Uneducating Mary
BY
KATHLEEN NORRIS

GARDEN CITY	NEW YORK
GARDEN CITY PUBLISHING CO., INC. "924COPYRIGHT, 1923, BY DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
COPYRIGHT, 1914, 1915, BY THE CROWELL PUBLISHING COMPANY, IN THE UNITED STATES AND GREAT BRITAIN
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES AT
THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y.■m
iv
UNEDUCATING MARY
CHAPTER I
/"\F ALL the homes in New Troy the little house of the young Billy Constables in Cathedral Avenue was generally conceded to be the most attractive. Everyone said that it was just like Mary Throckmorton’s luck to find such a house for sale when she was ready to get married and begin housekeeping. Mary, demurely announcing the engagement that was the social event of that particular winter, also announced her choice of a place of residence. She had been a fortunate child, a fortunate girl, a much envied and admired young woman. Now she was to marry the richest as well as one of the nicest of the town’s young men and live in the most delightful house New Troy could boast. The girls sighed while they laughed, at the hopelessness of ever keeping up with Mary Throckmorton.
The Cathedral Avenue house stood on a2
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wide quiet street,tree-bordered, uncommercial, aristocratic; the “court end” of the little city. Only two blocks away was the best shopping district, the library, and the little brick building that housed the woman’s club. A narrow strip of lawn behind the house ran down to the river; Mary had no front garden, but here were roses and fruit trees and a latticed summerhouse,, where the gracious mistress of the house loved to serve tea on summer afternoons.
The house was brick, narrow and quaint in design. There was a brass knocker on the paneled street door; arriving guests stepped straight into a tiny square reception-room facing, across a wide park hall, the pretty dining-room, where French windows opened on the lawn and river. But the drawingroom itself was reached by a flight of polished wide stairs, and was at the back of the house over the dining-room.
In this handsome drawing-room, on a certain April afternoon about five years after Mary’s marriage, two women were waiting for her. One was her mother, a sweet-faced, middle-aged woman, into whose plump, handsome face mirth had put more lines than age,UNEDUCATING MARY
3
and the other was Amy Throckmorton, Mary’s younger sister. Mrs. Throckmorton was placidly reading a magazine while she waited; Amy, restless and interested, ranged about the room, trying the little grand piano, glancing at the books that filled the low mahogany cases, studying here a framed photograph and there a bit of Japanese etching, and finally opening one of the wide casement windows for a view of the river under the fresh green of birch and willow trees Amy was a pretty girl, just two-and-twenty, and extremely attractive and deservedly popular.
“ I wish we'd telephoned, Mother, as you suggested,” said Amy presently, coming from the window to take one arm of her mother’s chair.
“Why, I don’t mind waiting,” Mrs. Throckmorton answered, closing her magazine and taking off her gold-rimmed glasses.
“ Promise me, Mother, you won’t say a word until I do!”
“Oh, no. I sha’n’t,” Mrs. Throckmorton agreed. Then, seeing a maid cross the hall a moment later she called, “Oh, Milly!”
Milly, a nice little maid, came into the drawing-room.
“Milly,” said Mrs. {Throckmorton, “won’tUNEDUCATING MARY
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you run upstairs, and see if the baby’s awake ? He was asleep when we got here, but that’s half an hour ago, and I asked Alice not to take him out until we saw him!”
“Oh, I think she’s taken him out,” Milly said, shaking her head, smiling but regretful. “They came down past the kitchen about twenty minutes ago!”
“Oh, no /” Mrs. Throckmorton exclaimed, with all a grandmother’s whimsical dismay. “Isn’t that a shame, Amy!” Mrs. Throckmorton mourned. “Now I’m afraid we won’t see him! I certainly thought Alice understood me-----”
“She understood you, all right,” Amy drawled, when Milly was gone.
“Why, my dear, she can’t have! Or she wouldn’t have taken him out!”
“My dear Mother, if you think a trained English nurse will take orders from any one
but her mistress----”
“It wasn’t an order, Amy dear! I simply asked-----”
“ I know you simply asked, darling!” Amy laughed. “But Alice loathes us.”
“Amy dear, how can you say that?”
“She loathes us because we don’t take herUNEDUCATING MARY
5
seriously,” Amy pursued cheerfully. “Mary does, you know. Mary calls her ‘Nurse/ and sees that she gets her tea every afternoon!”
“Here’s Mary now!” exclaimed Amy. “I heard the door!”
Here was Mary, sure enough, a woman in the full tide of her unusual beauty, at twenty-eight, tall, dignified, and graceful, slowly mounting the wide stairway from the lower hall. Under the curve of her soft, rough little straw hat, her hair, lusterless as black smoke, escaped to frame her lovely and serious face. Her eyes were wide and blue, a soft dark blue that also had some quality in common with smoke, her mouth was both sweet and strong, her skin had the clear pallor of the brunette. The lines of her sensible little tailor-made suit were full of distinction, the skirt short enough to show silk-stockinged ankles and the most practical of square-toed, little low shoes finished with wide silk bows. It was a most delectable costume.
She was glancing at letters as she came up, and so was at the very drawing-room door before she heard her mother’s eager “Mary!” Then her face brightened with pleasure and surprise, and in an instant she was in the older6
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woman’s arms. Seeing them, an onlooker might not have suspected that mother and daughters saw each other daily, sometimes twice a day.
“Mother!” Mary said. “And Amy! You darlings! But why didn’t you telephone? I was at the Club for the pure milk meeting, and Katharine carried me off for luncheon. We had about a hundred people there.”
“And what did you do, dear?” asked the mother with fond pride.
“Oh, not very much to-day!” Mrs. Constable gave her hat and gloves to the waiting Milly and ran her fingers through her smoky hair as she sat down. “I merely introduced the speakers, and gave a little sketch of what we have done already. But to-morrow I dread! Visitors’ Day at the Club, and I am the speaker of the day.”
“What are you going to talk about?” Amy asked.
“Oh, ' efficiency—efficiency in general. Really it’s a sort of review of lots of things, domestic and general,” Mary answered, with a laugh and a sigh. “Health and pure food and child-culture, and factory regulations, and school children’s lunches—that sort of thing!”UNEDUCATING MARY
7
“And the tango and eugenics?” suggested Amy.
“No!” Mary laughed. “Somehow I’ve skipped those. Well, Mother dear, what’s new at home ? And how’s my dad ? And did you two get to see Anna Lou?”
“We’re just from there,” Amy answered. “ Poor old girl, she didn’t seem very gay, did she, Mother?”
“Well, I suppose you could hardly expect her to be gay, Amy,” Mrs. Throckmorton said in mild reproach. Anna Lou was Mrs. Penne, her oldest daughter, recently widowed and the mother of two small girls. Mrs. Penne was now engaged in the dreary business of dismantling the pretty home in which she had spent the last few years of her happy married life. Mrs. Throckmorton sighed as she thought of her.
“She’s as brave as she can be, Mary,” she said. “Of course nothing’s sett.ed yet; she’s coming to Daddy and me to-morrow, until she can look around. Poor Dad! he is just longing to offer her a home with us as long as she’ll stay; but we feel that whatever she (Wants to do is the best thing for her now!”
“ I don’t suppose it will be anything but very8
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sad for her, anyway,” Mary murmured sympathetically. “Dear old Anna Lou, it’s too hard! I saw her yesterday. I wish we had room to put them up here for a little visit until Anna sees her way clear.”
“I wish Anna was such a manager as you are, Mary,” Mrs. Throckmorton said fondly, “then I shouldn’t feel so worried about her. But she’s just like a child, really, for all her experience.”
“Well, I’ve been very fortunate, Mother dear,” Mary said, smiling a little sadly. “I had my four years’ training; you know Anna Lou was only nineteen when she married! She never really had a chance to ‘find herself,’ as Professor Barnes used to call it. What is she planning, Mother?”
“Well, she’ll be with Daddy and me for a while, I suppose,” Mrs. Throckmorton suggested, a little uncertainly.
“I know, Mother dear, but that’s quite a strain for you both, with Lizabeth and Nancy romping all over everything, and Dad so nervous when he has his headaches!” Mary said. “It never works well, this doubling up of families!” A sudden idea occurred to her. “ But there’s Dick’s brother, Laurence Penne,”UNEDUCATING MARY
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she said. “ Surely if Dad helps a little, and he helps a little, and I do, we can tide her over until she gets on her feet!”
“Laurence Penne is engaged,” Amy murmured. her cheeks crimson, her head hanging, a dimple showing at the corner of her mouth.
Mary turned to look at her, the color creeping slowly into her own face.
“Amy Throckmorton!” she exclaimed, startled eyes upon her sister. “Amy! You —why, you darling, you don’t mean it!” Before the sentence was ended the sisters were in each other’s arms, laughing and talking wildly and perhaps not far from tears.
“Larry Penne!” exclaimed Mary, when the first excitement was over. “Well, won’t people be amazed, you secretive woman, you! Tell me all about it, and don’t skip anything. I never was so much surprised in my life!” Under this flattering pressure Amy plunged into the story: how she had hated Larry Penne when she first knew him; how she had met him at the Laberees’ picnic and liked him much better; and how his “darlingness” to Anna Lou at the time of her sorrow had completed his conquest.
“We’ve seen each other every day for six10 UNEDUCATING MARY
weeks, at Anna Lou’s,” Amy finished eagerly. “And really, Mary, he grows nicer all the time! And we’re going to be married in June, aren’t we, Mother?”
“Oh, I don’t know—you’ll have to settle that with Dad!” Mrs. Throckmorton protested.
“Amy, you won’t be married on that salary!” Mary, from whom no detail had been kept, said hastily.
“Eighteen hundred? I don’t see why I shouldn’t!” Amy protested.
Mary looked at her mother, a look of indulgence tempered with amusement.
“Why, darling, what do you know about housekeeping?” asked the older sister.
“I’ll learn,” Amy said stoutly. “I kept house for Mother last summer!”
“Learn!” Mary laughed kindly. “Do you realize that domestic science is one of the very hardest things in the world to master?” she asked. “It’s frightful, the girls simply break down under it. Do you know what a budget is, Goosie? Do you know what hypophos-phites are, and what sugar does, and what starch does? And that’s only the very beginning of it all!”UNEDUCATING MARY
ii
“Mother never went to college,” Amy said, with a doubtful glance at her mother.
“No,” said Mrs. Throckmorton, with a laugh and a sigh, “ and I am afraid your poor father paid heavily for it! I am ashamed to think of the meals I used to serve that poor, patient man! We had no delicatessen store here in those days, and I had only one ignorant little maid.”
“Now, you see, I had my books and my lecture notes,” said Mary, “and so I simply wrote out menus and gave them to Louise before we went on our honeymoon, even! It’s all so easy when you once know how!”
“Easy for you,” smiled her mother; “but you always took to books naturally, Mary. Neither Amy nor Anna Lou is like you in that.”
“Oh, Mother, any one could do it!” Mary answered with her quick, bright flush.
“Any one could manage a house with one hand and every club in town with the other, and anybody’s baby could be as carefully watched and taken care of as Anthony, I suppose!” Amy said affectionately. “Only, they don’t. Don’t be affected, Mary, you know you’re a wonder!”12
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“I am not!” Mary protested, adding immediately in a tone of concern, “Not going, Amy?”
“ I’m going to meet Larry at the office and walk out to Anna Lou’s,” Amy explained.
When Mary came back into the drawingroom after going to the stairs with Amy, her face was rather grave. She rang for tea and then sat down on a low stool at her mother’s feet with that suggestion of little-girl days that always went straight to Mrs. Throckmorton’s tender heart.
“Now, tell me honestly, Mother, are you pleased?” asked Mary. “Of course it’s not my affair, and I’m not going to say one word; but Larry Penne must be thirty, isn’t he? And eighteen hundred—you know that isn’t really enough! Of course he’s the dearest, sweetest fellow in the world; but I did think he would be a sort of comfort and stand-by to poor Anna Lou------”
“Well, I think they have some plan of cooperating,” Mrs. Throckmorton begun uncertainly. “I don’t mean exactly living together,” she added hastily as Mary put her lips together and began slowly to shake her head. “ But, you see, Amy feels she’ll have toUNEDUCATING MARY 13
pay at least twenty dollars for a house, and she plans—of course, nothing is settled—to take one of those big houses down by the bridge, it’s quite pretty and countrylike there, and then Anna Lou and the girls can have a floor to themselves and Amy won’t be so lonely while Larry’s away.”
Mary did not answer for perhaps two minutes. She went to seat herself beside the appetizing tea tray, and poured her mother’s tea very carefully. Then she said:
“ Mother, Amy won’t be so mad as to bury herself down there at Bridge Street! And even if she did, you know how bad it is for young married people to have any one else in the house with them! Do, do try, before they go any further, to make them see what a foolish thing that is to do! Why, there are perfectly charming apartments being built, right here on Forest Place, two blocks away! Do persuade her to wait, and at least see them!”
“ But Amy isn’t like you, dear,” the mother argued mildly. “She will have no servant; she really might get lonely with the care of her own house and kitchen. Amy doesn’t care much for books, Mary, she doesn’t like clubsUNEDUCATING MARY
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and civic reform—and—pure milk crusades, as you do.”
“Well, then, she ought to, Mother,” Mary answered, with her grave smile. “She owes it to Larry, and she owes it to herself, not to get absolutely into a rut! If ethics teach you anything in the world, they teach you that! Women have got to take their place in the world and stand on their own feet, in these days, whether they like it or not!” Mary pursued earnestly. “Why, I wouldn’t dare to drop out of the current, my responsibility as a reasonable human being is too great! I have my part to play, my work to do. I must know every detail of my household, must know the character and capabilities of my maids; I must watch every phase, mental, moral, and physical, of my child’s growth; I must know what other women are doing in the world, what is new in science and art and literature.”
“Yes, that’s very true, of course,” Mrs. Throckmorton said, more appreciative of Mary’s glowing beauty than of her words. “That’s really a very fine thought. But I suppose I feel some sympathy for Amy,” she presently added, “because of course I never had an opportunity to go to college, and no-UNEDUCATING MARY
i5
body ever made any of this—this importance —you were speaking about, clear to me.”
“No, if Amy really cares for Larry Penne,” Mary went on, thoughtfully, “we must try to give her the best possible start. I’ll say something myself to Anna Lou; that is, I’ll try to suggest some arrangement that will keep the two establishments separate, for the present at least. Anna has a small capital, of course; Dad might send something, I suppose; and I can”—Mary concentrated her fine brows for a second’s thought—“ I can promise at least three hundred a year,” she added. “Perhaps even more than that.”
