THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES


 
 THE THOROUGHBRED
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 By 
 HENRY KITCHELL WEBSTER 
 
 AUTHOR OF 
 
 The Real Adventure, The Painted Scene, etc. 
 
 WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY 
 
 W. B. KING 
 
 INDIANAPOLIS 
 
 THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY 
 PUBLISHERS
 
 COPYRIGHT 1917 
 THE BOBBS-MEUKILL COMPANY 
 
 PRESS OF 
 
 BRAUNWORTH & CO. 
 
 BOOK MANUrACTURERS 
 
 BROOKLYN. N. Y.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I OK EDGE 1 
 
 II THE INSULT 21 
 
 III THE MORNING AFTER ..... 47 
 
 IV EXPLORATION 73 
 
 V THE NEW WORLD 95 
 
 VI WHEN HE CAME HOME 134 
 
 VII INTERLUDE ... . . . . 145 
 
 VIII GERMINATION 168 
 
 IX ALFRED, MEANWHILE 178 
 
 X INTERVENTION 211 
 
 XI IN THE DARK 228 
 
 XII THE ELEVENTH HOUR 242 

 
 THE THOROUGHBRED
 
 THE 
 THOROUGHBRED 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 ON EDGE 
 
 WHEN Celia heard his latch-key, she sang 
 out from her room, the open door of which 
 was at the head of the stairs : 
 
 "You'll have to fly, Fred. It's a quarter to seven 
 and they're coming at half past." 
 
 A minute later, realizing that he had not an 
 swered, that there had indeed been no sound at all 
 since the click of the closing door, she called : 
 "It's you, isn't it?" 
 
 "Yes, it's me," she heard him say. And then 
 came the swish of his evening papers and the clat 
 ter of the big buttons on his overcoat as he dumped 
 
 1
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 it carelessly on the oak settle at the foot of the 
 stairs. 
 
 But there was another silence after that. What 
 ever was he doing down there? She even arrested 
 the movement of her lamb's-wool so that she could 
 listen better. Then, with a frown (not an ill- 
 tempered frown; a rueful one of exasperated pa 
 tience, which one saw pretty often in her face when 
 she was talking to, or about, her husband) she 
 started toward the door to investigate. But before 
 she had taken more than a step or two in that direc 
 tion she heard him lumbering up and went back to 
 her dressing-table. 
 
 The glimpse of the doorway that she got in her 
 mirror showed her that he had stopped there, but 
 even without that, she could have felt him looking 
 at her. So, without turning, she greeted him with 
 a good-humored "Hello," and added, "You heard 
 what I said, didn't you? It's nearly seven and 
 they're coming at half past." 
 
 "Are there people coming to dinner? All right." 
 
 His voice was stiff with preoccupation hardly
 
 ON EDGE 
 
 articulate. He might have been talking in his 
 sleep. 
 
 She shot a glance at him over her shoulder. 
 "You don't mean to say you'd forgotten all about 
 the dinner, Fred!" 
 
 In that same level voice, with neither surprise 
 nor contrition in it, he admitted that he had. "But 
 it's all right," he repeated. "There's plenty of 
 time." 
 
 "Not if you want to shave in the guest's bath 
 room," she warned him. "You'll have to be out of 
 there with all your lathery things, and clear up 
 after yourself, before a quarter past, because the 
 Colliers are driving out from town and they may be 
 a little early. And I can't spare Marie to pick up 
 after you, because I'm going to use her myself." 
 
 He said "All right" again, in that same dull, 
 half-conscious sort of way, so that she whipped 
 round upon him energetically. 
 
 "For heaven's sake, Fred, wake up and be hu 
 man! Go down-stairs and get yourself a drink. 
 That sleep-walking way of yours is growing on you 
 
 3
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 and you've no idea how maddening it is !" She 
 made as if to turn back to her dressing-table, but 
 faltered. "Nothing's happened, I suppose," she 
 said. 
 
 He answered, "No. Nothing's happened." And 
 added below his breath, "That's it." 
 
 She didn't hear the last two words and would 
 hardly have understood them if she had. But the 
 look and the tone were unmistakable. 
 
 "Oh, I know, you poor old dear !" she said. She 
 meant her voice to sound sympathetic, but in spite 
 of herself, the words came out petulantly, and a 
 realization of this made her add, "You know, don't 
 you, Fred, that I wouldn't keep you going like this 
 if I didn't think it was really good for you to buck 
 up and forget your worries for a while? You do 
 slump so when we're just together and there's noth 
 ing to do. And I know that doesn't help you, and 
 it's deadly for me. Don't you think you're better 
 in the morning if you've forgotten to worry for a 
 while at night? You don't think I'm just a selfish 
 beast, do you?" 
 
 4
 
 ON EDGE 
 
 He said, "No. It's all right. I'll buck up and 
 enjoy your party." But instead of going out of 
 the room, he came into it ; came up close behind her 
 and took her bare arms in his hands. "There's 
 time enough to give a chap a kiss, isn't there?" 
 
 She recognized his attempt to make the request 
 sound good-humored and casual; as if what he 
 asked for were nothing but the affectionate symbol 
 good manners entitled him to. But even without 
 the tell-tale evidence afforded by the edge in his 
 voice and the look of his eyes in the mirror, just 
 on the basis of long experience with him, she'd have 
 known better. There seemed always to be some 
 thing very inviting about her for him at just this 
 stage of her toilet; it was the contrast, perhaps, 
 between what was so completely finished and what 
 was not yet begun, that added piquancy to her 
 other charms ; between the highly professional "do" 
 on her hair (it was reddish brown, but you needed 
 a strong light to be made aware of the downright 
 red there was in it. Under a milder illumination 
 its brown looked merely warm. She had a lot of it 
 
 5
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 and it was, perhaps, the chief item of her good 
 looks, though her features were neatly chiseled and 
 regular enough to support the attention her hair 
 and the color of her skin attracted) and the tum 
 bled recklessness of her kimono. And then the 
 background; over the foot of the bed the rose-red 
 dinner-gown which her silk stockings and satin 
 slippers matched, the sumptuous, scented array of 
 toilet articles on the dressing-table, the costly, 
 fluffy, feminine things that hung out of the half- 
 open bureau drawers. Even through his preoccu 
 pation as he stood in the doorway, she'd been aware 
 pleasantly aware, too that he was taking it 
 all in. 
 
 But as he came up close and took hold of her she 
 leaned a little forward for a closer inspection of her 
 face in the mirror, and answered his request for a 
 kiss with the remark : 
 
 "You rode out in the smoker to-night, didn't 
 you? What unspeakable sort of things do they 
 smoke in places like that?" 
 
 His arms fell at his sides and he stepped back. 
 6
 
 ON EDGE 
 
 Indeed the impact of a good muscular push would 
 have been no more effective of her purpose. She 
 added in a tone of fretful apology, "There isn't 
 time to fool, Fred, really. It's seven o'clock. Do 
 run along." 
 
 She knew quite well that it was not because he 
 smelled smoky, nor because there wasn't time for 
 the embrace he wanted, that she had turned him out 
 like that. If she'd been more indifferent and less 
 in love with him, she wouldn't have minded. 
 
 It was a very old instinct in her, as old as any 
 thing about herself that she could remember as 
 old as the first starched frock of her childhood, to 
 hate being rumpled. She knew that. But she did 
 not at all realize the first-class importance of it. 
 Her whole development during more than a score of 
 years had been profoundly modified by it. It is in 
 teresting to speculate whether the instinct worked 
 from within out, or from without in. Was it, to be 
 gin with, just a sensuous, tactile delight in smooth 
 surfaces of fine texture that kept her aloof, in her 
 play, from all that clasped tight, gripped hard 
 
 7
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 and left marks and creases? And had the thing 
 gradually worked in to her soul? Or was the child 
 ish impulse to keep everything at arm's length and 
 finger's tip, the outer sign, merely, of something 
 that lay, from the beginning, at the very core of 
 her? It matters very little. The important thing 
 is that the two surfaces of her, the outer and the 
 inner, corresponded whichever it was that had 
 shaped the other and that they both were only 
 surfaces. 
 
 It had not been, in her childhood, that she lacked 
 energy to play, didn't want to play; and it occa 
 sionally happened that the energy bottled up 
 reached a pressure and the want an urgency that 
 carried her off, had her crumpled, panting before 
 she knew it. When that happened, she ran wild 
 for a while. Well, no more was it, now she was 
 grown, that she was incapable of strong emotions. 
 Nor was it the emotions themselves that she re 
 sented ; it was their power to tumble and ruffle that 
 smooth, fine-grained surface of hers. She hated 
 being made to cry, or blush, or tremble, hated the 
 
 8
 
 ON EDGE 
 
 drum of the pulse in her throat and ears. So, when 
 she could, she held at arm's length experiences she 
 suspected of the power to produce these effects. 
 
 Like most radical instincts, it seldom obtruded 
 on her consciousness. She'd have denied, quite sin 
 cerely, that it had anything to do with the major 
 decisions of her life ; with, to take the supreme case, 
 her marriage with Alfred Blair. But it did have a 
 lot to do with it. It also explained the slight sensa 
 tion of surprise that ran around her circle of friends 
 when her engagement to him was announced. 
 
 He was perfectly eligible, of course. Only not 
 just the man they'd have expected Celia French, 
 with her exaggerated fastidiousness, to select. 
 
 Alfred Blair was a man of whom every one spoke 
 well. But, in speaking well of him, they were 
 likely to use rather uninviting adjectives self- 
 made, steady, industrious. 
 
 He was steady and industrious, and the adjective 
 self-made was, perhaps, justified by the fact that 
 though he was a licensed architect, and a skilful 
 engineer, he was ornamented by no college degrees. 
 
 9
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 He'd finished up his formal education in one of 
 Chicago's technical high schools, got a job at nine 
 teen with a firm of contracting engineers that spe 
 cialized in grain-elevators and certain other forms 
 of warehouses, factories and markets. At twenty- 
 five, when his big opportunity came, he had the 
 audacity to grasp it; borrowed every cent of his 
 mother's little fortune, and launched himself in a 
 similar business of his own. His first big contract, 
 which had given him his opportunity, had enabled 
 him to pay back his mother's loan with a consider 
 able increment as her share of the profits (he had 
 insisted upon this) and left him established. At 
 thirty-five, when he and Celia were married, he had 
 ten successful years behind him and the assured 
 sense of power that success brings. 
 
 A man of more exuberant manners, on the 
 strength of a record like that, would have been 
 called brilliant. Blair's quiet, steady, unorna- 
 mental way made the adjective impossible; caused 
 him to be summed up, by casual acquaintances at 
 10
 
 ON EDGE 
 
 least, in a set of terms which didn't account for him 
 at all. 
 
 The thing that made it all the easier for persons 
 who had mastered a social skill to patronize him, 
 was that he was much too open-minded to despise 
 the things he knew he lacked and too simple to 
 pretend to a mild contempt of them. He wasn't 
 ashamed to show an almost wistful admiration of 
 and desire for the graces and refinements of life. 
 Which accounted amply, of course, for his falling 
 in love with Celia French. 
 
 But what attraction had he for Celia? The less 
 affectionate of her acquaintances had, of course, an 
 explanation ready to hand. The Frenches had 
 never been so well-to-do as they tried to look. Celia 
 had never had a proper dress allowance and had 
 had to do a lot of contriving even to go through 
 the motions of paying off her social obligations. 
 Here was a decently presentable man with plenty of 
 money. It was as simple as two and two. 
 
 Her real friends resented this imputation hotly. 
 11
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 When you got to know Alfred Blair, you found 
 him singularly attractive. He had such a straight 
 way of looking, and speaking, and doing things. 
 He had a pleasantly modulated voice. He had, ac 
 cording to one or two enthusiasts, real tact and 
 charm. The question whether she'd have married 
 him, had he not been prosperous, was a perfectly 
 barren one. Alfred Blair would never have asked 
 her to. 
 
 But not even her most intimate friends hit upon 
 the one decisive quality about him that had seen the 
 girl, happily and without misgiving, through a 
 three-months' engagement and the beginnings of 
 their married life. This was a touch of timidity 
 about him, almost reverent, that kept him from com 
 ing too close too soon. 
 
 Celia was twenty-six when she met him, and had 
 had experience enough with her own amatory emo 
 tions to believe she understood them. She had been 
 engaged once and half-engaged another time, to 
 say nothing of an indefinite number of young men 
 three or four, anyway who had come up to 
 12
 
 ON EDGE 
 
 the point where she had had to take a line with 
 them. She probably would have engaged herself to 
 marry the second man, had not her break with the 
 first made her wary. 
 
 That experience with her first lover had been a 
 shock. Her promise to marry him had transformed 
 him unbelievably into a stranger, and her feeling 
 for him, which she had confidently diagnosed as 
 true love, had curdled overnight into an active 
 aversion. The thing that led to her dismissal of 
 the second man was a lack of confidence in herself, 
 rather than in him. She'd thought a good deal and 
 asked a few questions, and profound and disquiet 
 ing misgivings were the result. 
 
 And then came Alfred Blair, who put the mis 
 givings to flight. The thing he'd given her first 
 was an unfathomable sense of security. All the 
 facts about him fitted in, of course; that he was 
 older, that he was self-disciplined, and, it can not 
 be denied, that he was prosperous. She tested him, 
 cautiously at first, then with growing confidence. 
 The little privileges she gave him, she freely am 
 id
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 plified when she found he never tried to amplify 
 them for himself. These restraints never led her 
 to doubt the genuineness of his passion for her. 
 That was plain enough for the blind to see. But 
 the will that reined it in was supreme. 
 
 Her new engagement and her marriage were 
 wonderful restoratives to her confidence. She felt 
 her attitude to her two former lovers, which had 
 caused her more doubts and unhappiness than she 
 was willing to admit, triumphantly justified. Her 
 instincts had not been wrong after all. Happiness 
 didn't necessarily hurt nor deface. For a while she 
 was utterly content, and her contentment was spiced 
 by a mild pity for pretty much all the rest of the 
 world, and especially for the girls who had married 
 those two former lovers of hers. 
 
 It was from an unexpected quarter that her 
 Nemesis began creeping up on her the unruly, 
 irrepressible growth within herself of a passion for 
 her husband. She found the fine silken fabric of 
 their life imperiled by impulses of her own that ter 
 rified her. Jealousy was one of them utterly 
 14.
 
 ON EDGE 
 
 without foundation in fact, she knew, which made 
 it all the more terrifying. 
 
 There was little Nora Brice, for example, some 
 where about twenty, whose people had lost all their 
 money, and who, as much from inclination as from 
 necessity, gave dancing lessons. The Blairs and 
 two or three couples of their friends had her in, 
 occasionally, to keep them up to the minute, and 
 she and Alfred had taken an innocently shameless 
 fancy to each other. She laughed at him treated 
 him like a boy, proved to him, to his intense aston 
 ishment, that he could dance as well as anybody, 
 and, under the stimulus of the phonograph, pol 
 ished off a facet of him that nobody had dreamed 
 existed. 
 
 Celia's line, of course, was good-humored amuse 
 ment, and she would, she felt, have been irretriev 
 ably shamed had any one discovered, especially had 
 her husband discovered, the true emotions her 
 manner masked. But she could no more help feel 
 ing those sharp stabs of pain than she could have 
 resisted the neuralgic twinges of a bad tooth. Jeal- 
 15
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 ousy was not the only feeling, either, that shook 
 and gripped and dismayed her. 
 
 So, from whatever motive you like to name it 
 (she tried hard not to name it cowardice), she clung 
 to the thing that had once not been a mask the 
 cool aloofness, the fastidiousness, the kindly af 
 fectionate superiority; went on pointing out, with 
 humorous tolerance, his little mistakes; maintained 
 the position which he had once so eagerly acqui 
 esced in and had never tried to change, that her 
 duty toward him was to refine and civilize him; 
 induce him to appreciate the value of the orna 
 mental and frivolous aspects of life; get him sup 
 pler more, as she used to say, human. 
 
 There had come within the last few months, and 
 within a year of their marriage, a change in him 
 which made this attitude of hers all the harder to 
 maintain. Something seemed to be undermining 
 that quiet confidence in himself which, when she had 
 first met him, had been his most distinguishing 
 characteristic. She knew, of course, that he had 
 business worries, due to the conditions created by 
 16
 
 ON EDGE 
 
 the outbreak of the war. But then, the war had 
 affected everybody. All their friends groaned and 
 joked about their poverty; affected an extravagant 
 ignorance as to where their next meal was coming 
 from. But they all went on living, as far as she 
 could see, in just about the same old way. 
 
 There was no reason to suppose that Fred was 
 any harder hit than the others. Indeed, he talked 
 very much less about hard times than the other men 
 did. He had, two or three times lately, looked 
 pretty solemn over bills, to be sure ; had asked, with 
 no jocular undertone, how much she'd paid for that 
 rose-colored evening frock, and had made a queer 
 noise like an audible shudder, over an offhand re 
 mark of hers about the possibility of trading in 
 their car for a this year's model. 
 
 That she had not taken any of these signs more 
 seriously was due to the fact that she supposed all 
 husbands made themselves unpleasant on the sub 
 ject of domestic expenditure. Her married friends 
 of longer standing seemed to accept this convention 
 quite light-heartedly, and burlesqued a lively terror 
 17
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 over the effect of all of their more ornamental pur 
 chases on their respective husbands. Besides, Celia 
 knew she wasn't extravagant, really. It couldn't 
 be that that plunged her husband into the brooding 
 melancholy that seemed to envelop him whenever 
 circumstances gave it a chance. 
 
 But this belief, quite honestly achieved, didn't 
 help her much; because the melancholy was there. 
 Many a time she'd surprised a haggard look, al 
 most a despairing look, in his eyes, that all but 
 brought the tears to her own. And the impulse 
 that came to get her arms around him tight, to 
 demand to be told what the trouble was all about 
 it clear down to the bottom, would be almost irre 
 sistible. But the fear of losing her own self- 
 control, going to pieces, crying, making a damp, 
 unpleasant little fool of herself, always restrained 
 her had up to to-night at any rate. She'd always 
 stiffened against it. In order not to go soft, she'd 
 become brusk bullied him a little, urged him to 
 cheer up, dragged him off to the theater or a four 
 of bridge with the Calvins around the corner. 
 18
 
 ON EDGE 
 
 Like all situations between intimates, this be 
 tween them was a product of a thousand small ac 
 cretions. Had he come home six months ago with 
 the look she'd seen in his face to-night, her wall of 
 resistance would have been shattered. The troubled 
 flood of compassion pent up within her would have 
 engulfed him. But he wasn't so very different to 
 night from what he had been this morning, or a 
 week ago ; not so different but that she could turn 
 back to the face in the mirror, after telling him to 
 run along, and go on with the minor improvements 
 in it, just as she had been doing when she heard his 
 latch-key. 
 
 Only she eyed that mirrored face now with a 
 hard alertness, as an old sergeant-major might 
 watch a recruit turning blue under fire, daring the 
 eyes to brim, or the lips to tremble. Her hands 
 began trembling and she gripped them together 
 fiercely, then slackened their clasp and set them to 
 work again. 
 
 When Marie, the maid, came up-stairs to hook 
 up the rose-colored gown, the voice in which Celia 
 19
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 questioned her as to the state of preparedness in 
 the dining-room sounded remote and small to her 
 own ears, though to Marie herself, so far as one 
 could tell, it sounded natural enough. 
 
 She stirred sharply a movement like anger 
 when she heard her husband come out of his room 
 and walk steadily down the stairs, without pausing 
 at her now closed door for a word. It was not the 
 omission that made her angry, but the sharp con 
 traction of her own heart that it caused the lump 
 that it brought in her throat.
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 THE INSULT 
 
 IT was eleven o'clock that night before she saw 
 him again, except in the presence of their guests. 
 And during all those hours, whenever her gaze 
 rested upon her husband's face, and whenever his 
 voice came clearly to her ears in a lull of the voices 
 of the others, heart and throat felt that same clutch 
 followed by the same dull sense of outrage that this 
 should be so. And all the while her voice went on 
 sounding small and far away, and her smile felt 
 stiff. 
 
 As a matter of objective fact, she knew that she 
 was in good form. Howard Collier, at her right, 
 being a comparative stranger, did not offer, per 
 haps, a fair test of her powers. He'd probably 
 have been more or less impressed anyway. But that 
 Carter Worthing, on her left Carter, the town 
 21
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 bachelor, who, on coming into his inheritance fifteen 
 years ago, had quit work and devoted himself to 
 the graceful evasion of matrimony that he should 
 betray an uneasy preoccupation with what she was 
 saying to Howard Collier, while Martha Walters, 
 at his left, was trying her prettiest to flirt with him, 
 and should fairly snatch at the smallest straw of an 
 opportunity to turn back to her, was an indication 
 worth paying attention to. 
 
 But the recognition of this fact brought her 
 none of the mild cool elation she'd naturally have 
 felt. It hardened, excited almost exasperated her. 
 It was, perhaps, responsible for the attitude she 
 took when the topic they were all discussing these 
 days came up, the Grahams' divorce. Perhaps, too, 
 it led her to put edge enough into her voice so that 
 all the table stopped to listen, and presently 
 joined in. 
 
 "Oh, I'm not on his side," she said. "I never 
 liked George Graham very well, and hardly knew 
 him at all, anyway. But I don't see what there 
 is to get so excited about. Three years ago, when
 
 THE INSULT 
 
 he married her, Dora Graham was a raving beauty. 
 Look at her now! I don't think it's so very sur 
 prising, what he did." 
 
 Two or three voices took issue with her simul 
 taneously. What was the "for better, for worse" 
 clause in the marriage service for, if not to cover 
 such a case? Did she seriously mean to say (this 
 rather solemnly from Carter) that a wife's loss of 
 her beauty justified her husband in being unfaith 
 ful to her? 
 
 Celia said no, she didn't mean that, of course. 
 "But Dora why Dora was her looks, and her looks 
 were Dora. That's what George Graham married. 
 Everybody knew it. Dora knew it. She wasn't 
 like an ordinary pretty girl. She was a profes 
 sional beauty, really. She never pretended to know 
 anything. She never tried to amuse people. She 
 knew she needn't bother to. She might have been 
 a picture on the wall. Well, I don't say it's her 
 fault that she's lost all that. But certainly it isn't 
 his. And she just isn't the person he married, that's 
 all." 
 
 23
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 It was an outrageous line to take, she knew. 
 She'd seized upon it to satisfy a need in her, which 
 she didn't understand, for something hard and cold 
 and metallic like that. And what she said wouldn't 
 have mattered, had it been engulfed, as she'd ex 
 pected it to be, in the confusion of dinner-table 
 chatter. 
 
 Instead of that, to her consternation, her words 
 were followed, and pointed, somehow, by a moment 
 of dead silence in which they veritably seemed to 
 echo. Something inexplicably kept her from look 
 ing across at her husband. And the panicky reali 
 zation inexplicably, also seized her, that if she 
 didn't look out, she'd cry, right there, before them 
 all make a scene. She, of all people! 
 
 She flashed round on Carter Worthing. "Oh, 
 don't be so solemn," she commanded under her 
 breath. "Say something silly. It's your turn."' 
 
 She couldn't have told afterward whether he had 
 obeyed her or not. But from some quarter or other 
 the talk started again. She got her breath once 
 more. The momentary panic passed. But she felt
 
 THE INSULT 
 
 curiously limp all the rest of the evening, and not 
 once did she meet Fred's eye. 
 
 It was with a mixture of relief and dread that 
 she saw her party beginning to break up. The 
 relief was the stronger, until the front door had 
 closed for the last time. But when it did, she had 
 a wild impulse to rush out and call back that last 
 pair of guests. 
 
 When Fred came back into the drawing-room, 
 and she tried to speak to him, her teeth were chat 
 tering. What she said was quite casual, though, 
 and her voice matched it. 
 
 "Did Howard Collier tell you," she asked, "that 
 they're thinking of coming out here for a year, if 
 they can get a house that's what they want?" 
 
 He said, "I don't know. Yes, I think he did." 
 
 His own voice was absent level lifeless again, 
 just as it had been before she sent him away to 
 dress, and he turned from her and leaned an elbow 
 on the mantelpiece. 
 
 A frantic exasperation took her, but it hid, for 
 a moment, behind a patient sigh and the statement 
 25
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 that since she was very tired she thought she would 
 go to bed. But, against her will, almost certainly 
 against her judgment, she added as she moved to 
 ward the door, "I just can't stand that dead-alive 
 voice and way of yours any more, Fred. I'm sorry, 
 but I can't. I can't stand it !" 
 
 At that he rounded upon her. "You'll have to 
 for a while, I guess," he said, and to her horror, 
 she saw his lips were trembling. His hands he 
 plunged bruskly into his pockets. 
 
 "Sit down," he commanded. "I've got some 
 things to tell you." 
 
 The power of habit is a wonderful thing. 
 Neither her voice, nor its inflection, nor the words 
 she chose, afforded any indication of what was 
 boiling within her. 
 
 She said evenly, "Oh, not to-night, Fred. You're 
 tired and blue, and I'm all edges, somehow. There's 
 no telling what might happen. And it's no good 
 having a scene, when we might be getting a good 
 night's sleep instead." 
 
 "A good night's sleep !" he repeated. "I wonder 
 26
 
 THE INSULT 
 
 when I had one last. I've forgotten. Well I'm 
 through!" 
 
 She sat down more suddenly than was her wont 
 In making such movements, gripped the arm of her 
 chair, and gazed at him with an uncomprehending 
 stare. 
 
 "Through!" she echoed. "Through with what?" 
 
 He jerked his hands from his pockets and flung 
 them out in a frantic gesture. 
 
 "I'm through with this," he shouted. "With 
 everything ! With this damned hell I've been living 
 in !" And then instantly, "I'm sorry. I beg your 
 pardon. You're quite right not to like scenes. I'll 
 try to do better. Here's the fact that concerns you. 
 I'm broke completely broke. I'm at the end of 
 my string the end, that's all." 
 
 She dropped back limply in her chair. "You 
 mean your business is going to fail?" she said 
 shakily. Her eyes filled with tears. "I'm I'm 
 terribly sorry, old man." 
 
 The words, especially the last phrase, hadn't 
 quite the right ring. That was inevitable. Be- 
 27
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 cause, the terrible pang that had gripped her when 
 he shouted that he was through, had been the belief 
 that he meant he was through with her couldn't 
 endure her any longer had fallen in love with 
 some one else. It was not a reasonable belief. Just 
 something that hurt intolerably. 
 
 On the other hand, business failures were phe 
 nomena that were likely to happen to anybody. 
 She didn't precisely understand the nature of them, 
 nor, to tell the truth, why they were taken so seri 
 ously. People went on somehow. Not quite the 
 same for a while, but not so very differently. They 
 gave up going south in the winter, perhaps. The 
 women went about in cabs, instead of having a 
 limousine of their own, and if one had a good 
 memory, one remembered their frocks. 
 
 It would seem harder to face, no doubt, after 
 that horrible alternative she had for a moment con 
 templated, was forgotten. But the thing to do with 
 him just now was to get him quieted down; get 
 him to realize that, after all, the pillars of the 
 world hadn't fallen. 
 
 28
 
 THE INSULT 
 
 But the passion that had caused his outbreak 
 seemed already to have subsided. He went to the 
 smoking-table, picked out a cigar a big expensive 
 cigar, at which he smiled in wry fashion and 
 lighted it. 
 
 "Do you care anything about details ?" he asked. 
 "Or will you just take the situation in a lump as it 
 stands?" 
 
 "I'd like to hear about it, of course," she said, 
 "unless unless, for to-night, you'd rather just 
 forget about it." 
 
 He echoed the word forget with a shiver, but 
 immediately began with a good appearance of com 
 posure, telling her his story. 
 
 "I can't see that it's been my fault. There's 
 nothing, now I think back over it, that I could have 
 done differently, unless I'd actually known how 
 things were coming out. I haven't taken any risks 
 that weren't the legitimate risks of my business. 
 At least, not since I asked you to marry me. I did 
 blow in fifteen thousand the year before that, on a 
 regular wild-cat one of those inventions that's 
 29
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 perfectly sure to make your everlasting fortune 
 and never does. But I could afford to lose it then, 
 and I figured the lesson I learned was cheap at the 
 price. 
 
 "But that hasn't anything to do with the situa 
 tion I'm in now. The thing that's really crippled 
 me happened just after the war. I was half-way 
 through that big Waters-Macdonald contract, when 
 they went into bankruptcy as dry and clean as a 
 lot of old bones. They'd have been on thin ice, I 
 suppose, even without the war, but nobody sus 
 pected that. When that was cleaned up, I was out 
 about a hundred thousand dollars, and there wasn't 
 any other business to get it back with. There was 
 nothing doing in our line of work, of course, for 
 months. The whole business was paralyzed dead. 
 But we all thought it was going to pick up soon 
 and the thing to do seemed to be what everybody 
 was doing, sit tight and wait for the squall to blow 
 over. It meant paying out money all the time, of 
 course, for no return at all, just the advantage of 
 30
 
 THE INSULT 
 
 being there, ready to do business at the old stand 
 when there should be some business to do. 
 
 "I got together all the money I could, mort 
 gaged this house for what it would stand you 
 knew about that and waited. Well, that's what 
 I've been doing ever since. I've had a few good 
 prospects to tease me along, but nothing not one 
 thing, do you understand, has ever come through. 
 Over and over again, I've been the low bidder of 
 half a dozen normal bids, and lost the job because 
 somebody had made a mistake gone wild, bid 
 twenty or thirty per cent, too low. 
 
 "I suppose it's just my luck evening up. I used 
 not to believe in luck. That was because mine was 
 all good. When I saw men go to smash, I used to 
 think that, somehow or other, it must be their own 
 doing. Well, I know better now. Though I sup 
 pose there'll be plenty of people who'll have a rea 
 son for what happened to me, when they know 
 about it. However " 
 
 It rose to her lips to ask what the reason was, 
 31
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 but she hesitated over the question. It couldn't be 
 anything to do with her could it? 
 
 At last he broke the silence. "There's nothing 
 more to tell, really. I stood the siege as long as I 
 could. It's a relief to have got to the end of it. I 
 said I'd hang on to the very last day, and I have. 
 This was it. It's been hell, the waiting, the 
 hoping. Because, of course, every time the post 
 man came in, every time the phone rang, it might 
 be something. Only, it never was. I've been half 
 crazy lately. That accounts for the manner you 
 objected to. Well, it's over, thank God. I've got 
 to the end." 
 
 "But but," she stammered, "things don't end, 
 Fred. They have to keep going somehow. You 
 can't just stop." Her face whitened then, and 
 her mouth dropped open with blank horror, over 
 the realization that there was a way by which a 
 man could just stop. Was that what he meant? 
 
