
 lenwood, Belle was trying to see something of 
 Corinna. Corinna had responded graciously, but 
 both girls found friendliness uphill work. There 
 was so little to go upon. 
 
 Now, Corinna loved Henry, and she had thought 
 he loved her. But Belle had been visiting Corinna 
 for a fortnight, and . . . did he love Belle ? 
 
 At least he was watching her intently as she 
 bent over the pansies Corinna had praised. 
 
 " They have the sweetest colors ! " Belle said. 
 " And oh, look ! They just match my dress ! I'm 
 going to pick some to wear." 
 
 She broke them with a child's pretty ruthlessness r 
 aiid glanced winningly up at Henry Raymond as 
 she pinned them at her bosom. And then Corinna, 
 who loved Henry, saw with the swift intuition that 
 belonged to her that Henry did love Belle: little 
 pink-and-white Belle, physically over-mature and 
 aware, mentally a winsome, selfish child.
 
 152 THE FAIRYLAND HEART 
 
 If Corinna had focused her own strange, dreamy 
 magnetism on the man she might have won him 
 back from her cousin. For Corinna was very 
 strong-willed and compelling, one woman in a 
 thousand; and Belle was only a little, ordinary 
 seeker after love. But just because Henry was 
 the only man who would ever be on earth for 
 Corinna, she stepped back into the castle of her 
 young maidenliness and shut the gate silently. 
 
 " Gather the rest of the pansies, Belle," she bade 
 with her strange, bright smile. " Then I want you 
 to take Henry out and show him the little green 
 pinewood I was telling him about yesterday, be 
 hind Allen Lake, the place where the Indian pipes 
 grow so thickly in summer. You may find little 
 red berries there even now." 
 
 " Oh, but you were going to show him that ! " 
 demurred Belle, moving to get her wraps, even as 
 she protested. 
 
 Corinna smiled again. It was not a young smile 
 any more; almost the expression of a mother who 
 is watching her children go out and play. She 
 stood and watched the two pass gaily out of the 
 house, forgetting everything but the frolic of being 
 together. When they had disappeared she too went 
 out, but in another direction.
 
 THE FAIRYLAND HEART 153 
 
 There was a place she knew, a high, bare, wind 
 swept hill where she sometimes went secretly to 
 watch the sunsets. It had about it an intensified 
 quality of solitude, and it was there that the New 
 England mystic of her could creep closest to 
 God. 
 
 " God will be there now," she said to herself, 
 smiling still as she made her way to it. " Perhaps 
 He will hold me from letting the selfish human part 
 of me care too much." 
 
 The sky was paling into a spring sunset. It held 
 the dim, northern lights, faint rose, clear grays 
 and sea colors; lights and tints more ethereal, of a 
 more spiritual gate to Heaven than the fire-rose 
 and fire-violet of midsummer. Corinna, with her 
 strong, young love pressing heavy on her, watched 
 the paling lights and felt the keen spring wind, 
 and reached passionately after the feeling of God's 
 nearness that was always, for her, behind the shows 
 and images of the world. 
 
 "It is only love that I have for Henry," she 
 whispered to herself, pacing swiftly up and down, 
 tall and wind-blown, her great gray eyes fast on 
 the sunset. " If we love people enough, it can only 
 make us happy . . . Love is everything. It 
 cannot hurt, it can only bless ... I can be a
 
 154 THE FAIRYLAND HEART 
 
 wind of love about them all their days . . . Why, 
 nothing can ever hurt me again, if I can only love 
 enough ! " 
 
 For an ordinary woman that thought would have 
 been a vain thing against the surging human forces 
 that say ruthlessly, " I want ! I want ! " But Co- 
 rinna was New Englander, artist, mystic; more 
 than that, she was une cerebrale, one in whom feel 
 ing was strongly intellectualized. She had unusual 
 powers of body and mind, powers that rayed from 
 her, and moved others as she was moved. And all 
 her own forces were turned inward on herself now, 
 to hold her back from the purely human and selfish 
 side of love pain, chagrin, denied desires . . . 
 She would give so much, so constantly, that she 
 would have no time to take or even to ask. Nothing 
 could hurt her any more; for she would love as 
 God loved, not for return, but for pure joy of 
 loving. 
 
 She watched the sunset till it was gone : then she 
 went down in the dusk to her home. Henry and 
 Belle would be there by now, talking to her mother : 
 the dear mother, so full of little homely watchful 
 nesses and sympathies! A little before Corinna 
 would have dreaded meeting her look of anxious, 
 clairvoyant affection. But now it was all right.
 
 THE FAIRYLAND HEART 155 
 
 There was nothing to be sorry about for her, no 
 pity she would ever need again. 
 
 A quietness fell as she entered. There was an 
 atmosphere of still radiance about her, of high 
 peace. The lovers forgot the self -consciousness 
 of their new secret, watching her. They forgot, too, 
 to speak. She smiled at them serenely. She loved 
 them very dearly. 
 
 " You are very happy, aren't you ? " she said 
 gently, with a little laugh for their astonishment. 
 
 " Oh, how did you know ? " cried Belle, coloring 
 and flinging her arms about her cousin. Belle had 
 felt a little triumphantly guilty before, for she 
 knew she had tried deliberately to take Henry 
 Raymond from Corinna and won. Corinna's at 
 titude took from her both the feeling of guilt and 
 the sensation of triumph. 
 
 " Perhaps the Good People told me," Corinna 
 answered lightly. " They sit to me for their por 
 traits, you know. Why, you dear, silly people, it 
 showed all by itself! . . . I'm very glad!" 
 
 The others laughed a little, now the tension was 
 removed, and the evening went on in a tide of 
 easy gaiety, Corinna sending the talk as she wished 
 it to go. Only she saw her mother's eyes, perplexed 
 and watchful, fixed on her the evening long.
 
 I 5 6 THE FAIRYLAND HEART 
 
 Her mother came to her next morning, where 
 she sat at her drawing board. She bent down and' 
 kissed her. 
 
 " Is my little girl quite happy? " she asked wist 
 fully. 
 
 " Quite and always happy," Corinna answered, 
 smiling and returning the caress. " This is such a 
 wonderful world, so full of people to love and 
 things to do ! How can I be otherwise ? " 
 
 " That doesn't sound like a young girl's speech," 
 said her mother. " Ah, well I'm glad, my dear." 
 
 She looked wistfully at Corinna a moment longer, 
 sighed and went out. Corinna went on with her 
 work. She was illustrating an edition de luxe of 
 Andersen, and had just reached " The Little Mer 
 maid." 
 
 " It's going to be one of the best things I have 
 done," she thought, as she traced in the young 
 queen's extravagant, graceful draperies, and the 
 slim, dancing figure of the Little Mermaid, with her 
 upcurved arms and flaring mass of hair. " I must 
 be putting my own happiness in it, I think." 
 
 It was, indeed, the best thing she had done. It 
 was the set of drawings which made her rank as 
 an artist. These pictures had a note new even to 
 her, a sweet, sexless unearthliness that was arrest-
 
 THE FAIRYLAND HEART 157 
 
 ing. They made you feel so peaceful, people said. 
 The exhibition of them began a few days before 
 she went to her cousin's wedding. 
 
 Years went along after that, but few outward 
 and material things happened to Corinna. She read 
 her mystical books and dreamed her mystical dreams, 
 and painted her elfin pictures. The Park on whose 
 outskirts they had lived crept out round them, but 
 Corinna and her mother lived on in the roomy old 
 house with its wide grounds. Corinna drew and 
 dreamed and held court, and was happy. She had 
 no more lovers. Men could not get near enough 
 to her to love her as men love women. Of both 
 men and women who cared for her as they would 
 have cared for an angel, there was no lack. She 
 grew to have more and more the quality which 
 compels worship. 
 
 When Henry and Belle's oldest daughter was 
 seventeen she came on from the distant town where 
 the Raymonds lived, to stay with Corinna and her 
 mother. She was interested in settlement work r 
 and she could find plenty to do near Gorinna's 
 house. She was her cousin's namesake Corinna 
 Goldthwaite Raymond. She had Henry's tall 
 slenderness and Belle's rose-gold coloring, and the 
 quality of the dreamer.
 
 158 THE FAIRYLAND HEART 
 
 Corinna and her mother were glad to have the girl 
 with them. She was light-hearted and fanciful and 
 responsive, and more of a companion to Corinna 
 than any one had ever been before. So, scarcely 
 knowing that she did it, Corinna drew the young 
 girl Krin they called her closer and closer to her. 
 When Corinna was not at her drawing and Krin 
 was free from her settlement work, the two were 
 always together, talking softly and unceasingly. 
 They shared their thoughts and dreams as if the 
 two had been of the same age. And the strong 
 force of personality that was Corinna's drew and 
 held the young girl till she wanted no other friend 
 than her cousin, who was, by worldly measurements, 
 a middle-aged woman. 
 
 " But she has never grown up," Krin explained 
 tenderly once to a man, a poet and fantast, one of 
 the people admitted to Corinna's inner circle. " She 
 has a sort of heaven about her wherever she goes, 
 and she always stays the same age, like the 
 angels." 
 
 The man laughed, and tossed back his long hair. 
 
 " It is not heaven, child," he answered. " It is 
 Fairyland. Corinna has been to Fairyland, and 
 they are keeping her heart there for her, under a 
 green mound. That is why she is eternally young.
 
 THE FAIRYLAND HEART 159 
 
 What she has now is a heart of topaz or amber a 
 Fairyland heart." 
 
 Young Krin came over to Corinna, who was sit 
 ting and listening with her usual still, bright smile. 
 
 " Is that why nothing ever hurts you or upsets 
 you; why you are always still and happy, no matter 
 what goes on? " she asked, laying her arms on her 
 cousin's lap and looking up at her with worshiping 
 eyes. 
 
 " That is why," Corinna said, answering on the 
 note of gentle fantasy that was a sort of language 
 among her group. " Once long ago I met the Little 
 People, and they said that I might make their 
 pictures, but only if I would come into Fairyland 
 and stay with them a while. And we liked each 
 other so much that when I was sent back I left 
 them my heart to keep. ' For half my heart's in 
 Fairyland and half is here on earth ! ' " 
 
 " They all worship you but I love you," whis 
 pered Krin. 
 
 " I love you, too, dear child," Corinna answered 
 in her sweet, caressing voice. In her heart of hearts 
 she was glad of Krin's love, almost humanly glad. 
 She did not realize how much she liked to receive 
 it She only knew that she cared for the child 
 very deeply, as if she had been her own daughter.
 
 160 THE FAIRYLAND HEART 
 
 " Nothing but good can ever come of loving," 
 she told herself that night, when she was conscious 
 of a faint wonderment over the intensity of her 
 feeling for Krin. " My dear little girl ! " 
 
 She looked around the still, high-ceiled room, 
 with its curious, dreamy pictures. 
 
 " There has never a throb of grief beaten against 
 these walls," she thought, as she had so often 
 thought, with a little thrill of pride in her own 
 height above common suffering. 
 
 Indeed, the few who were allowed to cross the 
 threshold of her inner room, and the many who 
 entered her house, were wont to notice first of all 
 the feeling of intense peace which wrapped the 
 place Corinna lived in. Few of her guests were 
 unsensitive. The densest of these felt the still at 
 mosphere, distinct as a perfume, which surrounded 
 her. To be with her was to drop all the pulsing of 
 ambition and jealousy and love and hate that most 
 human beings carry. And as her inner circle was 
 made up almost entirely of people who did creative 
 work, and as such people, working in the emotions, 
 carry a heavy burden of feeling, their rest was as 
 great in that shrine-like atmosphere as their ten 
 sion had been in the outer world. 
 
 She wondered a little sometimes why it was that,
 
 THE FAIRYLAND HEART 161 
 
 soothed and healed as she knew people to be by the 
 quiet of her home and presence, still it was to her 
 mother they brought their troubles for spoken help. 
 To the mother, who had not a particularly impres 
 sive personality, who was merely a very kind and 
 gentle elderly woman, people showed their hurt 
 places nakedly. Her room was a confessional. 
 
 Once, coming into that room unexpectedly, be 
 lieving it empty, Corinna had found her mother 
 sitting in her accustomed chair, with a lad sobbing 
 against her knees. He was a young singer who had 
 lately been drawn into Corinna's circle, a boy whose 
 sweetheart, it was whispered, had broken with him 
 brutally. Corinna had looked, and slipped out 
 again before she was seen. She had a strange, 
 half-terrified feeling, as if she had come too near 
 something dangerous and vibrating. It was so long 
 since she had seen or heard of a naked sorrow. Yet 
 her mother's face had bent over the lad's head, wise 
 and comforting and unafraid. 
 
 " She does that all the time," Corinna had sud 
 denly known. And she wondered the more about 
 it. 
 
 For Corinna's mother had never learned Corin 
 na's own secret of peace. Little things fretted her 
 openly, other little things made her disproportion-
 
 162 THE FAIRYLAND HEART 
 
 ately happy, as they had done ever since her daughter 
 could remember. She did not dwell on any rarefied 
 mountain-top of still joy, and if her maid or her 
 milkman did not like her she was uneasy till she 
 had won them and had usually won the stories of 
 their sorrows and joys into the bargain. Corinna 
 smiled tenderly as she thought of her mother. She 
 had never ceased, Corinna knew, wanting from her 
 daughter the little stream of daily confidences, of 
 tales of hurt feelings and hurt fingers which had 
 been hers in her daughter's childhood. Corinna 
 wondered dimly sometimes if the overflowing of 
 her mother's sympathy to others were not partly 
 because she wanted to be told of Corinna's hurts, 
 and was not. 
 