“Three hundred! Dearie, that would pay her rent,” Mrs. Throckmorton exclaimed eagerly. “But can you spare it, dear?” she asked.
“ I can spare it, inasmuch as I only have to ask my dear beau-papa for it, at one whack!” laughed Mary. “You can easily see that I won’t go hungry for that little piece of generosity!” She set down her teacup. Mrs. Throckmorton was genuinely impressed by the magnitude of the offer, but Mary dismissed the subject merrily. “Come into my room, darling,” she said. “We’ve five peoplei6
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coming to-night, and I want to put some lace on my black satin.”
“Five people!” ejaculated the older matron, following her daughter into the exquisitely appointed bedroom that was just across the hall from the drawing-room. “Five! Dear me, I used to be utterly worn out and exhausted if ever I tried to manage four, much less seven, for dinner!”
“ Louise is a treasure,” said Mary, opening a casement window that gave a view of the pleasant street, deserted in the quiet spring afternoon. “She likes company.”
Mary was a constant source of delight to her quiet mother. She had been pretty, good, clever, from her very babyhood; now it filled her mother’s heart with gratitude and satisfaction to find her rounding her life out so perfectly—a rich man’s wife, a devoted mother, the most admired and envied member of New Troy’s nicest set. Anna Lou had married a good man, if a not very brilliant or successful one, and Amy was to find a good steady husband, too, and Rodney, the one son, still unmarried, promised to be a credit to his devoted family.
The older woman found a strange charm inUNEDUCATING MARY
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every detail of her fortunate daughter’s life; she found the atmosphere of the Cathedral Avenue home both soothing and fascinating. Her own early married years had been hard and busy and unpicturesque; she had had no time for the scientific study of housekeeping. Her healthy, irrepressible children, her untrained servants, her tired, devoted husband, had absorbed every ounce of energy soul and body possessed.
Her girls had grown up capable, quick of speech and action, affectionate and happy. Anna Lou was just married when Mary had begun to talk of college. College! No plan proposed by the girl of to-day, however daring, could sound as strange to parental ears as the word “college” on their daughter’s lips sounded to Daniel and Ellen Throckmorton. Even Rodney had shown no desire for college.
Mary spent four years in college, and when she came home even the matrons of her mother’s age treated her with marked respect. She was more charming than ever, but there was a general feeling that no man alive would dare to ask this gifted and learned and poised young woman to share the common lot of wives in New .Troy.i8
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And then Billy Constable came home from college, and simple and unaffected and quiet as Billy was he nevertheless won the brilliant Mary in the course of a happy winter, and there were countless engagement cups and luncheons and dinners and “showers” for the young pair, and there were wedding presents such as New Troy had never seen before, and a wedding that was mentioned in social columns all over the state. Billy’s father, a nervous, eager, hard-working man of business, was devoted to his daughter-in-law, and his wedding present to the young couple had been the brick house in Cathedral Avenue, and, as Billy was the “Son,” of Constable and Son, the oldest brokerage house in New Troy, he had an income well fitted to the needs of the brick house.
So for five happy years Mary had ruled the delightful little establishment, growing riper and more secure in her womanly charm year after year. Little Anthony came presently, to enjoy the old silver mug and darkened mahogany cradle that had been his father’s, and to fill the sunny nursery upstairs with his delicious little voice. Mrs. Throckmorton really felt nearer to Anna Lou’s romping, gingham-clad little girls than she did to theUNEDUCATING MARY
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exquisitely guarded Anthony, for the little boy was high-strung and delicate, and, so necessarily, ill-disciplined.
She sat thinking contentedly of all these things as Mary finished her bit of sewing, called the confectioner by telephone to make sure of the ices for dinner, and telephoned also to some club-woman friend, with whom she held a long, and to her mother almost incomprehensible, conversation, concerning some point of parliamentary law.
“That was Edna Purcell,” said Mary as she hung up the receiver. “She’s here now visiting her brother, and just as much interested in the Club as ever!”
Mrs. Throckmorton set her mouth primly, and fixed her eyes upon space.
“ I know you don’t like her, Mother,” Mary admitted. “Or, rather, I know you don’t like her divorcing Harry Purcell. But she really is a dear girl, and she really is devoted to her boy, too—talks about him all the time!” “What’d she give him up for, then?” demanded Mrs. Throckmorton practically.
“Why, Mother, her love for Freddy had nothing to do with her leaving Harry! ” Mary said, wide-eyed.20 UNEDUCATING MARY
“I don’t see why it didn’t. If she loved her child, she ought to love his father. Harry Purcell isn’t to me an attractive fellow, but Edna married him. She didn’t have to marry him.” Mrs. Throckmorton shook her head, unconvinced.	“No—no—no!” she said
firmly.
Mary sat thoughtfully staring at her mother’s face for a few moments. Then she said patiently:
“The situation had become simply unbearable for her, Mother. She was slaving away the best years of her life. Edna was perfectly willing to do everything she could, but finally it seemed to occur to her forcibly that Harry wasn’t going to do any better; that she never would have a maid, or live anywhere else than in that horrid little house, and it broke her heart. She had given up a handsome income to marry Harry Purcell; she was only too eager to go back to work, and have the family board. But no—he wouldn’t do that! Edna had to ask him for every cent she needed; it was too humiliating!”
“Humiliating! I never found it humiliating to ask your father for money!” Mrs. Throckmorton exclaimed, with the flash ofUNEDUCATING MARY
21
anger that surprises even the mildest of women at this particular gibe.
“Mother!:—as if Dad wasn’t exceptional!” Mary said. “Anyway, Edna simply went away to her sister in Brooklyn. And there she got a fine position and a chance to develop herself along the natural lines. She’s doing wonderfully well.”
“I don’t know what you mean by natural lines,” Mrs. Throckmorton said disapprovingly.
“I mean to develop her own soul, Mother,” Mary explained. “Isn’t that the highest, finest thing in life ? If I am satisfied, if I am using my capabilities to the utmost, I am growing, and I am happy. But if some cramping, disagreeable element is eternally holding me back, if I am losing soul-tissue--”
“Soul-tissue!” interrupted her mother.
“Why, Mother, you know hate and worry waste your spirit as much as illness and starvation waste your body,” the daughter elucidated. “That’s an absolutely recognized fact.”
“Yes, but, Mary, surely we all have to do things we don’t like in this world, and endure people with whom we have no sympathy!22
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Why, there was your father’s Aunt Lizzie, we had her for three years-----” Mrs. Throck-
morton was beginning; but Mary interrupted.
“Well, you ought not have had her, Mother. It was simply your generosity and decency! I wouldn’t have had her! I wouldn’t have any one. It’s wrong. It does you an injustice. No, dearest,” Mary added, “there are psychological and ethical and biological reasons underlying these things—we used regularly to study them, you know—and when you understand those reasons you realize that the human family------”
“Edna Purcell doesn’t seem to have much regard for the human family, for all that she knows all about these things!”Mrs. Throckmorton suggested neatly.
The two women were chatting comfortably half an hour later when the English nurse returned with Mary’s four-year-old boy.
Usually little Anthony toiled up the stairs himself, shouting loudly for his mother. He was a masterful little fellow, and recognized no authority. But to-day something was wrong. Mrs. Throckmorton’s heart turned sick within her as she saw the limp little figure in the nurse’s arms, the fever-bright eyes andUNEDUCATING MARY
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burning face. She and Mary flew to meet child and attendant, the grandmother taking Anthony into her own arms while Mary interrogated the maid.
He had been a little queer when he wakened from his nap, said Alice, with an air at once respectful and self-righteous, but she had1 fancied that the air would restore him quite to the normal. However, he had been fretting and crying all the afternoon; wouldn’t play; wouldn’t walk; and she had presently noticed how hot his face was, and had brought him in.
Mrs. Throckmorton sat back into her chair, the child in her arms, a thousand prayers struggling in her heart. But Mary was still her alert and capable self, although pale with the shock. In fifteen minutes the best “baby-doctor” in town was examining little Anthony, and the nursery, which was at the front of the house above Mary’s own room, had been turned into a sick-room. The child’s crib was moved, unnecessary things were swept out of sight, air and light were regulated, and Mary herself held the frightened baby during the preliminary examination.
“A little fever, certainly nothing alarming,” said Doctor Hubbard. “No supper, of course,”UNEDUCATING MARY
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Mary said intelligently. “Oh, no, nothing whatever,” the doctor agreed. Measles ? Mary wondered. “Pos—sibly, possibly just a little teething or stomach trouble,” said the soothing physician. Mary asked as to the advisability of getting a trained nurse.
The doctor shook his clinic thermometer thoughtfully, bit his lip, and eyed the ceiling for a full minute.
“Ye—es, I think I would get a nurse,” he advised slowly. Mary telephoned at once, and before her mother, somewhat reassured, left the house, Miss Ashe was in full possession of the sick-room.
“Now, don’t you worry, dearie,” said the mother.
“Oh, I sha’n’t!” Mary promised, with a kiss. “Well, yes, I suppose I shall!” she added, with a wistful little smile. “I wish all those people weren’t coming! But there doesn’t seem to be any reason for postponing the dinner. It isn’t as if we were going out; we will be right here. He’s way upstairs out of the noise, of course, and Miss Ashe doesn’t want any one in the room, anyway. He’s used to Miss Ashe, he likes her.”
“You’re a wonderful little mother,” saidUNEDUCATING MARY
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Mrs. Throckmorton. “I am always so frightened ! Anthony looks better already. Goodnight, dear!”
“Good-night, Mother!” Mary said. She went upstairs again slowly, mounted the second flight to the child’s room. Everything here was orderly, serene, satisfactory. Anthony, worn out with his trying afternoon and the tears he had recently shed, was dozing uneasily.
Miss Ashe smiled at Mary, and came out into the hall.
“Still fever?” asked the mother. The nurse shrugged lightly.
“Fever in such a little child is nothing, Mrs. Constable. He’ll probably have a restless night, but I think we will see immense improvement in the morning.”
“It’s the greatest comfort in the world for me to have you here,” Mary said, with a long sigh of relief. “I have guests coming, and it means so much to me to know that you are here and that you will call me at the slightest sign----”
“There won’t be a sign of anything!” the nurse assured her smilingly. She went back into the nursery, and Mary went down to her own room.26 UNEDUCATING MARY
Six o’clock, and twilight in Cathedral Avenue. Mary stood idly gazing out of the window for a moment and then drew the shades, lighted her room, and began slowly to dress for dinner, when her husband came in.
Billy Constable did not knock at his wife’s door, as usual. To-day his honest round face was streaked with the grime and perspiration of the spring’s first heat, his hat was pushed to the back of his head, and his eyes were full of miserable concern.
“Kid sick?” he asked, without preliminaries.
Mary explained reassuringly, and suggested that he run upstairs and have a look at the baby for himself.
“I’ve been up,” said Anthony’s father. He sank into a chair and stuck his feet out before him. “Gosh, I’m dead!” he said heavily.
Mary did not speak, she even tried not to eye him too severely. Of course he was tired, and Anthony was the apple of his eye; but every fibre of her being was uncomfortably aware of the sprawling form in the armchair, the perspiration-streaked face, the dusty shoes. She hated the word “ kid,” although she sometimes used the term “kiddy” herself; sheUNEDUCATING MARY
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hated the exclamation “gosh,” and she was disapprovingly conscious of the fact that Billy had not greeted his wife politely, had not removed his hat, and was obviously forgetful for the moment of the fact that a dinner party was imminent.
“Always hated that dress,” was Billy’s next thoughtful contribution to the general conversation as his eye fell on the waiting black gown. Mary felt a sudden rush of anger. No woman alive can be indifferent to such a criticism, but it was in a very gentle voice that Mary presently said:
“Billy, dear, have you forgotten that the Archers and Tom and the Pattersons are coming to-night ?”
Billy’s suddenly raised face would have been comic, if it had not been so genuinely aghast.
“Oh, gosh!” he said dismally. And then, in a puzzled tone, “But, look here, what a— what about the kid?”
“Why, it seemed best to let things go on,” Mary said. “He’s quiet, and as comfortable as he can be, poor little chap!”
“Yes, I guess you’re right,” Billy assented slowly. He yawned profoundly. “I’ve got to shave,” said he, on another yawn.28
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Mary-again did not answer, and her husband pulled himself wearily out of his chair and dragged his way into the adjoining bedroom. Mary, hooking herself now into the sweeping lines of her black satin gown, frowned faintly at her own lovely vision in the glass. She was the type that clings desperately to domestic ideals; this scene was not ideal. She loved dignity, formality, what she described as “fineness” in form and manner. And sometimes Billy failed her.
Mary sighed, thinking about it. Billy was habitually disappointing in some ways. He was different, in a thousand subtle phases, from the gay, adoring, cheerful college graduate who had wooed and won her more than five years ago. Or perhaps, Mary was honest enough to admit, she herself was growing beyond Billy. Such uninspiring business routine as filled his hours in the offices of Constable and Son could surely do nothing toward elevating his ideals or developing the finer side of his nature. She had her books, her social work, her music, and her dreams.
Jolly theatre parties or card parties with a chafing-dish supper to follow had been all very well for the first year or two of marriedUNEDUCATING MARY
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life. Now Mary consciously yearned for hospitality of a more significant nature. She enjoyed nothing in life so much as those occasions when her literary club entertained some distinguished writer or actress; nothing that came to her in her own home was so satisfying to Mary as to fill the gracious role that fell to her at these times. She knew London and Paris, and New York, for she and Billy had taken a flying trip around the world for their honeymoon, and she took care to know of the latest plays, the new essayists, the rising poets. Sometimes, after a reception, Billy would find her dreamy and absent-minded through dinner.
“Want to go see ‘The Pink Elephant’?” he might ask when they rose from the table.
“Oh, Billy dear! Girls in yellow satin tights or Hussar uniforms! Oh, no!” Mary would protest laughingly. “Go and play me ‘Peer Gynt,’ and then let’s stroll over to Mother’s for a moment!”