 She tried to hide her terror. "It can't be so bad 
 as it looks to-night, Fred. There must be some 
 thing you can do."
 
 "Well, it's all over, thank God"
 
 THE INSULT 
 
 "Get some more money somewhere, do you mean, 
 to tide me over?" 
 
 She assented with a nod. "There must be ways." 
 
 "There's a way," he said. "My mother's little 
 bit is all in my hands. I could take that, and if the 
 luck changed within the next few months she need 
 never know of it." He eyed her with a ferocious 
 intentness as he made that suggestion. 
 
 She colored. "I meant possible ways," she said. 
 
 At that he turned away and begged her pardon. 
 "There might be possible ways," he said, "one or 
 two just possible." His voice dropped and dulled 
 a little. "And I suppose if I wanted to take them, 
 I would. But I don't. I've had all I can stand." 
 
 She pressed her knuckles against her lips as if 
 that could still their trembling, and tried to gulp 
 down the lump in her throat. The tears were brim 
 ming out of her eyes and trickling down her cheeks, 
 but she thought nothing of that. After a while 
 she managed to say: 
 
 "But but what are you going to do, Fred?" 
 
 "I sold the car to-day," he informed her, "for
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 enough to pay the couple of people I have kept at 
 the office, and the rent I owed down there, and the 
 telephone bill. They came to-day to take it out. I 
 paid up, but told them to go ahead and take it. So 
 there's the end of that." 
 
 "But you! What are you going to do?" 
 
 The words were a cry of undisguised terror that 
 brought him around. He stood for a moment look 
 ing into her face. 
 
 "Oh, not that," he said. "Not what you're 
 afraid of. I've treated you badly enough already, 
 without that. It's bad enough at the best, of 
 course, for you, but there'll be something. There's 
 the house. The equity in that is worth something, 
 if you can realize on it, and the furniture and so 
 on. Perhaps " He shook his head as if per 
 plexed by some memory he couldn't quite get hold 
 of. "Perhaps you could rent it furnished for 
 enough to pay you. And your jewelry might help 
 tide you over until " 
 
 "Tide me over!" She squeezed the tears out of 
 her eyes and stared at him. "Why are you talking 
 34
 
 THE INSULT 
 
 about me? And and what do you mean about 
 having treated me badly already? Tell me that 
 first." 
 
 "Oh, that's plain enough," he said. "It ought 
 to be plain enough to you. False pretenses not 
 up to specifications. It's just as you were saying 
 at dinner to-night. The man you married amounted 
 to something a comfortable, prosperous, solid and 
 reliable sort of ,chap. Well, as you say, I'm not 
 that man. That man's finished. He's gone, and 
 I can't play his game. It's no use. I haven't the 
 nerve for it. I haven't the sand. I'm good for 
 twenty-five dollars a week, perhaps thirty at most, 
 over a drafting-table in some other chap's office, 
 and that lets me out. It's rotten luck for you. I'm 
 sorry about it. That's why I was trying to figure 
 out some way to make it easier. I'll do anything 
 I can anything you want me to do. And you 
 could rely on me not to do anything that would 
 make it harder. You understand, don't you?" 
 
 He was not looking at her while he spoke, but 
 she, to make it impossible for him to do so, pulled 
 85
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 her chair around so that she could lean both elbows 
 on her spinet writing-desk. 
 
 "Yes," she said in a stifled voice, "I guess I do. 
 I'm beginning to get the idea, I think." Her eyes 
 were dry now and her cheeks were burning. "The 
 idea was that the man I married was able to give 
 me a house like this and all the clothes I wanted, 
 and a motor, and so on. That was a part of the 
 marriage service that the minister didn't read. But 
 it was understood just the same. 
 
 "And because that was your contract, you 
 wouldn't tell me how things were going with you, 
 or ask me to economize. Because you never did 
 never, never never once, so that I understood that 
 you meant anything by it. Why, you didn't even 
 joke about being poor now on account of the war, 
 the way the others did. That was your way of liv 
 ing up to specifications, I suppose you'd say. 
 You just let me go right up to the very last day 
 the day when they came to take the telephone. 
 Oh! And then you tell me it's over. 
 36
 
 THE INSULT 
 
 "And now, if I understand what you've been 
 saying, you're showing me how I can pick up 
 what's left out of the wreckage and scuttle back 
 home to father and mother and and this was 
 what you meant about doing anything I wanted 
 that I should get a divorce from you on some pre 
 text that you'd furnish me with, and and try my 
 luck again. And and the jewelry would tide me 
 over until I could find somebody else who'd meet the 
 requirements." 
 
 There was a silence of minutes after that. He 
 stirred two or three times as if he meant to speak, 
 but gave it up. Her way of putting the thing 
 made it impossible for him to admit that she had 
 taken his meaning correctly, but the essential truth 
 of what she had said prevented his denying it. 
 
 Presently she began to cry, put her head down 
 on her arms and sobbed and shook. He sat frozen 
 in his chair at the other end of the room. He didn't 
 dare come near her. He couldn't think of a word 
 to say. After a while a period of time that 
 87
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 seemed endless to him she sat erect again, dried 
 her wet face and began getting control of her 
 breathing. 
 
 The first thing she managed to say was, "I'm 
 sorry to be such a mess. If anything's silly to do, 
 it's to cry. But but an insult like that makes you 
 so sick you can't help yourself." 
 
 He cried out at that. "Celia, I didn't mean it 
 for an insult." 
 
 She choked down another miserable sob and an 
 swered. "I know it. That's what makes it so per 
 fectly unendurable. If you'd said it because you 
 were angry with me and w-wanted to hurt me just 
 as hard as you possibly c-could, it wouldn't be so 
 bad. But you really m-mean it. That's what you 
 th-think I am. That's what you've thought ever 
 since you married me. I suppose I ought to be 
 glad I found out at last." 
 
 He got out of his chair and there was another 
 
 long silence while he walked slowly back and forth 
 
 the length of the room, sometimes with his hands 
 
 in his pockets, sometimes getting them out and 
 
 38
 
 *2 
 
 d 
 
 I
 
 THE INSULT 
 
 squeezing them together, sometimes pausing to look 
 at her where she sat with her back to him, drooping 
 over the little spinet desk (making a wonderfully 
 appealing picture with her rose-colored frock of the 
 new old-fashioned cut, her gay colors and her wo- 
 begone air) and then moving on again. Any one 
 watching him could have seen that a momentous 
 question was struggling within him trying to get 
 itself asked. It is possible that Celia, without look 
 ing at him at all, was aware of this. 
 
 It broke through at last. He said unevenly, 
 "Celia, do you mean that you're still fond of me 
 without without any of the things that were a 
 part of me when we were married? And that you 
 won't mind coming down to twenty-five dollars a 
 week with me? Is that what you mean?" 
 
 She flushed, straightened, whipped round on him 
 in a gale of wrath. "Mind !" she said. "Of course 
 I mind. I mind horribly. I hate it. Poverty's not 
 romantic, and it's not a lark, and there's nothing 
 nice about it, and the virtuous, superior way people 
 act about it makes me tired pretending they like 
 39
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 it, pretending they wouldn't change things if they 
 could. I notice they do change pretty quickly 
 when they can." 
 
 She went on to say a good deal more than that 
 of the same import. She talked about the horror 
 of three-room flats "out on the West Side some 
 where!" She dwelt upon the terrors of makeshift 
 home-made furniture with cretonne tacked on 
 around it, the dismal results of fifty-cent-a-day 
 cookery out of the back pages of domestic maga 
 zines. She brought out the fact that these trials 
 were much less unbearable in the cases of certain of 
 her friends who had at least assumed them with 
 their eyes open. But to be asked if she'd "mind" 
 going and living like that, as the result of an 
 ignominious smash which she, ludicrously and in 
 tolerably, hadn't seen until it was about her ears ! 
 In short, in her tempest of anger, she whipped and 
 cut him where and how she could, and had him 
 looking pretty white and sick before she got 
 through. 
 
 He might have drawn a favorable augury from 
 40
 
 THE INSULT 
 
 all this, but it isn't wonderful that he did not. He 
 failed to remark, in the first place, that she had 
 left the first half of his question unanswered the 
 question whether or not she really was in love with 
 him, himself, rather than with the contented and 
 prosperous citizen he had ceased to be. And, while 
 he saw that she was trying frantically to hurt him, 
 to draw blood wherever she could, snatching at any 
 stinging phrase that would serve her purpose, he 
 was unable to make the simple deduction from this 
 fact that unless she were in love with him very 
 much in love with him the exercise would have 
 afforded her no satisfaction. She'd have been con 
 cerned with her own feelings, not his. 
 
 Her words stumbled at last over a big sob and 
 she pulled up short, visibly got herself in hand, and 
 said very deliberately: 
 
 "What you said was, wasn't it, that you'd do 
 anything you could anything I wanted you to? 
 I mean, as far as I was concerned?" 
 
 He nodded, but, as she wasn't looking at him, he 
 had to speak. It took a struggle to get the words 
 41
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 out of his stiff throat, but he finally managed, "Yes, 
 that's what I said." 
 
 "And you mean it?" she asked. "You'll do it? 
 That's a serious promise?" 
 
 "Yes," he said. "What is it that you want me 
 to do?" 
 
 She told him to wait a minute, she wanted to 
 think. It was with a question that she began, and 
 the nature of it startled him into a staring speech- 
 lessness, so that she had to ask it two or three 
 times. 
 
 "Can you really get that job you were talking 
 about, twenty-five dollars a week or so at a draft 
 ing-table, I think you said? I mean, can you 
 count on it, as much as that a week?" 
 
 Finally he roused himself enough to say, "Yes, I 
 guess so." 
 
 She hesitated over her next question, drew herself 
 up a little more defiantly erect, and made sure she 
 had command of a steady glance and a coldly re 
 mote tone before she asked. 
 
 "If a man and his wife were going to live on
 
 THE INSULT 
 
 that, how much rent could they afford to pay for a 
 flat? They'd live in a flat, wouldn't they? It 
 would be cheaper than a boarding-house? If she 
 did all the work herself of course?" 
 
 "Celia !" he cried. "You mean?" 
 
 "Answer my question," she commanded furi 
 ously. She was furious because she had to look 
 away from him after all. "Would they have a 
 small flat, I mean, instead of a boarding-house?" 
 
 "Yes," he said raggedly, "they would. And they 
 could pay about twenty-five dollars a month for it." 
 Then he came up behind her, not touching her, but 
 leaning close, one hand on the chair-back, the other 
 on the desk beside her. Even so she could feel that 
 he was trembling, and she had a giddy, irrational, 
 terrifying impulse to fling her arms around him 
 around whatever of him was within reach, and press 
 her face against him and cry. 
 
 "Do you mean ?" he asked. "Celia, do you 
 mean that you're going to do it? Going to see it 
 through with me in spite of everything?" 
 
 She flashed from the chair to her feet and backed 
 43
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 away from him. She couldn't see him for the in 
 furiating tears that kept welling over and spilling 
 down her cheeks. 
 
 "Of course I mean it," she said. "What else is 
 there that I can do? It's it's not because I'm 
 f-fond of you. It's because I want to show you 
 what an what an insufferable insult that was." 
 
 As he gazed at her now, the blood began to come 
 back into his cheeks, his breathing quickened, he 
 clenched his hands. He realized now that part of 
 his question had not been answered. 
 
 "But if you weren't fond of me " he stam 
 mered. "You are, aren't you, even if I am no 
 good?" 
 
 "I was," she flung at him furiously, "I was 
 p-perfectly idiotic about you, until I found to 
 night how you'd been thinking about me all the 
 time what sort of a person you thought I was. 
 You've been hating me, thinking it was all my 
 fault, and feeling very noble because you never 
 complained. Well, I'm going to show you. You 
 won't like it. You'll wish I'd gone scuttling back 
 44
 
 THE INSULT 
 
 to mother and lived on my jewelry, and left you 
 free to think what a what a vampire I was. Well, 
 I'm not going to let you do it. 
 
 "You've promised to do whatever I wanted, and 
 that's it. You go and get your job, while I'm find 
 ing a flat. Then we'll see." 
 
 This spirited rear-guard action sufficed to cover 
 her retreat. She eyed him steadily. There was no 
 longer about his look the suggestion that in an 
 other second he might laugh and cry all at once, 
 and hug her up in his arms and demolish her. He 
 was harmless now, for half a minute at least the 
 half-minute she needed. 
 
 "I think if you don't mind, I'll go to bed," she 
 announced politely, and left him. 
 
 Probably she needn't have locked her door, but 
 she did, with a good defiant click she hoped he 
 heard. Then she went over to her glass and took 
 a look at herself. The tumbled, tear-wet, panting 
 object she saw there was another creature from the 
 last Celia she'd seen. That fine, smooth, unruffled 
 surface she'd always guarded so carefully, was a 
 45
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 rag a mop. Celia allowed herself to laugh at it 
 a dangerous thing to do, because the laugh 
 choked in mid-career; the tears came up again. 
 She shot a last look of defiance into the mirror 
 she did not care and let go. She laid her face 
 down on her bare arms and cried to her heart's 
 content.
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 THE MORNING AFTER 
 
 AFTER five or six hours of the solidest sleep he 
 had enjoyed in weeks, Alfred Blair came wide 
 awake all at once and set himself to wrestling with 
 the new factors in his situation, those that Celia's 
 unexpected attitude and unprecedented display of 
 emotion last night had forced upon him. 
 
 He realized that the things women say in mo 
 ments of emotional stress do not always represent 
 their considered opinions. Celia's avowal, for ex 
 ample, that she had been fond of him "perfectly 
 idiotic about him" up to the moment of what she 
 had spoken of as his insult last night, might have 
 been snatched merely as an effective background 
 to set off the insult itself in more lurid colors. 
 
 But there could be no doubt that she felt strongly 
 about the matter. She was not indifferent to him. 
 Chivalrously as he had meant it, he could see now 
 47
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 that his suggestion of a willingness to furnish her 
 with a pretext for getting rid of him altogether, 
 right on the heels of his confession of his financial 
 downfall, had been inconsiderate even brutal. It 
 occurred to him that a clever, unscrupulous man, 
 who wanted to goad his wife into the acceptance of 
 his fallen fortunes with him could hardly have 
 adopted more skilful tactics ; granted, that is, that 
 he had the unmerited luck to be married to a little 
 thoroughbred like Celia. 
 
 He felt terribly contrite about it. His memories 
 of the evening convicted him of about all the crimes 
 in the husband's calendar. He had sworn at her, 
 bellowed at her, made her cry, for the first time, so 
 far as he knew, since they had been married. He 
 had infuriated her into the resolution to share his 
 poverty on a putative twenty-five dollars a week; 
 into binding herself to it by means of that promise 
 of his that he would assent to any plan for their 
 future which she might propose. 
 
 Well, it was now up to him to get her out of 
 that. Tact was called for, clearly self-control. 
 48
 
 THE MORNING AFTER 
 
 He must let her see that his happiness was bound 
 up in hers; that for her to go back to her father 
 and mother and to what comfort and independence 
 might be derived from the salvage of his shattered 
 fortune involved no disloyalty to him ; would be an 
 act, indeed, of the deepest consideration for him. 
 And, if she wanted to wait for him, there might 
 arrive a day when he could come back to her, bring 
 ing, as it were, his sheaves with him a new, per 
 haps ampler, crop of sheaves. 
 
 He talked it all out with her three or four times, 
 trying out different lines of reasoning. And, inas 
 much as he provided her half of the conversation 
 as well as his own, they all came out satisfactorily. 
 
 Over the breakfast table, naturally enough, it 
 was a different story. Celia ruined his opening by 
 being already seated behind the percolator when 
 he came into the dining-room; by being dressed, 
 unprecedentedly, in a very businesslike looking 
 skirt and blouse; by having obliterated from her 
 looks and air every trace of the ravages wrought 
 by last night's tempest. She was further fortified 
 49
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 with a quantity of crisp directions for the maid 
 which, while they did not keep her constantly in the 
 dining-room during the first ten minutes after he 
 came down, kept her imminent, so that there was 
 no chance to say anything. 
 
 And then, suddenly, with a "That's all" to the 
 maid, Celia took the game into her own hands. 
 
 "The Colliers really want a house," she said, 
 "and they acted last night as if they liked this. So, 
 if you think the best thing to do with it is to rent 
 it furnished, we'd better try to get them hadn't 
 we to-day ?" 
 
 It is always terribly hard to go on across a 
 breakfast table from where one left off the night 
 before. There is something so intensely prosaic 
 and matter-of-fact about the meal and its surround 
 ings that drastic decisions any projects which 
 contemplate a break in the daily routine, are likely 
 to appear fantastic. 
 
 He managed something, not meeting her eye, 
 about sticking it out another month. 
 
 But her reply came cleanly back. "Not a minute 
 50
 
 THE MORNING AFTER 
 
 after we can get away. Even if you could stand 
 it, I couldn't." 
 
 She was so clearly right about this that he 
 yielded at once. He knew he couldn't stand it 
 either. And this initial victory of hers gave her 
 command of the situation. He never had a chance 
 after that. He owned that the Colliers presented 
 an opportunity not to be thrown away. A forced 
 sale always meant a terrible sacrifice. The rental, 
 at any sort of reasonable figure, would meet the 
 interest charges on the mortgage, the taxes and so 
 on; would pay off in the course of a few months 
 their local bills, and would provide, after these de 
 mands had been satisfied, a steady little income, 
 which would come in handy, he concluded, in any 
 case. 
 
 "In any case" was meant as an entering wedge 
 a way of saying that a part, at least, of the 
 program he had suggested last night, was still open 
 to her. She could go back to her father and mother 
 and wait for him. 
 
 But the very intent look which the phrase drew 
 51
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 from her, though it invited an explanation of what 
 he meant by that, paralyzed his resolution. She 
 so very clearly was waiting with an ax for that idea 
 to thrust out its head. 
 
 He looked out the window and said he'd try to 
 see Collier some time to-day. 
 
 "Would you mind leaving that to me?" she 
 asked. Though in all but form, the request was 
 a command. "I can see Ruth this morning and I 
 think I can make a better bargain with her than 
 you could with Howard." Then she flushed up a 
 little and added, "That isn't the real reason. I 
 want to tell her my own story about why we're 
 doing it. 
 
 "I'm going to tell her," she went on, with a rush, 
 "that you're all worn out, on the edge of a bad 
 breakdown, and that I'm going to take you away 
 west somewhere and that'll be true, because the 
 West Side's west, and I shan't tell her how far 
 before it gets any worse." 
 
 "Is it your idea," he asked stiffly, for the thing 
 hurt him dreadfully, "that we can disappear under 
 52
 
 THE MORNING AFTER 
 
 cover of a story like that, and that no one will find 
 out about the disgrace that happened to us? If 
 it is, I can tell you now that it won't work. There 
 are a hundred ways for the facts to get out, even 
 supposing I could slink about the streets down 
 town without encountering anybody." 
 
 "I don't expect it not to come out," she said. 
 "But the story I was going to tell Ruth would 
 give me a chance to get away before they knew " 
 
 "The disgraceful truth," he put in. 
 
 She flung the phrase back at him. "Exactly. 
 The disgraceful truth that I never knew, never sus 
 pected a thing, until the actual moment of the 
 smash. That shows such a ghastly lot. Well, I 
 want to get away before they can put two and two 
 together. And I want to do it in such a way that 
 they'll understand I don't want to be followed up 
 and dropped in on and taken for charity rides in 
 their motor-cars. I want it fixed so that if they do 
 see me, they'll have to pretend they don't." And 
 then, most unfairly, she stepped on the buzzer and 
 summoned the maid. 
 
 53
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 Between that act and the opening of the service- 
 door, she got herself in hand again, recovered her 
 tottering poise, and was able to say in parenthesis, 
 between two factitious directions to Marie, "Of 
 course you can go to Howard yourself, if you'd 
 rather I didn't see Ruth." 
 
 He said into his coffee-cup, "No, that's all 
 right." 
 
 He'd have said right then, if interrogated, that 
 she had hurt and angered and humiliated him as 
 far as she could. The maneuver of summoning the 
 maid, the way she had phrased and timed her offer 
 not to go to Ruth at all, in such a manner as to 
 remind him that he had promised the night before 
 to assent to anything she wanted; and to make it 
 impossible for him to reply except by a categorical 
 Yes or No, was, he'd have said, the last arrow in 
 her quiver. It proved, however, that she had one 
 more. 
 
 She rose from the table when he did, and he saw 
 that she had a package in her hand must have had 
 it in her lap during the whole of the meal, a pack- 
 54
 
 THE MORNING AFTER 
 
 age whose solidly rectangular form was but indif 
 ferently disguised by the bunglesome job she had 
 made of wrapping it up. 
 
 He looked hastily away from it after one glance, 
 and said: 
 
 "I can't promise to get that job to-day, of 
 course. But I'll do my best." 
 
 "You might call me up this afternoon, if you 
 have any luck," she suggested. "Then I can tell 
 you how I've come out with Ruth about renting the 
 house. You and Howard will have to settle up the 
 details, of course." 
 
 He said he supposed so, and with a nod of fare 
 well, which, in his state of mind was the only leave- 
 taking he dared attempt, he turned to leave the 
 room. 
 
 She called him back. "Here's something, Fred," 
 she said in a tight little voice* "for you." She held 
 the package out to him. 
 
 He knew what it contained well enough, as the 
 dark flush that came up into his face, and the ab 
 surdly overacted casualness of his manner of say- 
 55
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 ing, "Oh, what is it?" made evident, no doubt, to 
 her. Also, he backed away a little as he spoke, and, 
 further to secure his hands from the necessity of 
 taking the package from her, he put them in his 
 pockets. 
 
 She reddened, too, and said, "It's the pearls and 
 the other things, everything practically. What 
 you were telling me last night I could live on 
 while I was waiting for somebody else to 
 turn up." 
 
 Thereupon ensued what I can only characterize 
 as a row a rowdy row at that, concerning the 
 details of which I feel it my duty, as a self-respect 
 ing chronicler, to maintain a decent reticence. The 
 major tactics of the battle, however, may be indi 
 cated. 
 
 He announced very forcibly that he would have 
 nothing to do with her jewels beyond acting as her 
 agent for the disposal of them. If she chose, in 
 spite of her avowed belief in his business incom 
 petence, to entrust the job of selling them to him, 
 56
 
 THE MORNING AFTER 
 
 he would make the best bargain he could, and have 
 the jeweler mail the check direct to her. She an 
 nounced a passionate indifference as to what he did 
 with them, provided only that she should never be 
 asked to look at them again, or accept, or hear any 
 thing about, the proceeds of their sale. It is per 
 haps not fair to say that she flung the package on 
 the floor. She propelled it vigorously in his direc 
 tion, and he declined to accept it, the law of gravi 
 tation operating in the usual manner. He sug 
 gested the ash-barrel as a proper receptacle, and 
 she, by implication, agreed with him. 
 
 When they parted, she for her room, and he for 
 the seven-fifty-three train, about the most one can 
 say for them is that he hadn't actually shaken her, 
 nor she literally slapped him. Short of that, 
 neither of them had left anything undone to pro 
 voke and justify the fury of the other. 
 
 The wrath of a kindly, slow-tempered man, once 
 it is heated up to the point of incandescence, is a 
 much hotter thing than any emotion that a quick- 
 57
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 tempered man or woman can experience. Celia her 
 self would have been horrified could she have known 
 the temperature of her husband's. 
 
 All the way to town in the train, behind the shel 
 ter of his newspaper, he seethed like molten steel. 
 The last look of helpless fury he had seen in Celia's 
 face, and the tears that stained it, were his only 
 source of satisfaction. He had given as good as 
 he got in that last five minutes, anyway. He 
 wished he had begun sooner. He was sorry, on the 
 whole, he hadn't shaken her. 
 
 But the episode of the jewelry was more or less 
 satisfactory. The injury, which acted as a blow 
 pipe to keep his wrath from cooling, was the thing 
 that had happened before that her avowal of the 
 story she meant to tell Ruth Collier about his nerv 
 ous breakdown and her intention to take him "west 
 somewhere" ; her admission that she felt herself dis 
 graced by his failure, to the point where nothing 
 but their severance of all ties connecting with the 
 old life, their total disappearance like a pair of 
 absconding criminals, would satisfy her. That 
 58
 
 THE MORNING AFTER 
 
 rankled frightfully. He didn't know whether it 
 was more maddening to believe that she really 
 meant it, or that she had said it merely in the hope 
 of wounding him as deeply as possible. He tried 
 out each of these theories, with the idea of discov 
 ering which infuriated him the worse, and at last, 
 although they were mutually contradictory, com 
 promised by adopting them both. 
 
 It was not until the train pulled into the ter 
 minal station and imposed on him the necessity of 
 deciding what he'd do next that he regretfully 
 clamped down the lid upon this pot and, as it were, 
 took it off the fire. A real rage like that was an 
 unaccustomed luxury to Alfred Blair. 
 
 But he must now turn his mind to more prac 
 tical matters. He had come to town to look for a 
 job, and he must find one before he again con 
 fronted Celia. The notion of going back to her 
 to-night and by confessing the failure of his quest, 
 give her a chance to drop the acid of pity into his 
 wounds, was intolerable. 
 
 He realized now that he ought to have spent 
 59
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 those waking hours before he came down to break 
 fast to better advantage than in sentimental maun- 
 derings about his wife. He ought to have laid out 
 a plan of campaign. When he had said, last night, 
 that all he was good for now was twenty-five dollars 
 a week or so over a drafting-board, he'd expressed 
 an emotion rather than a thought-out plan. And 
 even when she'd pressed him as to whether he could 
 get a job at that, he'd answered, "Yes, I guess so," 
 with only half his mind. Surely any one of his 
 former competitors would see that he was worth 
 that. But now that it was no longer a case for 
 emotions or oratory, simply a question of picking 
 out one of those former competitors, going to him 
 and asking for a job, it wasn't so easy. 
 
 It had been one thing to tell Celia, last night, 
 that he was at the end of his rope ; that he had lost 
 his nerve, and that all he was good for was a routine 
 job. It would be another thing to go into the office 
 of a man who still regarded him as a potentially 
 formidable rival and say so. 
 
 This unexpected flare-up of pride, of pride 
 60
 
 THE MORNING AFTER 
 
 hardly to be differentiated from Celia's own, discon 
 certed him frightfully. It was with an indescrib 
 able wrench that he realized how much easier it 
 would be to apply to a stranger who knew nothing 
 of his business history and need be told nothing of 
 it, for any sort of job street-sweeping, coal- 
 shoveling than to submit himself to the half- 
 kindly contempt of an inhabitant of his own world. 
 He tried to charge this feeling up to Celia's ac 
 count and make himself believe that he would not 
 have felt that way had she not expressed a similar 
 feeling, but he couldn't manage it. 
 
 It was without any objective at all that he finally 
 walked out of the station and turned up the street. 
 His dread of going with his story to any one who 
 knew him became absolutely inhibitory the moment 
 he fixed on any one in particular, and the reflection 
 came to him as a real relief at last, that such an 
 errand wouldn't do any good anyway. 
 
 What would have been his own attitude, a year 
 ago, to such a request? Supposing, for example, 
 that John Abercrombie had come to him like that, 
 61
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 said he was down and out and wanted a twenty-five- 
 dollar job? He'd have said to himself, "Here! If 
 this man is really down and out, he's dear at any 
 price. He won't be much good at first, and he'll get 
 steadily worse, and I'll be saddled with him. But if, 
 as is more likely, he comes back, then he'll leave me 
 and go in for himself again at the end of six months 
 or so, with all the inside dope of my office at his 
 finger-tips, twice as dangerous a competitor as be 
 fore." 
 
 No, he knew what he'd say to Abercrombie in these 
 circumstances. He'd say, in the most optimistic 
 manner he could manage, along with a clap on the 
 shoulder, and the offer of a cigar, "Look here, old 
 man. You're tired out, and you've got a touch of 
 liver. You forget your troubles for a while and 
 take a good rest. Go down to French Lick or some 
 where, and boil out. You will be back again in 
 three months, fit to give any of us a run for our 
 money. But this twenty-five-dollar-a-week stuff 
 forget it." And that, as sure as to-morrow's sun- 
 62
 
 THE MORNING AFTER 
 
 rise, was what Abercrombie would say to him to 
 day. 
 
 He'd been wandering aimlessly along all the 
 while, stopping every now and then to stare down 
 into a building excavation, or to watch an automo 
 bile with a balky motor trying to start. Now his 
 eye was caught by a spectacle almost as familiar 
 to Chicagoans the long file of men waiting out 
 side one of the afternoon newspaper offices for the 
 first edition, in order that they might be the first 
 applicants for the jobs advertised in its "Want" 
 columns. The length of that file is a pretty good 
 barometer to business conditions, but, good times or 
 bad, it is always there. And Alfred Blair, without 
 any reflection at all, just because there it was, and 
 here he was, dropped into place at the tail of it. 
 
 Four hours or so later, a torn-out bit of news 
 paper ready for reference in his overcoat pocket, he 
 was conducted by an office boy through the inde 
 scribable confusion of a big, dirty, resonant room, 
 with a lot of drafting-tables in it, many of them
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 unoccupied, to a desk in the corner, where sat a 
 lank, oily-looking man in his shirt-sleeves. 
 
 To him, Alfred Blair said, "I am answering your 
 advertisement for a draftsman." 
 
 The oily man was just back from lunch, and still, 
 with the aid of a tooth-pick, ruminant over it. He 
 was modeling his manners, as well as he could, on 
 those of the head of the firm, who had just cashed 
 in on his loyalty to the new city administration, 
 with a fat municipal contract. 
 
 The superintendent had been having his troubles, 
 it must be owned. There were many other loyal 
 souls coming around to be taken care of. But a 
 few men had to be found somewhere who knew their 
 business. It was this fact that had led to the in 
 sertion of the advertisement. 
 
 The superintendent took two minutes, perhaps, 
 for a searching and hostile stare at this surprising 
 applicant. What business had a man in his situa 
 tion to wear clothes like that? 
 
 He asked at last, out of one side of his mouth, 
 "What experience have you had?" 
 64
 
 "I am answering your advertisement for a draftsman "
 
 "I'm a competent draftsman," Blair said. "I 
 can do anything you want me to." 
 
 "Where'd you work last?" 
 
 Blair said, deliberately, "I don't care to give any 
 references." 
 
 The superintendent smiled a sneering sort of 
 smile that expressed, however, real pleasure. The 
 admission restored him to a sense of his own su 
 periority. 
 