 "Dear Mother!" Corinna would think, "I can 
 only go on being happier and happier, until some day 
 she will believe in my happiness." 
 
 But even to the hour of her death Mrs. Gold- 
 thwaite never did believe it. Almost the last words 
 she spoke to her daughter were words of comfort, 
 as if she were a little girl who was unhappy. 
 
 Corinna kissed her mother when she was dead, 
 and knelt by her for a little while. When she 
 lifted her face again it was lighted like an 
 angel's.
 
 THE FAIRYLAND HEART 163 
 
 " Look at her ! " the nurse whispered to Krin, 
 standing by her and sobbing. 
 
 Corinna had taken this grief, too, up to the 
 heights. 
 
 " You mustn't cry, little Krin," she whispered 
 to her cousin. " See, I'm not crying. Wherever 
 she is now she is close to us, and our love is close 
 to her, just as if she were here still. We can love 
 her so much more. We can love her soul back 
 to us close close!" 
 
 Krin looked up, drying her eyes, and clung to 
 Corinna. 
 
 " Cousin Corinna, you are like an angel ! Oh, 
 I will try to be like you. You're so close to God 
 you can't suffer." 
 
 " Close to God to love," Corinna murmured to 
 her. " Love is everywhere. There's no time or 
 space, just the love we give." 
 
 " But oh, I want her love too ! " sobbed Krin, 
 breaking down again. " Only last night she whis 
 pered to me about being careful not to lose sleep, 
 because it would tire me, and I couldn't do my 
 work ... and she could scarcely talk. Only 
 last night " 
 
 " Hush, dear ! " said her daughter again. " We 
 must love her so much that we won't have time
 
 164 THE FAIRYLAND HEART 
 
 to miss her love. And we will draw it to us, 
 so." 
 
 The next day Corinna opened a drawer where 
 she kept the few things Henry had given her, and 
 laid other things in it : her mother's knitting needles, 
 her gold-bowed spectacles, her religious books. It 
 was a drawer she opened often and looked into 
 smilingly, her heart lifted by love for them 
 both. 
 
 Krin stayed on with her, except, as it had always 
 been, in the summers. Then Corinna went away, 
 traveling or resting in some old farmhouse, and 
 Krin was with her father and mother. 
 
 The second summer, when Krin came back, Co 
 rinna thought she noticed a difference in the girl 
 a tremulousness and excitability, and swift alterna 
 tions of mood. But these, if they had existed at 
 all, faded away in the atmosphere of Corinna's 
 own still radiance. The two women went on with 
 their work, and held their little court. There were 
 as many pilgrimages now to Corinna's house as 
 there had been in her father's time. 
 
 Then, one still, winter afternoon, Corinna was 
 called downstairs from her drawing to see some one, 
 a Sydney Corning. She did not know the name, 
 but then there were a great many people she gave
 
 THE FAIRYLAND HEART 165 
 
 audience to whose names were strange to her. She 
 came into the room where he was, and greeted him 
 with her usual caressing stateliness, that gentleness 
 and sweetness of a queen which was her habitual 
 manner. 
 
 But, Sydney Corning, who was a handsome lad, 
 scarcely responded. He answered her shortly. 
 
 " I'm a friend of your niece's," he volunteered 
 when the greeting was over. 
 
 " My cousin," corrected Corinna, smiling. 
 
 " Your cousin, then it doesn't matter. And 
 Miss Goldthwaite, I came to see if you could help 
 me. Can't I see you in some place where there 
 won't be any one else coming in ? " 
 
 " Why, surely," Corinna answered with her un 
 failing gentleness. " Come with me." 
 
 She led him to the little sitting-room her mother 
 had been used to occupy. 
 
 " Now I will help you in any way I can," she 
 said, smiling at him as he rose impatiently from 
 his chair. 
 
 " I want you to send Krin Raymond away from 
 you," he said without preface. " They say you're 
 a saint and an angel and all that. Won't you let 
 her go?" 
 
 She looked at him in astonishment.
 
 166 THE FAIRYLAND HEART 
 
 " I think you do not know. Miss Raymond stays 
 with me because she prefers it." 
 
 " I know it," he burst out, " I know it and 
 you own her, body and soul. She adores you so 
 much that she's getting as like you as she possibly 
 can be. I didn't know, at first, whom she was 
 getting like. I knew she wasn't my Krin any more. 
 She did love me. She said so. But she came 
 back the next summer, not a human girl any more. 
 She's been somebody else ever since. I thought at 
 first it was grief, but it wasn't, though it dated 
 from the time Mrs. Goldthwaite died. She's happy 
 enough now. But she's like a gracious, pleasant 
 statue . . . She's like you ! " 
 
 Corinna looked at him in surprise. 
 
 " I'm sorry she does not love you," she said 
 gently. " But it is a little strained to connect me 
 with it." 
 
 " I came here very angry," he retorted impa 
 tiently, " and you're making me feel that I ought 
 to be very grateful to you for letting me offer you 
 homage. It isn't what you say, it's the atmosphere 
 of you. But you have done it to Krin, and if you 
 really don't know, at least you might let me tell 
 you." 
 
 " Tell, then," said Corinna, still smiling a little.
 
 THE FAIRYLAND HEART 167 
 
 He spoke more quietly. 
 
 " Corinna was all right, warm and human and 
 natural, till after your mother died. She must have 
 been one of the most wonderful people on earth, 
 that mother of yours, to keep things alive and the 
 rhythm of them going, against that thousand-candle- 
 power feeling you give off. Why, just talking to 
 you, I'm beginning to feel serene and walled-off 
 and inhuman." 
 
 He caught his breath for a moment, then : " Krin's 
 getting inhuman," he interrupted himself abruptly. 
 " She's far off, like a priestess like you. Oh, 
 Corinna Goldthwaite, if you do love her, change her 
 back take your spell off her! One goddess in a 
 house is enough. She'll be like you without the 
 genius ! Won't you help me ? Your mother would 
 have helped me ! " 
 
 The rush of selfish, demanding love there, warm 
 and throbbing in Corinna's still place of peace, 
 frightened her, as that sobbing boy at her mother's 
 knees had frightened her long ago. 
 
 "But what can I do, dear lad?" she asked, 
 struggling for her usual voice. 
 
 "Oh, don't!" he broke out bitterly. " Krin 
 said just that, in just that gentle, impersonally lov 
 ing way. Stop her being like you, that's what you
 
 168 THE FAIRYLAND HEART 
 
 can do! There are lots of women nobody wants 
 that you can turn into geniuses. But leave my Krin 
 human and alive. I want her to love me, and care 
 whether I love her, not scatter denatured affection 
 over the universe ! " 
 
 Corinna did not answer. She found that she 
 could not make her lips move. 
 
 The boy was frightened at his own daring in 
 the hush that followed. He looked at Corinna 
 Goldthwaite, sitting before him, erect and calm. 
 She was so gentle and great and wonderful, and 
 he had talked like this to her ! He began to apolo 
 gize brokenly. But Corinna held up one hand, with 
 the gesture of gentle sovereignty that was 
 habitual. 
 
 " I am sorry," she said at length in a low voice. 
 " I did not realize that I was doing wrong. Will 
 you forgive me? I I love Krin too. She shall 
 not be turned to stone . . . ' 
 
 Her voice broke a little, and she rose and left 
 the boy, still stammering his terrified apologies. 
 To his increasing sense of lese mafeste was added 
 a feeling that he had attacked Corinna for a 
 chimera, an intangibility. There was nothing real 
 he had been fighting air. 
 
 But the words had pierced through. Corinna
 
 THE FAIRYLAND HEART 169 
 
 stood in the middle of her own locked room, and 
 searched her heart to find how much of this terrific 
 thing was true. She, with her twenty years of 
 God-given, still happiness, of years of holding court, 
 of giving peace and surcease royally to the too- 
 intense people who sought her she had turned Krin 
 to stone! 
 
 She waited the rest of the afternoon and evening 
 for Krin to come in. The girl was superintending 
 a pageant that day at her settlement, and Corinna 
 knew that she would not be back until late in the 
 evening. Indeed, it was past twelve before Krin 
 returned, and through the long hours Corinna's 
 courage faded. When finally her cousin tiptoed up 
 the stairs, Corinna could only come and stand 
 mutely in her lighted doorway. 
 
 " It was lovely ! " Krin spoke, smiling at her. 
 " And all the children did so well, and I loved them 
 so. They sang like dear little rough angels." 
 
 " And do you think they loved you? " Corinna 
 asked, her throat dry. 
 
 Krin laughed sweetly. 
 
 " I never thought, any more than you do, cousin 
 Corinna ! / love them! " 
 
 " Just a minute, dearest ! " Corinna essayed again. 
 " There was a man here today Sydney Corning.'*
 
 170 THE FAIRYLAND HEART 
 
 Krin smiled again, that sweet, unmoved smile. 
 
 " He's been confiding in you, poor boy ! I am 
 sorry I let him care, that summer. It's seemed so 
 different, since. I I don't want to love anybody, 
 that way. It's . . . too alive . . . too close 
 and frightening feverish! I don't think I'll ever 
 marry, dear. I'm happy here with you wonderful 
 you!" 
 
 Corinna did not answer. The girl went singing 
 softly down the hall to her own room. She was in 
 her pageant dress still, a long clinging Greek gown 
 of green, with a little wreath of green leaves on her 
 streaming, fair hair. Her even walk and trailing 
 gown and uplifted fair head gave her a look of 
 some one unearthly, a fairy lady. And a word some 
 one had said of herself once rushed back on 
 Corinna 
 
 " Her heart is in Fairyland, under a green 
 mound." 
 
 Was Krin's heart there, too, young, vivid Krin's ? 
 Had she, with her silently dominant influence, her 
 perfect and saintly example, shut Krin out from 
 wifehood and motherhood? What could she do 
 what should she do? Even as she asked herself 
 she knew. No words or implorations would avail. 
 It had not been words or implorations that had made
 
 THE FAIRYLAND HEART 171 
 
 Krin like herself. She must go back in spirit 
 twenty years, back to that hill where she had forced 
 suffering out of her heart. 
 
 Up there in the little passionless room, where her 
 own sexless, gently-fantastic fairy people watched 
 her with their curious smiles, Corinna knelt down 
 at the couch where her mother had died, and prayed 
 again. In an interval of her praying she lifted her 
 face, and saw the only portrait in the room, her 
 mother's head. She had done it herself, in curious, 
 radiant colors. It was a glorified likeness. But 
 Corinna had known its lines too well to be able to 
 leave out its kind earthliness of expression, the 
 human, anxious mother-look she had been wont to 
 see bent on herself so often. 
 
 When some little everyday mischance had come 
 to Corinna, something that would have been a thing 
 for the mother's sympathy in most households, Co 
 rinna could remember that expression on her 
 mother's face, baffled, anxious her mother, cut off 
 from giving pity or consolation! Corinna remem 
 bered, now, hurt after little hurt that she had set 
 away from herself sublimely. Had her mother felt 
 them all, borne them all for her, as she herself was 
 bearing now for Krin? Only it must have been 
 more, much more, for she was not Krin's real
 
 172 THE FAIRYLAND HEART 
 
 mother. The picture, with its mocking fairy-tale 
 colorings, watched her unrelentingly, its mother- 
 eyes unrested still, still perplexed. 
 
 Corinna rose slowly, and went to the drawer 
 where her memory-things lay. There was the pair 
 of yellowing white gloves Henry had given her, 
 a bunch of ferns he had gathered for her one 
 day, some music. And by them her mother's knit 
 ting needles and spectacles, and some books. Co 
 rinna lifted one, a book of religious poetry, called 
 " The Changed Cross." Her mother had read that 
 last. 
 
 She had been used to look tenderly at the things, 
 smiling with the thought of her love for them both. 
 Now she lifted them out, slowly, the unaccustomed 
 tears raining down her face. She laid them on the 
 couch where she had been kneeling, the little futile 
 things which represented the two great loves and 
 bereavements of her life. They were both gone 
 from her now, Henry as much as her mother, for 
 the prosperous, obvious-minded business man Belle 
 had built out of the impetuous young Henry 
 Raymond was not even the shadow of Corinna's 
 lover. 
 
 But the old love for that dead young lover, and 
 the sorrow of that love; Corinna knew now that
 
 THE FAIRYLAND HEART 173 
 
 they were in her heart still, and that they always had 
 been, shut down deep by the work of her own will. 
 
 She had she made herself face the stabbing 
 truth, in her young dread of pain and self-con 
 tempt, deadened her hunger for Henry's love as any 
 very strong-willed person can deaden any desire, 
 by killing a part of herself with it. She had thought 
 her change a sublimation it had only been a drug 
 ging. She had deliberately avoided her share of 
 the human heritage, her share of suffering and 
 hurt. She had not been in heaven. She had been 
 in Fairyland, where hearts are spellbound and eyes 
 incapable of tears, not heaven, where she could 
 remember her mother's voice reading it " God hath 
 wiped away all tears from their eyes." And the old 
 grief of her lost lover, the newer grief of her dead 
 mother, pressed heavier and heavier, till it seemed 
 as if her spirit would shriek and break with the 
 accumulated weight of all the sorrows. 
 