Sometimes Billy prevailed, of course, and they went to the noisy musical show and to supper afterward, but Mary became more and more reluctant to share in these commonplace amusements and felt herself genuinely martyred whenever she agreed to go.UNEDUCATING MARY
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To-night she found herself supremely, if secretly, dissatisfied with her dinner guests. The Archers were bride and groom, commonplace, well-dressed young persons absorbed in the delightful, new experiment of matrimony. “Tom” was Dr. Thomas Field, a college friend of Billy, who dined with the Constables at least twice a month, and the Pattersons were brother and sister, rich, uninteresting, very quiet, and both in the late thirties.
But the dinner was perfect, and after dinner Billy operated the mechanical piano very successfully for half an hour. Then Doctor Field went, and the three gentlemen and Miss Patterson sat down to cards. This left Mary for a talk with pretty little Mrs. Archer, a talk the older matrons rather enjoyed, for her guest was both inexperienced and ingenuous and they found a good deal to say. A trip to the nursery had entirely reassured Mary as to the baby’s condition; her exploring hand found his little face much cooler and his neck damp.
“I’m glad we didn’t delay the dinner, and got the Pattersons off our chests,” said Billy, when husband and wife came upstairs at midnight, after the guests had gone away.UNEDUCATING MARY
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“I don’t think we ought to entertain people to whom we feel that way,” offered Mary. “We ought simply to drop them.”
“Simply to drop Cass Patterson would be simply to drop a pretty neat slice of business every year,” Billy answered dryly. And, reminded by the remark of something else, he chuckled. “Say, you’re in Dutch with the governor!” said he.
“With your father?” Mary asked proudly, in surprise.
“He’s wild—or he was!” grinned Billy, now wrenching at his white tie. “You got Mrs. Cliff a book, or something, for him, didn’t you ? ”
“Certainly,” Mary said, watching her husband with a regally held head and with two quick spots of color burning in her cheeks. “He said he had to make some sort of present to the Cliffs when they moved into their new house, and I suggested a guest-book and got it. Didn’t they deliver it ? The man promised me solemnly------”
* “Oh, they delivered it, all right!” said Billy. “And they also delivered the old man a bill for forty-five dollars. He was crazy. He called me into the office. ‘What’d Mary do?’ he asked. ‘Buy a gross of’em?’”UNEDUCATING MARY
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“Well, I certainly feel well repaid for all the trouble I took in that matter,” Mary said coldly. “ I had a vellum book specially made. I had Torrence’s engraver make a special design for the title page, and had someone of their people burn a beautiful design on the cover!”
“Oh, well, Dad is just nervous and cross these days,” Billy said easily. “ He’ll be over it in a day or two! We got stung on some Porcupine stock that Davis and Perkins couldn’t deliver, and he felt it awfully. I wish I had better sense, sometimes,” said the son a little wistfully. “I often tell him that you’ve got the brains of the family, that you ought to be his assistant instead of me! Things are going rotten now, and we don’t seem to catch up. I told him you and I might cut down a little-----”
“ I don’t know where,” said Mary promptly. “We have three maids, of course; but Milly practically gets no salary.”
“We have four,” remarked Billy sur-prisedly.
“No, three,” Mary persisted. “For your father pays for Nurse; he said he wanted that to be his present to Anthony.”UNEDUCATING MARY
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“That’s so, I forgot that,” Billy agreed. “And a pretty rotten job she makes of it!” he added under his breath a moment later.
“Who do you mean? Nurse?” Mary asked sharply.
“Well, he—yes, I do mean Nurse,” Billy said after a pause. “ She doesn’t manage him very well; he doesn’t obey any one now, not even me, and—and I’ll bet she lets him eat between meals.”
“Who would you prefer to have take care of him?” asked Mary, politely icy. Her husband gave her a resentful glance.
“Oh, now, Mary! Don’t take that tone. All I want is not to have the kid grow up completely ruined! ” he said.
“And I completely ruin him,’do I?” Mary asked evenly. Billy did not answer. Mary put her rings carefully into a little box, laid a chain she had been wearing in its own special compartment, shut the box and locked it.
“I don’t think there is a better cared-for child in New Troy than Anthony,” she remarked presently in a level voice. “ I supply him with a trained nurse, I give him minute directions about his food, I am continually having Hubbard examine him, he has aUNEDUCATING MARY
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schedule with which nothing is allowed to interfere—and then, because he is a delicate child and a strong-willed child, you blame me because he doesn’t obey you!”
“Delicate!” Billy echoed scornfully.
“ Don’t sneer, Billy. Yes, delicate. Nurse says she has never seen such a sensitive stomach. Do you realize that we have had a trained nurse in this house for Anthony five times since January? Anything upsets him, and a sick child is always a cross child. No, Billy; it isn’t Anthony that you’re angry about,” Mary said, with her even firmness. “It’s I. I know it. And I’ve warned you before that I can’t live in an atmosphere of criticism and carping and quarreling. If you and I can’t live in peace, let’s do the dignified thing. Let’s at least be honest about it, and admit that we’ve made a mistake! Anything is better,” said Mary, with sudden passion in her voice, “than a life like this, than wretchedness such as I have been enduring!”
Tears came to her eyes, and she rested one elbow on her dressing table and leaned her head on her hand. There was a short silence. Neither husband nor wife either moved or spoke.UNEDUCATING MARY
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“You mean divorce?” Billy said, with a nervous laugh, after a while. He had grown very pale, and Mary’s color was fading, too.
“Well, if I do?” she asked bravely. “There is nothing half as disreputable about divorce as there is about living in this way—hating each other while bound together in the most] sacred tie that life holds!”
“We don’t hate each other,” Billy submitted firmly, but in a troubled voice. Mary shrugged her shoulders.
“Ah, well, why quibble about it?” she asked wearily. “You know we are both unhappy. You don’t like my treatment of Anthony; you don’t like my friends; we have nothing in common-------”
“We’d be happy enough, if you were ever satisfied,” Billy persisted doggedly. “I’m sure I don’t know why you’re unhappy. We have a fine kid, and a fine house, and lots of friends. We’re young--------”
“If I were ever satisfied!” echoed Mary, with a sort of ghostly mirth. She gave him a look in which pity had entirely mastered indignation. “Let’s not degrade ourselves by idle discussions, Billy,” she said gently. “They don’t affect the reality; that I cannot36
UNEDUCATING MARY
-----” Mary paused, a little at a loss. She
had not foreseen this conversation and was unwilling to follow it to its logical conclusion. “That I cannot go on in this way,” she finished firmly. “ I am a human being, I am not a slave----”
“Oh, hire a hall!” Billy suggested good-naturedly. Mary had often heard the term before, and even used it herself in moments of high good humor. Now, however, she flushed darkly.
j “I think you need not be insulting, Billy!” she said coldly. “You may not like to hear it, but it is true. I have been married now for five years; I have faithfully met all the obligations of housekeeping and motherhood. You can’t deny it! Now I say that these duties do not satisfy me; I have other potentialities. I want to express myself, I want to mean something in the world! If you had a similar ambition, nobody would think of blaming you. Why should--------”
“Well, nobody’s blaming you! Go ahead,” interrupted Billy, who had been listening moodily, scowling meanwhile at the shining toes of his immaculate slippers. But Mary was staring darkly at her own beautiful re-UNEDUCATING MARY 37
flection in the mirror, and did not speak for several seconds.
“I would rather not discuss it just now,” she said finally, in a tired tone. “You speak of it all very casually, as if you were half in fun; but to me it’s deadly, serious, earnest. If we decide to separate--”
“// we decide to separate,” Billy began in a high key.
“Billy, please don’t use that tone to me,” his wife said patiently.
“I beg your pardon!” Billy said ferociously, and there was a long silence. Then the man added bitterly, “ I hope you’ll go so far as to inform me what you intend to do when you make up your mind.”
Of the two, Mary had far the better self-control. Now, although she was very angry, not a ripple of emotion crossed her face. She looked very tired, and felt an overwhelming weariness of soul
This was a “scene,” and she felt degraded and coarsened whenever she was dragged into one. Surely, surely, life could be lived on a higher plane than this one! Surely, dignified people need not indulge in these recriminations. To submit to this, to keep up the piti-UNEDUCATING MARY
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able pretense of the affection that had once bound them together was a course more suitable to the old, convention-bound woman of the past than to a modern woman of enlightened to-day. Mary dreaded the unpleasantness of a divorce, the publicity, the scandal. But, she told herself now, she was but twenty-eight, life was before her, she must not lose the next precious decade of years for mere fear of misrepresentation, of appearances!
“I’ll tell you how I feel, Billy,” she said slowly, with a deep frown. “ I don’t want to blame any one. I may be as much to blame myself as you are. But—I can’t go on. This is no sudden decision. I’ve been thinking of it a long time. I don’t want to go into the question of my merits or possibilities; I only know this: when I go to my own friends’ houses, when I entertain in my own way, I am happy, I am in my element; I feel that I can do things, and I know—I would be a fool not to know it—but the others turn to me when things are to be done, realize that I have a certain executive capacity. Wait, please don’t interrupt me!” said Mary, as Billy made a restless gesture. She went on, “Now at home everything is different. You and I areUNEDUCATING MARY
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not in sympathy. We are eternally getting into just such disgraceful squabbles as we did to-night, a thing I never did in my life before! The baby takes about one twentieth of my time, the house even less. Now, I ask you, what am I to do ? Embroider ? Play cards ? ” Billy found no answer to the scornful ring in her voice. “No,” said Mary, after a pause, in a lower tone, “ let us be reasonable, and think of the right way out, and take it!
“I don’t mean now, Billy. I didn’t mean to say anything about this for several days— weeks, perhaps. Amy’s just engaged, of course, and it wouldn’t do to have anything like this----”
“Oh, of course not! Let’s consider Amy,” Billy said sneeringly. “And how about the grocer; wouldn’t he like us to finish out the fiscal year?”
“If I went to New York for a visit,” Mary continued, ignoring his bitterness, “ if Anthony went to Mother, who is perfectly wild to have him, and if you rented this house for a while, it would be nobody’s business then except our own! You naturally think only of your own side of the matter,” she went on, as Billy made some inarticulate sound. “ But some day youUNEDUCATING MARY
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will think what it means to me to do this, to wreck the home you gave me, and start fresh somewhere——”
“What the deuce do you talk this way for, then?” Billy demanded. “It makes me sick! Take a vacation if you want one; do as you please, but don’t talk about dragging us all through the rottenness--”
“Billy,” Mary said thoughtfully, “do you realize that divorce is a modern institution, and that already one marriage out of every twelve is dissolved ? Think what that means, think how this country needed divorce! Think of the hideous hypocrisy of the days before divorce was legal, of the thousands of women who dragged out years and years of pretense----”
“Oh, good-night!” said Billy violently. And a second later the slamming of his door shattered the midnight silence of the house in Cathedral Avenue. Mary sighed. It was one more tiny link in the chain.
“It is the only honest and courageous course,” Mary said to herself, meeting her own somber glance in her mirror, “there is no other way; it must be divorce!”CHAPTER II
TT WAS in a sobered frame of mind that she came downstairs on the following morning. Anthony was much better, quite himself again, in fact, and Billy was gone for the day. So Mary had her letters and her breakfast alone in the sun-splashed dining-room, thinking deeply of the months to come with their tremendous changes and chances.
As the day and the week wore on, however, the happy current of her life caught her once more. Billy made no allusion to their midnight talk, although he was serious and unlike himself. Wide-spread entertaining met the news of Miss Amy Throckmorton’s engagement, and Mary gave luncheons and dinners constantly for her pretty little sister. The spring was in full flower now, lilacs and locust blossoms scented the still air of Cathedral Avenue, and Anthony drooped in the untimely heat. Mary’s clubs were giving their closing affairs, elaborate luncheons with
41UNEDUCATING MARY
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speeches and musical programs to follow, and she was in constant demand.
She was walking home one airless, fragrant afternoon in May, musing half-sadly, half-smilingly, upon the event of the day, upon the visiting clubwoman, with her admiring, “I wish you were in New York, Mrs. Constable, we need your kind!” upon the effect of her own graceful little speech, when a newsboy, crossing her path in swift flight, suddenly banished her dreams and awakened her to an uneasy and vaguely terrified present.
What was the wretched child calling, and what garbled account of some minor business transaction was he misconstruing into this disquieting news ? Suddenly the solid ground seemed to fail beneath Mary’s feet. She felt as if the glass that all her life had screened her in her sunny corner were shattered, and the cold winds of the world were blowing against her.
She bought the newspaper and carried it to her own room, and there pored over it in a misery of repulsion and fear. A brief article of perhaps three hundred words was the only thing she read, but the article was displayed on the first page and advertised by sensational headlines. Mary could make very little of it,UNEDUCATING MARY
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but by the time Billy came home she knew it by heart.
Her first glance at his face confirmed her worst misgivings. It was all up, he told her wearily, dropping into a chair. The dear old governor had seen it coming and had tried to stave it off; but there was no use, it was too late! Constable and Son had gone into bankruptcy.
In the first instant of utter consternation and distaste Mary found the truth impossible to believe. Constable and Son! Why, it had always been one of the business assets of the town, a firm of which New Troy could well be proud, as reliable as government bonds, as steady as the blue-gray mountains that ringed the city. Constable and Son fail, be proved untrue to its sacred trust, be blamed in the daily papers, and—it was too horrible to be true! Mary writhed away from the details, from her mother’s kindly concern and her sisters’ tactful sympathy. She could feel nothing but scornful resentment toward Billy’s father, Anthony Constable the older, who had turned, in a single week, from a cheerful, silent, keen-eyed broker to a thin and nervous shadow of his old self. He had been responsible*UNEDUCATING MARY
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after all, thought Mary; he might have seen this coming; he might have done something !
Toward Billy her attitude was hardly softer, or softer only by the measure of its quiet contempt. She had always blamed him for his light-hearted, happy-go-lucky philosophy; she was not apt to blame him less now. For days she went about like a woman in a dream, an evil dream, in which friendly faces were pitying and strange faces curious, and all the serene routine of life underwent a bitter change.
Repining was useless, and she was too clever a woman to waste time in useless regret. She suffered, but it was for the most part with dignity and in silence. From the very beginning she hoped that this cataclysm would lead to their leaving New Troy, to begin anew in some larger, more interesting city. This hope she did not express; but she did express her determination to find some means by which she herself might help to mend the family’s fallen fortunes, and consoled herself in her bitterest moments with the reflection that the eclipse was only temporary; in a few months or a year or two she would emerge from poverty and obscurity, to enjoy a stillUNEDUCATING MARY
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more enviable prominence. It was a change, at least, and Mary was young enough to feel that any change was for the better.