 "I suppose you're a booze-fighter," he said be 
 hind a yawn, "but that makes no odds to me, if you 
 can deliver the goods. There's about six weeks' 
 or two months' work. Take off your coat and sit 
 down over there. If you're any good, you've got 
 a job. Twenty a week." 
 
 "I've got to have twenty-five," Blair said. 
 
 The superintendent waved his hand. "Nothing 
 doing." But, as Blair turned away, he said, 
 "Twenty-two fifty." 
 
 "All right," Celia's husband agreed. 
 
 It was not until half past five that he had an 
 opportunity to telephone Celia from a nickel phone 
 65
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 in a down-town drug-store. In a more observant 
 mood he might have noted that his ring was an 
 swered almost instantly, and by Celia herself, as if 
 she had been waiting there at her desk for it. 
 
 Also, his ear might have detected a change in the 
 quality of her voice between her first "Hello ! What 
 is it?" and when she spoke after he'd laconically 
 told her he'd got a job. 
 
 "It's only twenty-two fifty a week, I'm sorry to 
 say," he added, "instead of the twenty-five I agreed 
 to get." 
 
 "All right. I won't pay more than twenty a 
 month for the flat." She added, "I've rented the 
 house to the Colliers for two hundred. I'm to call 
 Ruth up again and tell her if you say it's all right." 
 
 "It's quite all right as far as I'm concerned, of 
 course," he said. "That matter's in your hands." 
 
 He didn't know whether the unclassifiable sound 
 he heard just then came from Celia or was inserted 
 in the conversation by the telephone company. She 
 asked clearly enough the next moment, if he were 
 coming home to dinner. 
 
 66
 
 THE MORNING AFTER 
 
 "No," he said. "I shall be at the office until late 
 my old office packing up." 
 
 At that she said abruptly, "Good-by." 
 
 It had been a ghastly day for Celia. Months 
 afterward, when she could look back on the episode 
 as a whole, she sometimes tried, idly, to decide 
 which of those nightmare days was the worse this, 
 or its successor. Oftenest she concluded that this 
 one was. The thing that gave it its peculiar hor 
 ror was the fact that, on the surface, it was so like 
 an ordinary day ; the maids coming to her for their 
 routine instructions, the housework going on, peo 
 ple calling her up and asking her to do amusing 
 things, just as though she were still the secure, 
 imperturbable, unruffled Celia she had been yester 
 day, and that she had still to seem to-day. 
 
 She called up Ruth Collier as early as was decent 
 in the morning, and told her, as she had declared 
 to Fred she would, that they'd decided overnight 
 to go away. He was frightfully tired, hadn't been 
 sleeping, was on the edge of a bad smash, and be 
 fore it came, they were going to bolt. 
 67
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 "Oh, we don't know where. Disappear some 
 where for a good long while a year, maybe. And 
 this is why I'm telling you about it we want 
 you to take our house. You really are looking for 
 one, aren't you? Well, then, come out to-day and 
 look at this with that idea. About noon ? Oh, then 
 you will stop for lunch. That'll be fine. Just the 
 two of us." 
 
 She could make her voice sound all right, any 
 how, that was one comfort. She was sure from 
 the way Ruth talked she had suspected nothing 
 over the phone. But whether the resources of her 
 toilet-table were going to prove sufficient to obliter 
 ate from her face the traces of last night's and this 
 morning's tempests, she wasn't so sure. She went 
 to work, deliberately and methodically, to produce 
 this result. 
 
 All the while, she nursed her wrath against her 
 husband, as one nurses a dying fire. It was her 
 one defense against him the one thing that would 
 enable her to see the day through. If ever she got 
 to feeling sorry for him, to thinking about that 
 68
 
 THE MORNING AFTER 
 
 haggard beaten look she had seen in his face last 
 night, she knew she was lost. She'd carried her 
 jewel-box, still in its cumbersome wrapper, to her 
 room, and whenever necessary, she glanced at it. It 
 always worked. 
 
 Half an hour before Ruth's expected arrival the 
 cook brought in word that a man was at the kitchen 
 door asking permission to do any sort of odd job 
 for a meal. It was a common sort of occurrence. 
 But to-day it stabbed her with an almost intolerable 
 pang the thought that her husband was to-day, 
 at this very moment, perhaps, doing the same thing, 
 knocking at strange inhospitable doors, asking for 
 work. 
 
 Anger flared up again, though, and saved her. 
 It wasn't her fault, was it, that he had assumed 
 that her interest in him was wholly mercenary, and 
 had gone on keeping her in ignorance of the true 
 state of affairs until it had come to this? It was 
 not. So, though she toppled for an instant on the 
 verge of an emotional abyss, she managed to keep 
 her balance. She managed to maintain it, too, with- 
 69
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 out a break, during the two hours and a half that 
 her guest and prospective tenant stayed. 
 
 While she could do the talking herself it was 
 comparatively easy phrases just cool enough, in 
 different enough, frivolously humorous enough, 
 came readily to her lips, even while she went 
 through the mockery of speculating about what she 
 and Fred would do with their year's vacation, chat 
 ting about California and Honolulu. But while 
 Ruth talked, she couldn't keep her mind on the 
 things her guest was saying. It would bolt freak 
 ishly in unexpected directions, flash terrifying pos 
 sibilities before her eyes, stab her with memories, 
 and she would frantically summon her anger to the 
 rescue and repel these assaults. 
 
 After Ruth had gone, she tried to pack. There 
 was an immense lot of work to do, of course, get 
 ting things out of the way and putting the house 
 in shape for the reception of its new occupants. 
 But she didn't make much headway couldn't give 
 her mind to it. It was focused on the telephone, 
 and that focus kept getting sharper and sharper 
 70
 
 THE MORNING AFTER 
 
 all the time. He'd said he'd call up in the after 
 noon to let her know what luck he'd had. Evi 
 dently he hadn't got his job yet. Suppose, in his 
 discouragement and despair, he decided that it 
 wasn't worth trying to get. By half past five, 
 when he did call up, she was about at the end of 
 her endurance. 
 
 But his way of telling her just the bare facts 
 and nothing more, his infuriating apology for hav 
 ing accepted twenty-two fifty, when he'd told her 
 he'd get twenty-five, and the way he'd washed his 
 hands of her bargain with the Colliers, toned her 
 up once more gave her a good warm glow of 
 anger to go to work on. She was glad he wasn't 
 coming home to dinner. She wouldn't see him 
 again, if it were possible. She'd have no communi 
 cation with him, except what was absolutely indis 
 pensable, until she could confront him in the new 
 home his contemptuous disbelief in her had reduced 
 them to. 
 
 He disconcerted her a little, though she didn't 
 admit it to herself, by apparently wanting the same 
 71
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 thing she did making no effort, at any rate, to 
 see her. He made her heart jump by pausing an 
 instant outside her door it wasn't locked when 
 he came home very late that night, but he went on, 
 without a word, to his own room. He'd already 
 left for town when she came down-stairs the next 
 morning, and this program was repeated for two 
 days more. They communicated with each other 
 by leaving notes about politely laconic notes, 
 which they fancied Marie wouldn't see anything 
 wrong with. Though why Marie should matter, it 
 would be hard to say, since she, along with the 
 cook, had had her notice and her two weeks' pay, 
 and was leaving Saturday morning when the Col 
 liers were coming in.
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 EXPLORATION 
 
 IT was on Wednesday that Alfred got his job, 
 and that Ruth Collier came out to lunch and 
 agreed to take the house. On Thursday morning 
 not more than an hour after her husband's depart 
 ure, Celia herself set out, on a very inadequate 
 breakfast, and in very inadequate shoes, to find a 
 flat that could be rented for not more than twenty 
 dollars a month. 
 
 She had been vague as to what methods she 
 should pursue toward this result, until, coming 
 down-stairs to get her coffee, she had happened upon 
 Marie carrying off the last night's paper that 
 Alfred had brought home. She had never made use 
 of classified advertising; had always thought of it 
 merely as something that added an irritating bulk 
 to the newspapers she occasionally read. But a 
 73
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 memory of the legend Flats to rent at the head 
 of interminable columns of fine print, came up sud 
 denly in her mind, and she impounded the rumpled 
 and disordered sheets Marie was carrying out. A 
 cursory glance at them as she sipped her coffee 
 made her quest look easy. There were millions of 
 flats for rent, apparently, and they were arranged 
 according to neighborhood West Side flats to 
 gether by themselves, two or three columns of them. 
 
 She tore this part out of the sheet, and after 
 satisfying herself that it listed plenty of places at 
 twenty dollars, and less, she crumpled it into her 
 wrist-bag and went on with her breakfast, that is 
 to say, with her coffee. These had, for many years, 
 been synonymous terms to Celia. How Alfred could 
 eat things like liver and sausage, or even eggs, at 
 this time of the day, she had never been able to 
 understand. 
 
 Her idea was, when, in the train, she got out her 
 
 list and looked at it, that she would select a place at 
 
 the price she wanted, go out to it, and rent it. She 
 
 wasn't looking for luxury. She hoped or thought 
 
 74
 
 EXPLORATION 
 
 she hoped, sitting there comfortably enough in the 
 train, that it would prove as uncomfortable, and 
 cramped and mean as possible. The meaner it was, 
 and the more destitute of comforts the life they had 
 to live in it, the more triumphantly could she dem 
 onstrate to Alfred that he had misjudged her the 
 more completely avenge his insulting beh'ef that 
 now he was poor, she would abandon him and begin 
 a bright lookout for somebody else. 
 
 So she picked out, more or less at random, some 
 thing she thought would do, and dismissed the 
 matter from her mind. It didn't occur to her, until 
 after she got off the train in the terminal, that she 
 hadn't the least idea where the address was, or how 
 to get to it. Then, under the spur of necessity, she 
 went to the information desk and asked the man. 
 
 He wasn't looking at her, and his answer was a 
 gesture toward a tattered a vilely dirty volume 
 on the shelf at her elbow, which she made out to be 
 a City Directory. 
 
 It is fair to say that Celia's first step into her 
 new world began at that moment. She had never, 
 75
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 in her life, been compelled to submit to contact with 
 anything as repulsively filthy as that volume. 
 
 She opened it and stared at it helplessly. 
 
 "But," she said, "I don't want to know what 
 street and number any one lives in. I want to know 
 where a certain address is." 
 
 "Street Index," he said. Then, with a look at 
 her, relented. "Here ! I'll find it for you." 
 
 But the search was a rather complicated one and 
 he was interrupted three or four times before he 
 got to the end of it, by impatient train-catchers, 
 and the directions he finally gave her were not very 
 enlightening involved questioning conductors as 
 to where to take transfers and asking a policeman, 
 when she finally got in the general neighborhood, 
 which way to walk. 
 
 The morning was half gone when she finally 
 found the place. She'd walked what seemed miles ; 
 her feet ached excruciatingly, she felt worse than 
 dirty contaminated by the last street-car she'd 
 ridden in, and she couldn't be sure she'd got a 
 cinder out of her eye. 
 
 76
 
 EXPLORATION 
 
 But the place she found had at least the merit 
 of making her forget these minor troubles. 
 
 The terrifying thing about it was that it was 
 not so bad. She was escorted through it by the 
 tenant of the flat below, who had charge of the 
 key, and this lady praised it with genuine enthu 
 siasm. She pointed out that the floors weren't 
 badly worn at all, and had recently been coated 
 with shellac; she indicated the soundness of the 
 plaster. Nothing would come falling down on your 
 head here, even if the tenants of the topmost flat 
 of all should rouse round a bit. There was a radi 
 ator in each of the four rooms, and the heat was 
 ample. They, down below, frequently had to open 
 a window somewhere for a while. It actually got 
 too hot. The front room had two windows looking 
 on the street, the kitchen, at the back, got the 
 benefit not only of its own back yard, but of the 
 vacant lot behind it on the next street, while the 
 two middle rooms, thanks to the fact that the ad 
 joining building ran up only two stories, were at 
 the top of the light-well, and were almost as good 
 77
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 as outside rooms. She was sure it was a bargain 
 at the money, and Celia, with a sinking heart, was 
 forced to conclude that it was. 
 
 Because it came over her, in a wave, that she 
 couldn't stand it. There was a soul-blighting ugli 
 ness in everything about it the shape of each of 
 the four cramped, mean little rooms, the mean little 
 doors by which they opened out, one after another, 
 on a mean little four-foot corridor that strung them 
 together, the artificial oak graining of the wood 
 work, the fanciful hideousness of the gas-fixtures 
 in the front room, and the water-mottled oak man 
 tel. Celia's cicerone admitted freely that the fire 
 place this mantel enclosed was not practicable, but 
 pointed out that fires were a nuisance anyway, and 
 that in this flat, with an abundance of the hottest 
 kind of steam-heat, they were, happily, unneces 
 sary. In the dead of winter, a little cotton tucked 
 into the two west windows made everything as 
 snug and tight as one could desire. 
 
 Celia escaped from it in a good deal of panic, 
 like a fly out of a web, with the allegation of the 
 78
 
 EXPLORATION 
 
 fictitious necessity of bringing her husband for a 
 look at it before she decided anything. Her new 
 friend understood the necessity, but regretted it. 
 A bargain like this was likely to be snapped up at 
 any minute. What Celia said to herself, when she 
 stood panting on the sidewalk, was that she could 
 stand a slum, but she couldn't stand that. 
 
 The fact was, of course, that a slum was simply 
 a literary expression to her, an idea made up of 
 descriptions from two or three "realistic" novels, 
 and the stage-sets of three or four lugubrious 
 plays. But this flat she had been looking at was 
 not realistic. It was real. And it brought down 
 upon her an ominous sickening realization of what 
 married life on a salary of twenty-two dollars and 
 fifty cents a week might mean; not as the subject 
 of an acrimonious scene between her and Alfred in 
 the interval between an excellent dinner and their 
 retirement to two comfortable beds, but as a thing 
 to be endured for months years forever, per 
 haps. 
 
 She began walking slowly in the direction of the 
 79
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 nearest car line, and as she walked the idea insin 
 uated itself into her mind that, if she couldn't stand 
 it, she needn't. There was that comfortable home 
 she had lived in for years before her marriage, 
 where, with any excuse at all, or indeed with none, 
 they'd be glad to welcome her. There was her 
 room; there was her place at the table. And 
 wouldn't it be better to go back to it? Wouldn't 
 she be an unnecessary drag on Fred if she insisted 
 on taking him out to a place like that flat? Twen 
 ty-two dollars and a half a week, to a man with 
 no domestic responsibilities, would be comfortable 
 enough. He'd suggested that himself. 
 
 She got as far as that, but no further, for a 
 wave of good honest wrath came surging over her 
 again. That's what he'd expected her to think! 
 That was the incredibly, cowardly, mercenary 
 wretch he'd believed her! And he'd been nearer 
 right than she knew. Well, he should never 
 know it. 
 
 The tears came smarting into her eyes so that 
 she had to stop, there in the middle of the sidewalk, 
 80
 
 EXPLORATION 
 
 with two or three curious idlers staring at her, and 
 get out her handkerchief and mop before she could 
 see to go on. She'd show him ! She'd find a place 
 somewhere to-day ! 
 
 At four o'clock, more tired than she had ever 
 been before in her life, thoroughly discouraged, 
 but still determined not to go home until she'd 
 found a place where she and Alfred could go on 
 living together, giddy with hunger, though she 
 realized very imperfectly how much hunger had to 
 do with her exhaustion, she turned into a little 
 lunch room. 
 
 She wanted food for its own sake. But more 
 than that, she wanted it as an excuse for sitting 
 down. She must have a little rest before she could 
 walk another step. She was down to bedrock for 
 the first time in her life. 
 
 If the uncounted apartments she'd looked at since 
 that first one hadn't by themselves affected her so 
 strongly as that first one had, they had at least 
 rubbed that feeling in. She'd wasted a good deal of 
 energy climbing flights of stairs to places that had 
 81
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 cost more than her maximum, going up a bit at a 
 time, without realizing what she was doing, until she 
 caught herself on the edge of taking a place that 
 cost thirty-five dollars a month. When she dropped 
 back from this, the twenty-dollar places looked 
 worse than ever. All her fine sensibilities had been 
 scraped and rasped by the sound of voices she had 
 been hearing the intonations of speech the way 
 people wore their clothes. She was more than blue. 
 She was black and blue. 
 
 That was the color of the world when she sat 
 down in the little lunch room. She'd have thought 
 that it was impossible that she could ever smile 
 again. But she did within half a minute. 
 
 Her opening of the street door had rung a little 
 bell, and she had heard through the plain white 
 board partition that cut the place transversely half 
 way back, a groan and a sort of grunting yawn. 
 A door in this partition had opened almost imme 
 diately and she'd caught a glimpse of a man with 
 out a coat or collar, in the act of finishing the 
 82
 
 EXPLORATION 
 
 stretch the yawn had been preliminary to. But 
 the door had closed again instantly, leaving the 
 man on the other side. 
 
 But within half a minute, as I said, he appeared 
 again, this time most decorously clad in a white 
 jacket with a military collar. He had, too, rather 
 a military air of standing at attention of, indeed, 
 always having stood at attention, absurdly at vari 
 ance with his appearance of the moment before. 
 But there was a bright engaging twinkle in his eye 
 that candidly confessed the absurdity. 
 
 Involuntarily Celia smiled at him. He'd evi 
 dently had red hair once, but it was now a dusty 
 gray, and his clean-shaven sanguine face was finely 
 netted all over with wrinkles. And if he wasn't 
 Irish, then there isn't an Irishman in County Clare. 
 When he asked, "What can I do for you, Miss?" 
 she said, rather to her own surprise, "I'm afraid I 
 interrupted your nap." 
 
 "Well, an' that's true, too," he admitted. "I've 
 no key for that door, and I keep the place open 
 83
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 day and night. And, as we haven't many demands 
 for afternoon tea in these parts, I generally indulge 
 myself as you have discovered." 
 
 Just the sound of his mellow, pleasantly modu 
 lated voice, with the slight enrichment of its con 
 sonants that suggested a brogue without actually 
 constituting it, was indescribably friendly and 
 soothing to her worn nerves. 
 
 "I hadn't thought of tea," she said. It would 
 be impossible to address him in any other tone than 
 the one she would use for a social equal. "You see, 
 I forgot all about lunch. I suppose it's too late 
 for that, though." 
 
 He professed himself ready to prepare her as 
 elaborate a meal as she wanted, but pointed out that 
 the elaboration would take time. If instant relief 
 was called for, he'd suggest a pot of tea and a 
 fried-egg sandwich. 
 
 This was a viand that, as it happened, she had 
 never heard of, and the notion of it visibly amused 
 her. But she was a little dubious about the tea. 
 Not that she didn't like tea, but 
 84
 
 EXPLORATION 
 
 "You needn't fear my brew," he assured her. 
 "Tea's a tipple I thoroughly understand." 
 
 Five minutes later, with a contented sigh more 
 eloquent than words, she acknowledged the justice 
 of this boast. She had kind words, too, for the 
 sandwich. 
 
 He deprecated her praise while visibly basking 
 in it, but admitted that there was a considerable 
 degree of art involved in the proper frying of an 
 
 egg- 
 
 Her eyes widened a little as she said, half under 
 
 her breath, "I wonder if I could fry one at all." 
 
 "Well, there's great folly," he said, "in knowing 
 too many things. Take myself, for example. I'm 
 a bit of a cook, carpenter, ladies' maid, farrier, 
 plumber and gas-fitter and infant's nurse, to men 
 tion a few accomplishments that come to mind 
 and here I am !" 
 
 "How in the world ?" she gasped. 
 "Fourteen years in the army, ma'am. That's 
 the explanation. Too good an officer's striker ever 
 to be anything else." 
 
 85
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 She didn't know quite what to say to this, since 
 in spite of the humorous melancholy of his voice, 
 condolence seemed not to be asked for. So she 
 munched her fried-egg sandwich in silence for a 
 minute or two, and finally remarked: 
 
 "You didn't say you're a real-estate agent, 
 though, and that's what I need. I'm looking for a 
 place out here a flat, I suppose, where two people 
 with hardly any money at all can live." 
 
 "Well," he said, "there are plenty of places out 
 here where people with hardly any money at all do 
 live, and more perhaps where they could. But I'd 
 be better able to help you if I knew just how much 
 money you meant by 'hardly any at all.' " 
 
 "I mean twenty-two dollars and fifty cents a 
 week," she said with such unexpected promptness 
 and precision, and with a tinge of defiance thrown 
 in, that she made him smile. 
 
 "Well, there's nothing easier than that," he told 
 
 her. "I know of a fine little place just around the 
 
 corner that you can get for twelve dollars a month. 
 
 They could live there as snugly as you please. 
 
 86
 
 EXPLORATION 
 
 Three rooms and bath, and one of them a fine large 
 one." 
 
 "Twelve dollars a month!" she echoed. "And 
 I've been looking at places all day about twenty, 
 and they were horrible !" 
 
 He shot a keen look at her. "Well, I wouldn't 
 say," he admitted, "that it's a place you'd be carin' 
 to live in yourself. And it's possible, too, since it's 
 been on my hands three months ever since my 
 brother-in-law's second wife married again and 
 moved away to Kansas City, that I exaggerate the 
 good points of it. But you might find it worth a 
 look, and if you don't mind waiting till my daugh 
 ter comes back from school, which will be any min 
 ute now, to look after this place, I'll take you up 
 there and show you around." 
 
 In the five minutes or so that intervened late that 
 night between the time when Celia got into bed and 
 the time when she fell asleep the conviction estab 
 lished itself in her mind that, if Mr. Lawrence 
 Doyle had not actually hypnotized her, it had at 
 least been the glamour of his personal charms and 
 87
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 not the desirability of the twelve-dollar apartment 
 he had shown her round, that had led her to take it 
 not only promptly but with enthusiasm. 
 
 It did indeed comprise, as he had said, three 
 rooms and a bath (though the "bath" required a 
 qualifying foot-note), and it was also true that the 
 largest of the three rooms was, in actual feet and 
 inches, commodious and pleasantly proportioned. 
 Even for the combined functions of eating and "liv 
 ing" it would be ample. 
 
 What shook Celia's confidence in her judg 
 ment was the recollection of her enthusiasm over 
 the absence of the steam heat and the presence 
 instead of a "base-burner" which Doyle would 
 be glad of a chance to sell her for six dollars 
 and seventy -five cents. There was nothing like a 
 good old-fashioned coal fire for comfort. This 
 steam heat, now; always too much or not enough, 
 and nothing to do about it but pound the radiator 
 with a poker. A good coal-stove you ran to suit 
 yourself or rather, it ran itself to suit you. Also 
 she was able to recall a sensation of genuine delight 
 88
 
 EXPLORATION 
 
 over a gas-pipe in the kitchen, which would not only 
 reduce culinary labors to next to nothing, by mak 
 ing it possible to cook with gas, but, for a trifling 
 additional investment in a small boiler and heater, 
 one could have hot water whenever one wanted it, 
 day or night. Celia, who had all her life taken hot 
 water for granted, exactly as she had taken air to 
 breathe, was quite thrilled over this. 
 
 She had taken an inexplicable pleasure, too, in 
 the fact that their bedroom it was really nothing 
 but an alcove off the big room, capable of being 
 shut off by curtains, and just about big enough to 
 contain a double bed was up two steepish steps 
 from the main floor-level a concession to the ne 
 cessity for getting the stairs up from the entry 
 below. Most unreasonable of all was her delight in 
 the obvious fact that the bathroom had clearly not 
 been designed by the architect to serve that pur 
 pose. It had three doors, to begin with, all glazed ; 
 one into the big room, one into the kitchen and one 
 which let you out on the back porch quite an ex 
 tensive back porch, formed by flooring over and 
 89
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 railing in a one-story extension at the back of the 
 building. The door into the kitchen had been ren 
 dered impracticable by the installation of the tub 
 a large, circular, galvanized iron tub which Mr. 
 Doyle pointed to with pride as a demonstration 
 of his prowess as a plumber, for he had done this 
 job himself and knew it was good. The pipes came 
 simply and naively through a hole in the kitchen 
 wall. 
 
 Celia had been aware, even when striking her 
 bargain with Mr. Doyle, that these unique advan 
 tages were not, perhaps, the sort that would appeal 
 instantly to every mind, and that the place required 
 to be seen with an eye. Given time to reflect, she 
 might have come to the conclusion that she liked 
 it all just for the same unreasonable reason that 
 had made her hate the dozens of modern, mean, ma 
 chine-made places she had been looking at all day. 
 This place would make poverty picturesque. 
 
 She hadn't any leisure for reflection, though, be 
 cause of a remark Mr. Doyle made just after the 
 bargain had been struck. He said that if she'd 
 90
 
 EXPLORATION 
 
 let him hire a man to go to cleaning first thing in 
 the morning, her friends could move their furniture 
 in the next afternoon. And the word furniture had 
 brought her up with a jerk. Her mind had been 
 running on a single track and it hadn't got to the 
 furniture yet. 
 
 She told Mr. Doyle to go ahead and get the 
 cleaner, left him on a promise to turn up some time 
 the next day, and settled down in a street-car, 
 homeward bound, to wrestle with this new problem. 
 
 She couldn't use any of their own furniture. 
 The Colliers would want every stick of it. Every 
 thing must be bought new. She had, at first, only 
 a vague idea of how much this operation would cost. 
 But presently, out of nowhere, an advertisement 
 that had once adorned the bill-boards came up into 
 her memory. 
 
 "We will feather your nest," it had read, "for 
 one hundred dollars." She was grateful for the 
 figure, though she meant to do her own feathering. 
 But where was she going to get the hundred dol 
 lars ? 
 
 91
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 Well, there was the first month's rent on their 
 own house two hundred dollars payable in ad 
 vance. The sensible easy thing to do would be to 
 go ahead and get what she wanted, at once, of one 
 of the big department stores where they had a 
 charge account, and let the Colliers' check cover 
 it. But this didn't satisfy her. That two hundred 
 a month rent was sacred to the payment of old bills. 
 For other purposes it should be treated as if it 
 didn't exist. If ever she began dipping into that, 
 where would her vengeance on Alfred be her tri 
 umphant demonstration that he'd misjudged her? 
 
 The next possibility she thought of was of buy 
 ing it on the instalment plan. She could ask Fred 
 to appropriate so much a week out of his salary 
 to pay it off. But this would involve taking her 
 husband in on it, and she didn't like the idea. She 
 wanted something to hurl at him complete. If she 
 were to go to him with the problem he'd be entitled 
 to a say as to what she bought. It would give him 
 another opportunity to act generously and feel ag 
 grieved, which, she told herself passionately, she 
 92
 
 EXPLORATION 
 
 never meant to give him again. No, somehow she 
 must find that hundred dollars herself. 
 
 Well, then she thought of her jewelry. It would 
 be no trick at all to sell one of her good rings for 
 a hundred dollars. 
 
 But she rejected this idea with violence. She'd 
 done the only thing self-respect would allow her to 
 do, after that maddening insult of his, in giving 
 all that jewelry back to him. The fact that he had 
 refused to accept it didn't alter the essentials of 
 the case. The stuff was his, every scrap of it. 
 The box, still in its paper wrapping, must be kept 
 intact ; slipped unobtrusively in among his belong 
 ings, perhaps, after they had got settled in the flat 
 at all events, demonstrably untouched. 
 
 But where was she going to get her hundred 
 dollars? She thought for a while that she'd ex 
 hausted all the possibilities, and her mind slipped 
 off on a new tack. 
 
 Specifically, just what articles of furniture would 
 the flat need? Her mind's eye dwelt once more 
 upon its three rooms and bath, and it occurred to 
 93
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 her then that there wasn't a closet in the place. 
 What in the world would she do with all her clothes ? 
 At that she drew in a little gasp of excitement 
 and let out a sigh of relief. She knew now where 
 she could get her hundred dollars. It was a perfect 
 solution. Fred wouldn't have a leg to stand on.
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 THE NEW WOELD 
 
 CELIA began operations Friday morning 
 early Friday morning, be it said, before Al 
 fred had finished breakfast and he had to take the 
 seven-eighteen these days, in order to get down to 
 his job on time with a very careful and deliberate 
 toilet. It was the first time she had paid any at 
 tention to her looks since she had donned her armor 
 for Ruth Collier's visit on Wednesday. 
 
 At a quarter to eight, just after Marie had 
 brought up her coffee and toast, the door-bell rang. 
 
 "Oh, that's !" Celia began, then checked her 
 self. "Go down and see who it is," she directed. 
 
 She took a last swift reassuring look into her 
 mirror as the maid descended the stairs, then rather 
 carefully arranged herself in the big chair behind 
 the slim little table where Marie had deposited her 
 tray. She broke off a bit of toast, but didn't eat 
 95
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 it ; sat listening to what was happening at the now 
 open door. A man with a brusk colloquial idiom, 
 and a strongly Oriental accent, was trying to con 
 vince Marie that he had important business with her 
 mistress. Marie, it seemed, was not trying to con 
 ceal her misgivings about him, which were of the 
 darkest sort. But eventually she let him in and 
 came up to Celia with a card. 
 
 Celia dropped a negligent glance upon the not 
 immaculate face of it, and said, "Oh, yes. He 
 wants to buy some clothes of mine. Bring him up. 
 And, Marie," she added as the girl turned away, 
 "don't leave the room till he does." Then, with a 
 fine exterior calm, she took the first sip of her coffee. 
 
 It is not to be denied that she was a little fright 
 ened. And yet there was something pleasurable 
 about her excitement, too. A new combination of 
 emotions for Celia French. She had never been an 
 adventurer. 
 
 But then, everything about her present situation 
 was new. It was a new thing to need absolutely 
 to need a hundred dollars. It was a new thing 
 96
 
 THE NEW WORLD 
 
 to be thrown, definitely and unescapably, upon her 
 own resources for getting it. Consequently the 
 thrilling excitement attendant upon her discovery 
 of a way to get it was also new. 
 
 After her first gasp of relief when it occurred to 
 her that she could get that hundred dollars by sell 
 ing her clothes, she had, for a few minutes, felt 
 pretty sick. She'd seen herself lugging a great 
 bundle from one second-hand store to another, bat 
 tered discouraged. She had wept a few tears, 
 there in the street-car, of pure self-pity, and then 
 had dried them with a sudden flame of self-con 
 tempt. Why shouldn't she play the game as well 
 as she could, instead of as badly? If any bullying 
 was to be done, why not do it herself? 
 
 The entertainment of that idea began an epoch 
 with Celia really changed the texture of life for 
 her. She had sat down at* the telephone as soon 
 as she reached the house, called up, out of the clas 
 sified directory, a dealer who advertised a most lib 
 eral disposition toward the purchase of used gowns, 
 and told him curtly that if he cared to come to her 
 97
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 house before eight o'clock to-morrow morning, she 
 would do business with him. She was very busy 
 and would be engaged later. 
 