 But in the midst of the intolerable hurt that so 
 crushed her down as to make her physically sick 
 and faint, she caught her breath, and her tears 
 checked. 
 
 "Why, I am like them now!" she remembered, 
 " those poor hurt human people who came to mother 
 to be comforted. I am their sister now
 
 174 THE FAIRYLAND HEART 
 
 ' Sister to the mountains now 
 
 And sister to the day and night, 
 Sister to God . . .' 
 
 I am human. I am not in Fairyland any more, 
 I am close to my own kind. Oh, mother, if you only 
 were here to comfort me ! I would be so glad now 
 so glad . . . ' 
 
 The kind, earthly face on the wall never changed 
 its look of denied perplexity, of longing to give a 
 love and comfort never asked of it. The weight 
 of sorrow bore down drenchingly on Corinna. But 
 she knelt steadfastly on, holding the hurt to her, 
 her appointed portion. And with it came, touch 
 ing her almost as if it had been her mother's hand, 
 the blessed sense of oneness with all the world. 
 
 She belonged to people again, to the world's 
 rhythm of pleasing and being pleased, grieving and 
 being grieved, of giving and receiving. She was 
 humanity's sister. The Fairyland heart was gone.
 
 GOOD TIMES 
 
 IN the prospectuses and notices and advertisements 
 that you get from us of the Park about May, when 
 resort-lust strikes you and we are trying to steer 
 it in our direction, you always find, along with the 
 water and the air and the golf-links, a tender-noted, 
 sincerely affirmed paragraph about our board 
 walk. 
 
 We mean what we say about it, we who live here 
 in the Park through the eight long village months 
 you don't see, as well as the four glitter-months you 
 do see. We love it ourselves. It is not so very 
 long, nothing like so long as the Atlantic City one. 
 But it is smooth and very wide and un-built on, 
 and garlanded with lights and jeweled with light- 
 traced casinos. From the sea it looks like a necklace 
 of yellow diamonds, with the pier and casinos for 
 flashing pendants. It is the first place you go after 
 you have seen the hotel clerk about your trunk and 
 found out where your room is and had your dinner. 
 Other people from the hotel are going there, too; 
 the minister and his wife from your home town, 
 the little New York stenographer, plump and blonde 
 
 175
 
 176 GOOD TIMES 
 
 and uncorseted under her orange charmeuse; the 
 oculist and his wife from Leonia, with their three 
 graded daughters; the handsome young Rahway 
 man, who turns out afterward to have been a 
 barber, and the two girls you haven't placed yet. 
 And presently, because it is the Park, and because 
 it is summer and you are on a holiday, and because 
 your conventions are as pleasantly relaxed in this 
 tingling salt air as are your muscles and mind, you 
 all link arms in a jovial row and march dancingly 
 down the boardwalk in a crooked, giggling line. 
 And then some bold spirit starts a fascinating rag 
 time thing that you scolded your small son for wast 
 ing a dime on last week, and everybody that can 
 sings it. And everybody is very innocently happy. 
 You continue to be innocently happy, with a few 
 intervals when it rains, as long as you stay 
 down. 
 
 Now there is no reason on earth why you and 
 the minister and the stenographer and the oculist 
 and the barber should not foregather in the Park 
 on a gay equality, and sing " Melinda's Wedding 
 Day " down the jeweled boardwalk. There is no 
 reason why you should not lie all over the sand in 
 the mornings clad in your short-cut bathing suits, 
 taking snap-shot groups of yourselves in piles. We
 
 GOOD TIMES 177 
 
 like you to, indeed, because it shows that you are 
 cheerful and contented, and contented people con 
 tinue to stay at the scene of their joys, and spend 
 money that pays the interest on the notes. You 
 would not think of being friendly with the little 
 ribboned stenographer with her good-hearted dis 
 regard of grammar and the finer feelings, at home. 
 Neither would the minister be photographed at 
 home with his bathing-suited limbs held to the four 
 corners of the compass by four convulsed young 
 women, also in bathing suits. And, presumably, 
 the barber has not the opportunity of teaching so 
 many well-bred girls the one-step back in Rahway 
 where his trade is an open secret. 
 
 So it really doesn't matter as far as any of you 
 are concerned, you who come down here through 
 the four glitter-months to let us earn our living. 
 You go back home, when your weeks are up, feeling 
 fine. You have a fearful coat of tan, and much 
 less money than you expected. That's all. As for 
 your mind and your muscles and your conventions, 
 most especially your conventions, they tighten with 
 an automatic, painless jerk before your suitcase is 
 lifted down from its rack overhead. 
 
 It is different with the year-round people, who 
 have no other homes to go to. They stay in a sum-
 
 178 GOOD TIMES 
 
 mer-resort all winter, a Cinderella of a summer- 
 resort that has pulled off her electric jewels and 
 packed away her summer braveries, and merely 
 waits around till Prince Summer-Crowd shall come 
 again. It is very hard on the summer-excited, sum 
 mer-spoiled resident children. Nobody has thought 
 to explain to them about the conventions that 
 tighten up at the end of the train ride. At least, 
 nobody has been able to put it so they believe it. 
 And that is the whole trouble, and what this story 
 is about. 
 
 Nobody had even tried to explain to Dollie Valen 
 tine. Dollie was not exactly a Park girl, but she 
 might as well have been for all the time she spent 
 at home. She lived in Radnor Beach, a little next- 
 door place to the Park, the whole year round. The 
 unformulated idea at the back of her goldy-brown 
 head was that everybody interesting behaved sum 
 mer fashion always. Because it's very hard to 
 realize what you don't see. Of course, there were 
 many virtuous, carefully-behaved people in the 
 Park, people who kept Sundays village fashion, and 
 also kept their girls off the boardwalk. But they 
 were usually uninteresting people whom nobody 
 young could ever think of wanting to be like. Their 
 girls generally grew up shy and dowdy and a little
 
 GOOD TIMES 179 
 
 secretly resentful, and either took to books or good 
 works, as people different from their world must. 
 So they never counted at all. 
 
 Dollie's father was Valentine, of Valentine and 
 Jenkins, contractors and builders. He had started 
 out as a carpenter, and made a good deal of money. 
 There is nothing much over at Radnor Beach but 
 contractors, except plumbers. They are all well 
 off, because summer resorts have to be kept per 
 fectly contracted and built and plumbed. So Dollie 
 had all the clothes she wanted, and spending money, 
 and there was a pianola and a bull-pup. They had 
 no maid, because Mrs. Valentine said that she 
 wouldn't stand for no colored wenches stealing the 
 very clothes offen your back. But she did all 
 the work, because it was too much trouble to get 
 Dollie to help her. She had all the labor-saving 
 devices. Dollie, considering all things, had a pretty 
 easy life. But when you are sixteen, and pretty, 
 and full of vim to your strong little brown finger- 
 ends, an easy life which includes pretty frocks and 
 nowhere to wear them, a pianola with nobody special 
 to play for, and a bull-pup with nobody special to 
 admire him, you feel almost as sad as if you had 
 no bull-pup or pianola or frocks at all. Especially 
 when you know that just across the lake from you
 
 i8o GOOD TIMES 
 
 all the people are having as much fun as they want 
 all the time. 
 
 Like most girls who grow up outdoors in sea air, 
 Dollie was physically a slim young goddess. And 
 all the shore girls learn a ready courtesy, because 
 the Park has company and wears company manners 
 all summer. Some of them learn good English, too. 
 Dollie had. Except that her ways were a little 
 more assured, a little more challenging, you could 
 not have told her from the young girls at the Santa 
 Barbara, where every one paid six dollars a day, 
 and there was hot salt water in all the rooms. 
 Partly the money her father had made for her, and 
 partly the standards of the summer people, had put 
 her beyond her father and mother, and even her 
 brothers, finely-built, slovenly, cheerful loafers that 
 they were. It had put her beyond the other girls' 
 brothers, too ; particularly Tommy. 
 
 Tommy's other name was Brock. He and Dollie 
 had " gone with " each other, after the precocious 
 Park fashion, since Dollie was eight and Tommy 
 eleven. Tommy was big and cheerful and untidy, 
 with tragic blue black-lashed eyes and a great many 
 all-gold teeth. His nails were black-edged also, and 
 he slouched and usually wore a red sweater. He
 
 GOOD TIMES 181 
 
 plumbed a little, fitfully, but it is hard to work when 
 the whole place is a playground. You mostly found 
 him propping up a post in the overhung esplanade 
 we call Knockers' Row, or lying along the sand in 
 a small amount of bathing suit. He was a good- 
 tempered, easy-going boy enough, but he looked 
 about as much in the same class with Dollie as a 
 coal barge with a private yacht. Still, they had 
 kept on going with each other in the winters. They 
 had to; there is no other, kind of boy among the 
 prosperous artisan Radnor Beach population. In 
 the summer they drifted apart, of course. As the 
 residents say, you never see anybody you know in 
 the summer. 
 
 It was late June and the bathing was beginning 
 to be good. Dollie had run along the sand about 
 three-quarters of a mile to get to Whitefield Avenue 
 where most of the people go in. Tommy was there 
 before her, leaning against the high carpenter's 
 horse thing the life guards sit on, watching amiably 
 for a pretty summer girl to flirt with a little. He 
 grinned at Dollie in friendly fashion, as she flashed 
 across the sand with a couple of the other girls. 
 
 Dollie dashed into the waves and swam stroogly 
 out from shore. It was so lovely to get out alone 
 in the clear green water, out beyond the bathers,
 
 182 GOOD TIMES 
 
 and where nobody had dirty nails or used crooked 
 English, or let smells of cooking get all over the 
 house. While Dollie faced seaward all she could 
 see was clean, glimmering jade-colored water and 
 clean blue sky. She loved beauty, poor Dollie 
 Valentine, beauty and fitness and dainty ways. And 
 above all she wanted happiness, the good times that 
 are flaunted so before you at a summer resort. And 
 she was sixteen, the age when it most seems to you 
 as if youth was so short, so terribly short, and all 
 the good times life owed you had to be crowded into 
 now right now! And the boardwalk, with its 
 careless, singing people who had stopped being staid 
 for their two or four or eight weeks, was there to 
 tell her that there was happiness, lots of it, and there 
 were good times, luxurious, auto, ballroom good 
 times, if only she could manage to reach her hand 
 out a little farther and get them ! 
 
 She slid over on her back in the water and 
 laughed a little at the splash. Then she began to 
 sing softly to herself. Who wouldn't, after all, 
 young and strong and pretty, and lying out in jade- 
 colored water on a June morning ! 
 
 x A hand caught hers, and she saw a boy's face 
 smiling at her as she sang. He had taken her sing 
 ing as an invitation to make friends.
 
 GOOD TIMES 183 
 
 "You certainly can swim," he said. It was a 
 gentleman's voice, soft-noted and clear-cut, the sort 
 of voice some of the expensive schools can teach. 
 Dollie looked and heard, and smiled back and 
 splashed him a little. 
 
 Now, before we go any farther, it is only fair to 
 the boy, whose name was Herbert Grant, to explain 
 that he was not a villain nor a seducer, nor a dark 
 and cruel-minded person at all. He was merely a 
 lad of twenty whose father had always given him 
 more money to play with than he could possibly 
 need, and forgotten to give him standards to use it 
 by. Or to live by, indeed, except the general rules 
 of being kind-hearted and polite and keeping his 
 outside clean. These are not bad standards, but 
 they aren't enough to go around. For the rest, he 
 was slim and gay and gentle-mannered, a boy you 
 liked instinctively. He was bored to death, in his 
 young desire for good times, by the sedately-superior 
 Santa Barbara and summer girls who couldn't swim, 
 and desired to be jumped over breakers. He was 
 also the sort of boy Dollie wanted most to like. 
 She looked at the brown hand that showed its mani 
 curing even through the water, and liked it and the 
 swift, soft voice. And all the girls " picked up." 
 And when you are sixteen you are certain as never
 
 1 84 GOOD TIMES 
 
 before and never after that there may not be enough 
 good times to last the old year out. And all this 
 explains why Dollie smiled and answered. 
 
 " Some swimmer yourself," she said, showing all 
 her pretty teeth, and dashing water over him with 
 both hands. She had to twist round to do it, and 
 catch at him to regain her balance, and they both 
 laughed, blue eyes into brown. 
 
 " Race you over to the pier," said the boy. " Can 
 you swim that far ? " 
 
 " Sure I can," said Dollie scornfully, like a small 
 boy who has been dared. She gave him one parting 
 splash, and was off crawl-fashion. He followed as 
 swiftly. They reached the pier together, and clung 
 to the posts, watching each other in admiration. 
 
 " Let's go up on the beach and talk," suggested 
 the boy presently, and they swam back and flung 
 themselves on the sand together. " Gee, but you're 
 pretty," he said bluntly, running his hand down her 
 arm as they lay side by side. 
 
 The touch was no new thing to Dollie. She was a 
 boardwalk girl, and they make light-hearted love all 
 summer, as the custom of summer resorts is. The 
 Park is a sort of middle-class Arcadia, you know, 
 with a brass band instead of flute and tabor. She 
 was used to " fussing."
 