“We’ll have to move,” said Billy, one evening about a week after the crash, when husband and wife were talking over their affairs in the sitting-room.
“Move?” Mary asked, alarmed. “Why -—but we don’t pay any rent at all here!”
“I know it,” said Billy, “but we could always rent this house for a hundred, say. And we could get a smaller place somewhere I’m sure, for, say, thirty.”
“I suppose we could,” Mary admitted reluctantly, after some thought. It did not strike her as at all remarkable that her husband, a rich man’s only son, should take these heroic measures to bring about a reduction of their living expenses, but it did seem to her distasteful and inconvenient. “ But, Billy, we’ll have some money?” she asked doubtfully.
“What from?” Billy said. “My salary stops like a shot, of course.”
“But, Billy, you’ll have to get another position!”
Billy scowled thoughtfully.
“Well, you see, there it is, Mary!” heUNEDUCATING MARY
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answered presently, with a nervous laugh. “The governor is all broken up about this, as you know. It’s—it’s pitiful to see him these days! He feels that, if I stand by him, he may be able to get on his feet again, d’you see? He wants to pay everyone a hundred cents on the dollar, eventually, and, by George!” Billy interrupted himself with sudden enthusiasm, “ I believe that the old boy will do it yet! But he can’t do it without me.”
“I don’t see why,” said Mary, simply and unflatteringly.
“Well, you would see why, if you understood the business!” Billy answered with a resentful flush. “ I’m young, I’ve got my whole life ahead of me to help clear this thing up. I’m not awfully smart,” admitted Billy boyishly, “but everyone knows that if I stay with it there’s a chance that we’ll get it straight. Carter and Cartwright offered me a berth with them to-day------”
“They did!” ejaculated Mary, instantly brightening.
“ Sure they did. And I could see, when I said I was going to stick by my father, that they were surprised. It’s just as if they said to themselves: ‘Lord, Constable may pull out yet!’”UNEDUCATING MARY
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“I thought we were going to ‘settle’ with creditors,” said Mary, after a painful silence.
“That’s just the legal part. Of course Dad feels morally obligated to do better than that if he can!”
“I see,” Mary said discontentedly, after a pause. She was fairly sick with distaste and apprehension. The peaceful current of her life, once violently disturbed, seemed very unlikely to settle again soon. “I’ve let Nurse go, of course,” she added plaintively. Billy knew this, for his little son’s crib, to their mutual satisfaction, had been moved into his own room for the past two nights, but he said “Good!” simply to encourage his wife.
“And you told Louise and Delia that love’s young dream was o’er, didn’t you?” he asked.
“At the end of the month,” Mary assented solemnly.
“And Milly’s gone back to her interesting mother?”
“Yesterday.”
“Well, then, I’ll put this house in an agent’s hands to-morrow,” Billy said briskly in a satisfied tone. “Can you begin to look for some place?”
“I suppose so,” Mary said lifelessly. And48 UNEDUCATING MARY
she began quietly to cry. Billy came over to sit on the arm of her chair to comfort her, and she rested her head against his coat, and wept a little for the sheer luxury of tears.
“Then we h-have just the r-rent of this house?” she asked shakily, after an interval.
“Well, that’s all we’re sure of,” Billy said reassuringly. “Of course if we get tight up we’ll have to borrow, or I might sell a little real estate on the side, and get a commission, do you see ? Don’t worry, old girl, we’ll get along! ”
Mary left Anthony with Delia, and went house-hunting the very next day, and for several days thereafter. But it was discouraging work. The early summer days were hot and enervating, and their merciless brightness made empty houses and apartments look very dingy and bare. Her first find was a roomy, modern apartment, quite satisfactory in every respect except rent, which was eighty dollars.
Billy unequivocally refused to consider this proposal, and Mary began to hunt again.
“We simply cannot find what we want for less than sixty dollars!” she declared on the fifth evening.UNEDUCATING MARY
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“Then we must take what we don’t want,” said Billy philosophically.
“Billy! You don’t know what that means. Dark bathrooms, and no pantry between the kitchen and dining-room, and awful papers! Or else smells on the stairs and people you don’t know a thing about using the same halls! The floors of the Lincoln Street house are simply splinters; you couldn’t paint, you couldn’t stain them! Then that yellow house Mother telephoned about is a perfect barn, with the dampest basement! I’m sure I don’t know what we are going to do!”
“Well, I’ll look around myself to-morrow,” Billy said good-naturedly. And two days later, when Mrs. Throckmorton came in to spend an hour with her daughter, Mary told her that they had decided upon a house.
“Where is it?” asked the older woman, cuddling her grandson with unreproved satisfaction.
“River Street, down by the bridge,” Mary said unenthusiastically. “They’ve been standing empty something like six months; but they’ve six rooms, and twenty dollars; so, of course, Billy was delighted!”
“My darling, don’t be bitter!” her motherUNEDUCATING MARY
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said gently. “They’re plain little houses, of course, but it’s really a sweet quiet part of town; Amy and Larry are really seriously considering one!”
“You have to pass every factory in New Troy to get there,” Mary stated coldly. “But 1 suppose we have to live somewhere! I’ve not seen them, and I don’t intend to until
we move in. Mother-------” she began in a
slightly more interested tone, and stopped.
“What is it?” asked Mrs. Throckmorton.
“Nothing!” Mary answered. But just as her mother was going an hour later she suddenly asked casually, “Mother, how do you move?”
“How do I move?”
“I mean, how does any one move?” Mary amended.
“Oh, I see!” said her mother, careful to preserve a casual air. “Well, you pack boxes of books first; books and pictures and thing? you don’t need. Then you pack china and clothing, and cover any very handsome piece of furniture with old rugs, and take the beds apart, and roll the mattresses.”
“I telephoned the Bartlett people,” said Mary in a low tone, “ and told them to send aUNEDUCATING MARY
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professional packer. But I asked the charge, and it’s frightful—about sixty dollars, he said, for a house this size, and fifteen dollars a load for three loads. So I canceled the order.”
“ I’ll have Daddy send you out some barrels and crates,” said Mrs. Throckmorton, “and suppose I carry off this darling boy for the night?”
“I’m a wild jungle bear and my name is Ba-loo!” said Anthony. “Aunt Amy told me about it. Aunt Amy’s name is Hathi, and she is an elephant!”
“Well, you take me home to your lair, Baloo!” said his grandmother. Mary kissed the child’s eager little face a bit wistfully.
“Whom do you love?” she asked, straightening the bear’s coat collar.
“I love Aunt Amy,” said Baloo; “but I didn’t love Nurse, and I’m glad she went to the Winship children!”
When Billy came home he found Mary in the centre of the demoralized drawing-room, her hair wild, her cheeks flushed. She had a statuette in her hand and was standing by a lg.rge empty barrel.UNEDUCATING MARY
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“Billy, can you pack?” she asked without preliminary. “I’m sure I can’t, and Delia is simply no good! We packed a box, and it rattled frightfully, so we opened it again and four of the champagne glasses were broken already!”
“Well, we’ll see if we can’t struggle along with eight champagne glasses in the River Street house!” Billy said, with a grin for the artless experiment of the amateur packers. “Sure I can pack!” he added confidently. “Wait until after dinner, and then I’ll take off my coat and you’ll see the fur fly!”
Mary watched him after dinner with some respect as he capably selected heavy articles for the bottom of the crates, neatly filled in empty spaces, and used torn newspapers and crushed tissue-paper where they were needed, with economy and discretion.
“Now that I’ve seen you do it, I can go straight ahead!” she told him, when the first session was over at midnight. But when morning came, with a new note of something like timidity in her voice she asked him to stay away from the office for one day. Some of the Constables’ heavier furniture was to be stored, as unfitted to the River Street house, aUNEDUCATING MARY
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few pieces had been sold to the incoming tenant, odds and ends from attic and basement were to be given away; Mary felt utterly confused and overwhelmed by the varied directions that must be given. Besides, for perhaps the first time in her life, she had full charge of Anthony for the day, for Delia had been sent to clean the River Street house, and Louise was the centre of a wildly disordered kitchen and was responsible for cooking and serving the day’s meals as well.
Mary, since her little son’s birth nearly four years before, had made a serious study of all that was modern and best-approved in child-culture. Anthony was a clever child for all his restlessness, and Mary, in supplying him with a splendid nurse and with the toys and books recommended for boys of his age, had felt sure that he was started on the right path toward learning and self-development.
But to-day she found the care of him something of a problem. As long as she gave him her undivided attention he was delightfully sweet and amusing, even if he did build houses with his letter blocks, use his numerical chart chiefly as a rattle, mingle his nicely scaled weights with his Noah’s Ark, and fill the aqet-UNEDUCATING MARY
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tures into which they should have been fitted with lead soldiers. But the instant she left him alone he began to cry.
It was useless to remind him that now he was Mother’s big boy, that Mother was very busy to-day, that the lady in the house next door would hear him and tell her little boys and girls that Anthony Constable was a cry-baby! Anthony was dead to argument as he was dead to shame; he never had played alone, and he did not intend to begin to-day!
“I thought these new things would teach children to be self-dependent and resourceful,” said Mary to her mother in troubled tones when Mrs. Throckmorton, rosy and cheerful, came in to see if she could be of any use to the upset household. “Children”—Mary’s voice grew more confident—“children ought to learn enough in the nursery to give them a long start when school days begin,” she stated. “But he simply throws these things about as if they had no significance whatever!”
“Well, I don’t think Alice had a very nice way with children,” Mrs. Throckmorton said, a little obscurely. “She didn’t train him to amuse himself.”
“Why, Mother!” Mary exclaimed. “SheUNEDUCATING MARY
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was a specially trained nursery-maid, and got ten dollars a week!”
“Well, he’d behave a great deal better if he had a little brother or sister to play with, as all you children had,” suggested the grandmother.
The day seemed endless to Mary. She built block-houses, she turned the pages of Anthony’s books. The clock dragged. It was two o’clock, it was quarter-of-three, it was ten minutes after three. Anthony went to bed at seven, but seven o’clock seemed ages away. A summer wind was howling outside of the dismantled rooms, but Mary would have wrapped the little boy warmly and taken him into the Park if a dozen appointments with plumber and paperer, storage men and movers had not made her presence at home necessary.
But Billy, who had gone down-town on some business connected with the moving, got home at about four o’clock. Mary had not felt for months the warm rush of welcome that rose in her at the sight of him. Billy suggested that they all three go to have a look at the River Street house, and Mary was secretlyUNEDUCATING MARY
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almost as glad as the rioting Anthony to put on her hat and get out of doors.
Her heart sank, however, as they neared their new home, passing through the ugly factory district and reaching finally a wide and rambling street that, beside Cathedral Avenue, looked very shabby and bare. The house itself was cheap and part of a cheap row. There were flimsy fences around the little front yards, but for the most part there were no gardens, just well-tramped stretches of barren earth.
The new home possessed no touch of distinction. The paint on the front door was peeling, the entrance hail, finished in shining red varnish, smelled vaguely of dust and plaster. There was a sitting-room with a hideous mantel, connecting by wide doors with a perfectly square, bare dining-room. Delia, in a shaft of bright sunlight, was scrubbing the rough floor in the kitchen, a kitchen whose plaster walls had been thickly coated with light blue paint. Upstairs there were three bedrooms, all hideously and differently papered, and a bathroom with a tin tub, and a wash-hand stand built in above a cabinet with a varnished wooden door.UNEDUCATING MARY
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Billy kept sending wistful glances toward his wife as they went about; he was only a man after all, and the place looked bright and inviting to him; but Mary was too stunned to respond to his mute questions, indeed in her utter sickness of spirit she did not even see them. The dreadful fortnight just past had taught her something, for she had already borne more than she once could have borne, but now an anguished exclamation burst from her:
“Billy, dear! We simply can’t live here! It isn’t safe. That covered plumbing is an absolute menace to human life,” she said. “Washing tubs in the kitchen are most unsanitary, and you simply cannot keep cooking smells out of the house unless there is a large airy pantry between the kitchen and diningroom! Then the whole place is papered, which is sure to breed disease, and if we get a maid she’ll have to use our bathroom, and sleep on the same floor with us; one bathroom in a house is just about as good as none /”
“Well, you hunted the town over, and couldn’t find anything better,” said Billy, pushing his hat back and wiping his forehead with a silk handkerchief. “We’re cooler hereUNEDUCATING MARY
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than anywhere else in town, in hot weather, and the big bedroom gets a lovely view of he river. There’s a good backyard with an apple tree in it for Anthony; that’s more than he had at home!”
“It simply wouldn’t be safe to bring Anthony here,” Mary said firmly, “we would blame ourselves for ever if he got ill!”
“The block seems fairly safe for children,” Billy observed dryly, for indeed River Street swarmed with joyous babies.
“If we could scrape off every bit of paper,” Mary murmured, “put in modern plumbing, build a maid’s room and bath in the attic, and put the washtubs in the basement—but, even then, I’d be afraid!”
“Which would cost about four hundred dollars—more than a year’s rent!” Billy observed. “And the old man won’t do one thing; he stuck to that. It isn’t a question of what we’d like to do, Mary; it’s simply that we haven’t the money. Whatever this is, it’s better for the kid than living in some dark apartment, or boarding. I wish myself that everything was a little better, but Anthony can take his chances with the other youngsters!”UNEDUCATING MARY 59
Three days later the Constables moved into the River Street house, an experience to which Mary looked back all her life as unspeakably trying and discouraging. Billy was in unexpectedly high spirits; he really liked the less pretentious establishment, and Anthony was at an age when moving-day is one long delight. Amy flitted about the new domain like a good fairy, interested and eager in helping, and Mrs. Throckmorton came over late in the afternoon with a custard for Anthony’s dinner and an armful of roses with which to embellish the rather dreary sitting-room. But Mary moved through her part of the day’s proceedings, or through what she conceived to be her part, like an automaton, silent, abstracted, sad. Her eyes were full of unfathomable weariness, her voice lifeless and gentle. She did not care where Billy placed her bureau; she said she had no preference in the matter of rugs; she was not tired, her head did not ache, she was not hungry.
The whole long summer day was unutterably desolate to her. She shuddered in spirit at the sight of her familiar belongings against this background of garish cheapness. The dining-room, with its half-filled boxes, its6o
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tangle of newspapers and wrappings; the drawing-room, with careless pyramids of books cascading against odd vases and jars set on the floor; and the bedrooms with blankets and sheets tumbled haphazard upon the bare mattresses, were alike hateful to her.