 There had been an enormous satisfaction in feel 
 ing that she had got just the right intimidating 
 ring into her voice. There had even been a satis 
 faction in recognizing that the man at the other 
 telephone was playing the same game didn't know 
 whether he could come or not ; doubted whether the 
 things she had to show him would be worth the 
 trouble. The ring at the bell at a quarter to eight 
 this morning meant that she'd won this first skir 
 mish. She'd played the game better than he had. 
 
 Now, as she waited, she was keen to follow up 
 this victory. A feeling she did not even note the 
 absence of was shame humiliation. She didn't 
 a bit mind letting Marie know the nature of the 
 transaction, and was quite indifferent as to what 
 the maid might think, or whom she might confide 
 her speculations about it to. It was the sort of 
 secret she'd have guarded with her life a week ago. 
 
 You see money the need of money had always 
 98
 
 THE NEW WORLD 
 
 been the skeleton in the Frenches' closet. The as 
 sumption current in that family from the time of 
 Celia's earliest memories had been that all people 
 all people of the sort one met were providentially 
 provided with ample incomes. Any fact which 
 threatened to give the lie to this presumption was 
 ipso facto scandalous unmentionable indecent. 
 And while, of course, there were other topics simi 
 larly tabooed, this was the only one of them that 
 did not easily acquiesce in being ignored. 
 
 The Frenches were always managing, doing 
 without, stretching the not very elastic band of 
 their income to make the ends of it meet around 
 their necessities, and they had developed, not only 
 for use before the world, but even in the intimacies 
 of their domestic circle, a whole vocabulary of 
 euphemistic paraphrase and circumlocution. You 
 can make any subject indecent by avoiding it like 
 that. 
 
 A year of married life with Alfred Blair had 
 reduced Celia's sensitiveness to the topic, but had 
 not changed her ideas about it. It had still seemed 
 99
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 to her, up to the night of that disastrous dinner, 
 a little indelicate to ask the price of anything she 
 meant to buy. Or, if not that, at least to let it 
 appear that price was the determining factor 
 whether she bought it or not. It still seemed intol 
 erable to her to try to drive a bargain get any 
 thing cheaper than the price it was offered at. The 
 mere thought of trying to sell anything of her own 
 made her shiver. It always made her blue when 
 women book agents came to the house and began 
 reeling off the merits of some set of volumes, Moun 
 tain Peaks of Literature, and so on, that they 
 wanted her to subscribe to. She used to wonder, 
 in a kind of nightmare, what she'd do if she were 
 ever thrust into a situation where that was the only 
 means open to her for keeping herself alive. And 
 she decided, quite seriously, that if it ever came to 
 that she'd kill herself with morphine or chloral 
 instead. 
 
 But a gyroscope, if its gyrations are rapid 
 enough, will do unexpected and surprising things. 
 100
 
 THE NEW WORLD 
 
 It is capable even of driving a hard bargain with 
 the law of gravity. If you will assume a living, 
 highly conscious, self -critical gyroscope, which had 
 never really revolved at all, had always leaned up 
 in a corner for support, not fancying the notion 
 of tumbling over and scratching itself, and then 
 will imagine this gyroscope, through no volition of 
 its own, suddenly set whirling at ten thousand rev- 
 olutions a minute, you will get a pretty good notion 
 of the new Celia. 
 
 She'd have said, if questioned, that the force 
 which had speeded her up and transformed her into 
 so new and astonishing a person was her furious 
 anger with her husband a purely retaliatory de 
 sire to demonstrate to him how injurious and un 
 founded his opinion of her had been. 
 
 But she hadn't time to concern herself much with 
 whys and wherefores. It wasn't with any conscious 
 reference to Alfred at all that she braced herself 
 for the arrival of the second-hand clothes man and 
 prepared to get as much of his money as she could 
 for what she had to sell him. 
 101
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 She sipped her coffee daintily, and told Marie 
 what things to bring out from the closet. 
 
 Her first glance at her opponent gave her the 
 mistaken idea that it was going to be easy. He 
 wasn't much to look at; in most respects, a dis 
 tinctly inferior specimen. His manner, in the shock 
 of their first encounter, was weak and servile. Even 
 his oily black hair had a meek look, and the un 
 healthy pallor of his face accentuated it. 
 
 But when Marie had brought out, one after an 
 other, all the pretty frocks the closet contained 
 evening gowns, house dresses, a smart little after 
 noon suit, and her two opera cloaks and he, after 
 an appraising glance at each, and the notation of 
 a figure on a greasy bit of paper with the well- 
 licked stub of a pencil, offered her, with a quite 
 coolly indifferent air of utter finality, thirty-two 
 dollars and seventy-five cents for the lot, the blow 
 almost finished her. She felt a lump coming in 
 her throat. For a sickening moment she actually 
 believed that that was all the things were worth. 
 Even after her reason had come to the rescue she 
 102
 
 THE NEW WORLD 
 
 went on believing, for another minute, that that 
 was all he thought they were worth and the utmost 
 that he would ever pay. 
 
 But anger one of the best and most necessary 
 of all our passions, never forget that came to the 
 rescue. That servile, oily little rat standing there, 
 pawing over her pretty clothes, had meant her to 
 feel sick like that. He had shot her a look out of 
 his bright beady little eyes and no doubt noted the 
 effect of the blow, and was gloating now, inside, 
 over the prospect of getting those lovely clothes 
 for so near nothing. 
 
 Her finely penciled eyebrows flattened, and her 
 blue eyes darkened beneath them. 
 
 "Show him the way out, Marie," she commanded 
 crisply. "I have too much to do this morning to 
 waste time listening to vulgar jokes." 
 
 The man began protesting volubly, but Celia cut 
 him short. 
 
 "You don't speak English very well," she ob 
 served. "Perhaps you didn't say what you meant. 
 If you meant a hundred and thirty-two dollars and 
 103
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 seventy-five cents, you may stay" she glanced 
 over at her boudoir-clock "fifteen minutes and 
 we'll talk about it. I can't give you any more time 
 than that." 
 
 His eyes rolled in his head. He appealed to the 
 high gods. The lady was beside herself lunatic. 
 These were not the expressions he used. 
 
 "I'm not crazy at all," said Celia warmly. "I'm 
 extremely annoyed at having to listen, when I'm 
 busy, to childish nonsense. I know what those 
 clothes are worth, and so do you, and unless you're 
 willing to pay at least half that much I simply 
 won't bother with you." 
 
 He came up, with a wrench, to fifty; with a 
 groan, to seventy-five to eighty. He looked the 
 clothes all over again, minutely, and delivered an 
 impressive ultimatum eighty-two dollars and 
 twenty cents. 
 
 Celia got up and went over to her dressing-table ; 
 
 sat down in front of it with her back to him, took 
 
 an unimportant little gold pin out of her negligee, 
 
 and, holding it between her lips, as though she had 
 
 104
 
 already begun the operation of dressing for the 
 street, said: 
 
 "Take him away, Marie." 
 
 It was an admirable bit of stage-management, 
 and it worked. 
 
 "All right," the man said. "I'll give you a hun 
 dred for the lot." 
 
 Celia took her pin out of her mouth. 
 
 Now you are to note this. A hundred dollars was 
 what she had to have. She had won barely won 
 her victory. She didn't need any more. But 
 the thrill of the game had got into her blood. For 
 the game's own sake, and for nothing else in the 
 world, she said: 
 
 "You can have them for a hundred and twenty- 
 five." 
 
 She got, eventually, one hundred and eighteen 
 dollars. And the satisfaction she took in the su 
 perfluous eighteen, counted painfully out, in fright 
 fully shabby one- and two-dollar bills, was, it is 
 the unexaggerated truth, one of the very keenest 
 pleasures she had ever enjoyed, 
 105
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 Well, by then it was half past eight, and it was 
 Friday morning. By six o'clock Saturday night, 
 if Alfred were to be crushed in a convincing and 
 finished manner, she must have his new home ready 
 for him, furnished settled dinner cooking on the 
 stove. She had the flat. She had the hundred and 
 eighteen dollars, and she had the better part of 
 two days. 
 
 In the buoyant mood of her departure from the 
 house, fifteen minutes or so after that of the cha 
 stened clothing dealer, the allowance, in respect 
 both of time and money, seemed ample. 
 
 The place wouldn't need much furniture a table 
 and three or four chairs, a bed, kitchen things. It 
 occurred to her, as she rode in on the train, that 
 it wouldn't do to allow her possession of a large 
 sum like a hundred and eighteen dollars to lead her 
 to luxurious extremes in her purchases. The place 
 must look Spartan, or half the moral effect would 
 be lost. If she could tuck away thirty or forty 
 dollars in she smiled over this a stocking or a 
 teapot, it would be all the better, 
 106
 
 THE NEW WORLD 
 
 She wouldn't waste time over it, either. She'd 
 go to one of the big department stores on the cheap 
 side of State Street, march through her purchases 
 without any shilly-shally about making up her 
 mind, then go out to the flat and assist the cleaner 
 whom Larry Doyle had, presumably, put to work. 
 This would leave Saturday free for putting things 
 in place and getting settled. 
 
 This program determined upon, she settled her 
 self in the train to the contemplation of her living- 
 room as she wanted it to look. 
 
 The first thing she saw was a big rag rug. They 
 looked homely, and were really rather smart. A 
 bright blue would go well with the smoky gray of 
 the walls, she thought. It would be better, per 
 haps, not to go to the wrong side of State Street 
 for that. They kept them, she knew, in all the big 
 stores on her own side of that thoroughfare. And 
 then two comfortable, but unpretentious, chairs 
 a big one for Fred and a smaller one for herself, 
 one on each side of the stove. And a plain old- 
 fashioned table, with leaves that folded down. 
 107
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 She must, at this point, have slipped off into a 
 day-dream, since, with her waking mind, she knew 
 better than to suppose she could accomplish an old- 
 fashioned high-boy and a New England pre-Revo- 
 ^utionary side-table with her hundred and eighteen 
 dollars. 
 
 They went agreeably into the picture, though, 
 and she went on adding to it with growing pleas 
 ure, until she saw herself, not in her own small 
 chair, but on the arm of Alfred's big one, her own 
 arm tucked cozily round his neck, his nice, still 
 thick, just a little bit wavy and altogether adorable 
 hair where she could comfortably put her cheek 
 down on it. 
 
 At this point, properly scandalized with herself 
 for such even imagined inconstancy to her fixed 
 determination, she shook herself awake again, and 
 reverted to more practical considerations. She'd 
 have the blue rug, though. 
 
 She went straight to Shield's and bought it for 
 twenty-four dollars. Really for six, you see, be 
 cause she still had ninety-four left out of her hun- 
 108
 
 THE NEW WORLD 
 
 dred. Then, with the reflection that things here, 
 after all, cost no more than the same things would 
 across the street, and that she would save time, 
 precious time, too, by not adventuring in unfamiliar 
 ways, she went up to the household utilities depart 
 ment, intent on furnishing her kitchen. 
 
 She felt very virtuously practical over beginning 
 with the kitchen, instead of leaving it to the last. 
 
 "I want," she said to the young man who came 
 up, courteously concerned to know wherein he could 
 serve her, "I want to get everything one needs for 
 a kitchen a little kitchen, for only two people." 
 
 She caught her breath there, and turned away 
 with a blush and a blink. The thing sounded so 
 absurdly sentimental and honeymoonish so ironi 
 cally at variance with the grim reality the total 
 smash the totally hopeless smash that had over 
 taken her and Alfred. As she went on, her voice 
 had the cold ring of disillusioned practicality. 
 
 "I want to get it all as cheaply as possible," she 
 said. 
 
 This injunction didn't discourage the young man 
 109
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 at all. What spoke louder than words to him was 
 the cut of her skirt, the look of her hat, the condi 
 tion of her gloves. Indeed, the very quality of the 
 voice that pronounced the words. 
 
 He remarked easily that cheapness was a desid 
 eratum, of course, but that cheap things were not 
 really cheap. This was to say, that you got more 
 service for your money, which was the real test, 
 of course, by not being too sparing about your 
 initial outlay. 
 
 "We'll begin with refrigerators," he said. 
 "That's one of the most important things, really." 
 
 Celia started slightly. She'd forgotten about a 
 refrigerator. Their house had had one built in. 
 But of course they'd have to have one. 
 
 She spent an agreeable quarter of an hour among 
 the refrigerators, and at last tentatively agreed 
 upon one. Then they moved over to the kitchen 
 cabinets. 
 
 At this point a cloud, the size of a man's hand, 
 appeared on Celia's horizon. 
 
 The young man he was a very tactful young 
 110
 
 THE NEW WORLD 
 
 man apparently became aware of it. Gently, but 
 irresistibly, he convinced her that such a cabinet was 
 indispensable. The saving it effected in such staples 
 as sugar, flour, coffee, and so on, by keeping them 
 in properly devised air-tight containers, was enor 
 mous incalculable. Here was a charming little 
 affair, not unnecessarily elaborate, done in a mod 
 est gray enamel. Not so showy as white, but more 
 practical. Being constructed entirely of steel, it 
 was impervious to vermin and easily kept in per 
 fectly sanitary condition. He couldn't conscien 
 tiously recommend anything inferior. 
 
 It, tentatively too, went down on the list. 
 
 But the cloud was getting biggar. The young 
 man, aware of this perhaps, relaxed his severity 
 in the matter of fireless cookers. There was really 
 no need of going to great expense here. This one 
 at sixteen dollars was as good as one really needed. 
 An exceptional value this week a special. Had 
 been twenty, and would be again. 
 
 When it came to utensils, though, the young 
 man was adamant. There was really only one ma- 
 111
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 terial for pots, pans, skillets, kettles and so on. 
 This was cast aluminum. Not the cheap stamped 
 stuff. The solid article. The finest, the most ex 
 pensive enamel in th'e world would crack and flake, 
 if it were allowed to burn and such accidents 
 would happen in spite of the housewife's most rig 
 orous attention. 
 
 He led her up, unresisting dazed a little, if he'd 
 known the truth to the sumptuous silvery array: 
 coffee-pots, tea-kettles, stew-pans of assorted sizes, 
 frying-pans, griddles. 
 
 "Now, I'd suggest " he said capably, and be 
 gan making a list. 
 
 "Speaking of fireless cookers," said Celia pres 
 ently, in the midst of this and the troubled quality 
 of her voice distracted him from the labor he was 
 proceeding with, obviously con amore "speaking 
 of fireless cookers, how much does a stove cost a 
 gas stove?" 
 
 "We don't carry them," he said, "though we 
 could get you one, of course. But you could get 
 a pretty good one, I should say, for thirty-five or 
 forty dollars." 
 
 112
 
 THE NEW WORLD 
 
 "And how much," she asked, "are the things you 
 have already put down on that list? Not these 
 cooking dishes the others?" 
 
 The refrigerator, the fireless cooker and the 
 kitchen cabinet, it seemed, came to eighty-four dol 
 lars and twenty-five cents. 
 
 Celia turned away from him, bit her lip hard, 
 and clenched her hands until the fingers in her neat 
 gloves felt numb. For a matter of twenty seconds 
 she experienced violently the sensation one has when 
 an elevator starts going down too fast. 
 
 Here's where the difference came in. The old 
 Celia would have managed a tolerably indifferent 
 nod and a phrase about coming back a little later, 
 or looking a little farther, together with, perhaps, 
 a glance at her watch to account for the suddenness 
 of her departure. And she'd have gone away 
 sick humiliated. 
 
 The new Celia, after just that twenty seconds 
 for getting control of the elevator, turned back to 
 the young man, and with a candidly rueful smile 
 met his eye. 
 
 "I'm awfully sorry to have wasted your time," 
 113
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 she said, "but the sort of things we've been looking 
 at are simply out of the question. You see, I've 
 only got a hundred dollars ninety-four dollars, 
 that is, to furnish the whole flat. It's just a little 
 three-room place out on the West Side. I suppose 
 it can be done somehow. It's going to be. But 
 not with things I could buy here !" 
 
 Are you waiting to be told that on hearing this 
 avowal the young man looked superior and annoyed 
 and said something disagreeable about our house 
 of course not handling that class of goocls? If so, 
 you will wait in vain. But I doubt if you even 
 expected that. Certainly not if you have any ade 
 quate conceptiori of how Celia looked and how her 
 voice sounded when she said it; with heightened 
 color and bright eyes, wide with a look of adventure 
 in them like a child's ; or of the hint of breathless- 
 ness about her speech, revealing how much she had 
 surprised herself by giving away this confidence. 
 
 What the young man did was to blush to the 
 hair, smile rather idiotically, he decided afterward, 
 and experience a momentary twinge of the liveliest 
 114
 
 THE NEW WORLD 
 
 envy of the unknown man who was going to share 
 the little three-room apartment and its ninety-four- 
 dollar furnishings with her. 
 
 "I'll tell you something," he said very unofficially 
 confidentially almost. In fact, he had ceased al 
 together to be the perfect salesman, and had become 
 instead a man and a brother. "I never can get 
 my mother to buy any of her kitchen things up 
 here. She gets them all pots and pans and such, 
 you know, at the five- and ten-cent store. She says 
 the things wear out, of course, but that when they 
 do you can always afford to buy new ones because 
 you paid so little in the first place." 
 
 "Why, that's wonderful," said Celia. "I never 
 thought of that. I'm very, very much obliged." 
 
 She felt like shaking hands with him, and so, 
 indeed, did he with her. But good manners re 
 strained them both. 
 
 When she turned away, though, he fell in beside 
 her and strolled along in the direction of the ele 
 vators. It seemed he had something more to say. 
 
 "About stoves now "
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 Celia stopped short and faced him again. You 
 
 certainly couldn't get a stove at the ten-cent store. 
 * 
 
 "Of course, if you're going to serve elaborate 
 meals, or do a lot of baking, you need a big stove 
 with a, couple of ovens and a plate warmer and 
 all the rest. But if you aren't, why don't you 
 just get a flat stove without any oven the kind 
 that stands on a table or a box? You could buy 
 that kind for three or four dollars." 
 
 Celia drew in a long breath. "You simply 
 haven't any idea how kind you've been," she said. 
 " You've just saved the situation." 
 
 And, after he'd stammered, "Not at all," and said 
 how glad he was, she went on : 
 
 "And if I save all that, I suppose I could buy 
 a really good refrigerator. Here, you know." 
 
 The young man blushed again. What he'd done 
 already was bad enough, from the point of view 
 of the head of the department. But what was com 
 ing next was rank treason, nothing less. No won 
 der he hung fire for a second. But it got blurted 
 out at last.
 
 THE NEW WORLD 
 
 "I tell you what I'd do," he said. "You know 
 these big storage warehouses ? There are some out 
 on the West Side. Well, they're always selling 
 things that have been stored and not paid for, you 
 know all kinds of household things. You could 
 probably get a really good refrigerator as good 
 as you'd want, for eight or nine dollars." 
 
 This time Celia did shake hands, and blurted 
 out a secret at the same time. 
 
 "If ever I get rich again," she said, "I'll come up 
 here and buy everything in sight." 
 
 She left an excellent salesman completely demor 
 alized for the day. 
 
 As for Celia, she went her way to her flat to see 
 how the cleaning was coming on, and then to Larry 
 Doyle's lunch room to find out from him where the 
 best storage warehouse for buying second-hand 
 furniture was, buoyant with well, no, it wouldn't 
 be fair to her numerous and conscientious moral 
 preceptors to call it a new discovery. They must 
 have told her all about nettle grasping. Very likely 
 some one of them had told her about gyroscopes, 
 117
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 too perhaps even had demonstrated that if one 
 were rotating vigorously enough upon its proper 
 axis, it would decline to topple over at the first 
 push. They had expatiated, too, I am sure, on 
 the importance of having an aim in life, and pursu 
 ing it energetically, and promised her ample re 
 wards in the consciousness of duty well done. 
 
 But Celia, hot on the trail of a seven-dollar re 
 frigerator and a three-dollar stove, was indulging 
 in none of these smug generalities. All she was 
 aware of was that life had suddenly become a very 
 eager, thrilling, glowing sort of business, and that 
 she was running it herself, making it happen dif 
 ferently from the way it had set out to happen. 
 She had made it happen differently to other people. 
 She even made it happen differently to herself. 
 
 That man who bought her clothes this morning 
 he hadn't meant to pay her a hundred and eight 
 een dollars for them. He hadn't meant to pay half 
 of that. But she, Celia, all by herself, had made 
 him do it. And then, up there at Shield's, with 
 that thoroughly correct and highly superior young 
 118
 
 THE NEW WORLD 
 
 salesman. She'd gone on with him for three-quar 
 ters of an hour, feeling wretched and ashamed, and 
 a little hopeless, because she knew, without acknowl 
 edging it to herself, that she couldn't afford to buy 
 the things he was showing to her. But when, at 
 last, for a penance really, because she was ashamed 
 of herself for being ashamed, she'd made herself, 
 who hadn't meant to in the least, tell him the actual 
 literal truth in dollars and cents, she had found 
 herself perfectly at ease at once. 
 
 What hurt, she reflected, wasn't having people 
 know things about you. It was having them sus 
 pect things that you were trying to hide. Well, 
 that was easy. She need never be ashamed of any 
 thing again. 
 
 With a little leisure for reflection she might have 
 made some further discoveries just as surprising, 
 or even more so. But you won't need to be told that 
 she had none. She had two tasks on her hands: 
 one to get the new flat ready for herself and Fred, 
 the other to get their house ready for the Colliers. 
 Either one of them was enough to fill to bursting 
 119
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 the time at her disposal, and that she actually ac 
 complished both may be taken as a triumphant dem 
 onstration that a body can occupy two different 
 spaces at the same time. 
 
 Part of the credit for this must go to Larry 
 Doyle, for it was he who organized Celia's activi 
 ties, showed her the importance of doing certain 
 things first. It was nearly eleven o'clock Friday 
 morning when she confronted him across his lunch 
 eon bar, and she plunged into the midst of things 
 without the waste of a minute. 
 
 "It isn't any friends of mine that I took the place 
 for," she began. "It's my husband and me. He's 
 lost all his money, and he's got a job at twenty -two 
 dollars and a half a week. I told him he could leave 
 the flat to me and that I'd have it ready to live 
 in to-morrow when he comes home from work. I'll 
 bring sheets and blankets and towels and table linen 
 from home. Those things don't go with a fur 
 nished house, do they? And I've got a silly blue 
 rug that I paid twenty-four dollars for for the 
 big room, and I've got ninety-four dollars to buy 
 120
 
 THE NEW WORLD 
 
 everything else with. Oh, six of it goes for your 
 stove. That leaves eighty-eight. So I want you to 
 tell me where there's a storage warehouse, or a sec 
 ond-hand shop, where I can get everything cheap." 
 
 It's no wonder she rather took Larry Doyle's 
 breath, with her bright cheeks the March wind 
 was sharp this morning and her eager voice, and 
 her half-scared adventurous way of making friends 
 with him. 
 
 While he was making up his mind what to say 
 first, she ran on: 
 
 "It will be possible, won't it to have everything 
 ready for him, running, you know, by six o'clock 
 to-morrow night ? Oh, but it's got to be !" 
 
 "Sure, it's possible," he said. "But you don't 
 want to be bothering with your second-hand furni 
 ture yet a while. Go straight to the gas office now 
 it's not far and get your stove and tell them 
 you must have it connected up with a meter to-day. 
 To-morrow's a half-day, being Saturday, and you 
 won't get a hand's turn of work out of those boys. 
 So, if you don't want to be left till Monday "
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 "I see," she broke in, champing to be off. "Tell 
 me where it is." 
 
 He did, and added the warning that they'd very 
 likely tell her, to begin with, that it was impossible 
 for them to put the job through this week. 
 
 "But I'm thinking," he added, "that you'll know 
 what to say to them better than I could tell you." 
 
 She nodded and smiled, partly in anticipation, 
 partly in amused remembrance of a Celia who had 
 ceased to exist some time during the past week, who 
 had always said, with a touch of unconscious pride, 
 that she couldn't beg for things. 
 
 "On your way back from there," Larry called 
 after her, "stop in at the coal office and have them 
 send up a hundred-pound sack of range for your 
 stove. It won't do for you to be sitting around in 
 those cold rooms." 
 
 She might have tossed that caution off with airy 
 impatience but for a phrase the Irishman sent after 
 her. 
 
 "There are them that can afford to be sick," he 
 said, "and there are them that can't."
 
 THE NEW WORLD 
 
 She was inclined to disrelish that idea as she 
 walked away with it the notion that her health 
 was an asset her husband was entitled to count 
 upon. But she adopted it instantly, and presently 
 found a certain satisfaction in that point of view, 
 partly, perhaps, because she felt that Alfred's chiv- 
 alrousness would be shocked by it. 
 
 She found them, at the gas office, quite as diffi 
 cult as she had been warned they would be, and 
 it took a half -hour's intensive bombardment with 
 all her feminine artillery to reduce the man she 
 finally got herself taken to to a weakly acquiescent 
 state, in which the promise she wanted could be 
 wrung out of him. Then she paid for her stove 
 a three-burner affair and departed in triumph. 
 
 Her activities from then on were too complex 
 and multifarious to be followed in detail. She 
 stalked elusive bargains from one likely lair to an 
 other, slowly, it seemed to her, but really with re 
 markable expedition, accumulating the articles she 
 needed. 
 
 She had her ups and downs. There were ex-
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 ultant moments, just after finding something that 
 was exactly what she wanted, and buying it for less 
 than she had believed possible, when she thought 
 she was going to have more money than she needed 
 and revived the notion of a nest-egg hoard in a 
 stocking. There were moments of despair when 
 some necessity she had completely overlooked reared 
 its head and stared at her. 
 
 She wound up at the nearest ten-cent store at 
 half past four in the afternoon; purchased very 
 much at haphazard, because she was too tired to 
 think a quantity of kitchen dishes, and lugged 
 them, in two vast irregular bundles, from which 
 the strings were constantly threatening to slip, back 
 to the flat. 
 
 She experienced a very keen pleasure in finding 
 Larry Doyle there making a fire in the big base- 
 burner. Not only because a fire was very much 
 needed, the place being cold as a stone and damp 
 into the bargain from the cleaning it had got, but 
 because Larry was, by this time, such a very old
 
 THE NEW WORLD 
 
 and dear friend, and it warmed and rested one's 
 heart to see him. 
 
 He reported that the gas stove had come and that 
 the man with the meter had already come in and 
 connected it up; probably a world's record for 
 promptness, he thought, and an extraordinary 
 tribute to Celia's powers of persuasion. Also, a 
 large rolled-up package had come from Shield's 
 that must be the rug she had spoken of. Should 
 he open it? 
 
 He did, and they spread it down on the floor and 
 discussed its appearance. It would probably look 
 pretty funny, Celia thought, along with the junk 
 she had been buying this afternoon. 
 
 Her voice was flat with fatigue, and he com 
 mented upon it. 
 
 "You'd better call it a day, now, and go home 
 to bed," he advised. He must be leaving, himself, 
 since another busy hour of the lunch room was com 
 ing on. 
 
 "There are two reasons why I must stay," she 
 125
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 said. "One of them being that I am too tired to 
 stir until I have sat here for a while." She was 
 on the only seat in the place, the step leading up 
 to their alcove bedroom. "And the other that the 
 expressman who's bringing the things from the 
 storage warehouse will be along in a few minutes, 
 and I've got to be here to let him in. Oh, he won't 
 be long, and as soon as he comes I'll go." 
 
 Before he left he pulled up a corner of the rug 
 over the step to make it a little softer, and told her 
 how to shut off the stove for the night. 
 
 She heard the door close behind him, and almost 
 instantly thereafter, she thought, a violent knock 
 ing on it, which seemed, impossibly, to have been 
 going on some time. Also the room was now quite 
 dark, except as it was lighted by the glow through 
 the isinglass door of the stove. It was very bewil 
 dering, until she understood that she must have 
 fallen asleep, sitting on that step. 
 
 It was then seven o'clock ; a very alcoholic flavor 
 about the two men who had brought her load of fur 
 niture accounting, perhaps, for their delay in ar- 
 126
 
 THE NEW WORLD 
 
 riving with it ; and it was a quarter to eight before 
 the last article was stowed away and Celia could 
 turn the key on the place. 
 
 An even twelve hours ago she had received the 
 second-hand clothing dealer for the purpose of sell 
 ing him her clothes. It had been a day sure enough. 
 An ampler day, not only in the matter of material 
 activities, but in its emotional content, than any 
 she could remember. The people she'd encountered 
 had seemed more real and alive and human than 
 those her old paths had brought her into casual 
 contact with. 
 
 When had any of her conventionally made ac 
 quaintances evoked that warm spontaneous glow of 
 friendliness from her that she'd felt when she found 
 Larry Doyle building a fire in her stove, or when 
 the salesman up at Shield's had told her where his 
 mother bought her kitchen things? 
 
 The emotions hadn't all been rosy, though, by 
 any means. There had been an instant of cold ter 
 ror just at the end of the day, when, confronted 
 by that gin-reeking expressman, she had read in 
 127
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 his look that she was desirable, and alone. She had 
 moved briskly over and thrown open a window upon 
 the busy street, and with that protection had felt 
 safe enough. But the mere breath of that kind of 
 peril had never blown upon her before. Oh, it had 
 been a day. 
 
 She was so tired, as she made her way to the 
 corner drug-store to call up the house and tell Fred 
 where she was and that she was on her way home, 
 that the mere exertion of walking almost brought 
 tears. But even fatigue couldn't lessen the trium 
 phant sense of achieved adventure. 
 
 None of that, naturally, got over the telephone 
 to her husband, and his own tone of poignant anxi 
 ety he had been waiting hours for her to come 
 home and indulging in all sorts of terrors about 
 her sounded merely querulous to her. He had 
 called up her mother's house two or three times, 
 but they had no word from her. Was that where 
 she was now? 
 
 This supposition, naturally again, annoyed Celia. 
 Why should she be at her mother's ? She told him, 
 128
 
 without explanation, where she was, and that she 
 was coming straight home now ; would get in about 
 nine. 
 
 "You can't come home alone from a place like 
 that at this time of night!" And then, quite ab 
 surdly, he told her to wait there until he could come 
 in and get her. 
 
 This, of course, she flatly declined to do. A 
 street-car that would take her to the station ran 
 right past the door. "I hope you've got your 
 things all packed up," she said by way of a counter 
 attack. "If you haven't, you'd better get at it 
 now, because everything has got to be out of your 
 closet and your bureau drawers by to-morrow morn 
 ing. You can pack a trunk with what you'll want 
 to take with you to the flat, and put the rest of the 
 stuff in another trunk that Ruth says we can leave 
 in the attic. I shan't have a minute to do it to 
 morrow." 
 