 GOOD TIMES 185 
 
 But if the hand that caressed Dollie's arm was 
 wonted, the soft voice was not, nor the well- 
 groomed look of the boy even in his bathing suit. 
 Before this Dollie hadn't been exactly grown-up, 
 and had gone mostly with Radnor Beach boys even 
 in summer. She turned her pretty child- face, under 
 its rose-satin head drapery, toward his that was 
 almost as pretty and young, and smiled like a little 
 girl. 
 
 "Am I really?" she asked half shyly, half 
 coquettishly. 
 
 " Indeed you are'' said the boy fervently. He 
 was young, he had been bored, and here was as 
 pretty a girl as the beach afforded ready to help him 
 have good times ! " You're the prettiest, livest girl 
 I've seen since I came down here, and that's three 
 weeks ! " 
 
 In another moment, still holding her slim, brown 
 arm, he was pouring out the story of his weariness 
 at the Santa Barbara, the lonely weeks he had put 
 in, and his delight at finding such a nice girl as she 
 was. It was really a playmate that he was so glad 
 of finding. 
 
 Dollie listened hungrily. What he was saying 
 seemed the most interesting and important thing 
 that ever was. She answered him briefly and gaily,
 
 i86 GOOD TIMES 
 
 with a real interest that lighted her lips and cheeks 
 and hurried Herbert on. She tried to hide her awe 
 at the setting of what he said, the money, the motor 
 cars, all the soft-cushioned comfort of which the boy 
 himself was a little proudly conscious still. 
 
 Dollie liked him very much, and he liked her. So 
 before they parted to dress they had made an ap 
 pointment to meet on the boardwalk that night. 
 Herbert wanted to come to her house after her, but 
 Dollie would not let him. It was too far off, she 
 said. What she thought was that she did not want 
 him to see the plush things in the parlor, nor her 
 cheerfully-sloppy mother. They did not fit, she 
 knew, with her own grace and daintiness, and she 
 did want Herbert to think the very best possible of 
 her. 
 
 So that night Dollie and Herbert met on the 
 boardwalk and sat out together on the fishing pier, 
 as far as they could from the intrusive arc-light. 
 In a little while Dollie's head dropped to Herbert's 
 shoulder, and his arm locked round her close and 
 comforting. She could smell the faint, fresh odor 
 of cigarettes and violet water that was shaken from 
 his coat. She remembered Tommy's sweater and 
 shivered a little, and buried her goldy-brown head 
 deeper on Herbert's shoulder. She had been used
 
 GOOD TIMES 187 
 
 to arms around her ever since she could remember. 
 Love-making is the principal occupation in the Park, 
 you know, as in Arcadia. The visiting girls do it 
 while they are down. It doesn't matter, they say 
 they'll never see the man again. And most of the 
 pretty, empty-lived Radnor Beach girls do it all 
 summer and all winter. Which is natural enough, 
 when you come to think of it. The oculist's 
 youngest daughter from Leonia was sitting three 
 benches off. Her head was on a man's shoulder, 
 too, a man she had picked up on the beach the day 
 before. But she went home in two weeks, with a 
 harmless little love affair to remember, a delightful, 
 clandestine feeling of adventure and having had 
 something happen. Dollie, you see, had no some 
 where else to go. 
 
 The next night there was an auto ride. It seemed 
 he really had a machine of his own. Dollie had not 
 quite believed him till he appeared in it. They took 
 one of Dollie's girl friends and a boy Herbert knew, 
 and went up to Marty's. There was a very expen 
 sive dinner with bottles of champagne, and just one 
 little cocktail apiece for the girls, because they 
 wanted them, and a long ride afterward in the 
 moonlight. The girls were set down at a corner 
 near their homes at about two, and went home very
 
 i88 GOOD TIMES 
 
 happy and excited. Dollie's mother scolded a little 
 next day, but not much. You can't do a thing with 
 the children in the summer time ! That is the motto 
 with which Radnor Beach mothers dismiss many 
 things. 
 
 Herbert was down for the summer. He did not 
 mind, now he had found Dollie. He was very much 
 in love with her. You would have been in love with 
 her that summer, too; she was so pretty and so 
 young, and so gay and so loving. All the nice girls 
 Herbert had known so far had not known very well 
 hew to keep up their end of love-making, and he had 
 been a little shy of them, a little afraid they were 
 too good. But Dollie was as young and decorative 
 and pretty-mannered and gentle as any of them, and 
 the careless life she had always led, of light-hearted 
 love-making with any friendly lad she knew, had 
 smashed all the troublesome barriers boys of twenty 
 find so annoying. 
 
 " Have as good a time as you can," say the little 
 boardwalk girls. " There isn't much else to do, and 
 it's slow enough in the winter, goodness knows ! " 
 
 Herbert's friend went home in a couple of weeks, 
 and Ola, Dollie's friend, faded away into the dis 
 tance with another boy. Chums are a nuisance any 
 way, when you're in love. After that the two went
 
 GOOD TIMES 189 
 
 their way alone. They spent their mornings on the 
 beach, their afternoons on the lake or ocean, and 
 they danced at all the tango places within a radius of 
 twenty miles in the evenings, always alone, always 
 together. There never will be anything prettier 
 than Dollie, dancing the wild new dances in her 
 vivid satin frocks, held tight in Herbert's arms. 
 There is something about two young people very 
 much in love, a gladness and lightness of heart that 
 is blown out to you like a perfume. That is what 
 people mean by " all the world loves a lover." 
 
 Neither of them thought much about what was 
 going to happen next; they were enjoying them 
 selves too much right now. Dollie had reached out 
 her hands and caught the good times that had been 
 flying, like butterflies, just beyond her for so long. 
 She was having as good a time as other girls in the 
 Park, no matter how happy or how rich they were. 
 
 One night, fortunately for their appetites a few 
 yards from a roadhouse, the car broke down. Her 
 bert laughed a little and swore a little, but it was 
 too late to do anything till morning, and anyway 
 they were both starved. They laughed over it, and 
 went to the roadhouse and ordered a long, drink- 
 dotted meal. It was three before they had finished, 
 wine-thrilled, young, very much in love. And it
 
 190 GOOD TIMES 
 
 was late next morning when Dollie got home. Her 
 mother took it for granted that she had been with 
 Ola, and there was nothing much said. Mothers 
 always scold a little you have to expect that. 
 After that there were other times " with Ola " it 
 is so easy to do things when you're young and pretty 
 and in love, and all the world is one careless, kissing 
 Arcadia. Nobody bothers with you much in the 
 Park in the summer. They are too busy having 
 good times themselves. 
 
 So things went on in a world that was all sun 
 shine and green water and dancing and laughter, 
 till September came, and Herbert's people began to 
 think about going home. Of course, when they 
 went, Herbert had to go, too. 
 
 He couldn't very well tell his people about Dollie 
 just then Dollie saw that, didn't she? Though if 
 she really wanted him to he would tell them every 
 thing, every single thing even if it did mean every 
 thing being smashed up for him. 
 
 And Dollie, sobbing very pitifully, said that he 
 mustn't tell them till he found a good time for it. 
 Herbert said he was sure the best time would come, 
 very, very soon, and he would come back at the 
 latest before Christmas, and marry her. They even 
 planned out their honeymoon. They clung to each
 
 GOOD TIMES 191 
 
 other passionately, and Herbert was nearer to crying 
 himself than a man likes to get at twenty. They 
 parted, feeling that there was nothing in life worth 
 while but getting back to each other. Meanwhile 
 there would be the consolation not much, but still 
 a consolation of daily letters. 
 
 Herbert did not come back when Dollie thought 
 he would. She set it over the farthest edge of 
 probability, the beginning of November, so she 
 would be surprised when he came long before that. 
 He wrote, but not as often as he had said. His 
 letters were conscientiously fervent, but they grew 
 farther and farther apart. And he did not come in 
 November. Then Christmas came. But Herbert 
 did not come. And he sent nothing not even a 
 letter, not even a card. 
 
 The day after New Year Dollie finally gave up 
 hope. She locked herself in her little shiny-var 
 nished, red-rose-papered room, and clutched a post 
 card picture of Herbert in a pasteboard aeroplane, 
 and cried till there was a great wet spot in the rose- 
 patterned spread that she had made to nearly match 
 the wallpaper. She cried as she had never known 
 anybody could cry till there was no cry left in her ; 
 till she had reached that dreadful other side of tears 
 where everything is gray and sane and feels like
 
 192 GOOD TIMES 
 
 death. When she had come to this, she rose from 
 the bed and went over to sit and think by the 
 window. From where she stared she could see the 
 ocean, with its empty boardwalk and its little gray- 
 brown waves slapping tiredly against the shore. 
 Even the sea stops showing off when the summer 
 people go. The boardwalk itself was empty and 
 dismantled looking, with all its strings of colored 
 lights put away against next June. It is not a good 
 place to see when you are considering what to do 
 with a spoiled child-life, because it is so dreary an 
 allegory of forsakenness itself. 
 
 She felt hopelessly little and wrecked and alone. 
 She sat limply in her rocker and stared down the 
 long empty boardwalk, and suffered dully. Her 
 eyes focused, at length, on a far gleam of red. 
 Tommy, or some other boy like him; some boy she 
 had learned better than to be content with. And 
 the empty boardwalk. Yet that was the best there 
 could be for her now, if she could dare have even 
 that, spoiled, degraded little summer toy that she 
 was ! And Herbert was happy somewhere, gay and 
 loved and untouched, forgetting all his promises and 
 his love and what he had made of her! And she 
 loved him so! She loved him even yet, as only 
 strong, passionate young sixteen can love. It was
 
 GOOD TIMES 193 
 
 he who had made her this so gentle and kind and 
 wonderful a playmate as he had always been. She 
 could scarcely piece together the dear boy lover who 
 had always been so chivalrous and wonderful, and 
 this boy who had done a cruel thing to her and for 
 gotten her. Yet they were both Herbert. Because 
 of Herbert there were no good times for her any 
 where any more. Were there? Dollie's rounded 
 childish face, innocent still, as it had always been 
 ignorant, hardened suddenly into a middle-aged 
 woman's. Now she was this, and her Herbert, still 
 prosperous and beloved and triumphant, was going 
 on with his good times without her. It didn't 
 matter what this did. 
 
 Finally she got up and went over to the mirror 
 and powdered her face carefully, rouging it till it 
 was a fair counterfeit of the old childish bloom. It 
 was a half-mechanical process. She had never 
 needed to do much rouging before. After she had 
 made herself look like herself only it was an arti 
 ficial girl instead of a real one she sat on for 
 hours, staring through her image in the glass, 
 scarcely thinking. There didn't seem to be anything 
 to do but go on sittmg there forever forever till 
 she died. 
 
 " Dollie ! " called her mother sharply up the
 
 194 GOOD TIMES 
 
 stairs. " Here's one of the girls wants you to go 
 down on the boardwalk. Want to go ? " 
 
 She rose, still mechanically, and went down the 
 stairs. The boardwalk always the boardwalk ! If 
 you lived anywhere near it it owned you, whether 
 for good or bad. The boardwalk was there, 
 stripped, desolate, with the winds blowing across it. 
 But there were still boys on it. There was Tommy 
 Brock. It didn't matter to him much, she knew 
 that, whether she had done what she'd done or not. 
 The Radnor Beach boys more or less expected the 
 girls to be that sort. There was nothing left for 
 her of all the things she had wanted the things she 
 belonged with. She thought, shudder ingly, of 
 Tommy's black nails, of his good-natured vulgari 
 ties. . . . But there were other boys perhaps 
 boys as pleasant oh, no, no there couldn't be! 
 But still . . . Tommy would do to go with till 
 next summer. And perhaps next summer 
 
 " I'll show him I don't care ! " thought Dollie, 
 forlornly defiant. She looked in the glass again, 
 seeingly this time. She was almost what she had 
 been before. 
 
 " Kisses don't leave any mark," she remembered 
 hearing people saying. Having your heart broken 
 being a bad girl instead of a good one hadn't
 
 GOOD TIMES 195 
 
 left any mark, either. Might as well go on having 
 good times. Other men and if it came to marry 
 ing Tommy, in time well, that was a long way off. 
 
 Her poor little face hardened. It had been such 
 an innocent face! 
 
 " Tell 'em I'm coming, Mother ! " she called down, 
 and leaned forward for one more look in the glass. 
 
 " You gotta have good times ! " she said to herself 
 over and over, under her breath, and ran down the 
 stairs.
 
 OH, MR. DREAM-MAN 
 
 CELIA'S tray had been carried down. Celia herself, 
 up on her sleeping-porch, felt like going to sleep for 
 the night, she said; but the phonograph wouldn't 
 disturb her. So Ruth tiptoed across the floor of the 
 bungalow and put on a soft needle. She sank into 
 one of the low chairs that stood on either side of 
 the hearth, and, all alone in the twilight, crossed her 
 hands and prepared to listen to the record. 
 
 It was one of the oldest she had, and it was 
 scratchy in some places and blurred in others. But 
 Ruth's sober face, as she listened, softened to a 
 girlish, dreamy content, and her great wistful gray 
 eyes lighted tenderly. It was just a foolish old rag 
 time thing with cheap words and wistful unexpected 
 rhythms, sung by two negro voices that were rich 
 even through the medium of the scratched disk. 
 