Amy took Anthony to the little grocery at the corner at five o’clock and came back triumphantly with spongy bread and butter, canned tomatoes and mutton chops, for supper. Anthony’s radiant face was smeared with a moist ginger cracker when he came chattering in.
“Did this come in a sealed package?” Mary asked, as she patiently wiped the child’s face at the sink.
“No, it didn’t!” said Amy, struck with remorse. “Or if it did, it had been opened for some time. The man got it from under the counter.”
“Under the counter!” Mary said, with a violent shudder.
“Chops and bread—gosh, how good food looks!” Billy exulted unaffectedly. “And coffee! Me for two cups of strong coffee!”
“And we stopped a milkman and ordered milk and cream,” Amy announced complacently.UNEDUCATING MARY
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“What milkman?” Mary demanded.
“I don’t know, Sis. It said ‘Casey’s Home Dairy.’ It’s only two blocks away!”
“ Billy,” said Mary, a world of quiet tragedy in her voice, “do you think that is safe?”
“Oh, sure it’s safe!” Billy answered easily. “Look here, Scout,” he added to his son, “you mustn’t eat any more now! You’re going to sit up and have dinner with us tonight!”
One of Mary’s rules was that when severity or indulgence was meted out to Anthony by either father or mother, the other parent must remain passive, while the child was present at least. But she broke this rule impulsively now.
“Billy—really, dear! You know how bad that is for him! You know a child’s little nervous system records every impression; every hour he is out of bed after six o’clock wastes just so much precious tissue.”
“Well, his crib isn’t put up,” protested Billy. “I don’t believe it will hurt him, just this once! And he’s having the time of his life!”
Deeply hurt, Mary fell back upon silence. She put away the grocery packages, moving62
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wearily back and forth over the splintered kitchen floor. The chops were put upon a plate and with the milk were set away in the ice box. Billy went out to sweep dust and litter from the shabby front steps, and Amy ran upstairs to make beds. Presently Mrs. Throckmorton came in, eager to praise and admire and anxious to help with pinner preparations.
“Really, dearest, you’ve already done wonders with the place,” she said encouragingly. “I think you’ll be very comfortable here, and not half as much bothered with callers as if you had been nearer town! Hello, Grandma’s precious,” she said to Anthony, “look what I brought for my boy’s supper! It’s nearly six,” she added to Mary. “Can’t I help you get things started?”
“ Potatoes are coming, but they may not be here in time,” Amy sang cheerfully, returning to the kitchen. “But we’ve got a gas stove, so we can get ready in no time! We’ll have to eat here, the dining-room’s a mess. Where’s the milk, Mary?”
“In the ice chest,” Mary said, clearing a hundred miscellaneous objects from the kitchen table.UNEDUCATING MARY
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“In the ice chest!” Amy exclaimed. “Certainly,” answered Mary promptly. “Meat should never remain in paper, the juices exude too rapidly. And milk should never for one instant stand anywhere except in the refrigerator! The transporting o,f milk is one of the greatest difficulties which dealers
have to overcome, for any contagion-----”
“All very fine,” said Amy, in a gale of carefree laughter, “but there’s no ice!”
Mary’s face reddened slowly; even her gentle mother laughed merrily.
“I didn’t notice that,” Mary said slowly. “At home we—we always had ice! At least, I suppose we had------”
“Never mind, Mary,” her mother said soothingly. “It’s all rather confusing and difficult at first. But you’ll be as good a housekeeper as Amy is in no time!”
“I never would have known anything, if I hadn’t run the house while Mother was away last summer,” Amy said contentedly, pouring milk into Anthony’s mug. “Taste this, Mother,” she added, holding out a tablespoonful of milk toward her mother. “ Doesn’t that taste nice and rich?”
“Yes, but—but Amy never took a course inUNEDUCATING MARY
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domestic science,” Mary murmured, hurt and bewildered.
It took Mary Constable a little less than a month to discover that with all her learning, and all her earnest effort, she could not manage her house and her child without help. Her neighbors on either side, Mrs. Deetles and Mrs. Schwab, respectively the contented wives of a prosperous grocer and a traveling salesman of patent overalls, managed their children, three in one case and five in the other, with comparative success. They cooked, washed, mended, hung out long lines of blowing, fresh clothes; they played with their latest-born, or went off to market in apparent peace of mind. But Mary could not watch Anthony while she prepared dinner, and could not get breakfast, wash her dishes, brush out her dining-room and make her bed, all in one short morning.
Mary remembered, if she no longer had time to consult her notebooks. She struggled to maintain a budget, she attempted to let her head save her heels, she tried to apply efficiency to the kitchen of the River Street house. But it was no use. Her back ached perpetually, her feet ached, her hands were rough and grimed. She seemed to move through a hotUNEDUCATING MARY 65
world of unmade bed, unwashed dishes, and unswept rooms. The kitchen work was never quite done; always there was one more streak of milk from Anthony’s mug to be wiped away, always there was one unopened package from the grocery, one unwashed saucepan in the sink. Then she must get to market in time for the morning delivery; and get home in time to put a potato in the oven to bake for Anthony’s luncheon.
Mary began to appreciate the attention when her mother came in with a blue bowl packed with delicious salad, or invited the young Constables to come to the hospitable Throckmorton house after dinner to enjoy an ice and an hour or two on the shady side porch. Mary played the old songs he loved for her father; she even played bridge with Billy and Rodney and her father in the cool old airy sitting-room, although for years she had given up these simple occupations. On these occasions Anthony had to sit up for dinner, of course, and be carried drowsily home rolled in a steamer plaid, but even this departure from all nursery rule and regulation seemed less important to Mary than it once might have seemed.66
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Billy did what he could; months went by before Mary really appreciated the extent of his unselfish interest and cooperation. He never complained of the abridged meals; he praised wherever praise was humanly possible; he took Anthony off Mary’s hands almost every afternoon for the hour before dinner; and on Sunday, when she was too busy to go with him he carried the little boy off for an hour or two with Grandfather Constable. But even Billy could not spare Mary very much, and between fatigue and heat and inexperience and inward rebellion she spent a wretched month.
^ Would you rather have the front hall papered, for your birthday, or have a maid for a few weeks?” Billy asked one evening, when they were lingering over a comparatively successful dinner.
“ I would rather have a maid for three weeks than have a tiara of Cullinan diamonds!” Mary said fervently. “But there’s no comparison in expense, unfortunately! The papering would cost nine dollars, he said, and nine dollars would pay a cook for just one week.”
“ I’U bet I could get a maid for less than $9,”UNEDUCATING MARY
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said Billy. “I’ll round you up something just over from County Sligo, or a Russian lady in a fur hat!”
“Don’t!” Mary said ungratefully. “Im not able to instruct a greenhorn. No; let’s go on as we are.”
“You’re terribly plucky,” Billy answered gratefully. “But cheer up, Cassandra, the woyst is yet to come!”
“Don’t say that, Billy,” Mary said passionately, sudden tears in her eyes. He came penitently over to her side.
“Don’t worry, dear,” Billy said tenderly. “It’s rotten, I know. But it won’t last for ever. Next year will be just that much better, and the year after that I bet we’ll just be sailing along! It’s making a hit with everybody, our coming right down to brass tacks this way. Fellows simply go out of their way to be decent with me, and when the governor was looking over accounts the other day and found that you and I had drawn only fifteen dollars last month he just broke down like a kid. I told him we hadn’t meant to draw that; that we planned to live on the rent of the Cathedral Avenue house, and he—well, he got me all broke up, too!	It’s—it’s character-68
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building, Mary!” He laughed on the last words, and she laughed shakily, too, for that had been a familiar phrase in the days of their honeymoon, when Mary had asked her husband to forego his second cocktail, or Billy had urged her to dive boldly into the cold breakers of Monterey Beach.CHAPTER III
A FEW days later Drika came, a stolid little ^ ^ Dutch girl of perhaps seventeen, with a stiff plait of yellow hair sticking down her back between her round little plaid shoulders, and with the noisiest of hobnailed shoes. Drika spoke no English, nor did she understand even the simplest of the customs of her new-found country. She looked trustingly, if in utter bewilderment, upon Mary, with a' pair of yellow-lashed, sea-blue eyes. She still carried the green cloth bag with which she had come off the ocean liner five days before.
Drika had the sudden, free laugh of a child, unless it was more like the unexpected squawk of a wild bird. She clumped upstairs after Mary with a child’s docility and Billy, downstairs, heard the first of the remarkable dialogues that were to take place between the two women.
“Well, what d’you think of her?” he asked when Mary came down.
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“Impossible! Where’d you get her?” Mary asked in a low voice.
“At an employment agency. She’s just over,” answered Billy. “Her sister’s been in one place for four years. She comes of nice people, and two dollars and a half a week sounded good to her! The woman at the agency asked me no end of questions; they evidently mean to keep an eye on the kid.”
“They needn’t,” Mary said, with a flash of her old fun. “I don’t see anybody stealing her!”
She went into the kitchen to begin dinner preparations, and presently Drika slipped downstairs with the wary eyes of a hare and joined her mistress. The new maid presently set the table, adding several unnecessary silver spoons and cut-glass dishes to its usual equipment, merely for the pleasure their presence gave her. She triumphantly brought in the pudding while Billy was carving the steak, and laughed and clapped her hands with delight when the Deetles’ cat, as was his habit, walked uninvited into the room. Mary banished Drika and the cat, and the maid departed kissing the intruder affectionately. But when Anthony presently began to call outUNEDUCATING MARY
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from his crib, Drika ran upstairs as a matter of course to quiet him and later she settled down to dishwashing with evident good-will. Somehow the dishes were washed; Mary did not investigate the process, and the maid appeared at the sitting-room door to astonish her employers and delight herself with a beaming “Goo’-neet.”
“She’s a decent-hearted little thing!” said Billy, when she had gone upstairs. He smiled rather doubtfully at his wife.
“And, oh, the blessed relief of not doing the dishes!” Mary added, with a long, luxurious sigh. “Two dollars and a half, is it? I never dreamed you could get one! Perhaps I can do something with her.” And, silently grateful for an attitude even so much softened, Billy pursued the topic no further.
Mary speedily persuaded Drika to braid her hair about her head, a fashion very becoming to her blond youth, and gave her a pair of beautiful, if half-worn, shoes. She could not help liking the silent, stupid little thing, for Drika was instantly subjugated by Anthony, and Mary found her very fortunate in her manner with the little boy and evidently used to the company of small children.72
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Indeed, she was better in her management of Anthony than Mary was herself, the mother had to admit in bewilderment. On the second morning of her stay Drika took the small boy out to that spot where the shade of the apple tree was met by the clear shadow of the house. She gave him a colander, a tin spoon, and an old lard pail filled with earth. And here Anthony sat, sifting, shaking, stirring, and pouring, for a full half hour. Then he began to shout for company. Drika, dashing out to him with a dish towel in her hand, addressed him in purest Dutch, shook her head at him, and spatted his hand gently with her hard little red hand, and Anthony returned meekly to his operations with pail and spoon.
It soon became a habit with Anthony to amuse himself happily in the backyard between breakfast and luncheon time, and to come in hungry and dirty, filled with the glories of his adventures.
When a rainy morning presently came, Drika pressed Anthony into her service, upstairs and down. Anthony trotted to the sideboard with clean teaspoons, he stumbled with an armful of damp towels to the clothes basket in the hall. His fat hands made an eagerUNEDUCATING MARY
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effort to smooth beds and manipulate the broom, Drika’s half-civilized yell of rich laughter waiting upon all his efforts. When she played with his blocks, she made him divide evenly, she drew letters on his slate and pronounced them, and shouted with laughter when he pronounced them, too. It was to be seen that Anthony loved, respected, and feared her.
On the afternoon of the first wet day Mary came in from market to hear Drika’s and Anthony’s voices in the kitchen.
“Bed boy!” said Drika. “I slep you5 hend!” -
“Aw, don’t, Dreek,” exclaimed Anthony. “I’ll stop, I won’t eat any more!”
Curious, Mary opened the door. The two were shelling peas, Anthony more absorbed even than Drika was. The little boy sat in his high chair, his handsome little face screwed into a frown as he pressed a refractory shell. Drika, in a coarse blue cotton, looked picturesque at least, and the quiet warm kitchen was inviting on the damp, raw afternoon. Mary smiled at the domestic picture. Of course a child’s place is not in a kitchen, and green peas are not usually considered wise food for theUNEDUCATING MARY
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four-year-old stomach—but Anthony looked happy and was always good with Drika!
This was several weeks after Drika’s arrival at the River Street house, and long before this Mary had had some rather puzzling revelations of the girl’s capabilities. Country-bred daughter of a simple peasant though she was, Drika had common sense, and had had sensible training of a sort. Speckless cleanliness ruled wherever she went; she would have nothing else. She scrubbed and scoured and stoned the cheap woodwork of the kitchen tirelessly; her kitchen windows sparkled fearlessly in the sunlight.
She knew little of American cooking but something, Mary was surprised to discover, of cookery in general. Drika it was who put a pinch of soda into the heating milk that was about to curdle; Drika who peeled boiled beets under a stream of running water, with only her busy finger tips; Drika who stated, with great difficulty, that a streak of sunlight, falling across the open, butter jar, would give its contents the acrid, rancid odor that Mary despaired of conquering. Drika bleached fruit stains from Mary’s best tablecloth with some mysterious paste of her own mixing; she filledUNEDUCATING MARY
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the wash boiler with a magic lye that cleaned every grimy saucepan and frying-pan in the house. When Mary praised her for these accomplishments she fairly danced for joy, shouting out such English words as she had mastered and giving her wild laugh free play.
So much for the credit side of Drika’s ledger. There was unfortunately a long balance on the opposite sheet. At least once a day Mary decided that she must get rid of the creature, and try again. Drika’s lack of English was a continual exasperation; she was very noisy, and maddeningly ignorant in certain directions. She would place sheets, blankets, and counterpane upon a bed in any order that was convenient, blankets perhaps on top. She scrubbed the varnish from Billy’s hair brushes, washed out a beautiful silk scarf of Mary’s that was completely ruined by the process, and left a line of kerosene stain from her duster all about the sitting-room baseboard.