 She needn't have made that last remark, she 
 knew, and she didn't blame him a bit for slamming 
 the hook down suddenly, the way he did, by way of 
 129
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 concluding the conversation. Only, the ridiculous 
 ness of the notion that, after the things she'd been 
 doing to-day, and been through to-day, she should 
 finish up, like a Jane Austin heroine, by waiting 
 an hour and a half as a concession to the propri 
 eties because there was, of course, no real danger 
 so that her husband could escort her home, net 
 tled her a little. 
 
 Their meeting, when she got home, at half past 
 nine or so, didn't work much better. 
 
 He flung the door open for her as she came up 
 the steps and greeted her with a, "Wherever in the 
 world have you been?" 
 
 She gave a limp little laugh and said, "Where 
 haven't I been ! My, but I'm tired !" 
 
 "Celia," he said, standing in front of her to keep 
 her from walking off, as she showed a disposition 
 to do, "we've got to have a talk." 
 
 "All right," she said, k< but come on out into the 
 kitchen and talk while I eat. I had a lunch about 
 three at Larry Doyle's, but that's all since coffee 
 this morning. I'm starved!" 
 130
 
 THE NEW WORLD 
 
 Her manner both disconcerted and exasperated 
 him. He had been prepared to meet terrible emo 
 tional stresses tragedy. He felt pretty tragic 
 himself. But nothing of that should be allowed 
 to appear. From now on his dealings with Celia 
 should be marked by gentleness and serenity. And, 
 if she'd been the grief-stricken bewildered object 
 he'd got himself keyed up for, she would have found 
 him exactly that. But, as it was, he cried out: 
 
 "Who the deuce is Larry Doyle? And where 
 where have you been all these hours?" 
 
 She frowned, a little puzzled over his violence, 
 but said: "I've been all over the West Side. And 
 Larry Doyle is a dear. Wait till you've seen him !" 
 
 He said, "Celia, I can't do it treat the. thing 
 in that manner, I mean. Here we are at the end 
 of everything, and you're acting as if it was plans 
 for a week-end visit to the country. This is our 
 last chance to decide anything, and and I want 
 to talk about it seriously. You aren't so angry 
 with me now as you were, and I think I can make 
 you see that I didn't mean what you thought the 
 131
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 other night. At least, not in that offensive way. 
 I want you to consider going back to your father 
 and mother. Not to get rid of me, but to wait. 
 Oh, can't you sit down and listen !" 
 
 All the time he talked she had been eating away 
 steadily, and his last exclamation was provoked by 
 her getting up for a raid on the cake-box. 
 
 "I'm listening," she said, with her mouth full, 
 it must be admitted. Then, with an effort, and a 
 little bit more clearly : "But it isn't any use, Fred. 
 You agreed to the flat, didn't you?" 
 
 "You won't be able to find one that you'd be 
 willing to live in, for any rent I can afford to pay. 
 You've no idea what it would mean ; the things 
 you'd have to put up with, the neighbors you'd 
 have, the hardships." 
 
 "I don't suppose I do know them all," she ad 
 mitted, "but I've found a flat and rented it for 
 twelve dollars a month. It's off North Avenue, right 
 near Humboldt Park." She recited the street and 
 number to him. "You'd better write it down," she 
 132 '
 
 THE NEW WORLD , 
 
 added, "because it's where you live. I've been buy 
 ing furniture all the afternoon." 
 
 Then, at his look of perfectly blank amazement, 
 "Why didn't you think I meant anything I said 
 that night ? What do you think I've been doing all 
 the afternoon? Glooming around like the heroine 
 of East Lynne? Do write that address down, 
 Fred, because your dinner some sort of a dinner 
 is going to be ready there to-morrow night, at 
 half past six, and I don't want you wandering all 
 over the West Side, not knowing where you live." 
 
 She recited the address once more, and stood 
 watching, while he, like an automaton, wrote it 
 down. Then, before he could get his wits together 
 and she had plenty of time, for they were very 
 thoroughly scattered she added: 
 
 "I'm simply so dead tired and sleepy I can feel 
 my brains slipping around inside my head. I'm 
 going up to bed. Good night."
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 WHEN HE CAME HOME 
 
 IT wasn't quite the real thing, this manner of 
 hers. There was a dash of play-acting in it. 
 But she wasn't conscious, to-night she was too 
 tired, poor child, to be accurately conscious of any 
 thing of the motive that led her to assume it. In 
 the background of her mind, of course, she knew 
 that she had mislaid her rage against her husband. 
 More than that, had tossed it overboard long ago. 
 She knew that the motive, quite sincerely avowed on 
 the night of the dinner-party the desire to demon 
 strate, to his repentance and shame, how outra 
 geously he had misjudged her had been wearing 
 thinner and thinner every hour, and that it would 
 collapse almost at the first touch. But she didn't 
 want the collapse to happen until she got him fairly 
 into their new home. 
 
 There were a multitude of last things to be done 
 134.
 
 WHEN HE CAME HOME 
 
 at the house, of course, the next morning, and she 
 didn't get started on them as early as she might, 
 since she slept fathoms deep till eight o'clock, and 
 only by luck waked up then. So it was near noon 
 before she reached the flat. Six hours and a little 
 more left, and an amount to do that might well 
 have swamped her with dismay. 
 
 A description of how the place looked would be 
 lugubrious, and, since I am sure you can imagine 
 it, unnecessary. But Celia was not dismayed, and 
 there was a good reason why. Down below the 
 mere surface of her mind, which was, of course, 
 completely engaged from the moment of her ar 
 rival, she was preoccupied with what was going to 
 happen at half past six, and from then on. Marie 
 had brought her a note from Alfred with her break 
 fast he, of course, had had to go to town long be 
 fore she waked up a note which merely said that 
 he would come at the hour she had given him. All 
 the afternoon, this one fact was vividly in focus. 
 She rehear&ed the event a score of different ways. 
 He'd be surprised, no doubt, with what he found, 
 135
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 curious as to how she had accomplished it, and he'd 
 surely be repentant; especially after he'd found 
 out how completely she had deprived his grievance 
 of any standing ground at all; that she had not, 
 for instance, either gone in debt for the furniture, 
 or used a single bone of what may be called their 
 skeleton of contention namely, the jewelry for 
 the purchase of it. Certainly he couldn't object to 
 her having sold her clothes. That was so brilliantly 
 reasonable a thing to have done. 
 
 She wouldn't, of course, try to rub her own 
 grievance into him. It wouldn't be necessary. The 
 mere outstanding facts of the situation would cry 
 aloud how he had misjudged her. No, there must 
 be nothing tragic or aggrieved about her manner; 
 nothing virtuous or injured or martyrlike. She 
 must be good-humored and cool. She must act in 
 the manner of one who expects all she has done to 
 be taken for granted accepted as a matter of 
 course. 
 
 All this, until he had acknowledged, in some way 
 or other, how wildly in error he had been in his 
 136
 
 WHEN HE CAME HOME 
 
 opinion of her, and had, by implication at least, 
 asked her forgiveness. After that ? 
 
 Always, when she reached this point in the 
 drama, she found her hands getting shaky, and a 
 stiffness coming into her throat, and with a sort of 
 panicky haste she would ring down the curtain and 
 begin another rehearsal at the point where she 
 heard him coming up the stairs. 
 
 But all the resolution at her command wasn't 
 enough to prevent fancies and memories, especially 
 memories, from springing at her; little momentary 
 glimpses of her husband, their context often quite 
 forgotten, just how he'd looked, or how his voice 
 had sounded at one time or another. And when 
 this happened, she'd go very shaky for a minute, 
 and have to wipe her eyes on the sleeve of her big 
 gingham apron, in order to see what she was doing. 
 
 At two o'clock, when she went to Larry Doyle's 
 for lunch, it seemed to her that she had made little 
 headway. But he came back with her for an hour, 
 his noon rush being over, and between them they 
 accomplished miracles. 
 
 137
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 There was plenty to do, of course, even after 
 that. At five o'clock she locked up the flat and set 
 out, with her last three dollars, to buy food for 
 their evening meal, and she nearly forgot this 
 for over Sunday. 
 
 She had a surprise up her sleeve here for Alfred. 
 She was, really, despite the misgiving she had con 
 fided to Larry Doyle, not a half-bad cook. Years 
 ago, when that first man she had got engaged to 
 was in the ascendent, she had played, in quite a 
 serious manner, at domestic science, and had really 
 discovered a latent talent for cooking. Her dra 
 matic break-up, however, with the man who had 
 inspired these labors, had swept her into other 
 channels, and she'd never gone back. Alfred sus 
 pected nothing of this, and it had been part of her 
 program to complete his annihilation, if possible, 
 with a pretty good dinner. The fact that she had 
 to buy enough for five meals, with her three dollars, 
 gave her an excuse, which she was rather glad of, 
 for giving up this project. 
 
 At six o'clock, with the table set, the potatoes 
 138
 
 WHEN HE CAME HOME 
 
 boiling vigorously in their jackets, the slice of ham 
 ready to light the fire under when the moment ar 
 rived, she was seized with a panic because there 
 appeared to be nothing to do but wait, and she 
 simply knew she couldn't not without going all 
 to pieces. Already she could feel the tears com 
 ing up and a lump in her throat. It would be in 
 furiating to have everything spoiled now, just in 
 the hour of her triumph, by having him find wait 
 ing for him, instead of the good-humored, self- 
 possessed young person she'd been counting on all 
 afternoon, a sob-shaken, semi-liquid, tear-streaked, 
 grimy 
 
 Well, anyway, she could wash her face. That 
 was something to do. And, in the bathroom, she 
 scrubbed away vigorously for five minutes. After 
 that, providentially, she remembered that she had 
 forgotten to slice the bread, and with hands that 
 strangely refused to take a proper hold on any 
 thing, she managed to get it done. 
 
 Then she decided that the potatoes had boiled 
 long enough, and began peeling them. 
 139
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 And then, half-way through her second potato, 
 she heard a step on the stairs. It wasn't Alfred. 
 It couldn't be. It wasn't his time not for fifteen 
 minutes. But it was he ! Didn't she know his step ? 
 He was coming up heavily slowly, as though he 
 was tired. 
 
 She dropped her knife and the fork that empaled 
 the potato, and put her face down in the crook of 
 her arm. She was so limp she was sure she couldn't 
 stand up. But when she heard the door open she 
 did, and from the doorway of the kitchen she saw 
 him standing in the other. 
 
 She saw his gaze travel, dazedly, with a strange, 
 unrealizing wistfulness, from one object to another 
 about the room from the bright stove with its 
 glowing doors, to the big hollow easy chair, and the 
 little spring rocker with its fringe trimmings op 
 posite it, to the table with the lamp in the middle, 
 and the red checked table-cloth. It was coming 
 around to her now. But before it reached her she 
 saw his eyes fill up with tears. 
 
 That was the last thing she saw. She heard him 
 140
 
 WHEN HE CAME HOME 
 
 saying her name, just as her voice broke over his, 
 and then, somehow, they were in each other's arms. 
 "Tighter !" she said. 
 
 They had their talk, to be sure, but it wasn't 
 until a good deal later. You can compute roughly 
 how much later, from the fact that the potatoes 
 were absolutely stone cold, and had to be warmed 
 up in the frying-pan before they could begin their 
 supper ; that they ate at last, in the inconstant and 
 preoccupied manner of honeymoon lovers, and that 
 they washed up the dishes in the same way. 
 
 But after all that, and after they had rectified, 
 temporarily, Celia's total omission to provide cur 
 tains or shades, with a sheet pinned up over each 
 of the two front windows, they got down to a bath 
 robe and bedroom-slipper basis, settled together in 
 the big hollow chair, and told each other all about 
 everything; what they'd really meant by things 
 they'd said and done and omitted to do, and what 
 each had thought the other meant, and what a pair 
 of sillies they had been. And Celia wound it up by 
 141 

 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 narrating, though not just as I have done here, 
 how she'd spent the time since Thursday morning. 
 
 At last, blissfully content, and a little drowsy, 
 she began asking him questions ; if he was glad that 
 it had all happened just as it had, down to the very 
 least particular. She was, she said. There was 
 nothing, not the smallest thing, that she would want 
 changed. 
 
 She couldn't get him to go as far as that. 
 "There were things I said to you that night," he 
 insisted, "and things I I couldn't quite deny I 
 meant, that I'd give a good deal to wipe off the 
 slate." 
 
 "Oh, but that," she said, sitting up suddenly, "is 
 the very best part of it. That's what's done it all, 
 don't you see? We might have gone on for years 
 and never never really been married at all, if we 
 hadn't, in our rage, turned in and torn the the 
 husks off each other, so that we could see what we 
 really were. You were right about me, you know, 
 horribly right. That was what made me so furi 
 ous. And it was true that you weren't the man I
 
 'Tighter !" she said
 
 WHEN HE CAME HOME 
 
 married. Oh, but it's all right, silly, don't you see? 
 Because I'm not the girl you married, either." 
 
 He protested at this. She was the same Celia, 
 only now, for the first time, he saw her with open 
 eyes. 
 
 But she, quite dispassionately, stuck to her point. 
 "Surely I ought to know," she insisted, sitting up 
 straight and rubbing her sleepy eyes. "I remember 
 that girl well. I remember how annoyed and 
 shocked she was when she found the new girl the 
 new me, you know falling in love with you, in 
 in a new way which she didn't think quite ladylike. 
 And the new one was rather scared and easily im 
 posed upon, and she might never have got away at 
 all, if you hadn't come along the new you, re 
 member; not prosperous and self-contained, and 
 don't mind noble at all, but just raw and real and 
 human, and fighting mad, and turned her loose." 
 
 He still wanted to laugh her out of this fancy, 
 but she was very much in earnest about it. 
 
 "You must believe it," she insisted. "And you 
 must never forget it. You mustn't treat me like the 
 143
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 old Celia. The old one never liked to be next to 
 things, or people, but I do. I love it." She paused 
 to illustrate. "I've just come alive, don't you see, 
 and found out what a wonderful thing it is. 
 P please say that you're new too, and that this, 
 to-night, is the beginning of everything." 
 
 "The beginning of everything," he echoed. 
 
 For the former things were passed away. 
 
 So ends the first chapter of this episode in the 
 life of the Alfred Blairs.
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 INTERLUDE 
 
 "~\ "\ TE will sing," the preacher says, "the first 
 V T and third stanza, omitting the second." 
 
 There are three chapters in this fragment of 
 Celia's and Alfred's story; but we, at the conclu 
 sion of the first, are going to proceed directly to 
 the third. Blessed is the nation which has no his 
 tory. And blessed, for the same reason, is the 
 family which doesn't give the novelist a chance. 
 
 The three months which followed Celia's finding 
 and renting and furnishing of the flat make up this 
 second chapter. To Alfred and Celia it remains 
 the outstanding one, and when they are old, I fancy 
 they'll still talk to each other about it. As they 
 see it retrospectively, it is their period of pure ro 
 mance three golden honeymoons strung on a silver 
 wire. 
 
 Please don't take me as saying that I consider 
 145
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 poverty a romantic lark, or even the perilously close 
 approach to poverty that is spelled by an income, 
 for two people, of twenty-two and a half dollars a 
 week. 
 
 But the Blairs were not really so poor as they 
 made out. They had, for the present, plenty of 
 good serviceable clothes; they had in certain pros 
 pect, though they carefully avoided looking at it, 
 the income from their house. And, too, down in the 
 bottom of the mind of each, though neither ever ad 
 mitted it, was the consciousness that this state of 
 things was transitory, and really terminable at will. 
 
 There is no denying that this consciousness 
 changed the quality of their adventure a little, 
 spiced it faintly with the flavor of make-believe. 
 It was easier, for example, to make a joke of it, 
 when a mistake in the budget reduced them, for 
 four whole days, to a famine ration; or to smile, 
 as they stood together outside an enticing motion- 
 picture theater around on North Avenue, and had, 
 forlornly, to admit that they had exhausted their 
 amusement appropriation for this week. 
 146
 
 INTERLUDE 
 
 I don't mean that they enjoyed these experiences. 
 They honestly went hungry. They endured a gen 
 uine disappointment over not seeing Charlie Chap 
 lin in his burlesque of Geraldine Farrar. But these 
 pangs could be looked at as isolated phenomena, not 
 as the omens of a dreary future; which made an 
 enormous difference. 
 
 The most delicious thing about their new mode 
 of life was, perhaps, its intimacy. They had never 
 lived intimately before, and this fact had a deeper- 
 lying cause than Celia's the old Celia's aloofness 
 or her husband's shyness ; this was the spirit of the 
 social group of which they formed a part. No 
 group in the whole social system is so enslaved by 
 its own conventions as this prosperous, rising, sub 
 urban class. It is the determination to rise, of 
 course, that does it. The smaller group, just above, 
 which has reached what it considers the summit, 
 can afford to relax a little ; can even, within rigor 
 ous limits, of course, make a feature of its indif 
 ference to what other people think of its actions. 
 
 But Celia and her friends and their husbands, 
 147
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 with a summit in sight just ahead, had to keep in 
 the procession. The number and variety of their 
 entertainments were regimented with almost mili 
 tary precision. They gave one another more or less 
 the same dinners and lunches ; they followed one an 
 other, sheeplike, into the same recreations, the same 
 charities; read the same books, discussed the same 
 ideas. And, since their lives, in a sharply bounded 
 suburban community, were very visible to one an 
 other, they conformed pretty much to the same 
 domestic code subscribed to the same standards. 
 
 Well, and intimacy was distinctly not good form 
 among them. The notion sprang, perhaps, from 
 novels about the English aristocracy. Anyhow, 
 between husbands and wives, the proper manner was 
 one of rather hostile indifference. The sort of 
 things they were to say to each other when others 
 were about were sharp little witticisms. 
 
 And this attitude carried itself over into their 
 private life, an imposition guaranteed by their serv 
 ants, who were hired from one house to another, 
 and who formed almost as close a society as they 
 148
 
 INTERLUDE 
 
 did. That a husband and wife should have sepa 
 rate rooms to dress and sleep in was a matter of ele 
 mentary decency. 
 
 The three-room flat, of course, put an end to all 
 that in more senses than one. Their one bedroom 
 was just an alcove, really, separable by curtains 
 as yet unprovided from their living-room. When 
 they turned the key in the door at the head of the 
 stairs, they were as secure against intrusion as a 
 pair of pioneer settlers on a prairie. And they 
 reverted, in many respects, to the simplicity of 
 peasants. 
 
 But the astonishing discovery that they made was 
 that this material intimacy flowered out into a spir 
 itual intimacy that neither of them had dreamed of 
 before. You couldn't pretend much at close quar 
 ters like that. You couldn't nurse a grievance be 
 hind a politely intangible manner, or a noble, long- 
 suffering dignity. There was no standard, not 
 their own, that they must be always acting with 
 deference to. And the consequence was that things 
 got said out, that they came to know not only each 
 149
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 other's minds, but their own. They had occasional 
 sharp little quarrels, like the explosion of fire 
 crackers, during which they said and did things to 
 each other which would inexpressibly have shocked 
 their respectable friends. But these encounters left 
 no after-effects ; no virtuous, self -pitying sulks. 
 
 They began, now that they had stopped trying 
 to live up to anything, to have real fun a rather 
 rowdy, rough-and-tumble sort of fun, a good deal 
 of it due perhaps to their extensive patronage of 
 the movies. This was their theory of it, anyway. 
 
 The movies, of course, weren't their only form 
 of entertainment. They took extraordinary street 
 car rides. It's amazing, you know, how amusing 
 a street-car ride can be to a jovially minded, rather 
 outrageously behaved pair, snuggled together on 
 one of the back seats and guessing, in whispers, 
 most grotesquely and injuriously sometimes, about 
 the condition and business of other passengers. It 
 is possible to work a variant on the game, too, by 
 getting on separately, at different corners, and then 
 150
 
 INTERLUDE 
 
 elaborately making each other's acquaintance, to 
 the scandal of the car, and getting off together. 
 
 Celia was really shocked, though, one night, 
 when Alfred suggested that they go to a dance- 
 hall. Certain friends of Celia's, in her former in 
 carnation, made it almost their one business in life 
 to crush out the dance-hall evil ; or if not to crush 
 it out, at least to step sharply and disconcertingly 
 on its toes, and as a result of their reports concern 
 ing their slumming investigations, Celia had got 
 the idea that all dance-halls were sinks of unbridled 
 iniquity. 
 
 Alfred confessed he didn't know much about it 
 himself, but he passed on the remark of a friend 
 of his a man who knew the brightly lighted world 
 very well: "The majority of people in any of those 
 places are decent. Or, at least, they're acting de 
 cently at any given moment." He said that was 
 what made all these stage and moving-picture pro 
 ductions of fast restaurants and tough dances so 
 ridiculously unreal. They probably weren't, Al- 
 151
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 fred concluded, so black as they were painted. 
 Anyhow, he and Celia could try and see. 
 
 The place they hit upon was, to the eyes of their 
 innocence at least, perfectly harmless they never 
 stayed very late, it's true and they enjoyed oc 
 casional evenings there prodigiously. It was rather 
 an extravagance, of course. 
 
 The best amusement of all came a little later, 
 when the fine spring weather really set in. Alfred 
 came home, guiltily, one night, with two pairs of 
 roller-skates. Neither of them had attempted this 
 amusement since childhood, but, after one experi 
 mental and rather painful evening, they got on 
 very well. The park near by afforded an admirable 
 place for it. Sometimes they swung along arm in 
 arm, rhythmically romantically. Sometimes, in a 
 scandalous fashion, they mixed themselves up in a 
 miscellaneous game of tag that one was pretty sure 
 to find going on in one of the larger squares. All 
 told, there is no doubt that their standard of civili' 
 zation deteriorated very much. It was surprising 
 how much younger they got. 
 152
 
 INTERLUDE 
 
 This change in her husband was an astonishing 
 thing to Celia. 
 
 "The man I married," she confided to him one 
 night, leaning her elbows on the back of his chair, 
 and getting both hands, with a good tight grip, 
 into his hair he was like a big dog in enjoying 
 the rougher and more unceremonious sort of ca 
 resses "the man I married, you know, was middle- 
 aged, safe and sane, and awfully dignified; 'always 
 wholly serious,' the way Mrs. Humphrey Ward 
 wanted her uncle Matthew to be. But you, you're 
 just a big schoolboy a rather outrageous sort of 
 schoolboy, too." And, indeed, it was true that the 
 way he had been acting all the evening, ever since 
 he'd come home from work, warranted the indict 
 ment. 
 
 He puzzled her, though, by turning rather grave 
 and reflective about it. She leaned down for a bet 
 ter look at him, then came round and curled up in 
 his lap. 
 
 "Silly," she said, "don't try to pretend you don't 
 know how I love to have you like that !" 
 153
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 He pulled her up in a voluminous embrace that 
 was still a little absent-minded. 
 
 "No, it wasn't that," he said. "I was thinking 
 of something. Your speaking of a schoolboy re 
 minded me of it. You know, I've been trying, off 
 and on, ever since this happened ever since that 
 Saturday night when I found you here, to think 
 what it was like. It was like something that had 
 happened once before, I knew, but I couldn't get 
 hold of it. Now I have. 
 
 "It was when I was in fifth grade about ten 
 years old, I must have been and I had a teacher 
 that couldn't stand me. I don't know that I blame 
 her so very much, after all. I was pretty slow and 
 grubby, much as you'd expect me to have been, and 
 I didn't get on at all. My special nightmare was 
 arithmetic, which is queer, considering." The con 
 sideration was, though he didn't explain this to 
 Celia, that he had, really, an uncanny talent for 
 mathematics. "I've made up my mind since, that it 
 wasn't the mathematical part of the problems I 
 couldn't understand, but the English they were ex- 
 154
 
 "The man I married was middle-aged, safe and sane. 
 You're just a big schoolboy"
 
 INTERLUDE 
 
 pressed in. However, that was no help to me at 
 the time. I was the teacher's horrible example. 
 She used to say, over some uncommon piece of stu 
 pidity by some one else, 'Why, even Alfred Blair 
 wouldn't have done that.' " 
 
 Celia made a little shudder of disgust. "How 
 you must have hated her!" she said. Then, sus 
 piciously, "That teacher isn't going to turn out to 
 be me, is she ?" 
 
 He answered the second question with a "Wait 
 and see," but to the first, he replied more thought 
 fully. "No, I hadn't the satisfaction of hating her. 
 If I could have taken her personally, that would 
 have been easy. But she wasn't personal at all. 
 She was teacher you see? Destiny. All I could 
 do was just despair. 
 
 "Well, it got worse and worse, and one morning, 
 on the way to school, with a hopeless lesson ahead 
 of me that I hadn't even tried to get, I made up 
 my mind to quit. I'd have to do some desperate 
 deed first, to get myself expelled from school, be 
 cause otherwise I'd be made to go back. Then I'd 
 155
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 go and be a newsboy. I remember standing still, 
 in the middle of the sidewalk, and solemnly swear 
 ing to myself I think I said 'God damn' that I'd 
 do it. Then I walked on, trying to make up my 
 mind what I'd do. 
 
 "I considered pretty nearly everything, up to the 
 actual assassination of the teacher, but the particu 
 lar crime wasn't really picked out when I got to the 
 school. 
 
 "Well here's the point at last when I got 
 there, there was a card on the door. There'd been 
 a case of smallpox and the school was closed until 
 further notice. 
 
 "I'll never forget that walk home from school. 
 There'd been a miracle that had changed the whole 
 look of the world. You can imagine changing in 
 ten minutes from a prospective criminal who'd got 
 to get himself expelled from school, in order to go 
 and be a newsboy, to a kid on his way home on 
 the first morning of an uncharted vacation. A 
 prospector striking pay-ore is nothing to that, any 
 way. And to me Well, there you are. That's 
 156
 
 INTERLUDE 
 
 the nearest approach to how I've felt since since 
 this happened." 
 
 She squeezed up a little closer to him. "I expect 
 I was the teacher, though," she said. 
 
 He gave a laugh at that. "No, you lamb," he 
 said. "You were the smallpox notice." 
 
 Celia pondered a good deal upon this parable 
 during the following days. It illuminated many 
 things. A schoolboy, reveling in an unforeseen 
 holiday! That gave her the clue, not only to his 
 present state of mind, but to what his state of mind 
 must have been during the months that preceded the 
 crash. Indeed, ever since their marriage their 
 engagement before that, perhaps. 
 
 That serious, sober, responsible way of his wasn't 
 all her doing, of course. He had never, for one 
 thing, enjoyed the four years of sunlit irresponsi 
 bility, which is what most men manage to get out 
 of their term at college. He'd been shouldering 
 heavy burdens through all that time. He was in the 
 way of taking burdens for granted. That was why 
 he hadn't revolted at the burden his marriage had 
 157
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 been. Perhaps if he had come to her confidently 
 expecting the simple sa. sf actions he craved, she 
 might have given them to him. It made her sick 
 now to think how she'd starved him with her chilly 
 superiorities and restraints, her little lectures and 
 her ladylikeness the smooth, finely laundered gar 
 ment of unrumpled conventionality she had always 
 worn before him. 
 
 His still incredulous delight in her new ways with 
 him, with the commentary it carried on what their 
 old life had meant to him, was poignant to her 
 almost to the point of tears. She was the school 
 teacher in that allegory, although the smallpox card 
 as well, and the playground of his holiday. 
 
 Well, he deserved a holiday, poor dear, and she 
 meant to make it last as long as she could. 
 
 But it's the essence of holidays, that they come 
 to an end a point she'd thought of, but not 
 pressed, when he told her the parable. One had to 
 go back to school some time. How would he like 
 the new teacher he'd find when he went back ? 
 
 The thing she was sure he didn't realize, and that 
 158
 
 INTERLUDE 
 
 she meant, if possible, to keep him from finding out, 
 was that their new life 1ms not a letting-out of 
 school for her ; was, on the contrary, the beginning 
 of school the first real school she'd ever gone to. 
 That he didn't, apparently, even suspect it was due 
 to the fact that school-hours ended for her with 
 his return from the office. From then on, whether 
 at a movie-show, or dance-hall, or roller-skating in 
 the park, she was as gay and irresponsible as he. 
 In the morning, too, for that matter, when the 
 alarm-clock routed them sleepily out of bed, and 
 they dressed and got breakfast simultaneously, all 
 over the place. 
 
 But from seven-thirty, when he started down 
 town, until the hour of his return, life to Celia was 
 an intensely serious business. It was a business 
 that could easily have been hatefully dull and dis 
 agreeable. Under her old system of dealing with 
 nettles, stroking them just gingerly enough to get 
 the maximum sting with the minimum effect upon 
 the nettle, she could, in a week, have come to regard 
 herself as a dismally abused martyr. 
 159
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 Cooking wasn't so bad, though it was exasperat 
 ing to discover that every ingredient that made 
 things taste good was expensive. But washing 
 dishes! The new Celia shared the opinion of the 
 old that the nastiest substance in the world was 
 greasy dish-water. She hated the way it was spoil 
 ing her hands. Her feet and ankles were getting 
 spoiled, too. They would spread and thicken to 
 appalling proportions, if this life kept up long 
 enough. She was pretty soft, of course, all over, 
 and during the first fortnight she was discovering 
 new muscles all the time that she had never known 
 existed until they began to ache. 
 
 Her spirit ached, too, sometimes, more excruciat 
 ingly than her muscles. Determination and dash 
 didn't always win you a victory. And when you 
 were defeated, you did feel such a fool. To cite a 
 single instance: there was a disastrous day when 
 she tackled the wash. She'd blithely sent it out to 
 the nearest laundry the first week, and, since it 
 hadn't occurred to either of them that it was pos 
 sible to economize in this direction, the hole this 
 160
 
 INTERLUDE 
 
 made in their free assets for the week was shocking. 
 There were holes, too, in other things. This laun 
 dry evidently didn't understand the nature of silk 
 pajamas. So, with an undaunted air, but feeling 
 very hollow inside, Celia told herself that of course 
 it was ridiculous for a woman in her position not to 
 do her own washing. 
 
 Her direst forebodings were more than borne out 
 by the event. There was, it appeared, a technique 
 in this business which her own experience limited 
 to the washing-out of sheer little blouses and hand 
 kerchiefs, had not provided her with. And the hor 
 rible fatigue of it! Before she had even finished 
 the washing part, her back ached as if she had 
 broken it. 
 
 And when it came to the ironing ! Well, if you're 
 curious, just try to iron a pair of double bed-sheets 
 by hand yourself. Before she got through with 
 them, those two sheets represented a vast, illimitable 
 acreage enough for a country estate. Then, Al 
 fred had a horrible predilection for the very thin 
 nest kind of gauzy woolen underwear and socks, 
 161
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 which had to be bathed as tenderly as a young 
 baby. 
 