 " Oh, Mr. Dream-man, please let me dream some 
 
 mo' , 
 Just lak the dream ah had the night befo' " 
 
 sang the woman's voice in the refrain. 
 
 196
 
 OH, MR. DREAM-MAN 197 
 
 " Ah dreamt about a lovin' man, he was so sweet, 
 When ah start to think of him ma heart begins 
 to beat . . ." 
 
 The words blurred here; it had been an old record 
 when Ruth got it. She did not mind. She knew 
 how the end would be; the same words over again. 
 
 " Oh, Mr. Dream-man . . . please let me dream 
 some mo'!" 
 
 She sat still long after the record was finished. 
 Her face was still lighted and her lips moved oc 
 casionally. You would have thought, to see her, 
 that the old record was one some lover of hers had 
 sung, or perhaps been very fond of. But Ruth 
 Allaire had never had a lover. 
 
 It had not been that she was ugly, or repellent. 
 She had simply never happened to have the time or 
 the chance. When you're very shy and very busy 
 and only ordinarily pretty, men don't necessarily 
 take the trouble to love you. Ever since Ruth's 
 tenth year she had worked hard and desperately. 
 Her mother had worked, too, till she died, and so, 
 later, had pretty, delicate Celia, the seven-years- 
 younger sister. Ruth's health had been rugged 
 enough to stand, by a narrow margin, day-work and
 
 198 OH, MR. DREAM-MAN 
 
 night-school study, but the pleasures well, they had 
 never seemed to come close enough to touch, some 
 how. And now they never would, because she was 
 thirty-one and then, there was Celia. 
 
 Celia had worked, too. But she had played as 
 well, and her health had not stood the double strain 
 of office-work and good times. So it was a wonder 
 ful, a providential thing that a year before, when the 
 doctors had begun to talk cheeringly about open-air 
 cures, Ruth had attained to the height of being a 
 certified expert accountant. This meant that she did 
 not have to keep books in an office any more. She 
 went and came very much as she pleased, and told 
 banks whether their accounts were correct, which 
 is a very exceptional position for a woman of thirty- 
 one. Half her work could be done at home. So she 
 was able to buy the little bungalow, ten miles out of 
 the Park where the pines were thick, with its sleep 
 ing-porch on the second story for Celia; and there 
 the two of them lived with the collie, far off from 
 the world. Ruth went down to the city alternate 
 weeks. It was rather a long pull, but she managed 
 it. When she was away, old Mrs. Cooley-down-the- 
 road did for Celia. 
 
 Celia fretted a little, but on the whole she was
 
 OH, MR. DREAM-MAN 199 
 
 fairly sweet about it, though there was a lover wait 
 ing till she should get well. 
 
 "Of course, it's all right for you, Ruthie," she 
 would say when she was loneliest, " you never did 
 care for men or good times or anything but getting 
 ahead. But oh, dear! to lose a whole year out of 
 your life because of one foolish old lung, with 
 everything just chasing by down in the city ! " 
 
 " I know, dear," Ruth would say, " but just be 
 patient a little longer." And Celia, easily com 
 forted, would happily reread Harry's last letter. 
 
 Celia was only making the mistake that the rest 
 of the world did; that because Ruth did not ask for 
 things she did not want them. As a matter of 
 fact, for the first three months in the lonely bunga 
 low, with only kindly, busy Dr. Atchison going 
 in and out, Ruth had been nearly wild with loneli 
 ness and nerve-strain, and the dreadful feeling that 
 there would never be anything in life for her but 
 hurried, careful drudgery. But this was all over 
 now, and Ruth was nearly as contented as her sister 
 thought she ought to be. She had built herself the 
 dream-man. 
 
 It was absolutely ridiculous, a performance a 
 mathematician thirty-one years old had no excuse 
 for. But when you have been the lifter, not the
 
 200 OH, MR. DREAM-MAN 
 
 leaner, all your hard life, and finally face the fact 
 that youth, with all its gold maybes, is gone; espe 
 cially if you are worn by overwork and overworry 
 and are only a tired woman after all, why you 
 have to do something, or break. Perhaps the real 
 trouble was that Ruth was a born wife. It is 
 almost impossible to expend one's womanly affec 
 tions on rows of figures in ledgers. 
 
 It started one night, with the playing of the little 
 disk. Ruth had bought a second-hand phonograph 
 to amuse Celia. Celia didn't like it much, after all; 
 it was too vivid a reminder of unattainable dances. 
 But to pleasure-starved Ruth it became a joy. And 
 on a night she happened to play " Mr. Dream-man." 
 She was all alone downstairs, as usual. She heard 
 it through, lying back in her chair. She sprang up 
 at the end of it, staring ahead. She had been wild 
 with nervous depression all day. 
 
 " Why shouldn't I have a dream-man? " she de 
 manded aloud. " Why shouldn't I pretend to my 
 self the kind of a lover I'd like to have had? It 
 
 won't hurt anybody. And nobody " she laughed 
 
 a little bitterly " nobody'd suspect me of being so 
 silly!" 
 
 And so, out of mists and wishes and story-books
 
 OH, MR. DREAM-MAN 201 
 
 and wistful imaginings, but principally out of the 
 little old scratched ragtime disk, Ruth's dream-man 
 was made. 
 
 She always arranged the room carefully be 
 fore she summoned him. Then she would put on 
 the record and fold her hands and wait his com 
 ing. 
 
 At first he was rather a shadowy idea, but he 
 gradually became real enough for Ruth to have 
 drawn a picture of him and written ut his life his 
 tory. She had made him come in always about 
 the time the song had reached its second line. First 
 his step without, a quick, decided footfall ; then the 
 door flung open. 
 
 " For, of course," said Ruth to herself, " he is the 
 master of the house." 
 
 And then 
 
 " Well, little girl ! " she would dream his voice, as 
 she sat motionless in the firelit dusk. " Have you 
 wanted me? " 
 
 There would be a fresh breath of outdoors about 
 him, as if he had come from a long walk up through 
 the pines. 
 
 "Oh, yes!" Ruth would whisper. "You don't 
 know how I have missed you ! " 
 
 And then but she did not dare this till the
 
 202 OH, MR. DREAM-MAN 
 
 dream-man had come several times then she 
 sprang up to greet him with her arms out, and they 
 kissed each other. 
 
 (Ruth flushed, even this latest evening, when she 
 came to this part. But surely he would kiss her, 
 if she was his little girl that he loved and took care 
 of!) 
 
 Then she would fuss about him lovingly. But 
 he never let her do much waiting on him. 
 
 "You have looked after other people all your 
 life," was one of the comforting things he would 
 say. " Now, it's your turn to be looked after, 
 honey." 
 
 (She reached one hand across to shut off the 
 phonograph, ended. "Please let me dream some 
 mo'!" But her dream would go on.) 
 
 He dressed in a trim khaki, outdoors fashion. 
 His work kept him outdoors, she knew, though for 
 some time she did not know exactly what it was. 
 She did know that he was deeply browned by the 
 sun, so deeply that his eyes looked sapphire-blue by 
 contrast. His hair was curly, just a little, and thick, 
 and sunburned till there were gilt streaks through 
 its light-brown. 
 
 Tonight he flung himself down, half -kneeling, on 
 the hearth-rug between Ruth and the collie. She
 
 OH, MR. DREAM-MAN 203 
 
 could nearly touch his gilt-streaked hair in the fire 
 light. 
 
 "You are so pretty, my little girl," he said. 
 " And I love you more every day. . . . How long 
 have we been engaged, dear? " 
 
 Ruth's eyes looked contentedly into the dusk. 
 
 " Three months," she said. " Oh, I was so lonely 
 before you came! " 
 
 He stroked her hand. 
 
 " But you are not lonely now, my dear," he said. 
 " You will never be lonely again." 
 
 " I know that! " she said. " Oh, I am so glad 
 there is you ! " 
 
 Then silence fell for a while. That was one of 
 the most comforting things about the dream-man. 
 You could be as quiet as you liked or talk as 
 much as you liked, and he loved you just the 
 same. . . . 
 
 What was at first merely a fantastic, pleasant 
 daydream became very nearly a passionate reality 
 to lonely Ruth in her solitude of crowded city or 
 isolated woods. The day she found herself buying 
 a set of Conrad because he was a man's author, and 
 she wanted to talk about him with the dream-man,
 
 204 OH, MR. DREAM-MAN 
 
 she laughed at herself. She smiled at herself, too, 
 faintly, for getting some simple little evening 
 frocks she had never had any before because the 
 dream-man thought her neck and arms were pretty. 
 But the time when she got herself the little gold 
 lovers'-knot ring, she could not laugh at herself. 
 She found her eyes filling with tears. 
 
 Her lips and cheeks brightened, and the men in 
 the banks where she worked, who had seen her pass 
 so long, an efficient machine, began to be conscious 
 of the feel of femininity about her, for she was look 
 ing after her appearance more than she ever had in 
 all her hurried-up life before. 
 
 " Miss Allaire's got a sweetheart," the younger 
 of them decided. 
 
 " You have such lovely hair ! " he had whispered 
 the night she did it the new way the first time. In 
 deed, she had so much of it that she had always 
 merely plaited it tight and wound it out of the 
 way. " I like my little girl to be pretty! " 
 
 That was the time he told her the long story about 
 himself. He half-sat, half-lay in the old place she 
 loved, on the rug between her and the collie. While 
 he held her hand in both his long, brown capable 
 ones, he told her all about his boyhood. 
 
 " I had a hard time, too, dear," he said.
 
 OH, MR. DREAM-MAN 205 
 
 "Worked my way straight through college and 
 technical school." 
 
 " And you had some one to support, too," Ruth 
 answered in that fancied intercourse. 
 
 " Yes," he said. " I had my mother. ..." 
 
 " And what books do you like best ? " she asked 
 inconsequently. But it was hard for her to imagine 
 the answer, because she knew so little about men. 
 The next time she went to the city she bought the 
 Conrad and subscribed to a sporting magazine and 
 an engineering monthly. She could not expect him 
 to talk all the time about the woman things that 
 were all she knew ! After that she came to imagine 
 quite interesting conversations with him about sport 
 and engineering. If there had been a real man, they 
 might have made him laugh; but a dream-man has 
 to follow very much the lines of conversation you 
 lay down for him. Though Ruth got to the point 
 where she had to make scarcely any conscious effort 
 as regards his end of the talking. It came, it 
 seemed, almost of itself. How did he come to 
 have been here, in the pines, to have found 
 her? 
 
 " I love pinewoods, Ruthie, even little ones. You 
 remember the day when I came ta the door first? 
 There was a fearful snowstorm "
 
 206 OH, MR. DREAM-MAN 
 
 "And I let you in out of the snow " Ruth 
 
 whispered. 
 
 " And I knew that you were the one girl there was 
 for me." 
 
 " We both knew," Ruth said half -aloud. 
 
 Her voice broke the spell. The dog sprang up 
 with a sleepy bark, a log crashed through, and Ruth 
 came back to the reality of the fire and the loneli 
 ness and the little scratched record at rest on the 
 sewing-table. The dream was over for the night. 
 She went slowly to bed. 
 
 But as she fell asleep there was a drowsy, sweet 
 content wrapping her round, and she imagined that 
 she could hear quick steps lessening in the distance. 
 
 From being only an evocation of the disk, Ruth's 
 dream-man came to accompany her every thought 
 and step all the day long. She held long talks with 
 him as she went about her daily work in the house. 
 He kept step invisibly with her in the city streets. 
 Celia scarcely ever came downstairs, Mrs. Cooley- 
 down-the-road did not seem to be given to curiosity. 
 There was no one to disturb Ruth at her lonely, 
 happy play. 
 
 So gradually she made the den off the living-room 
 into a room for her dream-man. There she kept his 
 books and his case of instruments for mechanical
 
 OH, MR. DREAM-MAN 207 
 
 drawing, his magazines, his sofa-pillows; there was 
 his chiffonier, with the silver frame on it for his 
 mother's picture. There was his banjo that he told 
 her he had taught himself to play on. There in the 
 closet so far did the fantastic play take her hung 
 his white flannels. The drawers of the chiffonier, 
 even, grew to be full. Ruth, entering the room, 
 could evoke him at will. But the strongest reality 
 of him was still by the living-room fire, on the rug 
 at her feet or leaning eagerly forward in his chair, 
 talking to her tenderly, or brightly, through the long 
 lonely evenings. 
 
 Presently the fairy-story she was telling herself 
 became fcoo real for the comfort of Ruth's expert- 
 accountant side. It came to a point where she could 
 almost see his shape coming through the door at 
 half -dusk nearly hear his footsteps. The touch of 
 his arms around her, his lips on hers, came to be as 
 teal a feeling as the tangibilities of her everyday 
 life. 
 
 " I must not oh, I must not ! " she said to her 
 self, catching her breath. " It is heavenly but I 
 may go crazy if I keep this up much longer! " 
 
 Yet she could not bear to give up entirely the 
 dream-man who was her only happiness. She would 
 only summon him, she decided, when she was very
 
 208 OH, MR. DREAM-MAN 
 
 lonely. And one shouldn't be very lonely with work 
 to do and a sister to love and a perfectly good collie 
 and an adequate income. . . . 
 