In the kitchen her errors were countless. Sometimes the salted water for the oatmeal ruined the coffee, and the oatmeal came tasteless to the table. Baking puddings wereUNEDUCATING MARY
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forgotten until the very pudding bowl was hopelessly burned, and the kitchen draped with clouds of smoke. Her clumsy little hands made sad havoc with Mary’s beautiful china, and her voice and her laughter could be heard all over the house. Still, she was better than no help at all, and Mary, remembering the first hot month of the River Street house, dreaded being left to her own resources again. But it was Drika’s conscientious and capable care of Anthony, after all, that finally tipped the scale in her favor. She loved the little boy, and Anthony returned her affection.
Gradually Mary learned to shop so farsightedly that two or three afternoons a week were free, and when Anthony was with Drika, dinner so far anticipated that only half an hour would be needed to finish its preparation, Mary could lie down with a book, write a letter, or, dressing herself in the dainty gowns and retrimmed hat of the previous summer, could even go to see a few old friends on the other side of the city.
At first these calls were a real pleasure to her, but swiftly they lost their charm. The current of her life had swept her too far away from these orderly darkened drawing-rooms, theseUNEDUCATING MARY
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capped-and-aproned maids, these women in their beautiful gowns. She knew nothing of the clubs, nothing of social events. She could make her own changed fortunes and her do-mestic experiences the subject of a laughing tale, but she was not slow to realize that her old friends found this rather shocking than amusing; they could not understand the situation, and pitied her heartily for the little they did understand. She caught them tactfully withholding from her the details of their gowns and pleasures, the histories of expeditions and summer plans.
And even while she talked to them, she was conscious of being needed elsewhere. She must get home by five o’clock if Anthony’s supper, and the family dinner, were to be served on time. She would leave her hostess with laughing excuses, and come home wondering if the trip and the effort were worth while. Wasn’t it really easier to stay in her cool gingham gown, and read or rest in the heat of the afternoon ? Was it really true that one was liked for one’s intrinsic merit, that a woman on a small income could hold her
i
place with the richest and idlest of them if she would ?78 UNEDUCATING MARY
Mary presently gave up calling, and, as she and Billy were unwilling to accept hospitalities that they could not return, they began to see less and less of their old friends. .It was one more unreal phase of an unreal existence for her. That people would not flock to see the Billy Constables under any conditions was a genuine surprise to Mary.
“ It only shows that money is the real standard, and people come to you for what they can get!” she said to Billy, half-bitter, half-amused.
“Well, I never thought they came for anything else!” Billy said tolerantly. “Why should they?”
It was on the tip of Mary’s tongue to remark contemptuously, “ It shows exactly what they’re all worth—we’re well rid of them!” But she did not say it. She really did not want to see her old friends now, their attentions would have been only unwelcome and inconvenient. More than that, she knew that they had not changed; it was the Constables who had changed. The simple loss of income had put them definitely into another class despite intellect and charm, despite all their advantages of education and former position.UNEDUCATING MARY
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From amusement, Mary came to have a dull resentment at being placed so palpably at a disadvantage. It was not her fault that she was poor; it was not her fault that life had changed so completely. And it was too hard that she should suffer it, should be so helpless in the grip of circumstances!
She looked about her, absolutely terrified to discover that poverty and patient endurance were on all sides. There was no picturesque and dramatic outlet, there was no spectacular fashion in which all this distressed dream might be dismissed as a dream! She had been the rich Mrs. Constable. She was a poor man’s wife now, worrying over the cost of butter, the rapidity with which her little boy wore out his shoes. And nobody cared!
Poverty—but hadn’t there always seemed to be something wrong with people who were always poor? Something to criticize, something at which to wonder, some quality to which one felt superior ? Mary’s cheeks burned sometimes when she remembered her crisp criticisms of men who allowed their wives to go on year in and year out without a servant, who let younger men pass them in the business world.8o
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And she thought with new understanding and pity of those women of her own old world, “society women,” who had struggled year out and year in to maintain the pretense of financial ease. Women, thought Mary, who had attempted so gallantly to replace with witty conversation and daring innovation the luxuries to which their guests were accustomed. And the guests, too often, saw through the pitiful little pretense and laughed at it, or despised it.
To her, Mary, that game would never be worth its pains and disappointments. She was too proud to beg for what had been gladly offered her before, and too sensible to place any value upon friendships that were at their best so meaningless and vain. And at the same time, these considerations spurred her toward the realization of her old ambition to find some work that would relieve the financial strain and give her a chance to develop her own gifts. She was well educated, and she was self-reliant and energetic; she might win by her own efforts a place in a far more discriminating circle than any she and Billy had ever known.UNEDUCATING MARY
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She gave some thought to the subject, weighing the advantages of one occupation over another, and suddenly, fired by enthusiasm for this new plan to relieve the distasteful situation, sat down and wrote a short sketch for a woman’s magazine, outlining some of her recent culinary discoveries and including the very modest budget that she had been keeping for several months. This dispatched to a popular monthly, Mary cast about for some other outlet for her excess energy, and finally decided to go to see an acquaintance, a woman she much admired, who was superintendent of the city’s nicest private kindergartens. Before her college experience Mary had taught in this kindergarten for two successive terms with great success, but that was nearly ten years ago.
She found Miss Montrose busy but friendly, glad to see Mrs. Constable, and to relax for a few minutes’ chat.
“How are you supplied with teachers now?” Mary asked casually.
“Oh, we have fifty on our waiting list,” Miss Montrose laughed cheerfully. “Well, no! not fifty,” she corrected herself. “But, you see, old-fashioned kindergartening isn’t82
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as popular as it used to be. This new Italian method, you know, is really entirely different, and almost all the girls are studying that.”
“But they’re still using Froebel in the public schools?” Mary asked, with a little sinking at her heart.
“Yes, but there, of course, it’s really primary grade work.”	;
Somewhat discouraged, Mary went home, but only a day or two later she took her courage boldly in both hands and went to see an architect with whom she and Billy had had some social as well as some business association, and who had always professed himself to be a great admirer of the charming Mrs. Constable. A year or two before, when the plans for a friend’s house were being drawn, Mary had shown herself to have a real instinct for designing and Mr. Webb, senior partner of Webb and Wilkinson, Architects, had personally congratulated her for her suggestions as to the economical arrangement of butler’s pantry and nursery bathroom.
Mary found Mr. Webb in his delightful office and was warmly welcomed, but she could see that business of some sort was underUNEDUCATING MARY 83
way and made her call as businesslike as possible.
“The truth is this, Mr. Webb,” she said frankly, when the first pleasantries had been exchanged, “Mr. Constable is working very hard just now and, although he hasn’t exactly said so, I know he isn’t extremely hopeful of reestablishing the business of Constable and Son. So it has occurred to me that, if there is any way in which I can help him, just temporarily, of course, I would be very glad to do it.” Mary was amazed and disgusted to find her voice slightly thickened by tears at this point, she did not quite know why. “Now, I don’t know whether you remember our talks two years ago when the West-cotts were building their house?” she went on.
“Perfectly!” Mr. Webb said encouragingly.
“Well,” said Mary boldly, “the final plan for that house was mine, and I remember that Mr. Wilkinson said that it was a really practical one, and that he would keep a draft of it, in case that particular problem—it was to fit a very small lot, you remember ?—ever came up again. And that made me wonder if, in anUNEDUCATING MARY
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office this size, you might not possibly have use for some person who really liked that sort of work, and who could spare the time to fuss and plan and work over details.”
Mr. Webb listened to her in smiling silence, his bright eyes never moving from her face. Then he leaned back in his revolving chair, fitted his finger tips together, and said pleasantly, in a leisurely drawl:
“Mrs. Constable, of course that is one very important part of our business, very important. And I need hardly say,” he bowed, “that to put such work into your hands would be a great delight to me, a real pleasure. But— you see I have four boys here, five, with young Mr. Wilkinson, and such work as that is just what those boys are waiting for; in fact, it is what they studied architecture for, what they imagined they would have to do, chiefly. Now I don’t have to tell you, Mrs. Constable,” continued Mr. Webb, “that there is a good deal of grind in our business. I won’t go into details, but you may imagine that grading, and plumbing, and property rights, and street elevations, roofing, and installing furnaces, keeping our contractors up to their work, and fighting weather conditions, are all part of ourUNEDUCATING MARY
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work. Pretty tedious things to attend to! And that’s what I keep our boys busy with, month out and in. So that when a little designing does come along, there isn’t one of them who isn’t glad enough to sharpen a pencil and settle down here in the office for a whole morning!”
“I see,” Mary said bravely, managing a smile with unbelievable difficulty. “But I thought perhaps that—that there might be things that these boys couldn’t manage— things that a housewife,” she added with some diffidence, “would understand better than a young man could! Of course I’ve had college training, Mr. Webb.”
“Ah?” Mr. Webb said. “But of course you wouldn’t touch this sort of work in college. These boys of mine have taken some technical school work—that helps a little!”
Mary said nothing more of the hope with which she had entered the office, and after a few minutes of casual chat found herself in the street again. But her cheeks were burning and an inexplicable sense of defeat possessed her.
“Of course you wouldn’t touch this sort of work in college!” His phrase came back86
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to her over and over again. Hadn’t she studied to any purpose ?
“Of course, I never studied architecture exactly, although I did take up designing,” she said to herself. “Those boys specialized, I suppose. But I went through college, and took twenty hours a week, and lots of these boys simply went into commercial school for a year’s course!” She walked on for a few blocks very swiftly. “I wonder what I did specialize in,” she asked herself suddenly. “ I declare, I think all college work ought to be specialized!” she said.
“ Stenography,” she thought. “ Why didn’t I take up stenography and typewriting?” But then, Billy would never have permitted her to take such a position. Indeed she was aware that diplomacy would be needed to reconcile Billy to her working at all. What did other women do ? Opened tea-rooms, cooked for special patrons, sewed and embroidered, taught dancing or music. No—she could do none of these! Millinery was out of the question, New Troy was full of milliners; newspaper writing she knew she could not attempt. Boarders ? Mary’s laugh ended in a sigh; was she the sort of woman who couldUNEDUCATING MARY 87
do nothing more unusual than keeping boarders?
She began to pin her faith to the article she had sent to a magazine, and to plan a second article of the same nature. But over and over again the first one was returned by the different editors, who invariably explained that they had used, or were about to use, similar articles that they considered more practical and more generally useful.
Mary felt baffled and profoundly discouraged. It seemed impossible to her that there was no escape from the sense of inefficiency that made her so wretched. She had had six months of poverty; what did the women do who had years and years of it? She had one child; how did anyone manage to take care of more?
“What have I been learning all my life?” she asked herself unhappily. “What can I do?”
A six-months’ course in something, that was the solution. But a six-months’ course in what ? Mary finally gave the whole thing up in despair, and in doing so plunged herself into quite the saddest mood she had ever known. She would have made a good woman of busi-88
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ness, she knew. She would have made a splendid manager for a children’s home; she could have traveled, giving lectures, like that lovely elderly woman in the plum-colored suit who had visited the club last year. But it was too late to take up those things now. She must resign herself to all the misery and privation of her present existence.
Mary realized, for the first time in her life, that certain people could not afford certain things. Not because they wanted their money for something else, or wanted to save it on general principles, but simply because they did not have it! She had always felt that good management would accomplish any miracle; that delicious, if simple, dinners might be achieved by the most modest housewife, and that hospitality was merely a matter of taking pains.
Now she knew better. She knew that the “simple cup of hot tea,” to which she might once have 'cheerfully alluded as being within everyone’s reach, involved an expense for cream and lemons, and for bread and butter, and involved at least half an hour’s fussing in a summer-time kitchen as well. She knew' that a dinner-guest was a definite luxury notUNEDUCATING MARY
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always possible however much desired. Cookbooks might blithely suggest the embellishing Df an ordinary dinner with a cream soup, a jar af preserves, and a cup of strong iced coffee; but if milk and cream, preserves and extra coffee did not chance to be in the house, the hostess was not materially aided by such suggestions. Mary learned what it was to step impulsively into a drug store for some old-time luxury, and be brought to a pause before buying it by the recollection that the money for it was actually not in her purse.
Being Mary, she talked to the grocer at the corner, calling his attention to the unobtrusive “compound” that followed the words “New Orleans Molasses” on his bottles, to the “Artificially Colored” jams, and the peas faintly labeled “with sulphate of copper.” She urged him to cover his fruit boxes with netting, and to keep his loaves in a glass case.
So the hot midsummer weeks dragged by. Mary and Billy saw very little of their old friends, and were satisfied with an occasional accidental encounter. A great many people were out of town—Mary herself had never been in town at this season before; she re-UNEDUCATING MARY
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me mb e red now that Billy had not got away at all last summer, and wondered that his failing to do so had made so little impression on her. She was secretly convinced that Anthony would be ill before the hot months were over, but on the contrary the little boy was very well, better than he had ever been in his life. Like all children, he was not deeply affected by the weather.
Amy had gone on her honeymoon now, and Mrs. Throckmorton had taken her rather delicate husband to the mountains; but Mary’s older sister, the widowed Anna Lou, was keeping the Throckmortons’ old home open and here Mary and Anthony often wandered in the long afternoons. Mary found an unexpected sympathy and affection developing between herself and her older sister. Anna Lou had never been particularly brilliant; she was a simple, loving woman, devoted to her husband’s memory and absorbed in her two beautiful little girls. Mary had sometimes felt that Anna Lou accepted circumstances too meekly, made the best of inconveniences with which a more forceful nature would have done away.s But now she had come in contact with unmanageable trials herself, and sheUNEDUCATING MARY
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began to have a great respect for the sweet and sunny Anna.
“You mustn’t say to yourself, ‘What do I absolutely need?’” Mrs. Penne said smilingly. “You must put it this way, ‘What can I afford?’ One can live without desserts, you know; one can live without meat, very comfortably indeed! And when you have cut down desserts and meat, and still the income isn’t adequate, you have to go to other things; no butter if you have gravy, for instance, and no salad if you happen to be out of oil!”
“But that’s actual need!” exclaimed Mary.