 She told him, when he came home that night, 
 with a hysterical attempt at jocularity, that he'd 
 have to wash those things for himself thereafter. 
 Perhaps they'd let him go in swimming with them 
 on, in the public bathhouse in the park. They 
 could dry on him then and perhaps not shrink. 
 
 The problem was solved by a compromise. They 
 learned to be less reckless about using things that 
 had to be washed, and the flat things were sent out 
 to the laundry. 
 
 But I'm not going into the details of Celia's 
 schooling. They'd be voluminous. Literally, what 
 she didn't know when she took on the job of being 
 a wage-earner's wife would fill a book. Anyway, 
 that isn't the story. 
 
 But her spiritual attitude toward those hard les 
 sons is a part of the story. That she kept herself 
 from sagging and drudging through them, and 
 submitting, by this attitude, to a spiritual defeat, 
 was due mostly to two causes. One of them was 
 162
 
 INTERLUDE 
 
 the consciousness that she was putting it over 
 with Alfred, to an extent she hadn't dreamed of 
 when she made the threat the night of the dinner 
 party. 
 
 He'd been dangerously near right in the opinion 
 of her he'd unconsciously expressed that night. 
 The old Celia, if she hadn't been burnt to ashes in 
 the fire of the new Celia's wrath, might easily 
 enough have done just what her husband had ex 
 pected she would. 
 
 But you couldn't make Alfred believe that now 
 not on the oath of the Recording Angel. He was 
 still in the depths of contrition, as far as so happy 
 a man could be, over the injustice he'd done her. 
 And a contrite husband, aware that he has never, 
 until now, appreciated you, is a much more stimu 
 lating companion to live with than an aggrieved 
 but nobly forgiving one. It was a wonderful stim 
 ulus, living up to his new and still wondering opin 
 ion of her. 
 
 There was another, which she was less conscious 
 of. This new life of hers had, extraordinarily, the 
 163
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 quality of being alive. It was real. It took hold. 
 The things she did were effectual. They made 
 things come out differently from the- way they'd 
 otherwise have come out. 
 
 Take the matter of economy. There was so 
 much money real money, not an impalpable bank- 
 balance to meet their current necessities through 
 the week. The amount of that which she had left 
 on Saturday night was what they could have fun 
 with through the next week. There was always 
 a vivid emotion of triumph, or of chagrin, when 
 it came to displaying that residuum to her husband. 
 
 This same quality of vividness characterized, in 
 deed, pretty much everything about her new life. 
 The experiences of that interminable, wonderful 
 day, when she had sold her clothes and bought the 
 furniture had been true omens. 
 
 She had expected to be lonely ; and, in the social 
 sense, of course, she was. For none of their sub 
 urban friends had been given a corrected version of 
 the story of a flight out west somewhere, that had 
 been made up for Ruth Collier. But, to her aston- 
 164
 
 INTERLUDE 
 
 ishment, she found herself tasting the joys of real 
 companionship as she had never known them be 
 fore. I don't mean with Alfred, but during the 
 daytime, while he was at the office casual people 
 who sold her things in the little shops, people she 
 met day after day during her afternoon breath 
 taking in the park. Foremost of these, an old 
 Garibaldian gardener. Then there was the librarian 
 at the substation of the public library, and the 
 cadaverous-looking Russian boy who brought them 
 a loaf of whole-wheat bread every other afternoon, 
 and who she discovered to be an absolutely au 
 thentic Nihilist. And, first and always, Larry 
 Doyle with his idolized youngest daughter, who 
 went to business college, and the son, who was a 
 trouble-man in the employ of the telephone com 
 pany. They all came closer, somehow gave her 
 more and took more from her, than people in the 
 old life, whom she'd called by their first names for 
 years. 
 
 Figuratively, she and those old acquaintances 
 had always felt one another through gloves. Well, 
 165
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 now, imagine the sensations of a person who has 
 always worn gloves, whose hands have never known 
 contact with anything except the inside of his 
 gloves. Imagine his sensations when he first took 
 them off; how sharp and exciting they would be 
 painful, sometimes, but worth the pain. That 
 will give you a notion of Celia. She had just come 
 alive. There it is in two words. 
 
 Coming alive, she began experiencing a strong 
 emotional interest in live things growing things; 
 the vegetation of the young spring, so tenderly 
 nourished by the old gardener in the park. He so 
 old, but getting a fresh vicarious life out of his 
 plants. 
 
 She experienced in herself a longing to make 
 things grow. Window-boxes in the flat, that was 
 her first idea, which expanded to a day-dream of 
 an acre, not too far from town for Alfred, where, 
 while he was away at work, she could have flowers 
 and garden vegetables chickens. 
 
 But that was only the fringe of the idea. The 
 core of it she didn't reach till a little later. She 
 166
 
 ~
 
 INTERLUDE 
 
 came upon it, one afternoon, in the park, and 
 stopped with a sob too sudden to be repressed. She 
 knew now what the growing thing was she really 
 wanted. Before her eyes was a common enough 
 sight, a mother Italian, she looked sitting on 
 one of the benches nursing a baby.
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 GERMINATION 
 
 IT was this discovery of hers, really, that marked 
 the end of the second chapter for Celia, any 
 way. The growing strength of her new desire car 
 ried her along like the current of a river. The grati 
 fication of it would mean an end to her husband's 
 holiday. They couldn't have a baby in a place like 
 this. He must have space, and clean sweet air and 
 sunshine ; that acre, if possible, and a cow. 
 
 She dwelt on the details of the dream lovingly. 
 But she hesitated over telling her husband about it, 
 partly from a new shyness which made it sweet to 
 keep the wonder of it to herself for a while, partly 
 from the very clear realization of what the accom 
 plishment of it would require from her husband. 
 Often, during the first few weeks of their life here, 
 he had spoken to her of the wonderful relief it was 
 having merely routine work to do no responsibil- 
 168
 
 GERMINATION 
 
 ity beyond the mere carrying out of his instruc 
 tions, after all those months of maddening worry. 
 
 The undertaking of a baby would mean, of 
 course, the end of all that; would involve the ex 
 ercise of more imaginative and better-paid powers. 
 She shrank from asking him to begin looking about 
 for a more responsible job, even for the reason she 
 would have to offer. She wouldn't want to name 
 this new mysterious desire of hers in that connec 
 tion at all. Of course, she might not have to. He 
 might see the necessity for himself. But, equally, 
 he might not. Men were ignorant about such mat 
 ters. It might not strike him that they couldn't 
 have a baby right here, in this teeming neighbor 
 hood, with scarlet fever, whooping cough and mea 
 sles lurking in every street-car and along the 
 benches in the park. And perhaps pretty soon 
 he'd end his holiday of his own accord. 
 
 She'd noticed something a little different about 
 him lately unexplained preoccupations, the cessa 
 tion of casual chat about the deeds of his fellow 
 draftsmen and the routine of his office work. So, 
 169
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 for a while, with a patience that was new to her, 
 she waited. Then this happened. 
 
 One hot Saturday night, after they'd virtuously 
 decided to do up the dishes in order to leave their 
 holiday to-morrow as free as possible, but still hung 
 lazily over the supper-table while they summoned 
 resolution enough to put the disagreeable job 
 through, Alfred said: 
 
 "I had a funny encounter in the street to-day; 
 ran into Major March." But he didn't go on from 
 there, as he might have been expected to, so she 
 said: 
 
 "I don't believe I ever heard of the major. Who 
 is he?" 
 
 "Not the major," he corrected. "Major. It's 
 his first name. He's a queer genius of an in 
 ventor. I had an idea I'd told you about him. You 
 know, I think a man ought to be able to get heavy 
 damages from his parents for naming him Major 
 when his last name was going to be March. Some 
 people seem to go out of their way to make people 
 ridiculous with the names they give them." 
 170
 
 GERMINATION 
 
 "Was he the inventor," Celia asked, "who was 
 going to make your everlasting fortune and didn't 
 the one you gave the fifteen thousand dollars 
 to?" 
 
 He shot a look at her, and said, with a laugh, 
 "Yes, that's the man. But I didn't realize I'd told 
 you about my having gone in with him. I thought 
 I'd kept that pretty dark." 
 
 "You told me about it," she explained, "the night 
 of that last dinner-party, when you told me such 
 a lot of things." She went on, after a moment's 
 silence. "What did he say to-day ? Did he tell you 
 that his great invention was coming out right, after 
 all?" 
 
 Once more he looked at her in that rather odd 
 way surprised, but rather more than that almost 
 startled. But then he laughed. 
 
 "Not exactly. It was the old story. He needed 
 just two thousand dollars more. That was all that 
 stood between him and untold wealth. He'd got his 
 big people interested. He'd got the thing right 
 beyond the shadow of a doubt. But he had to dem- 
 171 '
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 onstrate it to them with some rather elaborate lab 
 oratory tests. The two thousand was to be for 
 that. Then all his trouble's over." 
 
 "Do you suppose it's true?" she asked. 
 
 "Oh, there's no doubt he thinks so. The poor 
 little cuss is the soul of honor. And lord! He 
 may be right about it. Very likely he is. He 
 sounded quite convincing." 
 
 There was a little pause, then he went on, with 
 a smile. "I'd never admit that, if there were the 
 slightest possibility of my giving him the money. 
 I've had my lesson, and I don't need to be taught 
 it twice. But as long as the possibility doesn't ex 
 ist " He broke off there, thinking she meant to 
 speak, but if she had she'd changed her mind 
 about it. 
 
 "Come along," he said. "Let's get through the 
 dishes." 
 
 But she detained him with an outstretched hand. 
 "Let's fix the budget first," she said. 
 
 It was their Saturday night routine to take his 
 pay-envelope and divide its contents into various 
 172
 
 GERMINATION 
 
 funds to cover the next week's expenditures. But 
 to-night, upon her asking for it, his face went sud 
 denly blank. Then: 
 
 "Good gracious !" he said. "I forgot to tell you. 
 They've given me another raise. Thirty a week 
 now. What do you think of that?" 
 
 "Oh, that's great !" she cried. "Let's see it." 
 
 "I haven't got it," he said. "I expect they mean 
 to pay me by check from now on. Thirty a week 
 counts as salary instead of wages." 
 
 Her face paled a little, and she had to swallow 
 the lump in her throat before she could speak. 
 
 "That's true, isn't it, Fred?" she asked. "You 
 you aren't trying to spare me something? You 
 haven't lost your job?" 
 
 He came around the table quickly and took her 
 in his arms. "No, I haven't lost my job," he said. 
 "I give you my word for that. Were you really 
 frightened?" 
 
 She pulled in a long breath and let it out explo 
 sively. That answered him. 
 
 "But look here, Fred," she said earnestly. 
 173
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 "Wouldn't they be willing to go on giving it to 
 you in the same way in real money, in an envelope, 
 every Saturday night? That's the basis of every 
 thing, you see knowing what we've got and what 
 we've got to do without." 
 
 He admitted she was right and said he'd get them 
 to do it that way. He was sure they wouldn't mind. 
 
 She dismissed, vigorously and contemptuously, 
 from her mind a thought that popped into it, of 
 the contrast between the manner in which he had 
 made this announcement to-night and that with 
 which he had told her of his former rise from 
 the original twenty-two fifty to twenty-five. He'd 
 shouted his news to her from the doorway that 
 other time, and waved his envelope at her extracted 
 and displayed, in all their glory, the five, flat, new, 
 five-dollar bills. And they'd spent that evening 
 calculating, with the most minute exactitude, how 
 they'd spend that surplus two dollars and fifty cents 
 in a riotous celebration the next day. Certainly 
 things hadn't gone like that to-night, and the 
 174
 
 GERMINATION 
 
 change might well be thought significant of some 
 thing. 
 
 But it was easier to refrain from speculating 
 about it because her mind was so well occupied by 
 something else a fascinating breath-taking possi 
 bility, which wouldn't consent to be dismissed as 
 absurd; that came back, at all events, every time 
 she did dismiss it that way, with more assurance 
 about itself, more the air of a serious plan. It 
 kept her awake a long time that night. It, and the 
 necessity for lying very rigorously still, in order 
 not to disturb Fred. When at last she did move, 
 she found he'd been awake all the time. 
 
 He said, without preface, "Celia, are you getting 
 tired of it?" 
 
 She asked, "Of what?" though somehow she 
 knew. 
 
 "Of living like this. Of the flat, and cooking, 
 and washing dishes. Are you beginning to hate 
 It?" 
 
 "Why, I love it," she cried, with a little catch 
 175
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 in her voice. "Surely you know that. I've never 
 been so happy. Life's never meant so much. 
 Only " Her voice faded out there and there was 
 a long silence minutes, it seemed. 
 
 Then, as if out of a stiff throat, he asked, "Only 
 what?" 
 
 With a little sob she wound her arms around him 
 and nestled close. "Nothing yet," she said. 
 
 With that answer he seemed content. 
 
 She was content, too, and soon fell happily 
 asleep. Because now her mind was made up. The 
 fascinating possibility had become a resolution. 
 
 On Monday morning, about half past eight, 
 after the breakfast things were out of the way, 
 she drew out of the bottom of Alfred's trunk, where 
 it had lain hidden beneath some things he hadn't 
 happened to want, a package whose solidly rectan 
 gular form was still indifferently disguised by the 
 clumsy wrappings it had worn when it had lain on 
 the floor between a furiously angry husband and 
 wife, who had, respectively, refused in the most 
 176
 
 GERMINATION 
 
 passionate manner to avail themselves of the oppor 
 tunities it offered. 
 
 Celia looked at it with a rueful smiling memory 
 of the row it had precipitated. It was still entitled 
 to be called the skeleton in their closet, since it had 
 never been mentioned by either of them since that 
 morning. 
 
 She dressed as well as she could, then set off 
 down-town with the package under her arm. There 
 were only two questions in her mind now. Could 
 she sell it, this jewelry of hers, for two thousand 
 dollars ? And if she could not, would that inventor 
 be able to get on with a little less?
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 ALFEED, MEANWHILE 
 
 CELIA might well have given more weight than 
 she did to that new preoccupied manner of her 
 husband's, and she might have taken more seriously 
 than she did the contrast between his offhand way 
 of announcing that his pay had been raised from 
 twenty-five to thirty dollars a week, and his previous 
 excitement over the announcement that it had been 
 raised to twenty-five. She would have done so, no 
 doubt, but for that preoccupation of her own about 
 which I have told you. But even if she had allowed 
 speculation to run riot gone to her inferential 
 limit, she'd hardly have come abreast of the facts. 
 For a month, indeed, after Alfred Blair had 
 taken his new job, he had, just as he told her, rev 
 eled in the irresponsibility of it. He had sat over 
 his table from eight to twelve, and from one to five, 
 doing the work before him with an almost contemp- 
 178
 
 ALFRED, MEANWHILE 
 
 tuous ease, exercising a set of faculties that a long 
 and early training had almost transmuted into in 
 stincts, while the inner man of him rejoiced in long- 
 drawn breaths and the delicious relaxation of racked 
 nerves. He was like a man washed ashore from a 
 wreck, exhausted by the struggle with tempestuous 
 seas, content to lie for a while on the sun-warmed 
 sands, incurious as to what his new island domain 
 might have in store for him. 
 
 The first stirrings of curiosity he repressed se 
 verely. Each time he caught his mind reaching out 
 to grasp the essentials of the work he was doing, 
 criticizing the engineering of his superiors, decid 
 ing how the thing really ought to be done, he 
 checked the impulse vigorously. It was none of 
 his business whether the job was done right or 
 wrong, economically or extravagantly. Had he 
 ever been as happy in his life before as he was right 
 now ? Well then, why spoil a good thing ? Hadn't 
 he had enough worry and trouble in the past year 
 and a half to last him a while longer, anyway? 
 He had. As a means of further reassuring him- 
 179
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 self on this point, he had talked to Celia about the 
 pleasure he was taking in the routine nature of his 
 work. 
 
 But he couldn't keep this up indefinitely. To 
 the trained athlete it is unendurable not to exercise. 
 Heart, lungs and muscles cry aloud for the tests 
 they are accustomed to. And the man who has 
 made trained athletes of his judgment and imag 
 ination can't leave them out of his reckoning in 
 definitely. They'll begin taking hold some day, in 
 spite of him. They won't be satisfied, either, by 
 the mere acknowledgment on his part, of the possi 
 bility or the Tightness of the things they have 
 pointed out to him. They'll never let him alone 
 until he has harnessed all his energy to the task 
 of making the possibilities they have pointed out 
 come true. 
 
 Do you remember I'm sure you will if you're 
 old enough the classical story of the young prin 
 cess and her pet tiger? It was either in the third 
 reader or the fourth, I can't be sure which. At all 
 events, the tiger was a perfectly amiable beast and 
 180
 
 ALFRED, MEANWHILE 
 
 enjoyed the complete confidence of the princess, the 
 secret being that his diet was confined to milk and 
 biscuits. But one day, in a fit of affection, he be 
 gan licking the princess's hand, and his rough 
 tongue presently wore through the skin, so that he 
 tasted blood. Whereupon, without remorse, he pro 
 ceeded to eat up the princess. 
 
 I don't claim perfection for my analogy, since 
 the princess of my tale is the oily, toothpick-chew 
 ing foreman of the drafting-room, whom I intro 
 duced to you in the act of hiring Alfred Blair. 
 The parallel would be closer, too, if the tiger in the 
 legend were not an innocent cub, but a reformed 
 man-eater, who had gone upon a milk diet voluntar 
 ily. Apart from these defects, however, the thing 
 works out pretty well, since it was a purely good- 
 natured impulse to help his manifestly incompetent 
 superior by showing him how a certain detail really 
 ought to be managed, that led Alfred to take his 
 first taste of blood ; that is, of responsibility. 
 
 I don't know whether the tiger was surprised or 
 not when he discovered that he had eaten the prin- 
 181
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 cess. I do know that Alfred was genuinely aston 
 ished over the discovery that he had, inadvertently, 
 eaten the foreman. He got, that is to say, this 
 unfortunate gentleman's job. 
 
 That's what happened, however quite inevita 
 bly, if one stops to think about it within a fort 
 night from the time when he ventured to correct 
 that first detail. 
 
 I don't know whether you will consider the other 
 first step he took that day to have been inevitable 
 also. I'm afraid not, without some explanation. 
 The step was and it proved quite as important 
 as the other that he refrained from telling Celia 
 about his promotion when he got home the evening 
 of the day it happened. 
 
 I won't attempt to deny that he ought to have 
 told her; that it was cowardly and evasive of him; 
 and, I'm afraid I must add, decidedly masculine, 
 not to tell. He got adequately punished for it in 
 the event, as you are to be told. But while you are 
 waiting for that to happen to him let me try to 
 show you how it looked and felt to him. 
 182
 
 ALFRED, MEANWHILE 
 
 In the first place, he was informed of his pro 
 motion the moment he arrived in the office one morn 
 ing. If they'd told him the last thing before he 
 left for home the night before, I haven't a doubt 
 he'd have gone straight to Celia with it. As it 
 happened, he had a day to look his new job over 
 before he went home, and it made him pretty sick. 
 
 He'd suspected the truth about this big mu 
 nicipal contract from the day he was hired. And 
 he'd been getting little fragmentary glimpses of it 
 from day to day at his own drafting-board. But 
 from his more elevated position as superintendent 
 of the drafting-room, with only one engineer be 
 tween himself and the contractor, he now saw the 
 thing in all its naked effrontery. It was the famil 
 iar formula for municipal work: fifty per cent, 
 graft, fifty per cent, incompetence. 
 
 The maddening thing about it was, too, that, 
 but for the incompetence, the graft would not be 
 necessary. A man of decent ability, with that con 
 tract in his pocket, could deliver the city an honest 
 job and make as much legitimate profit out of it 
 183
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 as this shifty numb-witted grafter could hope to 
 steal. 
 
 The position Alfred's incautious display of tal 
 ent had got him into was the proverbially uncom 
 fortable one between the upper and the nether mill 
 stones. He could no longer absolve himself, as he 
 had done at his drafting-board, from all responsi 
 bility for the job. They'd picked him up and made 
 him responsible. Yet they hadn't given him au 
 thority to change a thing that really mattered. 
 
 If you will imagine Hercules, with a tin bucket 
 and a scrubbing-brush, getting his first sight and 
 whiff of the Augean stables, you will have some no 
 tion of Alfred Blair's state of mind. 
 
 It's important to remember that he was Hercules 
 was in the habit, anyhow, of dealing with things 
 in a Herculean way, turning the course of rivers 
 through them, if necessary. What I mean is that 
 he really was, down inside, despite the temporary 
 eclipse of the past few months, the successful, au 
 dacious, highly energized big-caliber man that Celia 
 married ; a man accustomed to carrying heavy loads 
 184
 
 ALFRED, MEANWHILE 
 
 of responsibility upon his capacious shoulders; to 
 the exercise of a trenchant and unquestioned au 
 thority ; to the accomplishment of big things in big 
 ways. 
 
 Yesterday a private in the ranks, he had been 
 able though barely to keep alive the pretense 
 that the big man Celia had married was, as he had 
 told her the night of the dinner-party, done for, 
 never to come back. To-day, with a sergeant's 
 chevron on his sleeve, the pretense was demolished. 
 He knew to-day that he had come back that his 
 old powers had come back. And the knowledge dis 
 turbed him painfully. 
 
 All the way out to the little flat that evening 
 he fretted over the situation. He wouldn't be able 
 to stand the new job very long. It would be really 
 maddening. Eventually likely enough within the 
 next few days he'd find himself locking horns with 
 the chief engineer, telling him to go to hell; put 
 ting on his coat and walking out. Well, and then 
 what could he do? Try for another routine job 
 at twenty-five a week? 
 
 185
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 He wouldn't let himself admit that this was not 
 a real alternative. Down inside he knew so well 
 that it was not, that he told himself it was with most 
 unnecessary emphasis. Put it all in a word and 
 say that he was in a stew a stew that kept getting 
 hotter as the packed elevated train jolted and 
 creaked around its curves. 
 
 At his station he squeezed his way out automati 
 cally and started at a rapid walk for home. The 
 little street they lived in was still radiating the heat 
 of an unseasonably early summer's day. It radi 
 ated noise, too, from a hurdy-gurdy and a ball 
 game, and from some long-distance visiting that 
 was going on back and forth across the street. 
 
 Usually Alfred liked this; reflec'J::g, perhaps, 
 Celia's warm delight in it. But to-night he strode 
 through it all unheeding, except as perhaps the 
 heat and the confusion added a few degrees to the 
 temperature of his interior stew. He walked fast 
 because, when he got to a certain door the door 
 his latch-key fitted, a miracle ~7~s going to happen. 
 It happened every night, and ^et it remained none 
 186
 
 ALFRED, MEANWHILE 
 
 the less a miracle. He never missed a moment of 
 exquisite fear just before he opened the door, lest 
 to-night it wouldn't happen. The miracle was, 
 quite simply, that after he'd opened that door and 
 stepped inside, he was in a place called home a 
 place unique in all the world a place of ineffable 
 security against all possible assaults of the world. 
 To-night, more than ever, he was hungry and im 
 patient for it. 
 
 It didn't always happen in exactly the same way. 
 Sometimes Celia was cooking something noisy in 
 the kitchen so that she didn't hear him until his 
 latch-key clicked in the door at the head of the 
 stairs. But other times she heard him at the outer 
 door and had the inner one open for him before he 
 was half-way up. 
 
 This was what happened to-night, and he got 
 his first hug out on the landing. They squeezed 
 through the narrow doorway in one lump. Then 
 she held him off for a look. 
 
 "You're tired to-night," she said. "Almost wor 
 ried. Right up there." The spot she indicated 
 187
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 with her lips was between his eyebrows. "Noth 
 ing's gone wrong to-day, has it?" 
 
 "Never less in the world," he assured her. And, 
 if she'd waited a second, he might have gone on 
 and said the thing right out. But she went straight 
 on and supplied an explanation for herself. 
 
 "It's just the heat, of course. That made you 
 want to smoke, and the smoker was packed " 
 
 He pushed her away a little. "I must be a pretty 
 loathsome object, and no mistake sweaty and 
 dirty, with a little more beard than usual on ac 
 count of the heat, and then that smoking-car was 
 the limit! I ought to have freshened up a bit be 
 fore I let you come close." 
 
 Her answer was to give a contented little laugh, 
 hug him up as tight as she could, and cuddle her 
 face down against his chest. "Do you suppose I 
 mind?" she said. "Do you mind me the way 7 am ?" 
 
 She wore, as she usually did at this time of day, 
 a big all-over apron with short sleeves, instead of 
 a dress, and a little cap that she could tuck all of 
 her hair into. 
 
 188
 
 ALFRED, MEANWHILE 
 
 His answer didn't require any words, but his 
 memory gave him a lightning flash of a contrasting 
 situation between them the time he'd come home 
 on the eve of that last dinner-party of theirs, come 
 home to tell her that he was through with the life 
 they'd been living; that he'd endured it up to the 
 last day, and that this was it. He'd found her 
 half-dressed before her toilet-table, with all her 
 sensuously alluring paraphernalia about her the 
 rose-colored stockings and slippers which matched 
 the gown which lay across the foot of the bed 
 the perfume of her powder subtly pervading the 
 air as he came close and asked her for a kiss. She 
 had drawn sharply away from him, charged him 
 with having ridden out in the smoker, and wondered 
 what unspeakable tobacco men smoked in such 
 places. Then she had urged him to hurry along 
 and dress, because there wasn't time to fool, really. 
 
 That girl, against whom his resentment had 
 
 flared almost to the temperature of hatred, had been 
 
 well, not his same Celia, but she had had his 
 
 Celia locked up inside her, waiting to break out 
 
 189
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 when the shock of their disaster should give her a 
 chance. 
 
 The pungent odor of the gingham, or whatever 
 it was that her big apron was made of, gave him a 
 thrill that none of the perfumes of the old days 
 had been capable of giving, and there was a soft 
 contented warmth in her voice. There clutched at 
 his heart a passionate fear, and a passionate re 
 solve the fear lest the new prosperity which 
 loomed ahead of him should carry them back into 
 that old artificial life where they lived, not together, 
 but in two separate shells ; the resolve that at all 
 costs, this thing should not be allowed to happen. 
 
 He'd say nothing of the promotion to Celia for 
 well, three or four days or a week. The situation 
 at the office would probably have taken definite 
 shape by the end of a fortnight, anyway. 
 
 He went on to tell himself, virtuously, how much 
 kinder it was to Celia not to tease her with the story 
 of a promotion which so easily might prove illu 
 sory. Of course, if the thing worked out all right, 
 or showed even an inclination to do so, he'd tell her 
 190
 
 ALFRED MEANWHILE 
 
 at once. He angrily cast off the insinuation which 
 sneaked into his mind from somewhere that it might 
 be a good thing to keep Celia seriously in the dark 
 for any length of time as to his improved fortunes. 
 What was he making all the fuss about, anyhow? 
 It wasn't an important decision he'd just taken. 
 What did it matter whether he told her to-night 
 or three nights from now? Perhaps he would tell 
 her to-night, after all. But he didn't. 
 
 For a week the state of things in the drafting- 
 room remained as chaotic and hand-to-mouth as it 
 had looked the first day. And then a new factor 
 entered into the situation well, not new, but one 
 that Alfred hadn't counted on politics a sharp 
 bitter fight between the administration (that's the 
 mayor and his appointees, chief of police, corpora 
 tion counsel, and so on) and the board of alder 
 men. 
 
 The mayor of Chicago has a lot of power, and 
 he can exercise it, up to a certain point, quite irre 
 sponsibly. But if he is overtaken by illusions of 
 grandeur and neglects to conciliate at least an ef- 
 191
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 fective minority of the aldermanic body, that body 
 can make him wish he had never been born. 
 
 Well, this contract that Alfred was concerned 
 with had been one of the most attractive displays 
 in the mayor's pre-election show-window a senti 
 mental, half -practical, half-baked project for a 
 municipal market which should loosen the rapacious 
 clutch of the commission man upon the throat of 
 the ultimate consumer. And it is quite consistent 
 with our American impatience of thorough study 
 and expert advice, and our eagerness to do material 
 things to do something, it doesn't matter much 
 what that this great project should have boiled 
 down, almost at once, to the letting of a contract 
 for the first unit of a vast acreage of buildings ; 
 in short, to a fat job for some loyal liegeman of 
 the mayor. 
 
 And you will see, I think, how naturally it came 
 about that when the desire arose to make the mayor 
 uncomfortable, this job should have been picked 
 out as the target. It was so picked out, and a com 
 mittee of perspicacious and able-minded reformers 
 192
 
 ALFRED, MEANWHILE 
 
 (the use of the word reformer is not necessarily 
 derogatory) was appointed to investigate. 
 
 The mere announcement of the appointment of 
 this committee, before ever it fired a shot, brought 
 the contractor down to his office in a foaming rage. 
 
 The grafting politician, in stories and on the 
 stage, is presented as formidable, wielding vast un 
 questioned powers ; giving orders (with a cigar in 
 his mouth) to respectful subordinates who rush to 
 do his bidding; anything from murder down. He 
 is inhumanly adroit as well as grim. Already he 
 has made his millions, and he is on his way to make 
 millions more. He frequently gets "crushed," to 
 be sure, in the last act or the last chapter, but never 
 until he has had a long and, some might think, 
 compensatory run for his money. 
 
 But the real grafter, I venture to say, seldom 
 enjoys an experience like that, even before he is 
 forced to his knees by the superior adroitness of 
 the young hero. For your real grafter is always 
 grafted upon. Let me attempt a definition that 
 will make this clear. Graft is a cash valuation upon 
 193
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 gratitude. The man who has just cashed in on 
 somebody's gratitude to him, Alfred's contractor 
 for example, with his fat job from the mayor, must 
 in turn honor drafts upon his own gratitude. If 
 he were to let these drafts go to protest, try to 
 get his own work done on a basis of ruthless effi 
 ciency, the vengeance upon him would be instanta 
 neous and terrible. So he's the worst-served man 
 in the world. 
 
 A man of first-class ability, to be sure, might 
 compromise his way out of the difficulty feed his 
 flock of lame ducks sufficiently with jobs where they 
 couldn't do much harm, and still pay competent 
 people to do the real work. But the grafter never 
 is a man of first-rate ability. If he isn't stupid, he 
 isn't a grafter, since the rewards of playing the 
 game within the rules are, to the mart of exceptional 
 ability, immensely greater than any conceivable re 
 ward for the grafter. 
 