 Ruth cried stormily all the night she came to the 
 decision, as if she had sent away a real lover. She 
 locked the door of his room next day, sobbing as 
 she did it. She was too tired to be self -controlled, 
 she reminded herself. The strain of the housework 
 and nursing and the long journeys might be making 
 her want to cry if there had never been any dream- 
 man at all and a sharp little pain went flying 
 through her heart as she put back the key on her 
 ring, a physical pain as sharp as the mental one. 
 But Ruth was firm with herself. 
 
 " Not unless I am very lonely," she said. 
 
 For two months she held to her resolution. She 
 suffered quite as much as if she had given up a real 
 lover. 
 
 Finally, one unseasonably bitter night in No 
 vember, when the work for Celia and her own work 
 had both been cruelly heavy, she broke down. 
 
 " Just one more night with my dream-man ! " she 
 pleaded to the common-sense self. " Oh, I must 
 have him just once more I must! . . . If I can't 
 think some one is sorry for me and loves me I 
 shall die!"
 
 OH, MR. DREAM-MAN 209 
 
 She fled up to her room, softly, for fear of wak 
 ing Celia. She put on deliberately her prettiest 
 frock, a pale blue satin with a sash of deep rose 
 a frock she had bought for her dream and with 
 slippers and stockings to match. She fastened a 
 necklace round her throat and bracelets on her 
 arms. She waved her hair carefully and heaped it 
 high. She was thinner and paler, she could see in 
 the glass, than she had been the two lonely months 
 had told on her. She touched her cheeks with nail- 
 rouge till they were faintly pink again. Then she 
 walked slowly downstairs, still fighting the desire. 
 It was so like the night she had imagined for her 
 dream-man's first coming! 
 
 " Let me in let me in ! " he seemed to say, knock 
 ing against her heart. 
 
 And as she fought the obsession there was an 
 actual rap at the door. It toned so uncannily with 
 her visionings that her first impulse was to run 
 and bolt the door against the dear vision which was 
 becoming stronger than she. But as the imperative 
 knock came a second time her common sense made 
 her cross slowly to the door and throw it open. 
 
 " I've lost my way, I'm afraid," said a man's 
 quick, pleasant voice from behind the wall of snow 
 the wind had heaped smoothly up to the very door-
 
 210 OH, MR. DREAM-MAN 
 
 handle. A spray of pine lay on the top of the drift, 
 Ruth had time to notice, before the stranger 
 struggled through it. " May I come in ? The snow 
 has stopped, but I'm afraid I've got to rest a 
 minute before I can go on." 
 
 She could only see a straight dark shape in the 
 dusk. Even yet she was scarcely certain whether 
 the hallucination was not finally conquering her. 
 But " Come in," she said in a frightened voice. And 
 the man pushed himself through the snow and 
 across the threshold. 
 
 He was tall. His dripping hair curled a little 
 under his cap. He was so heavily tanned that it 
 made his eyes seem a brighter blue than they ac 
 tually were. Ruth's heart beat wildly. He was 
 real yes, that was certainly real snow that 
 dripped from him in water on the floor and yet 
 he was like the dream-man. 
 
 Ruth's expert-accountant side took the helm 
 again. " If he's a hallucination I may as well go 
 on with it till he's through," it said; " if he's a real 
 man I ought to help him. So either way " 
 
 The dream-man pushed the door shut behind 
 him, pulled off his wet cap and laughed a little. 
 
 " I'm afraid I'm too wet to be anything but a 
 nuisance," he said. " But may I try to dry out a
 
 OH, MR. DREAM-MAN 211 
 
 little by the fire? And thank you for letting me 
 take shelter." 
 
 " Oh, yes, please come near the fire," she said 
 shyly, and watched him fascinatedly as he moved 
 close to the blazing logs and half -knelt beside them. 
 Just so she had imagined her dream-man kneeling 
 by the fire a hundred times! She took a sudden 
 resolution. It was only kind, after all the thing 
 she was going to do. 
 
 " In in that room there," she faltered, one hand 
 playing nervously with her necklace, " you'll find 
 dry clothes, and I think everything you want." 
 She pointed to the dream-man's room. 
 
 He rose from beside the fire and smiled at her. 
 Ruth's heart lifted sharply his look and gestures 
 were so like the dream-man's still! 
 
 " Thank you," he said, and entered the door she 
 held open for him. She thought she heard him ex 
 claim as the door shut. She heard him moving 
 hurriedly about, changing, she supposed. Then 
 there was silence for a little. 
 
 Ruth bent to the phonograph. She laughed at 
 herself for being so foolish. Yet she adjusted the 
 disk and set it softly playing. Its first sounds were 
 drowned by the hasty flinging open of a door. 
 
 " What does it mean ? " demanded the stranger,
 
 212 OH, MR. DREAM-MAN 
 
 striding over to her. He had dressed himself, Ruth 
 noted hastily, in the white clothes from the ward 
 robe, and they fitted him. Her eyes were shining 
 and his forehead was knit in perplexity. " What 
 does it mean?" he asked again passionately. 
 " That's my room, or it might as well be. Those 
 are my books, nearly all of them, in the case my 
 pictures on the wall you've even got alpenstocks 
 crossed over the mantel the way mine are." 
 
 Ruth put her hand over her heart, which was mis 
 behaving now worse than it had at all, though it had 
 worried her a good deal lately. 
 
 " Do you mean do you mean you have a room 
 like that somewhere ? " she panted. 
 
 '"' Yes" said the stranger. Then he pulled him 
 self together. " I beg your pardon for being so 
 excited about it, but it certainly was queer. The 
 fellow that owns that room must be my other self 
 V . . it certainly is curious almost exactly the 
 room I have, even to the mechanical drawing instru 
 ments and the frame where I keep my mother's 
 picture on the bureau only his frame hasn't any 
 picture in it." 
 
 He sat down opposite her in the dream-man's 
 chair, and bent over to pat the dog's head. " By 
 Jove, it was funny like the things you read about
 
 OH, MR. DREAM-MAN 213 
 
 in a fairy-book ! " he said. " Is it your husband ? " 
 he asked frankly, " the chap with tastes like mine? " 
 
 He waited eagerly for her answer. There was 
 only one thing to say, or so it seemed to Ruth. 
 
 " My my husband," she replied faintly. 
 
 " Oh, yes, of course," said the stranger in a 
 strained voice. " Your husband, of course." 
 
 A little silence fell after that. The man's blue 
 eyes were fixed on the rug at his feet. Ruth 
 watched his brown, strong, face, shadowed as it had 
 not been before she spoke. She broke the silence 
 nervously. 
 
 " How did you come to be out on such a dreadful 
 night ? " she asked. Unconsciously her voice 
 softened as if she were speaking to her own veri 
 table dream-man. 
 
 He smiled again, with a flashing of white teeth. 
 
 " I don't know," he confessed. " It was a silly 
 thing to do. I acted on one of those queer impulses 
 that you get up and follow sometimes before you 
 know what you've done. I'd been doing some moun 
 tain-climbing in the Far East I generally spend 
 my vacation that way and one of those see- 
 America-first ideas struck me so hard that I came 
 back here. And nothing would do but that I should 
 go exploring before I'd been ten minutes in the
 
 214 OH, MR. DREAM-MAN 
 
 hotel, even. And I had a strange feeling ever have 
 it? that something awfully good was at the end of 
 the journey. I used to have it when I was a kid 
 sometimes that there was a corking surprise wait 
 ing for me at the end. So I was day-dreaming, I 
 suppose, as I walked, and didn't notice how exces 
 sively lost I was getting, or how high the snow was 
 piling. I was about all in when I saw your light." 
 
 He stopped and leaned back in his chair as if he 
 were not only tired, but a little down-hearted about 
 something. Ruth saw, now, that he was older than 
 she had thought. There was gray in his hair, and 
 his face, when he did not smile, was sharper cut 
 than she had imagined. He was thirty-five, at a 
 guess, and some of the years had been hard ones. 
 
 He was so like the dream-man so very like! 
 Ruth longed to kneel by him and slip her bare arm 
 round his neck and whisper, " I am sorry you are 
 tired I am sorry there was no wonderful thing at 
 the end of your journey but you have me still, 
 remember, dear ! " 
 
 But he was real, and a stranger, and she had told 
 him she was married. 
 
 " You must be hungry and thirsty ! " was all she 
 could find to say. " I will get you something." 
 
 She fled to the kitchen, and made chocolate and
 
 OH, MR. DREAM-MAN 215 
 
 broiled meat and prepared salad and creamed pota 
 toes with quick, shaking hands, while her heart beat 
 suffocatingly, agonizingly. She had to lean against 
 the door to catch her breath. In an incredibly short 
 time she had the food on a tray, on a little table 
 beside the stranger. He lifted the chocolate to his 
 lips, thanking her, and drank off the contents of the 
 little cup. Then he lifted his wrist to the level of 
 his eyes, as if something had pricked him. 
 
 "That's a price-mark!" he said, jerking the bit 
 of pasteboard from his sleeve. " This suit has never 
 been worn. And neither had any of the other things 
 I put on. Ah, tell me " 
 
 Ruth lifted both tremulous hands toward him, 
 mutely begging him to stop. He caught her wrists, 
 bringing her hands nearer to him, examining them 
 closely. 
 
 "What does it mean?" he said vehemently. 
 " And you have no wedding-ring on why did you 
 say you were married ? " 
 
 It never occurred to Ruth to question his right 
 to ask her, or to wonder what it all was to him. 
 She was overwrought already by the strain and ex 
 citement of his coming, and though she did not 
 realize it the work and unhappiness of the lonely 
 months before.
 
 216 OH, MR. DREAM-MAN 
 
 " I will tell you I will ! " she said panting. 
 "Only don't look so!" 
 
 " I haven't any right to ask, I know," he said in a 
 softened voice. " But if you will - " 
 
 He broke off confusedly, with his blue eyes fixed 
 on Ruth hungrily, beseechingly. 
 
 " I was so lonely," she falteringly began, " so 
 very lonely! And I have never had time to play, 
 nor been where there was any one to play with 
 me . . ." 
 
 " I know," he said softly; and the understanding- 
 ness of his voice gave her courage to go on. She 
 lifted her eyes to his. 
 
 " I bought this phonograph for Celia," she said, 
 " and it played one night, ' Oh, Mr. Dreom>- 
 
 The story was not so hard to tell as she had 
 thought it was going to be. But it was hard enough, 
 at that the story of the loneliness that had become 
 desperation and had finally made her build a lover 
 out of dreams of how the dream had become so 
 real that she had furnished the room for him, and 
 dressed herself as she had thought he would love 
 to see her. 
 
 He said nothing. He only stood and listened to 
 her with a deepening light on his face. His eyes
 
 OH, MR. DREAM-MAN 217 
 
 were fixed on hers. Ruth flung away from him with 
 a cry. 
 
 " Oh, I am ashamed ! " she said. " It was such a 
 foolish, foolish thing to do ! " 
 
 She laid her arms on the mantel, and her head on 
 them. She did not cry she was too heartsick for 
 the relief of tears. She shuddered as if a cold wind 
 were blowing over her. 
 
 She heard her dream-man's voice behind her at 
 length, speaking softly. 
 
 " Let us try the charm again," he said. She heard 
 him, through her shamed misery, at the phonograph. 
 The music began to play again, softly and scratchily. 
 . ." Oh, Mr. Dream-man . . ." 
 
 She heard him move behind her. His hand was 
 laid on her shoulder so like the firm, warm hand 
 of her dreams ! 
 
 " You called me," he said gently. " Don't you be 
 lieve it, my dear ? You must have called me all the 
 way from over there. . . . You must have been 
 very lonely, my poor little girl ! And I I have been 
 lonely, too, always." 
 
 Ruth lifted her face and stared at him. What 
 was there in the sound of the words that he was 
 saying ? 
 
 He came close and put his arms around her.
 
 OH, MR. DREAM-MAN 
 
 " It is true, is it not? " he said. " And, Ruth, I 
 don't see why either of us ever need be lonely 
 again." 
 
 " Oh, Mr. Dream-man! " crooned the forgotten 
 phonograph, "please let me dream some mo'!" 
 
 " I shall never be lonely any more ! " whispered 
 Ruth, laying her head on his shoulder. She closed 
 her eyes, for, though she was perfectly happy, she 
 was very tired. 
 
 Mrs. Cooley-down-the-road, clumping faithfully 
 through the snowdrifts next morning toward her 
 regular Friday cleaning of the bungalow, exclaimed 
 fretfully, " Holy Mary! " at the sight of the blown- 
 open door. 
 
 " I'll be a good half -hour cleanin' away the snow- 
 wreaths on the door itself," she grumbled as she 
 plowed through the untouched mound of snow that 
 was heaped door-handle high, with a spray of pine 
 on its top. 
 
 The crouching collie whined at the sight of her, 
 and ran to her catching her skirt in his teeth and 
 tugging at it. And Mrs. Cooley, standing in the 
 middle of the snow-wreaths, screamed. For, by the 
 mantel, beyond a little table set with untouched food 
 and drink for two, half-stood, half-leaned Ruth.
 