“Oh, no, indeed it’s not!” her sister said. “I think the only need is when you get into debt; then you really do feel poor and squalid and all the rest of it! As long as my actual cash came out even, or if I had a penny left, at the end of the week, I never felt anything but proud and happy. I remember once Dad gave me a really handsome bureau outfit for Christmas,” Anna Lou went on smilingly, “but, as it happened, I didn’t need a mirror, or a brush and comb; so I asked him if he minded my changing them, and of course he was only too glad----”UNEDUCATING MARY
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“But, Sis,” Mary objected, “surely a gift is in the spirit, and not in the actual need! I’ve never changed----”
“Gifts among very rich people may be,” Anna Lou laughed. “But I assure you that, at that time, Dick and I were not eligible for the income tax! Well, I took the brushes back to Fordham’s—luckily a drug store, and, my dear, I proceeded to buy things that Dick and I hadn’t had for the five years of our married life! Fine soaps, powders, writing paper, tooth paste, things for the babies—it was an orgy! And when I had finished the clerk said, ‘This comes to only eleven dollars, madam; would you like the other nine in cash ?’ Cashr' I felt like kissing her then and there! I went out and got Nancy and ’Lizabeth new stockings, and bought myself shoes, and took Dick home an alligator pear----”
And suddenly Anna Lou, who had been smiling, put her face into her hands and burst into tears. Mary’s arms were instantly about her, but the young widow cried unrestrainedly for perhaps five minutes.
“I can’t help this, I know it’s silly!” Anna Lou said presently with a trembling lip. “ But we were so happy / Ten years, Mary, of theUNEDUCATING MARY
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best and sweetest and strongest man that ever lived, and the wisest! Well,” she straightened herself and wiped her eyes, “it is something to have had it,” said Anna Lou bravely, “to know that he was happy, and that he thought himself the most fortunate man in the world and me the best wife!”
“But how did you ever learn to be such a good housekeeper, Anna Lou?” Mary asked simply. “You never would read books on domestic economics, efficiency, household budgets, and all that!”
“I should hope not!” Anna answered, laughing. “That’s all theory. But there’s not much to the best of them!”
The blood rushed to Mary’s face and she was glad that Anna kept her eyes on the apron she was making for ’Lizabeth, and that the topic was presently changed. Theory, indeed ! Why, where would books and colleges and scientists be without theory!
But some of her sister’s words haunted her as she went home with Anthony in the slanting rays of the sunset. “He was happy, and he felt himself the most fortunate man in the world, and me the best wife!” Mary felt a faint thrill of envy for Anna Lou; she won-94
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dered if Billy had ever thought of herself and his home as perfect, even in the old days. A first sick little premonition of self-distrust began to shake her. Circumstances were frightfully against her now, of course. But—but they had been against Anna Lou, too, and not for months only, for long hard years and years! And Anna Lou burst into tears at the memory of them, tears of longing and of grief. Could it be possible that Anna Lou was— wiser than Mary? Even poor and widowed, had Anna Lou made the greater success of her life?
For once she accepted facts without attempting to account for them or tabulate them, and entered her own gate with a quicker step and a brighter face than she had worn for months. Billy, the picture of penitence, met her at the door.
“Say, Gregory’s here for supper, Mary,” he said in a quick aside. “His train doesn’t leave until ten o’clock, and I’ve not seen him since college! I had to ask him. He’s upstairs, washing his hands. Drika sounds like a henhouse out there; and from what she showed me we’ll have to eat the candles! But it was just one of those cases----”UNEDUCATING MARY 95
“Why, that’s all right!” Mary said"pleasantly, to her husband’s mingled amazement and relief. “You go keep him amused, and I’ll see what can be done. It’s stew, and not much of that; but I’ll poach eggs on top and stuff the potatoes! There’s a lemon for iced tea.”
“Would a little money help you out?” asked Billy, fervently grateful. His wife fixed him with amused and tolerant eyes.
“A little money? My dear boy—have you any money?”
“I have a dollar,” said Billy, eagerly producing it. “I lunched with Greg to-day and with Forbes, about that business, yesterday.”
“Ah, well, then!” Mary assured him confidently. “We’ll have some grapefruit and some berries! I’ll send Drika, if you can amuse your man!”
“We’ll walk down to the river and take the kid along,” Billy said, and before leaving he added, “Mary, you’re a wonder!”
She had heard the phrase all her life. She had surely done more wonderful things than rush a company dinner together on a hot August night. Yet Mary, entering her kitchen for the fray, glowed from head to foot with the joyUNEDUCATING MARY
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of being praised. Only what a million other wives were doing the country over; only, as she had often said, what any intelligent “ menial” could do, yet what energy and enthusiasm she brought to it!
They had once or twice tried the experiment of having dinner-guests before in the River Street house, with conspicuous unsuccess. Mary had been too conscious of the change in dinner and service to be a gracious hostess, and too tired from the actual labor involved in getting dinner ready to take much interest in its consumption. But to-night she was really her charming and interested self once more; there were no apologies, there was really nothing for which to apologize. It amused her to see that her guest could not reconcile the cheap house and the flustered maid with his old chum’s cheerfulness and the personality of his old chum’s wife. Handsome, composed, and entertaining, she took the head of the table, and they were still at table when Mr. Gregory found that he must hurry for his train.
Drika had gone to bed, but Mary and Billy cleared away the dishes and straightened the dining-room. A dozen times Billy expressedUNEDUCATING MARY
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his appreciation and pleasure, but Mary was rather quiet.
“Why so silent?” he asked at last.
“I don’t know,” Mary said, smiling dreamily. “Just thinking—I was thinking that six months ago I thought I was a good manager because I could say to Delia ‘Eight for dinner,’ and ask Louise to have artichokes and something frozen for dessert!”CHAPTER IV
QJHE fell upon a silent time, brooding, weighing, and measuring, comparing the old viewpoint with the new. Sometimes she smiled over her thoughts, more often the conscious blood rushed to her face at some memory that filled her now with an amused shame.
“Being poor ought to be a part of every young person’s education,” she said to Billy, after a particularly enlightening day.
“Think how that course would be cut!” Billy answered cheerfully.
Theoretically, her life in the River Street house was entirely deplorable.
Theoretically, yes. But actually the state had its compensations. She was well, Billy was well, Anthony was miraculously well. When the first exquisite days of September came to cool the burning earth, when Amy came back, full of her own domestic ambitions and ready for her own unavoidable mistakes, Mary began to feel stirring within herself a
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certain joy of living that, was as unexpected as it was delightful. Had she never noticed before how wonderful September was ? Where had she been last September to miss the delicious crispness of the early mornings, the golden clearness of the lingering afternoons? Sometimes she and Billy took Anthony down to the river bank, to watch the screaming boys that were always splashing somewhere within sight, and the lumber tugs that went so slowly down the current, and the ducks that swam and quacked and dabbled among the reeds.
“Why didn’t we ever do this at home?” Billy asked lazily one afternoon, as he skimmed flat stones for his ecstatic son. Cathedral Avenue was always “home” to the Constables.
“Well—I always thought the river was unwholesome, somehow,” Mary answered slowly. “And then Nurse liked to go up to the Park and see the other nurses, and I never had very much time in the garden. ”
She tried to remember what had given her, in those days of incredible leisure, the sensation that she had no time to spare. Nowadays she knew the value of time! Every hour of the day had its predestined occupation,IOO
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and she dared not drop the domestic reins for so much as one idle afternoon. She put Anthony to bed now, a task strangely nerve-racking at first, but of late surprisingly enjoyable. His confidences, his little gaye-ties and minute depressions, the touch of his warm little fragrant face after his bath, the damp rich curls of his hair, redolent of soap, his dancing and rushing about, all began to hold a charm for his mother.
It was through Anthony that several more of her cherished theories were routed, although the sheer terror of the occasion banished all other considerations for some days afterward. Anthony had a touch of croup one cool November evening, and his mother opened her reference books to discover exactly how modern science dealt with the nursery horror.
“For it certainly is croup,” she said to Billy, when they sat under the reading lamp that evening pretending that the little hoarse cough that came occasionally from the upper regions did not strike both their hearts cold.
“Well, it’s a croupy cold,” Billy admitted, with a father’s reluctance to consider his child susceptible to any of the ills of babyhood. “I’ll tell you what!” he exclaimed suddenly.UNEDUCATING MARY ioi
“I’ll go down to the drug store, and telephone Doctor Hubbard, and then in case he really does choke up a bit, why, we’ll be ready for him!”
“Oh, I wish you would!” Mary said eagerly, and Billy departed forthwith. “You’re awfully good, Billy—you’re so tired!” she added gratefully.
He came back with a reassuring message from the doctor and a small bottle of ipecac.
“Hubbard asked if we had a croup kettle,” said Billy, “and I said no. He said it wasn’t really necessary, and of course the drugstore didn’t have one, so we’ll have to get along without it to-night! But if Anthony’s going to be croupy, we’ll have to get one.”
“I don’t believe he’s going to have a bad night,” Mary said, “he hasn’t coughed once since you went out.” And later, just before getting into bed, she went to Anthony’s crib and watched the little sleeper fora few minutes. “He’s breathing heavily, but he seems sound asleep,” she reported to Billy. “I daresay we’re having all this worry for nothing!”
An hour or two later, however, they both were awakened by a sound from the crib, and in a second in the terrifying darkness and the102
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night the full horror of croup was upon them. Mary, lighting the gas with trembling fingers, found Billy already lifting the choking baby from his little bed.
“Keep him warm!” she gasped, snatching a blanket to wrap about the child. Terror clutched her heart like a clutching hand.
“There—there—there, old scout, cough it up for Dad!” Billy muttered, very white, and with agonized eyes on the little convulsed face. The frightful knowledge that seconds were precious, and they were helpless, smote both father and mother at once. Mary’s voice, in spite of her instinctive effort not to lose self-control, rose almost to a scream.
“Oh, my God, Billy, he’s dying! Oh, dearest, can’t you—for Mother, my darling! Oh, Billy, Billy, Billy, what shall we do!”
“Get that stuff!” Billy shouted, in a tone almost as frantic as her own.
“Oh, yes, I forgot it!” Mary sobbed, running into the bathroom. She came flying back with the bottle of ipecac and a spoon.
“Be sure it’s right!” Billy warned her.
“Oh, yes—yes—yes !’* She turned the label for him to read, and began to measure drops into a shaking spoon.UNEDUCATING MARY
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“Quicker, dear!” Billy said. “He said three teaspoonfuls!”
“Oh, he couldn’t!” Mary exclaimed in agony as a fresh paroxysm of choking made Anthony writhe in his father’s arms. “Here on the bottle it says, ‘Infants, ten to twenty drops. One to four years, forty drops.’ Oh, Billy, I daren’t give him more! It must be a poison, or else narcotic!”
“He’s going!” Billy said in a hollow tone, and indeed the little boy’s face was dark with blood, and a choked moaning stabbed both parents with an agony such as they had never known before.
“O God—help him, help him!” sobbed Mary, falling on her knees. “ My little, little boy—if only Mother could take it for you!”
“Don’t!” Billy said hoarsely, even now finding a free arm to put about her.
It was at this instant that the door was abruptly opened and that Drika ran into the room. She held a teaspoon in one hand and, pushing Mary aside, she knelt down beside Anthony.
“Here, queek!” she said, putting the spoon into the child’s mouth. “Eat it! So-o-o, poor boy!” murmured Drika, as with sput-104 UNEDUCATING MARY
tering and protest the dose went down. “Now—!”
She flew for Anthony’s little white enamel basin, with the geese and the goose-girl walking round it, and it was needed, for Billy now held in his arms a very much nauseated little boy. And when the nausea was over and Mary had wiped the damp little forehead with Florida water, and Anthony was sweet in clean blue pajamas, the croup was gone. Wearily, deliciously, the invalid sank off to sleep, and wearily and deliciously Mary cried upon her husband’s shoulder.
“What was it that you gave him, Drika?” Billy asked when his voice was quite under control, and the three seniors were talking in undertones in the dimly lighted room.
Drika showed a bottle of white vaseline, her face one radiant smile.
“Hot,” she explained. “I hear coughs,” Drika coughed violently in illustration, “so I run keetchen, because my brother—yes, too!” By which the Constables understood that, hearing Anthony cough, Drika, remembering what was done, when her little brother coughed, in far-away Riisoord, had run to the kitchen to heat a spoonful of vaseline. She.UNEDUCATING MARY
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went on to remind the parents that Anthony had had several biscuits with jelly for his dinner, assuring them that croup never followed anything but a too-heavy dinner and managed to convey to Mary a request that they have a goose for dinner some evening in the near future and save some of the healing grease for another such occasion.
“Well, I’ll get a croup kettle to-morrow!” Billy said, with a long, deep sigh of relief. “And I’ll have Hubbard run out and look at him!”
Morning, however, found Anthony as gay as a lark, racing about the backyard before breakfast, and insatiable as to oatmeal. Mary had planned to spend the whole day with him at her mother’s, and after a little discussion it was decided that Doctor Hubbard need not be called in to-day.
“That’s the whole situation, Mary,” said her mother a few hours later, when the midnight scarce was being discussed in the Throck-mortons’ comfortable sitting-room. “I always used to feed you children very lightly at night, and perhaps rub your chests with a little oil of camphor if you were at all croupy. Just a little common sense is better for children than a hundred doctors.”106 UNEDUCATING MARY
“ I begin to think that common sense is just what I haven’t got!” Mary said soberly.
Her mother glanced at her quickly, ready to laugh. But there was no mirth in Mary’s eyes.
“And the point is, what did I go to college for?” she asked whimsically, and without waiting for her mother to answer she went on: “Billy, now, that’s another thing. Nobody could be more, well, more ordinary, in a certain way, than Billy---”
“Oh, Mary, you can’t say that!” her mother protested. “Billy is one of the dearest boys that ever lived!”
“Well, but you know how I mean. Billy’s just the average,” Mary persisted. “Not a student, not intellectual, fond of just the things all men are fond of—Mother, don’t look so disapproving,” she interrupted herself to say laughingly. “I’m not depreciating Billy! But you know what I mean!”
“I don’t know what you mean,” said Mrs. Throckmorton, with unusual firmness. “ Billy Constable, to my thinking and to your father’s thinking, too, is a very unusual fellow! For a rich man’s son he was the steadiest and simplest boy I ever saw, and I thought it wasUNEDUCATING MARY 107
just characteristic of his good sense to fall in love with you instead of some rich girl who would have cared only for his money!”
For Several reasons this speech was supremely unpalatable and very astonishing to Mary, but she could not say so. Indeed, she laughed a little.
“Well, Mother dear,” she said demurely, “ I married him, didn’t I ? Doesn’t that indicate some little approval on my part?”
“Oh, yes, indeed I know you loved him, Mary,” Mrs. Throckmorton said hastily.
“Loved him!” Mary echoed, with a peculiar smile. The color rushed to her face. “Why the past tense?” she asked.