 So if the case of this particular grafter had been 
 sorrowful before, it was really desperate after the 
 appointment of that subcommittee. 
 194
 
 ALFRED, MEANWHILE 
 
 Alfred witnessed the tragedy not completely, 
 as one sees a performance in the theater from the 
 fourth row, but in vivid intimate glimpses as one 
 sees it from the wings outbursts and explosions 
 that came through the glass door of the private 
 office, asides which he was supposed, ludicrously, 
 not to understand when he'd been summoned into 
 the presence for instructions as to this, or explana 
 tions as to that. The contractor had flown to the 
 mayor, it seemed, and had got small comfort from 
 him, His Honor having evidently made it clear that 
 he had troubles enough of his own. The engineer 
 talked of resigning. 
 
 Finally there came a morning when Alfred Blair 
 turned, with a shrug, from a sheet of figures he 
 had been poring over, stretched his arms, grinned, 
 got up and walked, unsummoned, into the private 
 office. The contractor rasped out a "What do you 
 want?" and resumed, gloomily, the contemplation 
 of a sheet of figures of his own. There was still 
 the suggestion of a smile on Alfred's face. 
 
 "I came in to suggest," he said, "that you come 
 195
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 to lunch with me to-day at one o'clock at the Union 
 League Club. I have a proposition to make to 
 you" 
 
 The contractor started, stared, made a passion 
 ate prediction as to his state in a future world, and 
 demanded to be told what his subordinate meant. 
 His amazement was driven home a little deeper by 
 a realization he couldn't have explained, that the 
 man who stood there the other side of the desk was 
 a subordinate no longer. 
 
 Exteriorly he looked just the same, was in his 
 shirt-sleeves, his waistcoat unbuttoned, his hands 
 in his trousers pockets ; but his air was, inexplica 
 bly, one of authority. 
 
 "I mean just that," he said. "I have a propo 
 sition to make to you. Lunch is a good time to talk. 
 The club's just across the street." 
 
 "Are you a member of that club ?" asked the con 
 tractor. 
 
 Alfred nodded. "If you object to it," he said, 
 "we can go anywhere else." 
 
 It was, we may observe in parenthesis, a matter 
 196
 
 ALFRED, MEANWHILE 
 
 of pure luck that Alfred had not resigned from that 
 club. He'd paid his dues for the year not more 
 than a fortnight before the crash. He hadn't con 
 sidered it luck at the time; but there he was mis 
 taken. The effect of Alfred's announcement on the 
 contractor was cheap at a hundred dollars. It 
 made a perfect dramatic preparation for the thing 
 Alfred was going to suggest. The suggestion was 
 the sort that wanted preparing, too. 
 
 The contractor said he didn't object to the club. 
 
 "You'll come then," said Alfred, not inflecting 
 it like a question. 
 
 The contractor said, yes, he'd come, but wanted 
 explanations. What was the idea? 
 
 "I'll wait till lunch to explain, if you don't 
 mind," Alfred told him coolly, and went back to 
 his desk. 
 
 These tactics, adroit as they were, were not pre- 
 calculated at all. They were just a symptom that 
 Alfred's mind was once more fully on the job. His 
 employer's curiosity, if unsatisfied, would be work 
 ing for him steadily till lunch-time. And the sort 
 197
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 of lunch he would give him the atmosphere with 
 which the club would surround the lunch would 
 work for him, too. 
 
 He gave all these influences time to do their work 
 plenty of time. Then, after the lighting with 
 one match of two admirable cigars, he made a fal 
 con swoop straight to the heart of the business. 
 
 "My proposition is," he said, without preface 
 or explanation, "that I guarantee you a profit of 
 twenty thousand dollars on this contract in consid 
 eration of a half-interest in whatever the profits 
 turn out to be ; also in consideration of your putting 
 complete authority over everything concerned in the 
 contract into my hands." 
 
 Alfred was himself again, no mistake. There 
 was the old touch about these tactics. The obvious 
 method of going about the business would have been 
 to begin by dwelling upon the contractor's plight 
 the gristly prospect ahead of him if things went 
 on as they were going now, an opening which would 
 have given the contractor something to argue about. 
 198
 
 ALFRED, MEANWHILE 
 
 Alfred's omission to say a word about this star 
 ing fact only made its stare the more sinister. 
 
 "Your guarantee would be worth a hell of a 
 lot, wouldn't it?" said the contractor, with the best 
 imitation he could manage of jovial scorn. 
 
 "Of course," said Alfred, "the only guarantee 
 that would be of any value would be the cash itself 
 put up with a bank pending the completion of the 
 contract." 
 
 "Look here!" demanded the contractor. "Who 
 in blazes are you, anyway?" 
 
 "You ought to know," Alfred said. He didn't 
 answer further, and when the contractor asked, 
 "Are you A. C. Blair?" he merely nodded. 
 
 The contractor blew up at this point and spoke 
 at length and at large, the upshot of his harangue 
 being a demand to know his competitor's motive in 
 spying around his office. 
 
 "Not spying," Alfred said quietly. "You'll see 
 that for yourself in a minute. If I'd been a spy, 
 instead of coming to you now, I'd be going around 
 199
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 to the council's subcommittee and getting a job as 
 their expert. I am an expert. I know that line of 
 work as well as anybody in the United States. But 
 I haven't done that. I've come to you and offered 
 you an absolutely fair proposition." 
 
 "What did you come for, then?" persisted the 
 contractor. "Did you have a tip that those fool 
 aldermen were going to butt in?" 
 
 Blair hesitated for a second, then told the simple 
 truth. 
 
 "No," he said. "I needed a job and I answered 
 a blind ad. in The News." 
 
 "Down and out, eh?" commented the contractor. 
 He didn't believe a word of Alfred's story. Then, 
 with a pounce, "Where did you get this twenty 
 thousand dollars ?" 
 
 "I haven't it," said Alfred. "If you take up my 
 proposition, I'll have to go and borrow it some 
 where." 
 
 The contractor stared blankly across the table. 
 "Say!" he demanded roughly. "What's the idea, 
 bringing me here and kidding me along with a pipe 
 200
 
 'What's the idea bringing me here and kidding me?'
 
 ALFRED, MEANWHILE 
 
 like that, when you haven't got a cent? What do 
 you think it'll get you ?" 
 
 "You don't need to worry about that," Alfred 
 said. "You aren't out anything for listening, even 
 if it is a pipe. All you have to do is make up your 
 mind whether you will accept it or not, in case I can 
 come across. That's the next step yes or no 
 from you. If it's yes, I'll try to borrow the money. 
 But I've got to have a proposition to borrow it on." 
 
 "You've got no more chance to get that 
 money " the contractor murmured, and then let 
 the sentence slump away while he gazed moodily at 
 the table-cloth and the pattern he was drawing on 
 it with his thumb-nail. "What will you do," he 
 asked at last, "if I tell you there's nothing doing?" 
 
 "I don't know," said Alfred. "I'll cross that 
 bridge when I come to it." 
 
 It would have been almost a relief to the con 
 tractor if Alfred had threatened him with going to 
 the subcommittee and getting appointed as their 
 expert. That would have given him something to 
 get fighting mad about, and his temper craved a 
 201
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 fight. The threat was there all right, though it 
 wasn't expressed. 
 
 Alfred drew a folded paper from his pocket and 
 handed it across, without comment, to the con 
 tractor. It was a memorandum of the bargain he 
 had proposed, stated almost as simply as he had 
 stated it a few moments before. There was one 
 more paragraph in it, stating that the agreement 
 was of no effect unless Blair put up the money 
 within forty-eight hours of their signing it. 
 
 The contractor pondered it a while longer with 
 out speaking. At last : 
 
 "Oh, it's all damned foolishness," he said. 
 "You'll never get the money." 
 
 "Don't count on that," said Alfred, "or you're 
 likely to get fooled. Here, do you want a pen ?" 
 
 Fifteen minutes later, with the signed memoran 
 dum in his pocket, he walked into his bank and sat 
 down in the president's office. An hour later, he 
 walked out again with the money. 
 
 He was not in the least surprised that it had 
 come out this way. The opportunity was so lumi- 
 202
 
 nously clear to him, and his confidence in his own 
 ability to make the most of it so clearly based on 
 expert knowledge and tried ability, that he could 
 hardly have failed to get the help he needed. It 
 was just a question of making everything trans 
 parently clear. 
 
 His personal credit, it should be pointed out, was 
 excellent. The way he'd poured his own money into 
 the cleaning up of the Waters-Macdonald mess, was 
 a thing no banker would be likely to forget. 
 
 He went straight back to the office and spent the 
 rest of the afternoon nailing down all four corners 
 of his agreement with the contractor. He meant 
 to leave no unstopped rat-holes in that document. 
 For heaven knew there were rats enough! 
 
 The contractor lost his temper a good many times, 
 climbed up on his dignity, appealed to the high 
 gods. His new partner was trying to convert him 
 into a mere figurehead. 
 
 "Exactly," said Alfred coolly. "That's the es 
 sence of this bargain. My authority's not to be 
 questioned, and everything else is. I'll do all the 
 203
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 hiring and all the firing. Then those specifications ! 
 They're crooked from beginning to end. I'll go to 
 the council and get them straightened out. If any 
 of your friends come to you and squeal, send them 
 to me. But what I'd do, if I were you, would be to 
 take my wife and go to the seashore anywhere, 
 and not come back till the job's done." 
 
 The contractor writhed and struggled would 
 have got away if he could. But the numerals on 
 that check kept him fascinated. 
 
 At five o'clock it was all over. Even as he had 
 eaten the foreman a week or so ago, Alfred Blair 
 had now eaten the contractor. 
 
 And it was not until this deed was fully accom 
 plished until he had put on his hat and coat and 
 stood ready to walk out of the office, that the 
 thought of Celia came into his mind at all, or of 
 what the new situation was going to mean to them. 
 
 Of course it wouldn't be accurate to say that he'd 
 
 acted this morning, and subsequently, without any 
 
 premeditation at all. He had meditated. He had, 
 
 more or less, figured the whole thing out, but as a 
 
 204
 
 ALFRED, MEANWHILE 
 
 fanciful project purely as something he wasn't 
 going to do. His imagination had to be at some 
 thing, and it had constructed, he looking on with 
 indulgent amusement all the time, this project; 
 had developed it indeed, down to some of its quite 
 small details but always, as I said, fancifully. 
 What led him to get up that morning and walk into 
 the contractor's office and begin to carry the thing 
 out, was impulse, motivated not by any wish to pro 
 vide an ampler life for Celia or to rehabilitate him 
 self ; springing rather from a pure impatience to 
 get the job done. The muffing and fumbling that 
 had gone under his eyes, had irritated him to the 
 point where he couldn't stand it any longer. So he 
 got up and took on the job himself. That was all 
 there was to it. 
 
 It wasn't all there was to it, though. He realized 
 this the first time he thought about Celia. She 
 couldn't be expected it wouldn't be human to ex 
 pect that she'd want to go on living as they were, 
 now that he was getting a salary of a hundred dol 
 lars a week (this was what he and the contractor 
 205
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 had agreed upon) and a half share in the profits 
 besides. 
 
 Of course there mightn't be any profits at least 
 not for Alfred. To the eye of cold reason, that 
 possibility would appear to be worth taking seri 
 ously. He didn't take it very seriously, to be sure, but 
 then he knew his eye wasn't coldly reasonable. He 
 knew he was going to succeed. Still, one never lost 
 any chickens by refraining from counting them till 
 they were hatched. And from Celia's point of view, 
 mightn't it, perhaps, be a kindness not to tease her 
 with hopes which she could see plainly enough 
 might turn out groundless ? Wouldn't she be hap 
 pier if he waited till the job was done and paid for, 
 and then presented her with the results, in, as it 
 were, a package ? To balance that evening when he 
 told her of his failure ? 
 
 But, contemplated, this scene didn't afford him 
 any whole-souled satisfaction. He couldn't see 
 Celia rushing delightedly into his arms at the end 
 of the recital. The heroines of the screen would, 
 all right but Celia 
 
 206
 
 ALFRED, MEANWHILE 
 
 Then there was another angle on the thing. 
 She'd been a perfectly corking sport about the 
 whole business ever since that night when he'd 
 told her of the smash. There hadn't been a whim 
 per a reproach. But that was because of her un 
 questioning belief that the come-down was neces 
 sary. And wouldn't that belief be shaken, if he 
 were to go to her now and tell her that he'd bor 
 rowed twenty thousand dollars, and made himself a 
 partner in the enterprise? If he could get twenty 
 thousand dollars as easily as that just by going 
 and asking for it, why hadn't he done it three 
 months ago? He'd had just a touch of that feeling 
 himself as he came away from the bank. The whole 
 effect of the day's doings upon him, was to make 
 that routine work of his over a drafting-board, at 
 twenty-two fifty a week seem a little unreal like 
 playing a part. Wouldn't she feel that even more 
 strongly feel that she'd been sacrificed, not to ne 
 cessity, but to a mere vagary of his own tempera 
 ment ? Perhaps if he waited a while before he told 
 her not until the job was finished, of course, but 
 207
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 for say another couple of months, and then per 
 haps broke it gradually, promoted himself by easy 
 stages 
 
 He didn't like that notion any too well, either. 
 Anyhow, the thing wanted thinking over. He could 
 take time for that a few days what would they 
 matter one way or another? to come to the right 
 conclusion. Of course he'd tell her. It would be 
 outrageously unfair to try to keep her in the darjc. 
 The only question was just how he'd do it, and 
 when. 
 
 There is an insidious and diabolical subtlety 
 about the sin of procrastination, which lies in the 
 fact that while its effects go on remorselessly piling 
 up, the sin itself diminishes in geometrical progres 
 sion. The difference between making a confession 
 on the eighth day, instead of on the seventh, is very 
 much less than the difference between making it on 
 the second instead of on the first; while the differ 
 ence between making it on the thirty-first or on the 
 thirtieth is almost negligible: 
 
 This was what made it possible to go on not tell- 
 208
 
 ALFRED, MEANWHILE 
 
 ing Celia of the change in his fortunes. It would 
 be an outrage to deceive her ; he admitted that. She 
 had earned, if any human being ever could earn, his 
 completest confidence. Well, and didn't he mean to 
 give it to her? Of course he did. Only not to 
 night. To-morrow, perhaps or Sunday, when 
 there'd be time for a good long talk about it. But 
 Sunday they'd devoted to a picnic up the shore. 
 Why spoil a perfect thing like that with a lot of 
 worries about the future? Celia was happy, wasn't 
 she, with things as they were? Obviously happier, 
 healthier, altogether more alive than she'd ever been 
 before in her life. 
 
 So he went along, except for an occasional 
 twinge, rather easily, until the night when his in 
 cautious reference to little Major March, and his 
 equally incautious neglect to bring home a pay-en 
 velope, brought him up standing against a fact and 
 on the threshold of a surmise. The fact was that his 
 pretended willingness to tell Celia, his pretended in 
 tention to tell her when the occasion should arise, was 
 completely false. She'd given him the occasion, 
 209
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 and instead of taking it, he had, in a panic, delib 
 erately lied to her made up a hasty excuse about 
 having had his salary raised, so obviously flimsy 
 and extemporaneous, that it was a wonder she 
 hadn't seen through it. 
 
 And the surmise was that Celia was not so happy 
 not, at least, so contented with their present way 
 of living as he'd supposed. The way her mind 
 had played with the possibility that the inventor 
 might make their fortune after all as if, for some 
 reason, a fortune were a desirable thing haa kept 
 him awake for hours that night. And when at last, 
 discovering that she was awake too, he had nerved 
 himself to ask her, point-blank, if she was getting 
 tired of the way they lived of the hardships and 
 deprivations of it all, and she had told him eagerly 
 that she was not she had begun to say something 
 that would qualify her answer, and then stopped. 
 "Only " It had taken all his resolution to ask her 
 to go on. "Only what?" And she'd said, "Nothing 
 yet." 
 
 Yet. There was an immense lot to think about 
 behind that one small word. 
 210
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 INTERVENTION 
 
 BARRING one bad moment just after she en 
 tered the store, when the floor-walker came 
 up and asked, rather mechanically, what he could 
 do for her, Celia found no difficulty in carrying out 
 the first item of her program namely, the sale of 
 her jewels. 
 
 Old Colonel Forsythe, the senior partner of the 
 firm, had known her father for years, and her since 
 she was a little girl, and from the moment she was 
 shown into his office, everything was easy for her. 
 He had, probably, a bad moment of his own after 
 she'd told him her errand, which she did complete, 
 in one sentence, as she held out her parcel to him. 
 
 "I want to sell these things for two thousand 
 dollars," she said. She added, over the look of 
 acute unhappiness she saw come into his face, "I 
 mean I hope they're worth that much." 
 211
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 He explained, while he was cutting the string 
 and opening the package, why it was that the 
 amount things had cost was not a trustworthy 
 guide to what they might be worth when one wanted 
 to sell them. "We can't sell second-hand jewelry, 
 you know, and all we can pay for is the unset stones 
 and the bullion value of the setting." 
 
 His face cleared instantly, though, when he saw 
 the contents of her treasure-box. Alfred's taste, 
 luckily, had been primitive. It hadn't run to en 
 crusted butterflies and things like that had con 
 fined itself to what a gambler or a professional base 
 ball-player would speak of as rocks. 
 
 "These things are worth considerably more than 
 two thousand dollars," said the jeweler. 
 
 "Oh, that's nice," said Celia comfortably. ''But 
 it's just two thousand that I want. So if you'll 
 pick out what comes to that, I'll take the rest back." 
 
 The thing could be done on that basis, but not, it 
 seemed, so instantaneously as Celia had supposed. 
 To his offer to mail her a check during the day, and 
 send the residuum back to her by special messenger,
 
 INTERVENTION 
 
 she demurred. She'd like to wait for the money, if 
 she might, and take it away in cash. 
 
 To her surprise, he hesitated over this request, 
 frowned, drummed his fingers on the desk seemed 
 on the point of making some sort of protest, and 
 then instead, said something that struck her, for a 
 moment, as utterly irrelevant, about the wild uncer 
 tainties of the stock-market. 
 
 The course she and Alfred had been taking in 
 the movies during the past three months, supplied 
 her suddenly with an explanation, and she laughed. 
 
 "Oh, I'm not going to speculate with it," she told 
 him, and his face cleared at once. 
 
 "If only you knew how many of them do that be 
 hind their husbands' backs women who ought to 
 know better and put me in a position of having to 
 choose between being an officious meddler, and a 
 particeps criminis " 
 
 "Do they, really?" said Celia, properly scandal 
 ized. "But how silly of them! They always lose, 
 don't they?" The movies, as I say, had made this 
 perfectly clear to her. 
 
 213
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 She was quite honest about this. The word spec 
 ulation had a definite meaning to her. It consisted 
 in taking your money to a room with a ticker in it, 
 giving it to a man, who immediately rushed out to 
 the floor of the Stock Exchange with it, and made 
 wild gestures, while his victim stayed by the ticker 
 and watched the tape: at first with exultation be 
 cause you always won at first and later with de 
 spair. Because, inevitably, you lost in the end. 
 That the word speculation could be applied to the 
 act she contemplated ; namely, giving her money 
 all her money, practically to an inventor, for the 
 purpose of financing the tests of his invention, 
 didn't occur to her. 
 
 His doubts removed by the unquestionable can 
 dor of Celia's attitude, Colonel Forsythe promptly 
 thought of a way to avoid keeping her waiting. 
 
 "I can give you two thousand dollars now," he 
 said, "and then, when these things are precisely val 
 ued, which involves examining and weighing them 
 very closely, you can come in and select, to keep, 
 214s
 
 INTERVENTION 
 
 whatever will leave us the two thousand dollars' 
 worth we have bought." He also persuaded her to 
 take a check instead of the twenty hundred-dollar 
 bills she wanted. She hadn't thought of pick 
 pockets. 
 
 Major March's address ascertained from the 
 telephone-book, down in the lower twenties some 
 where, just off Wabash Avenue, involving a ride in 
 a crowded street-car made the colonel's sugges 
 tion seem worth taking. 
 
 A momentary fright she had on the way down 
 would have been a good deal more serious if she had 
 had those twenty hundred-dollar bills in her wrist- 
 bag. The adventure began just a block after she 
 had taken the street-car, when a man got on and 
 sat down beside her. The car wasn't empty enough 
 to make this action of his really marked. He'd 
 have had to sit down beside somebody. Still there 
 were plenty of other places where he might have 
 sat, and he had chosen her seat rather abruptly 
 plumped down in it without that customary moment 
 215
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 of hesitation to give her a chance to move over a 
 little, and quite involuntarily she glanced around 
 at him. 
 
 The glance reassured her. He seemed completely 
 preoccupied unaware of her as anything but a 
 lump that took up so much space in the seat. He 
 had a big manila envelope in his hands, which were 
 pale and nervously precise in their movements. The 
 moment he was settled in his seat, he put on a pair 
 of tortoise-shell spectacles, undid the patent 
 fastener of the envelope, and drew out a quantity of 
 typewritten sheets, whose pristine freshness pro 
 claimed that they were just out of the machine a 
 manuscript, evidently, that he was just fetching 
 away from the typist who'd copied it for him. An 
 author, probably. That would account for the 
 vague oddity there was about everything he did. 
 His sheets were spread out so candidly under her 
 eye, that she had definitely to turn away and look 
 out the window, in order to avoid reading them. 
 
 Just before they reached the street where she was 
 to get off, she pressed the motorman's signal and 
 216
 
 INTERVENTION 
 
 stood up. The action seemed to startle her com 
 panion rather unnecessarily, for he snatched off his 
 spectacles, crammed his pages together anyhow, 
 and himself rose to let her go by. 
 
 She said : "Oh, I'm sorry !" and "Thank you," in 
 a tone which her faint amusement over him made a 
 little less mechanically impersonal than the one 
 she'd ordinarily have used. 
 
 Even so, one would hardly have thought he heard 
 anything more than common civility in it, and she 
 was a good deal surprised when, obviously without 
 premeditation, he followed her down the aisle and 
 got off the car just behind her. It was still more 
 disconcerting when she'd crossed the street and 
 turned east, to observe that he was coming along 
 that way, too. 
 
 She was not really alarmed about him, of course, 
 and but for the forlornness of the neighborhood, 
 with its negro tenements, boarded-up residences, 
 and rusty little stores with windows long unwashed, 
 she'd hardly have given him two thoughts. As it 
 was, when she saw the number she wanted, painted 
 217
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 dimly on a transom, she had an impulse to keep 
 right on going as briskly as possible to the nearest 
 car line. She conquered it, of course, and went up 
 the three rickety steps to the door above which the 
 number was painted. It was an unkempt little 
 wooden building one story high, that had once been 
 a retail shop. But its show-window not plate 
 glass but common panes had been painted white, 
 as also the light in the door had been, to baffle the 
 curiosity of the passer-by. 
 
 She tried the door and found it locked ; knocked 
 smartly on it, and got no answer, and was turning 
 away, baffled, when she saw that her pursuer from 
 the street-car had halted at the foot of the steps 
 and seemed, indecisively, to be waiting for her to 
 come down. That was when she got her momentary 
 fright. 
 
 She turned back to the door and rattled it. 
 Whereupon the young man came up the steps. At 
 that she rounded upon him. 
 
 "What do you want?" she c.manded fiercely. 
 218
 
 INTERVENTION 
 
 "I wanted to get in," he said, and then she saw 
 he had a key in his hand. 
 
 She stared at him a second, then understood. The 
 explanation was so simple that nothing but the ex 
 traordinary nature of the coincidence had kept her 
 from seeing it sooner. In his absorption over his 
 papers, he'd have ridden by his corner, if her get 
 ting up hadn't aroused him. She said : 
 
 "Oh, then you're Major March?" Then she re 
 alized that she'd called this total stranger by his 
 first name. To cover this slip, she hurried on : "I'm 
 Celia Blair Alfred Blair's wife." And, in the next 
 breath, before he'd at all got his, she added, "I've 
 come to bring you that two thousand dollars." 
 
 At that he stared back at her. The look in his 
 eyes wasn't far from panic. Vaguely he put his 
 key back in his pocket, crumpled his carefully cher 
 ished envelope in both hands, turned very white, 
 beaded out all over his forehead with sweat, and sat 
 down limply on the top step. 
 
 She rescued his envelope and said: "If you'll 
 219
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 give me your key, I'll go in and get you a drink of 
 water." 
 
 He said, "Just a minute," and before the expira 
 tion of that time, got to his feet again, unlocked the 
 door, and with a ceremony pathetically out of place 
 in the circumstances, ushered her in ahead of him. 
 
 The little shop was pretty well filled up with 
 bulky objects which she classified loosely as ma 
 chinery, but there were two chairs one with a 
 cushion in it, in front of an old black walnut table. 
 In order to get him to sit down she promptly took 
 the other one. 
 
 "This is made out to me," she said, taking the 
 check from her wrist-bag, "so I'll have to endorse 
 it." She reached over and helped herself to a pen. 
 "Shall I say, 'Pay to the order of Major March?' " 
 
 "Yes," he said blankly, "that's all right." 
 
 When she pushed it over to him, he picked it up, 
 but almost instantly laid it down again and drew 
 a trembling hand across his forehead. Then, with 
 an astonishing intensity, his eyes fairly burning 
 into her, he demanded, "There's nothing funny 
 220
 
 'This is no joke? That's a good check? I can get the money?"
 
 INTERVENTION 
 
 about this, is there? This is no joke? That's a 
 good check? I can get the money?" 
 
 "Joke !" she gasped. Then, very simply, "It's a 
 good check. They're the biggest firm of jewelers 
 in the city. It's quite all right." 
 
 He offered no apology for his questions ; just sat 
 there drawing in one long breath after another. 
 After a moment he pulled the papers out of the 
 envelope he'd brought in with him, and once more, 
 unconsciously, began crumpling them. 
 
 "Oh, please don't do that!" Celia cried, and 
 would have rescued them from him. But he chucked 
 them bodily into a waste-paper basket. 
 
 "They're no good now," he said. "That check's 
 the answer to them. It was a fool appeal I was go 
 ing to send out hopeless, I knew, all the while." 
 
 Then he got up and said, "I suppose you'd like 
 to see about the place a little," and taking her as 
 sent for granted, began to point things out to her 
 a hydrogen generator, an electrical furnace 
 other things whose names were too unfamiliar to 
 stick in her mind. 
 
 821
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 But suddenly he stopped in full career, and said, 
 as if it were what he had been talking about all the 
 while, "You see, when a man really doubts himself, 
 that's about the end of him. That's why my talk 
 with Alfred Blair Saturday just about finished 
 me. He's not one of these ordinary rich numskulls. 
 He's a man of imagination a big man. And he 
 believed in me once. He was the only person who 
 did. It's been, as much as anything else, the feel 
 ing that I've got to justify that belief that's kept 
 me going. I have kept going, and I've got the 
 things right that were wrong before. 
 
 "But he didn't believe that when I told him so the 
 other day. He was kind he'd always be that 
 and encouraging. But it was quite plain that I'd 
 become to him just one of those freak fool inventors 
 that they make jokes about in the comic supple 
 ments somebody to be sorry for and lend fifty dol 
 lars to and get rid of. 
 
 "Well, it's pretty hard to believe a man is wrong 
 when you see him surrounded with the evidence of 
 his rightness about other things see him making 
 222
 
 INTERVENTION 
 
 decisions, crisp and cool, and other people taking 
 them without a moment's question. So I came away 
 wondering if he wasn't right about me. That's 
 why I went to pieces like that when you came and 
 told me he'd changed his mind." 
 
 "But you didn't understand!" said Celia. "He 
 didn't disbelieve in you. He told me that night 
 that he thought probably you were right about it. 
 But we're poor. Didn't he tell you that? We lost 
 all our money. We're living in a little twelve-dollar- 
 a-month flat out near Humboldt Park. He's work 
 ing for twenty-five dollars a week oh, but thirty! 
 He got a raise Saturday. So you see, it wasn't that 
 he didn't believe in you." 
 
 It had been a certain tense incredulity in his gaze 
 at her, which had kept her piling up these confirma 
 tory details a vaguely disquieting look. She was 
 glad when he turned away. 
 
 "But then, the two thousand dollars?" he asked 
 suddenly, turning back again after a silence. 
 "Where did that come from?" 
 
 "Oh, that," she said, "was something that he in-
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 sisted was mine and wouldn't touch. It was mine, 
 in a way, of course. So when he said he thought 
 you were right about it, I went and got the money, 
 without telling him, you see, and brought it to you. 
 And I don't want you to tell him, either. Just 
 write him a note that you've got the money for 
 the test, and that you'll let him know how it comes 
 out." 
 
 "Sit down for another minute," he said, and led 
 the way back to the black walnut table, where the 
 check lay, just as she'd pushed it over to him. "I 
 think I ought to tell you," he went on, "that any 
 sensible man of business experience, if he knew 
 about this transaction, would warn you very 
 earnestly, not to go through with it. He'd beg you 
 to pick up that check, if he were standing here, and 
 put it back in your pocket. If he did, I shouldn't 
 have a word to say, except to thank you for your 
 kindness. That's what I'll do if you pick it up and 
 put it back in your purse now. I don't urge you to 
 do it myself, because I absolutely believe that it's 
 a safe, immensely profitable investment. But I'm
 
 INTERVENTION 
 
 the only person in the world who believes that. 
 Don't you want to take it back?" 
 
 "No," said Celia. "I believe it, too." 
 
 He picked up the check, folded it very deliber 
 ately, and put it in his pocketbook. Visibly he was 
 thinking his way through the silence to something 
 else. At last he said, "I'll do as you like about 
 your husband, of course tell him simply that I've 
 got the money to complete the tests; also, I'll tell 
 him when they're successful. But, since you're a 
 partner in this business, I'd like to notify you, too. 
 Do you mind letting me have your address?" 
 
 "Why," said Celia, "why of course not. I 
 we'd be glad if you'd come and see us. And and 
 of course you may let me know as well as Alfred, if 
 you like." 
 
 He took the card she wrote for him and put it, 
 too, in his pocketbook, with an air, somehow, of con 
 cluding the business between them as he did so. 
 
 She got up and held out her hand to him. "Good- 
 by," she said, "and good luck ! And I hope you'll 
 come out and see us." 
 
 225
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 She hadn't the least idea that he would. She 
 gave him the invitation in an uneasy attempt to 
 obliterate the reason he had avowed for asking for 
 her address. So that he could notify her as well as 
 her husband of the success of his tests ! Oh, it was 
 natural enough that he should want to do that 
 especially considering how queer he was a sort of 
 sentimental recognition of her as a partner in the 
 enterprise. If he'd just said something like that 
 
 It was his silence his failure to make that ob 
 vious little explanation, that made it seem queer. 
 But even his queerness could hardly go to the 
 length of a fear that her husband wouldn't tell her 
 if the thing succeeded. 
 