 OH, MR. DREAM-MAN 219 
 
 She was clad in blue silk with blue beads around 
 her neck and bracelets on her wrists, and her hair 
 was waved and carefully dressed. Although her 
 half -hidden lips smiled and her cheeks were faintly 
 tinted still, Mrs. Cooley could see that she was dead. 
 The old Irishwoman shuddered and crossed her 
 self. " Aye, it did always be risky work, settin* out 
 the place an' the clothes an' the food for Them. But 
 the Lord knows I couldn't be sayin' anything." 
 She shuddered again, and went reluctantly up the 
 stairs to Celia. She never looked back. But vivid 
 in her mind still was the picture of the crisp maline 
 of Ruth's shoulder-knot; marked in five ridges as by 
 the strong pressure of a loving hand.
 
 DEVIL'S HALL 
 
 IT was rather late in the afternoon for them to be 
 out walking so far from home, Cousin Quincy 
 and Naomi, but Mother knew where they had gone. 
 At least they pretended to each other that they 
 thought she did. 
 
 In October most of the summer people had gone 
 away from Allenwood, across the lake from the 
 Park, and their beautiful big houses, all set about 
 with box hedges and flowered lawns, were left 
 alone. If you went up there then with a basket 
 and scissors you could always bring home lots of 
 nasturtiums that would maybe keep on growing, 
 and red-and-yellow leaves like the ones that made 
 the letters at the station. And once they found a 
 kitten, a little gray kitten, that was so starved and 
 gaunt and heart-breaking that they had to hurry 
 home with it as fast as ever they could, so as 
 not to cry out loud about it before they got 
 there. 
 
 So this afternoon, while Mother was dashing 
 around trying to get to her Ladies' Aid in time, 
 Naomi had suggested to Cousin Quincy that it 
 
 220
 
 DEVIL'S HALL 22t 
 
 would be nice to cross the bridge to Allenwood and 
 get her some flowers. 
 
 " Can I take Cousin Quincy out to hunt flowers, 
 Mother ? " Naomi asked, and Mother was in such a 
 Ladies' Aid hurry that she never asked where. She 
 just said, " All right, sweetheart. Be good children 
 and don't go far," and hurried off, and they took the 
 big basket and went as straight as they could over 
 'the Allenwood bridge. 
 
 There was a long stretch of the emptied houses 
 along the side of the lake, with now and then one 
 that somebody lived in all winter. This made it 
 very heart-beating and adventurous, because you 
 never could tell which mightn't be a lived-in house, 
 with some one to call out of an unexpected window, 
 " Go away, you children ! " very crossly. 
 
 Quincy had the trowel. Naomi ought to have 
 carried it, because she was seven and he was only 
 six, but today she had been absent-minded, and he 
 had pounced on it. She let him have it, because 
 she knew he would sit down flat if she insisted on 
 her rights, and she was in a special hurry to get to 
 Allenwood. The truth was, she was carrying a 
 Dark Secret that day instead of the trowel a Dark 
 Secret and a Quest. She was looking for Devil's 
 Hall.
 
 222 DEVIL'S HALL 
 
 When deacons came to see Father you could 
 always be sure of hearing something interesting if 
 you sat mousy-quiet and let them forget you were 
 there. This had been a very vehement deacon, the 
 one who told Father about the Devil's Hall. 
 
 " They call it the Devil's Hall down in the vil 
 lage," said the deacon quite unmistakably, pounding 
 the armchair hard, " and it looks it. Respectably- 
 married couple," he went on louder, " and every 
 minute he's out of the house she does exactly what 
 she pleases carouses with all the riff-raff in town, 
 and she only nineteen, and he not much older." 
 
 Nineteen seemed quite old to Naomi, but the 
 deacon seemed to think it was young. Naomi won 
 dered how old he was. Ninety, maybe. 
 
 "And what about him?" asked Father, pulling 
 his eyebrows together. 
 
 " It's her money he's living on," said the deacon 
 quite growly-ways, " and he doesn't care as long as 
 he can bum around town on it. Lets her do any 
 thing she's a-mind to." 
 
 Here Naomi had forgotten herself and asked, 
 "What does she a-mind to, Deacon?" So, of 
 course, Father sent her out flying on an errand he 
 knew Naomi knew was made-up. She was sorry, 
 because the deacon looked as if he was just going
 
 DEVIL'S HALL 223 
 
 to pound again. But, anyway, she had enough to 
 go on, so she arranged things as quick as she could 
 to go see, Mother being in a hurry to get to the 
 Ladies' Aid and all. 
 
 " What do you think it looks like? " asked Quincy 
 when they were well on their way, and Naomi had 
 told him all about it. Naomi felt doubtful. 
 
 " I don't know," she said. " Something like the 
 Pilgrim's Progress, maybe." 
 
 " Or the Purgletory Book? " said Quincy, getting 
 excited. The big Dante with the Dore illustrations 
 was his pet picture-book. " Little round pavement- 
 holes to poke people down do you s'pose it would 
 be hot, Cousin ? " 
 
 "No," Naomi said hastily. She was afraid she 
 would frighten him, and, to tell the truth, she felt a 
 little creepy about those Dore manholes herself. 
 But Quincy was not frightened, it appeared, only 
 hungry for sensations. 
 
 " Maybe there'll be legs sticking out of the holes, 
 anyway," he mused hopefully. " Oh, Cousin, here's 
 a splendid lawn ! " 
 
 They both forgot all about their unholy quest, 
 because about this time they happened on a gorgeous 
 house with beds and beds of nasturtiums for all who 
 sought, and a great bushful of red-and-yellow chry-
 
 224 DEVIL'S HALL 
 
 santhemums which Naomi robbed so valiantly that 
 next day there were two vases full for Mother and 
 lots left for Father's sick people. After that Quincy 
 wanted to play he was a train of cars, all up and 
 down the big empty porch, using the pillars for 
 stations. Naomi never could do anything with 
 Cousin Quincy, so she sauntered back into the 
 garden, not to waste time, and played that she was 
 a princess with golden curls. Every little while she 
 would try to detach Cousin Quincy from his rail 
 road, but it was nearly dark before she could coax 
 him to come away from the porch and on home. It 
 was quicker to go on and across the lower bridge 
 than to go back. 
 
 But all the big, empty, shadowy houses looked 
 suddenly as if they didn't like them, and would do 
 frightening things to them if they could and as if 
 perhaps they could. Naomi caught Quincy's hand, 
 and he held hers tight, and they hurried a little 
 faster and began to talk about all the warm, home, 
 lighted things they knew, the fire and supper and 
 the collie, and what Mother would say. They did 
 not talk any more, either of them, about Devil's 
 Hall. But all the empty houses looked as if they 
 might just might and it got relentlessly darker, 
 and they hurried on a little faster still. It felt as if
 
 DEVIL'S HALL 225 
 
 Mother and the fire and the collie were hundreds of 
 miles away, instead of a scant half-mile. 
 
 They were almost to the bridge when Quincy 
 gave a tug away from Naomi's hand, and went on 
 alone in brave masculine independence. Naomi 
 looked the way he was looking, and then she felt 
 all cheered up, and as if Mother and the bread-and- 
 milk were certainties, not vague incredible hopes. 
 There was a lovely white stucco house sitting up 
 gallantly between two darkened ones, all lighted like 
 the parsonage when there was a sociable. Naomi 
 took a long look and prepared to go on again. But 
 not so Quincy. 
 
 " Want-a-drink-o'-water ! " he proclaimed, making 
 straight for the drive of the lighted house. Naomi 
 liked the bright lights as much as he did, but she 
 wanted to get home. 
 
 " Aw, no you don't, Quincy," she coaxed. " No 
 you don't. You just think you do. Don't you want 
 to get back and have hot cocoa and bread-and-milk ? 
 You don't want a drink." 
 
 " Want-a-drink-o'-water ! " insisted Quincy un 
 convinced, showing signs of sitting down flat. So 
 she gave in, and followed him up the drive, up the 
 steps to the door, nearly as frightened of the asking 
 for a drink as she would have been of the dark.
 
 226 DEVIL'S HALL 
 
 She was shy and besides she thought the people 
 might take them for beggars and be cross to them. 
 
 Quincy found the bell and held it a long time. 
 Naomi could feel him straightening out his company 
 manners there in the dark. Cousin Quincy had 
 been born with a complete set of perfect manners 
 which he could use whenever they were needed. 
 Naomi was very proud of them, because her own 
 were painfully handmade, and sometimes buried by 
 shyness when she wanted them the worst. 
 
 The door opened. 
 
 " I beg your pardon," said Cousin Quincy, with 
 his yellow-brown curls scarcely l^vel to the door 
 knob as he took off his cap with a sweep, " but can I 
 ask you for a drink-o'-water ? " 
 
 The big gray-haired Irish maid at the door looked 
 down on him with affectionate admiration. People 
 generally did look at little Cousin Quincy that way, 
 till they had charge of him for a day. 
 
 " Ye can indeed," she said, " and the little girl 
 with ye. Come into the hall, childer, it's cold 
 standin' outside." 
 
 " I am Pastor Ainslie's little nephew, and this is 
 Naomi," volunteered Quincy sedately as they slid 
 thankfully into the warm brightness. 
 
 "A priest's childer, is it?" she said, by which
 
 DEVIL'S HALL 227 
 
 Naomi knew that she was a Roman Catholic and 
 felt sorry for her. She did not say anything, 
 though. It's rude to try to convert people unless 
 you know them quite well, and she was shy, besides. 
 " Well, priest's children or no, ye've pretty manners 
 and a pretty face, darlin'. Come in, both of ye, an' 
 get yer drink." 
 
 But before they could follow her a crowd of 
 people cascaded from the dining-room (the children 
 could see the table back of them) and out into the 
 hall where they stood. 
 
 Of course, Mother was the prettiest lady in the 
 world. Father said so, and you could see it for 
 yourself besides. But the Big Girl who was running 
 out of the dining-room in the middle of ever so 
 many big boys was undoubtedly a more exciting per 
 son to look at. They placed her as a Big Girl, not 
 a grown-up lady, because she was running, and be 
 cause all her beautiful doll-colored hair was all in 
 a twist down her back with hairpins sticking in it, 
 as if she had been trying to pin it up, they thought, 
 and couldn't. She had bright pink cheeks and very 
 red lips and her eyelashes were like a doll's too, all 
 flary and black, with funny, pretty bead things on 
 the ends. Naomi felt a little hurt to think Mother 
 hadn't any beads on her lashes. In between the Big
 
 228 DEVIL'S HALL 
 
 Girl was very white, nose and forehead and chin. 
 But her face looked like a little girl's somehow, 
 underneath; not as grown-up as Quincy's looked, 
 even, when he was thinking hard. The boys with 
 her were dressed all sorts of mussy-ways, two in 
 sweaters and one in a shirtwaist and trousers, and 
 one in a dress-suit. But the Big Girl had on the 
 sort of a dress Naomi had always intended to buy 
 herself when she was a Big Girl, too. It was pink 
 satin with a low neck and short sleeves and a trail, 
 and yes even to the pink satin slippers her dream 
 was complete! Just that way she had always been 
 going to come down to breakfast when she was old 
 enough and had money. She was glad somebody 
 else had that much sense. It always seemed strange 
 to her that Mother never should. 
 
 " Cousin! " whispered Quincy loudly, pulling 
 Naomi's dress. " Are they a Bible Class? " 
 
 Naomi couldn't see why they all laughed as loud 
 as ever they could. It wasn't polite, and besides, 
 she had been wondering herself whether they were a 
 Bible Class or a Brotherhood. You had to keep 
 Bible Classes and Brotherhoods up with Sociables 
 or they fell off anybody knew that much. (Naomi 
 never found out where they fell to, though she used 
 to wonder. )
 
 DEVIL'S HALL 229 
 
 " Sure, we're a Bible Class, kiddies," said the big 
 one in the red sweater, the one who should have 
 shaved before he came. "We're Dimples' Bible 
 Class aren't we, Dimples? " 
 
 Everybody laughed again, and looked at the Big 
 Girl, but she only gave them all little pushes and 
 slaps, and then made a swoop and hugged Quincy. 
 
 "Aren't they the sweetest?" she said; and her 
 little-girl face looked younger than ever. " Who 
 are you, children? Where'd they come from, 
 Honoria?" 
 
 " They came askin' a drink for the boy, Miss 
 Dorothy," the big gray-haired maid answered 
 shortly. 
 
 "Aren't they dears?" said the Big Girl again, 
 keeping her arm around Quincy, who bore it 
 politely, only stiffening a little. " What are your 
 first names, little girl? " 
 
 Naomi told her. " And if Quincy could just have 
 a drink we won't bother you any more," she said 
 worriedly, for she could see the dark through the 
 door-lace, racing to get things black all over, before 
 Quincy got his drink. " He would come in." 
 
 " So he shall come in," said the Big Girl, un 
 buttoning his reefer quickly, and throwing it and 
 his cap on the floor, then starting on Naomi. " He
 
 230 DEVIL'S HALL 
 
 shall have a drink and some cakies and be my little 
 sweetheart! Get the bowl and the glasses now, 
 Nora dear, and the cakes, and bring them straight 
 into the parlor this minute." 
 
 Naomi approved of that Big Girl. She was doing 
 something else she'd always wanted to do: having 
 things when you wanted them instead of waiting for 
 the proper time. And all you wanted. She watched 
 Quincy and Naomi eat the cakes the way you watch 
 a kitten drink milk. They were beautiful pink and 
 yellow confectionery cakes, the very-dear kind 
 Mother couldn't afford. Then she got Quincy his 
 drink herself. He only took a tiny bit. Naomi 
 had known perfectly well he wasn't thirsty, only 
 wanted to get in out of the dark! 
 
 "Don't you want some of this, too?" said the 
 Big Girl, running over to the big glass bowl Honoria 
 had brought in, all full of red lemonade. Indeed 
 they did, both of them. It was much better than 
 water, or even cocoa. It had a lovely, unexpected 
 taste. After they had it Naomi felt suddenly very 
 quiet, and like going into a corner and sitting down 
 and watching everything. It seemed to her as if 
 she could hear and see and smell everything much 
 better, only it was all like a picture, somehow, not 
 real exactly. So she sat down on a hassock off in
 
 DEVIL'S HALL 231 
 
 the corner and watched the picture go on, especially 
 the Big Girl and Quincy. They seemed to like each 
 other very much. The red lemonade hadn't made 
 him quiet or sleepy at all, which was queer, because 
 it was getting near his bedtime. His cheeks were all 
 flushed, almost as pink as the Big Girl's, only a 
 different color, somehow, and his brown eyes were 
 like stars. He and the Big Girl were chattering 
 away to each other with all the boys around them. 
 Some were standing and smoking, and some were 
 on the floor smoking, and two were smoking on the 
 arms of the Big Girl's chair, with their own arms 
 back of her close. 
 
 One of them came over and began to talk to 
 Naomi, but he talked as if she were a ridiculous 
 little thing, and she didn't feel like bothering to 
 speak, somehow. So she didn't answer much, and 
 he went away, and Naomi kept on watching things 
 happen like a big talking picture-book. The Big 
 Girl had one of the boys start the phonograph, and 
 then they danced in a sort of ring, going two ways 
 and changing hands, some of the boys with hand 
 kerchiefs on their arms, making ridiculous noises 
 and pretending to be girls. That was very funny. 
 The Big Girl had Quincy dance, too, and showed 
 him how. Then they sat down again, and Quincy
 
 232 DEVIL'S HALL 
 
 sang for them. He wouldn't always do that for 
 people. He sang " I'm a Little Pilgrim " and " A 
 Kitten Once to Its Mother Said." 
 
 While he was in the middle of the singing, going 
 ahead as fast and as loud as you could possibly 
 want, and they clapping their hands and laughing at 
 him, another boy came in. He slid in softly, as if 
 he didn't belong there as much as the rest did. He 
 was thin and a little tired-looking, with eyes as big 
 as Naomi's and Quincy's, only set way deep. He 
 sat down quietly a little behind the rest. The Big 
 Girl didn't make a fuss over him the way she had 
 over the others. She jerked her shoulder at him as 
 if she was cross, and began to talk very fast and low 
 to another boy to make him laugh. 
 
 The boy closest to Naomi snickered a little. 
 
 "There's the Master-of-the-House again," he 
 said, low, and the one he said it to snickered too. 
 So Naomi supposed that was another joke, like the 
 Bible Class. 
 
 Quincy finished singing. He had done splendidly, 
 as loud as loud, and never a word forgotten. Naomi 
 was proud of him. 
 
 " Well, you are a clever little devil," said one of 
 the boys, reaching out and patting at him. Quincy 
 jerked away.
 
 DEVIL'S HALL 233 
 
 " That a-minds me," he said very quickly so they 
 wouldn't notice the jerk. 
 
 " What a-minds you, you cunning thing? " asked 
 the Big Girl. 
 
 " About the devil. I want to find Devil's Hall. 
 So does Naomi. It's up here. Naomi heard a 
 deacon tell her farver." 
 
 Everybody began to laugh again, very loud, as 
 if what he said was awfully funny, funnier than 
 about the Bible Class. 
 
 "What's it look like, kiddy?" asked the boy in 
 the red sweater. 
 
 " I don't know," said Quincy. " Naomi fought it 
 was like Pilgrim's Progress, with little pointy flames 
 under the door. I fought it was like my Purgletory 
 Book. That has holes and fire and legs sticking up, 
 and curly devils poking in the legs wiv forks. An' 
 there's people in it, married. She's only nineteen, 
 but she has riff-raffs very badly. And he has her 
 purse, wiv all her money in it, so all he cares is to 
 bun around town," finished Quincy, repeating 
 Naomi conscientiously. "How do you bun, Miss 
 Dimples? " he broke off to ask the Big Girl. " Is 
 it nice?" 
 
 But the Big Girl had been biting hard to keep her 
 mouth stiff all the time Quincy was telling about it.
 
 234 DEVIL'S HALL 
 
 When he stopped she just let go. She turned and 
 gave the two boys on the arms of her chair two, 
 quick, cross, temper-pushes and jerked herself 
 around so her face was against the velvet chair- 
 back, and suddenly cried and cried and cried. Her 
 shoulders, all white out of the lovely pink satin 
 gown, shook hard, and her long rope of doll- 
 colored hair came more untwisted and hung down 
 nearly loose. 
 
 Then suddenly Naomi found why the sweater- 
 boy had called the tired one the Master-of-the- 
 House. It was because he was. He walked up by 
 her chair so fast you scarcely saw him get there, 
 into the middle of the boys, right by Quincy, who 
 was watching and looking uncomfortable but inter 
 ested. But that was the way they all looked. 
 
 The Master-of-the-House dropped his hand 
 down quick on the Big Girl's shoulder. 
 
 " Go home, you fellows," he said in a quick, deep- 
 down sort of a way Naomi thought was rude. He 
 stood there straight and stiff with his eyes burrow 
 ing way into them. He kept on standing and she 
 kept on crying, and nobody said anything, but began 
 to slide out in the mousy-quietest way. 
 
 That is, all but one. The big boy in the red 
 sweater stayed. He laughed a little.
 
 DEVIL'S HALL 235 
 
 " Go, if you please," said the Master-of-the- 
 House. It sounds polite, but it wasn't, the way he 
 said it. The sweater-boy stuck his hands in his 
 pockets. 
 
 "Waiting for Dimples," he said impudently. 
 " She's going for a little trip with me tonight. 
 Might as well break it to you now as any time. 
 Come on, honey. He wants your house to him 
 self." 
 
 "Dorothy!" said the Master-of-the-House as if 
 something had hurt him. 
 
 " No, no, no ! " she said. 
 
 Naomi never knew which she said it to. The 
 sweater-boy ran over to her and dropped down by 
 the chair and began to talk fast. He looked very 
 handsome, but black-catty, somehow. " Come, 
 honey," he said. " Come now what do you 
 care?" 
 
 " No no I won't after all ! " she said from 
 against the chair-back. 
 
 " He doesn't care for you," he said. " I told 
 you. He never had any use for anybody but Marge 
 Stuart. He married you to get back at her. I 
 told you ! " he said. 
 
 She gave a sort of little moan at that. 
 
 " I'll go I'll go ! " she said, and started to get up.
 
 236 DEVIL'S HALL 
 
 But the Master's hand on her shoulder was hold 
 ing her down. 
 
 "You brute!" said the Master-of-the-House. 
 " Is that the way you did it? Get out of this place 
 before I throw you out ! " 
 
 The sweater-boy lifted himself and started to go, 
 for anybody would unless they were very brave, the 
 way the Master looked. But he stopped at the door. 
 
 " It's true enough," he said sulkily. " And you 
 might as well let her go now as any time. She needs 
 somebody to be good to her, poor kid ! " 
 
 " You'd better go," said the Master-of-the-House 
 softly and coming up to him close. 
 
 So he went and the door clicked shut behind him. 
 
 The Master-of-the-House came back and stood 
 over her again. 
 
 " It isn't true ! " he said. 
 
 " Isn't it, Laurie? " she said from the chair-back. 
 " They all said so they told me all the time ! 
 Girls and all. If it's true I shall go. Not with 
 Jack, maybe, but I'll go ! Oh, Laurie, I didn't mind 
 when I thought it was the money. Lots of people 
 
 marry for money. But Marge " She began to 
 
 sob softly again. 
 
 He looked as if he had made up his mind to do 
 something dreadful. He started to speak twice be-
 
 DEVIL'S HALL 237 
 
 fore he could. At last he did speak, in a queer, 
 stiff voice. 
 
 " I guess I'd better tell the truth, Dorothy. It 
 wasn't the money. It was Margaret Stuart. But 
 oh, Dorothy, it it isn't, any more! It is you. 
 Dorothy, couldn't you forgive me, or just stay 
 with me a little longer, and think it over? Just a 
 little while ! Because I don't suppose you can be 
 lieve it but it is you, now." 
 
 She didn't say anything. But she slipped her 
 hand out where his could get it if he wanted it. 
 
 He did. He almost pounced on it, and held it 
 tight with both his hands. And she held tight, too, 
 and cried some more. 
 
 " If you really cared ! " she said, all muffled still. 
 
 You never saw anything so surprised as he 
 looked. 
 
 " Dorothy ! " he said. " You don't mean you 
 could care for me ! " 
 
 He dropped down on his knees beside the chair, 
 and reached out and pulled her head round to his 
 shoulder instead of the chair-back. 
 
 She kept right on crying while he turned her, and 
 Naomi saw her face, all screwed up, and more like a 
 little girl's than ever. One cheek wasn't pink any 
 more, and the other was all cry-streaks. But the
 
 238 DEVIL'S HALL 
 
 Master-of-the-House didn't mind. He only kept 
 on saying over and over 
 
 " My poor little girl ! My poor little girl ! Did 
 you care as much as that ? " and patting her shoul 
 der steadily as if she was a baby. 
 
 " I thought you didn't want me ! " she said. 
 
 Of course it all came out mixed with crying, but 
 Naomi could tell what she meant, and so could the 
 Master-of-the-House. " I thought you didn't care 
 and I tried to make you care and you wouldn't, and 
 I thought you didn't want me ! " 
 
 She said that over and over again, too. Naomi 
 could see his arms pull round her so tight they 
 nearly sank in. 
 
 " Want you ! " he said. " Because I hadn't any 
 business to say anything because it was all your 
 money ! " 
 
 They both began to talk at once, telling each 
 other that they did want each other. They were 
 not paying any attention to Quincy, so he had 
 strayed off to a table where there was another plate 
 of the lovely cakes, and was eating lots more with 
 out asking. Then he yawned and looked around for 
 a sofa. Naomi knew what that meant. If Quincy 
 once got to sleep you couldn't waken him till morn 
 ing. You had to walk him to bed that way.
 
 DEVIL'S HALL 239 
 
 But it was so hard for Naomi to move and stop 
 the far-off picture-book feeling that he was actually 
 on the sofa and nearly fast asleep before she could 
 get over to him and pry him off and walk him to 
 the hall door. 
 
 She looked back a little as they marched out. 
 The Big Girl and the Master-of-the-House were 
 still holding tight and saying, " I do ! I do ! I do ! " 
 and " Never ! Never ! Never ! " They must have 
 wanted each other very much. 
 
 Looking over her shoulder that way, Naomi ran 
 Quincy almost straight into Honoria, who must 
 have been listening. Maids do, Mother had told 
 her. They don't know why they shouldn't. She 
 had been crying, too, till there was a big cata- 
 corner piece of her apron all wet and crumply. 
 These people struck Naomi as being different from 
 the ones she usually saw. They cried more. But 
 you're always coming across new kinds of people 
 when you're seven. 
 
 " You're the only grown-up person here, 
 aren't you?" Naomi asked her, as nicely as she 
 could. 
 
 Honoria seemed very easily surprised. 
 
 " It's heaven's own truth," she said. " I'm the 
 only grown person that is in the house or iver was,
 
 240 DEVIL'S HALL 
 
 unless it plight be yer two little old-fashioned 
 selves." 
 
 "Would you mind taking us home, then?" 
 Naomi said. " Quincy won't wake up again to 
 night, and it takes somebody big to walk him over 
 the curbs and round the corners when he's asleep." 
 
 " Take ye home ? " said Honoria. " Av course 
 I'll take ye home. Tis a small thing to be doin' fer 
 a guardeen angel an' his sister ! " 
 
 She buttoned Quincy expertly into his reefer and 
 dropped his cap on just right, while Naomi put her 
 own hat and jacket on. Then Honoria got her own 
 things, and took Quincy by the shoulder and Naomi 
 by the hand, and they started for home. 
 
 When the outside air struck Quincy he woke a 
 little. 
 
 "Want go Devil's Hall!" he said crossly. 
 " Want see legs stickin' up ! " 
 
 " Whisht, darlin' ! " said Honoria, guiding him 
 down the steps as cleverly as if she had walked little 
 boys in their sleep all her life. " I don't think ye'll 
 iver see any Devil's Hall over here, ner any legs 
 stickin' up, foriver an' iver amen. An* ye've only 
 yersilf to blame." 
 
 Naomi did not see how he was to blame at all. 
 She was going to tell Honoria so. But as she picked
 
 DEVIL'S HALL 241 
 
 him up and kissed him hard as soon as she said it, 
 she evidently did not think he was so very bad. So 
 Naomi held to her skirt and said nothing at all. 
 
 But though they looked and looked the next time 
 they went up that way, Quincy and Naomi, and 
 Quincy called on Honoria and got to be great 
 friends with her by and by, she was quite right. 
 They never did find any Devil's Hall.
 
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