 He did run away with strange notions, though. 
 His account of his scene with Alfred was so widely 
 at variance with her husband's report of the casual 
 encounter that had taken place between them. 
 
 What had he meant by saying he had seen Alfred 
 
 with all the evidences of his Tightness about other 
 
 things around him; making decisions that other 
 
 people accepted? It must have been a most casual 
 
 226
 
 INTERVENTION 
 
 encounter, really. Hadn't Alfred said it took place 
 in the street? The inventor might have walked 
 along with him back to the office, of course. 
 
 She stopped short on the way over to the street 
 car, from a sudden impulse to go back and ask the 
 inventor one question. Had Alfred offered him 
 fifty dollars? March hadn't said so in so many 
 words. Alfred had treated him, he said, as the kind 
 of inventor one offers fifty dollars to in order to get 
 rid of. Of course it was an absurd idea. Alfred 
 hadn't fifty dollars. She knew didn't she? al 
 most exactly, within a couple of dollars, how much 
 he had on the last day before pay-day. 
 
 All the same, it was a minute or two that she 
 stood there fighting off that impulse to go back. 
 And the real reason down underneath, why she did 
 not go, was that she was afraid to.
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 
 IN THE DARK 
 
 THERE Is a widely held idea that we arrive at 
 our convictions by piecing them together, 
 matching up bits that fit, the way we solve picture 
 puzzles. But in reality, convictions are live things, 
 and they grow. Sometimes they're plants we get 
 from the gardener and set out in a carefully se 
 lected spot, with an artificially enriched soil about 
 their roots; sometimes they are weeds whose seed 
 ing is a mystery to us and whose rank growth is 
 our despair. That is how a hateful conviction 
 about her husband began to grow in Celia's mind. 
 
 She could not have told, when first she saw it 
 sprouting up, exactly what it was going to turn out 
 to be. It was just a vague wonder, at first some 
 thing not to think about. Something shaped like 
 an interrogation point, which she had resolutely to 
 ignore whenever she tried to tell herself, as she did
 
 IN THE DARK 
 
 more often every day, that she was completely in 
 her husband's confidence, and he in hers. 
 
 The thing had planted itself and begun to grow, 
 although she didn't know it, at some time before her 
 talk with March., 
 
 This was evident from the fact that the invent 
 or's hints had found something in her that answered 
 them met them half-way. If the thing had not 
 already seeded and sprouted in her, the notion 
 would not have occurred to her, even though labeled 
 preposterous, that Alfred might have offered Ma 
 jor March fifty dollars. 
 
 And now that she looked at it, she saw another 
 stalk growing beside it the question whether Al 
 fred's boss had really raised his wages last Satur 
 day, to thirty dollars a week, and if so, why he had 
 forgotten to tell her. Forgotten ! And come home 
 on a Saturday night without his week's pay in his 
 pocket! And looked so blank when she'd asked 
 him for it ! 
 
 She scolded herself furiously was indeed, sin 
 cerely angry with herself despised herself rather. 
 229
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 It was her miserable feminine pettiness and suspi 
 cion and jealousy that were responsible. Women 
 were like that, she supposed, and they'd just have 
 to get over it, before the equality they were so fond 
 of proclaiming nowadays would have any basis in 
 fact. Love in them didn't breed a fine confidence in 
 the object of it. It made them willing eager, to 
 impute the low-downest, meanest evasions and 
 tricks. She remembered, years ago, having heard 
 a boy say about a girl he'd quarreled with, that she 
 was no gentleman. Did she want to give Alfred the 
 right to say the same thing about her? 
 
 A thorough dressing-down like that did her 
 good. The first time she resorted to it, indeed, she 
 thought it had effected a cure. This was on the 
 afternoon of that very Monday when she took the 
 two thousand dollars to Major March. She waited 
 for her husband to come home that night, with noth 
 ing in her heart but a pure longing to make up to 
 him in love and confidence, for the injurious mis 
 givings she'd harbored against him. 
 
 But, just the same, when he, before she'd taken 
 230
 
 IN THE DARK 
 
 her arms away from around his neck, pulled out of 
 his pocket a sealed envelope a regular pay-en 
 velope and tore it open and produced three ten- 
 dollar bills, she sensed something a little unnatural 
 about it all. If he'd gone to the cashier to get the 
 money instead of the check as he'd promised, would 
 the cashier have taken the trouble to put the money 
 in an envelope? The pettiness of the doubt infuri 
 ated her, and she retorted on herself with a counter 
 attack. Wouldn't she have been just as suspicious, 
 unworthy little fool that she was, if he'd taken 
 three loose bills out of his pocket? Have wondered 
 why they weren't in an envelope? 
 
 She waited, breathlessly one might almost have 
 said, to see whether he'd tell her that he'd heard 
 from March; assuring herself pretty often that of 
 course he would, and finding herself believing, in 
 between, that he wouldn't. She tried, off and on, 
 to convince herself that there was no reason why he 
 should. But this ground was untenable. 
 
 He did tell her on Tuesday night the very day 
 he'd heard. But not until quite late, after they'd
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 gone to bed. It hadn't been a very jolly evening. 
 There was an uncomfortable silent stretch after 
 supper, which he'd broken up by suggesting the 
 movies. They'd gone, and they hadn't been much 
 amused. He had been as bored as she, she was 
 sure. But it was he who had asked her what the 
 matter was why she hadn't liked it. 
 
 "Oh," she exclaimed, "they're all so exactly alike, 
 those people on the screen. They lie so much and 
 believe each other so easily ! Somebody says some 
 thing that isn't so at all, but no matter how un 
 likely it is, the other person acts as if there weren't 
 any possibility of doubting it ; goes on and believes 
 it for years. I don't believe that people really can 
 lie very much, or deceive each other very long, there 
 are so many little ways of giving themselves away. 
 That wife to-night, if she hadn't been born an 
 idiot, would have known." 
 
 Alfred had had nothing to contribute to this con 
 versation at all, and they'd walked along home, 
 locked up, undressed and gone to bed in an almost 
 unbroken silence. It was then he said:
 
 IN THE DARK 
 
 "Oh, by the way ! I heard from March. He got 
 his money." 
 
 "His two thousand dollars?" It was curiously 
 easy for her to manage that tone of cool indiffer 
 ence. She despised herself, rather, for being able 
 to act so well. "I suppose," she went on, "that the 
 person who gave it to him must look pretty foolish 
 to you." 
 
 "Oh, no," he said comfortably, "not necessarily. 
 No, not a bit. There's a chance that he's made a 
 perfectly corking investment. He probably got his 
 pound of flesh for it, all right." 
 
 It occurred to Celia at this moment, that she'd 
 made no bargain, expressed or implied, with the in 
 ventor; had simply given him the money. She 
 didn't believe that he had noticed the omission 
 either. 
 
 This speculation of hers occupied a rather long 
 silence. Finally Alfred went on, jocularly a little 
 too jocularly, her ear told her. 
 
 "So you see, we may make our everlasting for 
 tunes after all. I've got an iron-clad contract with 
 233
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 him not that March would try to evade any sort 
 of contract, or even an obligation that gives me 
 half of whatever his invention brings in, cash, roy 
 alties, or stock. Old lady, we may get to be million 
 aires yet." 
 
 The only appropriate response Celia could think 
 of to this remark was a laugh of good-humored 
 skepticism, and as she did not dare attempt this 
 (feeling pretty sure it wouldn't sound as she meant 
 it to) she lay still and waited. 
 
 After another silence, he asked, "Do you wish 
 we were ?" 
 
 "Millionaires? With a butler and a box at the 
 opera and six motors?" 
 
 "Oh," he said, "I didn't mean anything fantastic. 
 I meant, were you wishing it might run to enough 
 to put us back where we were your old friends, 
 the old way of living? Shall you be looking for 
 ward to it as something that would pull us out of 
 this? That's what I mean. Are you getting sick 
 of this?" 
 
 The words gave Celia a chance to tell him what 
 234
 
 IN THE DARK 
 
 she really did want. She'd hesitated to tell him be 
 fore, you will remember, that dream of hers about 
 the two or three acres somewhere, from a reluctance 
 to cut short his holiday. Well, whatever had come 
 to take its place, his holiday was over had been, 
 now she came to think of it, for weeks. And this 
 bubble of hope which Major March's invention had 
 sent swimming before their eyes, was, no matter how 
 illusory it might prove to be, a thing one could use 
 for seeing all sorts of fanciful, roseate reflections 
 in. Well, why couldn't she say to him : 
 
 "Darlingest, I wouldn't go back to that old way 
 of living for a million dollars, or a hundred million, 
 and you know it just as well as I do. It was a 
 nightmare to you when we lived like that, and it 
 wasn't to me. But it's grown to be a nightmare 
 to me now since I've learned what really being alive 
 means. But I do want to get away from here to 
 somewhere where live growing things young live 
 things will have a better chance ; more air and sun 
 and cleanness than they'd have here. I don't want 
 anything big not too big for me to run myself 
 235
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 while you're in town but room enough for flowers 
 and vegetables, and chickens, and a cow. And a 
 baby, Fred." 
 
 If she could have said that she'd have saved her 
 self some bitterly unhappy weeks ; could have said 
 it aloud, that is. She did say it to herself almost 
 word for word as I have reported it. But she 
 couldn't say it to Alfred. And why? Well, she 
 knew why. Because she believed he wasn't telling 
 his true dreams and hopes to her. 
 
 What she did say, with the kind of yawn one 
 makes when he finds his teeth inclined to chatter, 
 was: 
 
 "Oh, what's the use, Fred? You asked me that 
 just the other night. You don't need to worry 
 about me. It won't do any good in the first place, 
 and there's no need of it, in the second. Of course, 
 if this summer keeps on very hot, it won't be easy. 
 This place gets like an oven about three in the 
 afternoon, but I can go out in the park where it's 
 as cool as anywhere. You're the one to worry about 
 236
 
 IN THE DARK 
 
 really. You've looked awfully tired and pulled 
 down the last week or two. Is it dreadfully hot in 
 your office?" 
 
 He said, rather gruffly, that he was all right, and 
 she waited a good long while, lying very still, to 
 see if he'd say any more. But he didn't. 
 
 Well, then, the thing Celia had regarded, when 
 she first saw its sprouts appear, as a noxious weed 
 of suspicion, grew straight and tall and hard in 
 fiber, until it was a great tree a veritable oak of 
 conviction. The conviction was that her husband, 
 by means unknown, had recovered his former pros 
 perity, or at least a good part of it; and that his 
 reason for concealing the fact from her was a fail 
 ure to trust her a fear that, given the chance, 
 she would go straight back to the hard, artificial, 
 pretentious life he had hated so. 
 
 The conviction was fed and watered by nothing 
 
 tangible enough to be called evidence. Indeed, 
 
 when bits of evidence or opportunity to collect bits 
 
 of evidence came her way she deliberately shut her 
 
 237
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 eyes to them. The fact of prosperity was legi 
 bly stamped on him, that was all; the way he 
 said things, his tricks of speech, the color of his 
 ideas. 
 
 If she had been fanatically logical, as many wo 
 men are, the life would have been impossible to her. 
 Because the logical implication of his fear was that 
 he had never believed in her didn't believe in the 
 new Celia at all; regarded her merely as the old 
 one in masquerade, waiting only for the chance to 
 turn back to her true colors. All her guarantees 
 of good faith, the finding and furnishing of the 
 flat, the joyous acceptance of his poverty, the pas 
 sionate renunciation of her old self, had availed 
 nothing. 
 
 She did ride out to that logical terminus some 
 times when she was alone, but the sound of his step 
 on the stairs always brought her back to two quite 
 simple facts: that she was in love with him and 
 that he was in love with her. No asbertos fabric 
 of mere ideas could withstand the white heat which 
 238
 
 IN THE DARK 
 
 those two facts together generated. So, though 
 she was indignant tormented humiliated, she 
 was able, in some mysterious way, to snatch some 
 hours out of the twenty-four of pure happiness 
 with him. 
 
 She punished him in various small ways ; rubbed 
 the drudgery of her domestic routine into him in 
 subtle ways that concealed the intent behind them. 
 For example, one hot night when he came home he 
 found she hadn't cooked any supper. 
 
 "The stove before and the dish water after," she 
 said, "was too much." If he didn't mind, they'd 
 go round to Larry Doyle's and get something. 
 "Out to a restaurant for dinner!" she mocked. 
 "What shall we have? Let's see. Sweet-breads, 
 sous cloche, and hearts of lettuce with Thousand 
 Island dressing, and a peach Melba. Doesn't that 
 sound good?" 
 
 He winced at that, then said : "All right. Come 
 along. We'll go to the Blackstone instead of to 
 Larry's, and we'll have exactly that."
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 "The Blackstone !" she flashed at him. "Do you 
 think I'd be seen there in any of the clothes I've 
 got?" 
 
 Then, over the acute misery in his face, she re 
 pented. She hadn't meant it. She'd been edgy 
 all day, waiting for somebody to dig her claws 
 into, and it happened to be he. 
 
 She'd love to go to the Blackstone. She thought 
 a lark that they flagrantly couldn't afford was ex 
 actly what they both needed. As for clothes, of 
 course hers were all right. 
 
 So they went and had a thoroughly good time. 
 And when Alfred paid the bill Celia pretended to 
 be looking another way. The entertainment cut no 
 figure in their weekly accounts, and where the 
 money it cost had come from was neither asked 
 nor explained. Celia went on keeping accounts, it 
 may be said, but she no longer balanced them. 
 
 The thing that made it possible, of course, to 
 go on like this from day to day was that a crisis 
 was clearly coming. When Major March had com 
 pleted his tests, and driven his bargain, and in- 
 240
 
 IN THE DARK 
 
 formed her of the result of it, something would 
 have to happen. If the tests were successful, and 
 the bargain a good one, and Alfred didn't tell her 
 then!
 
 CHAPTER XII 
 
 THE ELEVENTH HOUE 
 
 JUST six weeks after Celia took her two thou 
 sand dollars to Major March six weeks and 
 one day, to be precise, bringing it upon a Tuesday, 
 along about eleven o'clock in the morning, right in 
 the midst of her week's ironing she got the letter 
 he had promised her. 
 
 Her husband's manner for the past three or four 
 days had led her to believe it was about due. It 
 had been enigmatic portentous of something 
 anyhow, a manner of visibly suppressed excitement, 
 during the brief periods when she had seen him 
 awake. He had been staying down-town evenings, 
 and even on Sunday he had gone off about nine 
 o'clock, to clean up some extra work, he'd said. 
 
 She tore open the envelope in a tangle of contra 
 dictory emotions, feeling that good news would have 
 so much bad in it, and bad news so much good, that
 
 THE ELEVENTH HOUR 
 
 she hardly knew what to hope for. It contained 
 news at all events. 
 
 "I haven't a doubt," March wrote (evidently he 
 could lie better on paper than viva voce), "that my 
 tidings, as tidings, are superfluous. But as con 
 gratulations, you will accept them. The thing has 
 come out beyond my hopes. Not the tests, which 
 your faith made possible. They showed precisely 
 what I knew they would. But the bargain we were 
 able to drive on the strength of them. 
 
 "That was all your husband's doing, of course. 
 The eagles would have made a meal of me and left 
 little but bones. But in Blair's office, seated about 
 his broad mahogany board, where we have been 
 rooted for the past four days, with important peo 
 ple clamoring for audience with him on other af 
 fairs, it has been easy to feign an Olympian in 
 difference as to whether our capitalists accepted 
 our terms or left the opportunity to other and 
 wiser men. Even I managed not to gasp, at least 
 not so that it showed, when Alfred announced the 
 minimum which we would accept as a trading basis. 
 There are still a few details to be ironed out, but 
 the essentials are all agreed upon. 
 243
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 "We get fifty thousand dollars in cash to be 
 divided equally, of course, between Alfred and me 
 forty-eight per cent, of the stock in the com 
 pany to be formed, and a royalty of five per cent. 
 
 "I realized yesterday afternoon, for the first 
 time, that between you and me no bargain had 
 been struck. I shall, of course, return to you, as 
 soon as I receive my check to-morrow, I hope 
 the two thousand dollars on which the whole trans 
 action pivoted. As to the further share which is 
 rightfully yours, I suggest that, since you are 
 probably a worse bargainer than I, we refer the 
 matter to Alfred. And I only wait your release 
 from the seal of confidence which you imposed upon 
 me to take it up with him. 
 
 "I am, with a deeper and more whole-souled grat 
 itude than it is possible for me to express, 
 "Yours most sincerely, 
 
 "MAJOR MARCH." 
 
 The main purport of this extremely explicit let 
 ter went by Celia almost uncompreh',nded. What 
 her mind fastened upon were two or three phrases 
 near the beginning that dealt with Alfred's already 
 attained prosperity. His "broad mahogany board" 
 244
 
 THE ELEVENTH HOUR 
 
 in a private office, where they'd all been rooted for 
 the past three or four days. The important people 
 outside clamoring for audience with him and not 
 getting it, obsequious secretaries and stenographers 
 hovering about. He was sitting there like that 
 now while she ironed his shirts. He'd been there 
 yesterday while she had washed them. It had 
 been a steaming hot day yesterday. For how many 
 weeks months had the farce been going on? 
 Had it ever been anything but a farce? 
 
 Well, yes, it had. She recalled with a hot fierce 
 relish the night of their talk after her dinner-party. 
 The agony there had been in his voice when he 
 told her he couldn't stand the hell he'd been living 
 in any longer. It was she who had pulled him 
 out of that hell and given him a taste of Paradise 
 instead. It had been a Paradise. There could be 
 no doubt about that, either. 
 
 And this was how he had repaid her ! With dis 
 trust, deceit oh, downright lies. Making a fool 
 of her with his precious thirty dollars a week in 
 an envelope !
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 Well, she had him now, as the saying is, to 
 rights. She'd wait a little longer, until she was 
 sure he had received his twenty-five thousand dol 
 lars. And then she'd ask him, casually, how the 
 great invention was coming along. And when he 
 said it wasn't coming, or that those things took a 
 long while, and one couldn't expect anything yet, 
 she'd show him Major March's check for her two 
 thousand and ask him how about that. 
 
 She went on embroidering this lugubrious fancy 
 for a while in the half-hearted belief that she found 
 a sort of satisfaction in it. But she gave up the 
 attempt at last and whole-heartedly wept. 
 
 What presently dried her tears and flushed her 
 cheeks with a new fury of exasperation was the 
 dazzling perception that the thing wouldn't come 
 out that way at all. The picture she had been 
 making up was as false as any movie she had ever 
 looked at. Alfred wouldn't lie to her in that whole- 
 cloth sort of way. He wouldn't be silly enough 
 to try to get away with that. He'd tell her the 
 truth, or as much of it as he thought expedient, 
 246
 
 THE ELEVENTH HOUR 
 
 and use it as a blanket for his past deception. He'd 
 flaunt his check very likely before her eyes with a 
 "Here we are, old lady. We can get a fresh start 
 with this set ourselves up in business. Cautiously, 
 of course, perhaps not making any very great 
 change in our way of living just yet." 
 
 There was something subtly infuriating about 
 that picture and it made Celia see red. But there 
 was a way to demolish it. And the time to demolish 
 it was now. She washed her face, dressed, and, 
 without wasting a move or a minute, unless you 
 can consider wasted the ironic glance she allowed 
 to rest upon the abandoned ironing-board, she went 
 down-town to her husband's office. 
 
 She went with no definite idea of what she was 
 going to find, and with no plan at all as to what 
 she'd do when she found it. She knew where to go. 
 At least, where to go first. She'd been to the place 
 just once, and that visit was made within a fort 
 night of the time Alfred answered the blind adver 
 tisement in the News and got his job at twenty-two 
 dollars and a half a week. It wasn't a very pleas- 
 247
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 ant experience, since the foreman of the room, of 
 whom she'd had to inquire for him, had growled, 
 and indeed, had made it explicit that he didn't care 
 to have his employees' time frivolously broken in 
 upon. And Alfred's fellow draftsmen, who had 
 taken up the cry for him and sent it rolling down 
 the room, had acted like a lot of sophomores. Nat 
 urally she hadn't gone back. 
 
 She had used to lunch with him occasionally in 
 those early days, but their meetings were effected 
 by her stopping at the drug-store on the ground 
 floor of the building and telephoning up to him. 
 To-day, carried on by a current which cared noth 
 ing for foremen or sophomoric young men at draft 
 ing-tables, she boldly pushed open the never-for 
 gotten door, and at a desk in a corner inquired of 
 a foreman (the desk was the same, but the foreman 
 was different) for Mr. Alfred Blair. 
 
 "A. C. Blair?" questioned the foreman. "You'll 
 find him down-stairs where the general offices are. 
 This is just the drafting-room up here. Same door 
 as this, one story down." 
 
 248
 
 She went down one flight and opened the corre 
 sponding door she was directed to. She found her 
 self in the railed-out space of a very big room 
 it was a dignified mahogany fence, rather than a 
 rail. Inside it there were a great many desks and 
 a great many people. Some of them rather im 
 pressive-looking people, too. But none of them, 
 she was able swiftly to assure herself, was Alfred. 
 There was a door, though, down at the end, marked 
 "A. C. Blair. Private." 
 
 "Who was it you wanted to see?" a languid voice 
 inquired. 
 
 Turning in the direction the voice came from, 
 Celia confronted a young lady at the telephone 
 switchboard. 
 
 "I'd like to speak to Mr. Blair, if you please," 
 Celia said very politely indeed. 
 
 "He's in an important conference," said the 
 young lady, "and can't be disturbed." 
 
 "Very well," said Celia. "I'll wait." 
 
 There was a hard mahogany bench outside the 
 rail where persons were, it appeared, at liberty to 
 249
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 wait as long as they liked. But the movement of 
 the young lady's very visible shoulders made it evi 
 dent that she considered such a proceeding ill-ad 
 vised and fruitless. 
 
 During the better part of an hour that Celia sat 
 there the magnificence of her husband's isolation 
 was further revealed to her. Lots of people tried 
 to talk to him over the telephone, only to be turned 
 away in most instances with the same formula that 
 had been used for her. 
 
 Another thing Celia became aware of, though 
 only vaguely, was that she herself was an object 
 of some curiosity. A man from one of the desks 
 down near the private door came out and had a 
 low-voiced colloquy with the telephone girl, and 
 then came over to her. Since Mr. Blair was busy, 
 could no one else attend to her business for her? 
 When Celia said it was Mr. Blair himself whom 
 she wished to see, he told her that if she wished 
 to give her name the girl would telephone it in. 
 But Celia said this wasn't necessary. She would 
 wait. 
 
 250
 
 THE ELEVENTH HOUR 
 
 She didn't mind waiting, as a matter of fact. 
 She could afford to wait. Because when she did 
 see him, at all events when he saw her, her vengeance 
 would be instantaneous and terrible. He'd stand 
 there before her red-handed, as it were. 
 
 It was with a startling suddenness that the tele 
 phone girl finally spoke to her. "There's Mr. Blair 
 coming out of his office now," she said. "He seems 
 to be going out. But you can speak to him if you 
 like. He'll come this way." 
 
 And then followed what were, I think, the most 
 eventful thirty seconds in Celia Blair's life. All 
 she did with them was to get up and walk swiftly 
 across the railed-out space to the telephone girl's 
 desk and stand there, leaning over the switchboard, 
 with her back to the little gate Alfred was coming 
 through, as well as to the door he was going out of. 
 
 Also, she said to the telephone girl, with a mirac 
 ulous kind of smile, "I'll wait till another time, I 
 think, when he isn't so busy." 
 
 Of course, the important thing was what she did 
 not do. She did not lay the irreparable ax to the 
 251
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 tree of their mutual love and confidence and hap 
 piness. 
 
 I think, in all likelihood, it was that new sym 
 pathy with, and longing for, and understanding of, 
 live growing things which had sprung up within 
 her with the spring of the year, that saved her. 
 A comprehension of the fact that while you could 
 hew marble, or pour steel into forms prescribed by 
 logic of a hard geometry, you could not deal with 
 living things like that. Things that were alive 
 could be killed. 
 
 She didn't think it out during those thirty sec 
 onds. All she had was a brilliant vision of what 
 Alfred's face would look like when he saw her stand 
 ing there confronting him. After that, until the 
 door into the corridor had closed behind him, she 
 merely prayed that he wouldn't think of some last 
 message to leave with the telephone girl and come 
 over and see her there. 
 
 She sat down again for two or three minutes' 
 after he'd gone, and then went home. 
 
 She found him there waiting for her. He'd 
 252
 
 H
 
 THE ELEVENTH HOUR 
 
 driven out, it seemed, in a taxi, and had had time 
 to get rather worried. Not because she was away 
 from home in the middle of the day, but because the 
 look of the place indicated that she'd abandoned it 
 in a hurry. 
 
 "It was pretty hot," she said. "I went out for 
 some air. But you ! Home like this ? Nothing's 
 gone wrong, has it?" 
 
 "No," he said, " right. I've got some things 
 to tell you." 
 
 She cried out. "You don't mean Major March? 
 Not the great invention?" 
 
 "Yes," he said, "there's that. We cleaned it up 
 this morning. I've got a check for twenty-five 
 thousand dollars in my pocket. Thought perhaps 
 you'd like to have a look before I banked it. But 
 let's not get started on that yet. There's something 
 else." 
 
 From the burning intensity of the look in her 
 wide-open eyes he turned away walked off to the 
 window. And there, with many haltings and stum 
 blings, began telling her the story you know al- 
 253
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 ready : how his first promotion had seemed so inse 
 cure that he'd put off telling her about it. How, 
 when the day came that he needed capital for buy 
 ing into the business, the very ease with which he'd 
 got it made him seem rather a fool. Feel at least 
 that he'd look rather a fool to her, and would make 
 her suspect that the uprooting of their former life 
 had been less the necessity he'd painted it than a 
 sort of temperamental brainstorm on his own part. 
 How, finally, he'd loved it so exactly as it was, 
 this new life of theirs that he had, out of sheer 
 cowardice, put off telling from day to day the thing 
 that would make a change. 
 
 "I knew I had nothing to be afraid of, really 
 that no material change, I mean, could alter the 
 essentials of this new thing of ours. I funked it, 
 really, as one does the dentist. I've paid for it 
 I hope you'll believe that exactly as one pays 
 for putting off the dentist. The longer I put it 
 off the worse it hurt, and the worse I knew it was 
 going to hurt. But well, the tooth's out now! 
 254
 
 THE ELEVENTH HOUR 
 
 You will forgive me, won't you? Oh, I know you 
 will!" 
 
 He turned and looked at her then, and fairly 
 cried out, she had gone so white. Naturally enough 
 only he couldn't understand with the sense of 
 the dreadful nearness of the peril she had escaped. 
 But she came straight into his arms and he at 
 tributed the whiteness to the heat. 
 
 "We've got to get out of this," he said, "that's 
 clear enough. But where we go, and how we live, 
 that's in your hands." He kissed them both, and 
 his voice broke. "In your hands, my dear." 
 
 Then, to get her quiet, he told her about the 
 car he'd bought. They'd promised it for to-day, 
 and he was furious because they'd failed him. But 
 to-morrow, they said, was sure. He'd abandon the 
 office for a week, and they'd take a little trip. 
 Where would she like to go? 
 
 "We might cruise around," suggested Celia, 
 "and look at places where we could live not too 
 far away from town for you to come in, but far 
 255
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 enough so there'd be room two or three acres 
 where things could have air and sun enough to 
 grow in flowers, and vegetables, and chickens, and 
 a cow. And a baby." 
 
 "That was why," she told him after a while, "I 
 sold the jewelry and gave the two thousand dollars 
 to Major March." 
 
 He amazed her by taking this announcement with 
 a grin, rather than a gasp. 
 
 "Oh, Major didn't give you away!" he assured 
 her. "But, of course, when the tests came out the 
 way they did and I saw what we had, I asked him 
 where he'd got the money. How much he'd had 
 to pay for it. Because, of course, what he had had 
 to pay ought to come out of my share as well as 
 out of his. His way of refusing to tell me was so 
 impressive religious, you might almost call it 
 that it would have given almost anybody a hunch. 
 And then, when he swore that the person who had 
 given him the money hadn't driven any bargain 
 for it at all, it struck me that there wasn't any 
 body else couldn't be anybody else who'd be " 
 256
 
 THE ELEVENTH HOUR 
 
 "Fool enough," Celia put in contentedly. 
 
 "Oh, well," he said, "I don't care what name you 
 call it by." 
 
 He found out about her visit to the office, too. 
 No later than next day. "That stenographer of 
 mine," he said, "has got a queer bee in her bonnet. 
 She swears that you were in my office yesterday 
 morning, and that you waited there for an hour 
 to see me, and then went away." 
 
 "It must have been a lady, then, I suppose," 
 mused Celia. "Somebody all dressed up, probably, 
 and terribly excited because they wouldn't let her 
 in. But what made her think it was me? She's 
 never seen me." 
 
 "Well, of course," said Alfred, "there are three 
 pictures of you on my desk." And then, meeting 
 her eyes, he cried out, "It was you !" 
 
 Well, the new car had arrived by then, and what 
 with the excitement of getting ready for their trip 
 and preparing the feast that Major March had 
 been invited to for that night, and the delirious 
 bliss of just dropping everything now and then and 
 257
 
 THE THOROUGHBRED 
 
 looking at each other, I suppose it is no wonder 
 that they failed to treat that potential and so nar 
 rowly averted tragedy as soberly as it deserved. 
 Indeed, beyond a guilty laugh from Celia, and a 
 wry grin and an exclamation from Alfred, they 
 didn't treat it at all. 
 
 Two or three nights later, though, out in the 
 country and under a very fine yellow moon, in the 
 course of talking over the whole adventure, he 
 asked her why she let him off like that. 
 
 She said, with more meaning in her voice than 
 there was in the words, "Oh, what would be the use? 
 You may find me some time where you could smash 
 me flat, or I find you. But I don't believe there's 
 anything immoral about not paying off grudges, 
 do you ? There's something in the Bible about that. 
 And don't you think we're both much nicer this 
 way than we would be crushed?" 
 
 He couldn't take it as lightly as that, but his 
 feelings wouldn't go into adequate words. 
 
 "You little thoroughbred," he said. 
 
 THE END
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY 
 
 Los Angeles 
 This book is DUE on the last date stamped below. 
 
 to 
 
 APR 2 11971 
 
 Form L9 Series 444
 
 3 1158 00716 9492 
 
 UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY 
 
 A A 000259167 5