“Well, you know what I mean,” Mrs. Throckmorton said in her turn, with a confused laugh and a little rise of conscious color herself.
“He’s—he’s never studied these things,” Mary went on, after an uncomfortable moment of silence, “yet it’s remarkable to me how many emergencies Billy rises to! Now, when we first moved he packed and he planned; he seemed to know just how to treat the expressmen and what to expect of them! And then, getting settled, so many times when I108 UNEDUCATING MARY
really would have sent for a special workman of some sort, or given a thing up, Billy puttered away and did things! I remember he started the clock, when I wanted to send for an expert from Bruce’s, and he got down on his knees and painted all those awful margins each side of the stair carpet! And he found the house, you know, and really, Mother, although it’s a hideous place and I shall always loathe and detest it, it has served our particular purpose pretty well. It’s sunny and quiet, and too far away for people to come poking about and bother us, and we’ve all been extraordinarily well there—I must say that. The only two scarces that we’ve had,” poor Mary admitted with a little laugh, “were the croup last night and the time Anthony ate a green apple in the Deetles’ backyard and Drika cured him of colic with dairy cheese.” “Dairy cheese?” said Mrs. Throckmorton. “Yes, just pot-cheese, made of sour milk. He couldn’t keep anything else on his stomach, and that agreed with him right away. And Billy telephoned to Hubbard, and he said that it’s one of the very recent discoveries for summer complaint; nothing could be better.” “But how did Drika know that?”UNEDUCATING MARY
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“I don’t know; perhaps she didn’t know it. Perhaps it’s some old-country remedy that has been used for years. Anyway, it was wonderful, and I’ve told it to two or three other women, just neighbors there, and it works every time.”
“Well, live and learn,” Mrs. Throckmorton said resignedly. “I’ve had six children and raised four, and I never heard that before!” “Live and learn,” Mary repeated. “But, Mother,” she resumed suddenly, “isn’t a college education worth anything?”
“In what way?” Mrs. Throckmorton asked in surprise. She had not followed the current of Mary’s thoughts.
“Well,” Mary said, again growing a little red, “we used to say that at college we learned to live. And lately I’ve been wondering just how much we learned to live. Certainly I didn’t learn much, much, I mean, that was of practical use to me when the real test came!” “Well, I always felt it was—was a perfectly safe place for you, dear,” her mother explained. “And that you loved it, fond of study as you were, and that it couldn’t hurt you and would give you a little prestige among the other girls. In fact, Mary,” she added, a little hesitat-no
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ingly, “I really didn’t think very much about that part of it; I knew you wanted to go, and Dad and I were both only too glad to have you do what interested and gratified you.”
Mary was speechless with mortification for several minutes. Meanwhile, tea was brought in by Mrs. Throckmorton’s faithful old factotum, and Anthony, instinctively attracted, came up to see what delicacies flanked the teapot.
“Well, it is certainly gratifying,” Mary presently observed, with a dry laugh, “to realize that everybody about you has been thinking you a foolish theorist for years and years. If this is all college counts for, I might as well never have gone!”CHAPTER V
"DILLY’S birthday came early in January and Mary, after long hours of worry, came to the discouraged conclusion that she could not make him a “real” present. Necessities had never seemed to have a true holiday flavor to the Throckmortons, and a gift was usually something luxurious and unexpected, something with a little tang of extravagance to give it spice.
But this year there could be no extravagance. Five tons of coal had been put into the Constables’ cèllar, against the long winter, and Anthony had demanded flannel underwear and overshoes and a new reefer, with cheerful disregard of the cost thereof.
Last year, Mary remembered, she had given her husband his mahogany auto-valet; there had been a dinner party of twelve, with toasts and much formality. Mary had been secretly disappointed that evening, she remembered now, because there was a symphony concert in town, which she had to forego. And Billy
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had been angry because his father had not been asked!
Ah, well! That was one thing she could do this year. Anthony Constable had been living at his club since his handsome old home had been turned over to his creditors in the spring; he must be tired of club cooking by this time. Mary reproached herself that she had not made an effort to see him oftener; he had always been very good to her.
Now she determined to ask him to Billy’s birthday dinner. And little Anthony should be allowed to sit up with the family, as a special treat. The menu she began eagerly to plan, just the dishes she and Drika were absolutely sure of; the bean soup that Billy had said he would get up in the middle of the night to eat; the panned oysters that had proved such an unexpected success, and the grapefruit salad that was a real treat, and black coffee in the silver percolator, and the candles in their silver sticks---!
Then, while there could be no real gift, there were several little things that Billy needed that would make him laugh at least. He needed a bottle of ink, and six pairs of new socks, and a stick of his favorite shaving soap.UNEDUCATING MARY
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And, since pickled walnuts were his favorite delicacy, he should have a big bottle of them. And Mary put a new film in her camera and posed Anthony for a dozen careful pictures, to be mounted in a little cartridge-paper book. She hunted up the old lamp of which Billy had been especially fond, cleaned it herself and put it in order, and she and Drika secreted it in the kitchen closet with much laughter, to be produced as a surprise on the birthday night.
“Going my way, Dad?” Billy said in surprise on his birthday evening, when his father turned the first corner of the walk home. This was where the old man and the young usually separated after the office day.
“Why, yes, I am!” Anthony the elder said, as if surprised.
“Good for you!” Billy said heartily. They returned to the talk of the day, talk more cheerful than it had been for some time, for Constable and Son was slowly but surely coming into its own again. It was a cold evening with a restless wind that tasted of snow; at six o’clock the streets were quite dark. But the two men walked along cheerfully enough,ii4 UNEDUCATING MARYj
their great coats buttoned snugly to their chins, their hats pulled over their eyes.
“Say, where do you think you’re going?” Billy demanded suddenly, beginning to suspect something unusual as his father showed no sign of leaving him.
“Don’t you worry,” his father said. “I’m celebrating something that gave your mother and me a good deal of pleasure thirty years ago.”
Billy grinned suddenly.
“ Is that right ?” he asked. “ Did Mary ask you to come to dinner?”
“Asked me in person,” his father said. “Well, I call that great!” the younger man said in immense satisfaction. “That tickles me! She might have known that nothing in the world would give me more pleasure.”
“ She looked mighty pretty, and she seemed very happy,” his father said. “All the privation you youngsters have been through doesn’t seem to have affected Mary.”
“She’s—nicer than she ever was lately ” Billy said, with a sort of laughing shyness. “It’s been a wonderful year for me. I don’t pretend that I like to have as little money as we have just now, and a wildcat like Drika forUNEDUCATING MARY
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our only maid, and the care of the furnace up to me. But I do certainly feel as if Mary and the kid belonged to me now; we—well, I can’t explain it, especially to you, for you and Mother always were rich, but somehow we’ve all gotten together this year.”
“I can see what you mean,” said Anthony Constable. “Well, so much the luckier you, William. Some men are married for years,” he repeated, “without knowing what that is.”
The River Street house, when they reached it, sent shafts of ruddy light from a half a dozen hospitable windows, and before they could ring Mary and little Anthony opened the door. Silhouetted against the warmly lighted hall, Mary’s white ruffles and the child’s bright head and dancing little figure made a picture of welcome; Mary gave her husband a birthday kiss, and little Anthony sprang into his grandfather’s arms. They all went into the little sitting-room, where the resurrected lamp sent a not too merciless light upon the unlovely wall paper. Beyond, the dining-table shone with delicate candlelight, and red roses in a silver bowl glowed against the setting of white and silver. Anthony satn6 UNEDUCATING MARY
in dignity opposite his grandfather; husband and wife smiled at each other across the small round table.
And the dinner was wonderful! Mary needed no further testimony than the empty plates that she had to refill, but her carefully planned menu had a hundred spoken compliments as well. Billy had pink ice cream and a birthday cake flaming with candles— delicious bits of nonsense that somehow, accompanied by Mary’s eager and laughing look, brought a blur to his eyes and a thickness to his throat. The cramped little room with its ugly windows and painted floor suddenly took on new beauty. Happiness sometimes chooses a queer lodging, and Billy realized to-night that his was one of the happy homes of the world.
While they loitered, talking, over their cheese and coffee, of wonderful changes that must be made in this room and throughout the house during the coming year, Billy all eagerness, Mary’s fine eyes thoughtful and satisfied, the older man watching them with something like wistful amusement, little Anthony slipped from his chair and went into the kitchen.UNEDUCATING MARY
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“Where’s the infant going?” asked Billy.
“I don’t know,” Mary said, smiling, “but I fancy he and Drika have some little scheme of their own. We’ll see in a moment.”
A moment later the kitchen door was opened and, with a shout of laughter from both, Drika and Anthony came in. Anthony, in baggy blue trousers and wooden shoes, was the most delicious little Dutchman ever seen, and Drika was in full holiday regalia, her skirt partly covered with a gayly colored apron, and on her head a wonderful cap of lawn with gold knobs at her temples.
Anthony pulled out his wide trousers for a deep bow, and suddenly his astonished parents found themselves listening to a birthday greeting, wholly incomprehensible as to words, because in Dutch, but unmistakable as to meaning. Drika’s face during this performance was a study in joy and pride; the recitation ended with shrieks of delight. Then Drika solemnly presented her employer with a round blue bowl in which exquisite tulips were blooming, and made a little speech of her own. This was supposedly in English, but Mary had to interpret it, tears of bright laughter in her eyes.n8
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“She says that her father and mother, in Riisoord, are drinking your health to-night, Billy,” translated Mary. “The bulbs came from her own garden at home, and were raised in her sister’s kitchen.”
“Well, gosh!” Billy said simply, “I never —not since I was a kid—had such a nice birthday! You—you are very kind, Drika, and I’m much obliged. Do you get me?” Much laughter seemed to imply that Drika did. After having kissed her fellow performer rapturously, she withdrew to the kitchen, from which bursts of laughter still proceeded unchecked at two-minute intervals.
“That’s no joke about the birthday,” Billy said seriously, when the guest was gone and he and his wife were alone. “ I’ve always liked celebrations; I love surprises and fuss! Let’s always do things like this, cakes with candles on them, you know, and—and”—his eyes wandered to his presents ranged on his bureau —“and shaving-soap, don’t you know?”
“Oh, Billy, you are nothing but a baby!” Mary laughed. “No, but I agree with you,” she added quickly. “It really is fun.”
“And you don’t think it’s silly?” he asked wistfully. “You don’t quite hate this place,UNEDUCATING MARY
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do you, Mary? You—you like some things about River Street, and Drika, and living on a hundred a month, don’t you ?”
His arms were about his wife now and Mary’s hands resting on his shoulders. She raised her honest, beautiful eyes to his.
“It isn’t River Street, and a hundred a month, and a stupid little Dutch girl,” she said thoughtfully. “It’s home and you, and the baby, and the feeling that I’ve a real little friend and ally in the kitchen. It’s really living, Billy, and of course I’m happy. Even if we went back to Cathedral Avenue tomorrow, things never could be as they were; I never would let Drika go. And as for birthdays, we’ll celebrate them all; we’ll have Christmas parties and Thanksgiving parties for the family, and birthday sprees for you and me and Anthony, and his little sister and his little brother--”
“Ah, you darling!” Billy gave his wife a kiss before she slipped quietly into the next room to look at the sleeping child. When she came back he was standing staring dreamily out of the window at River Street piled roughly with snow and the river slipping along under the cold winter stars.120
UNEDUCATING MARY
“You know,” he said, with his odd whimsical smile, as Mary joined him. “ I am beginning to agree with three-fourths of the population of New Troy, and think that my educated wife is a most extraordinary woman.” “Educated!” Mary echoed, with her grave laugh. “Would you call her that now, Billy? Uneducated—dis-educated—is more my idea of her.”KATHLEEN NORRIS
ITATHLEEN NORRIS upsets all our ac-cepted ideas of how a novelist is made. Busy helping to care for her orphaned sisters, the young girl was far too occupied with earning bread and butter to dream of fairy tales. She was learning the realities of life as they are taught in the school of adversity and these lessons of her most impressionable years have colored all her work. For the characters in Mrs. Norris’s books are real people with real problems and an atmosphere of actuality.
Mrs. Norris was born and spent her early life in San Francisco. Forced by a series of financial misfortunes coming just after her father’s death, to find employment, she began with a hardware firm at a salary of thirty dollars a month. It was not until 1904 when she was barely twenty-three that her literary ambitions bore fruit. Her first successful effort was a story entitled, “The Colonel and the Lady,” which was accepted by The Argonaut of San Francisco and for which she received $15.50. At that time, Mrs. Norris held the position of librarian ip the Mechanics’ Library and was able to devote more of her time to writing. From this position she went into settlement work but later went to the Evening Bulletin as Society Editor and still later as a reporter on the San Francisco Call.
After many weary months of returnedKATHLEEN NORRIS
manuscripts one of her stories fell into the hands of Mr. Ellery Sedgwich, editor of the Atlantic Monthly. The editor’s letter of acceptance read as follows:
Dear Mrs. Norris:
The readers report that, delightful as this story is, it is “not quite in our tone.” The feeling of the Atlantic is, that when a tale is as intimately true to life as this is of yours, the tone is surely a tone for the Atlantic to adopt.
It gives us much pleasure to accept so admirable a story.
Very truly yours,
The Editor.
Success came rapidly and since that time she has had stories published in McClure’s Magazine, Delineator, Woman’s Home Companion, Good Housekeeping, Pictorial Review and nearly every other large magazine in the country.
Rupert Hughes said recently when speaking of one of Mrs. Norris’s most successful books, “Certain People of Importance”:
“Among the living Californians, Kathleen Norris is among the most successful. She married into the name of Norris, but she brought a dowry as rich as that of the Colonial bride whose father stood her in the scales and balanced her with gold.
“Mrs. Norris’s brother-in-law, Frank,wrote novels that are always classics. Her husband,KATHLEEN NORRIS
Charles G. Norris, is the author of two, ‘Salt’ and ‘Brass,’ both of which have been accepted as works of the highest quality.
“Kathleen Norris’s books have probably outsold those of her men-folk for she is one of those women who are astonishing and terrifying the males by their enormous moneymaking abilities.
“It is stated that Mrs. Norris refused an offer of $30,000 for the serial rights of her most recent novel, and it may well be believed. She can afford—she could hardly afford not to —to write one book for the book’s sake, without taking thought of the skeletonic construction demanded of a serial. She devoted four years, they say, to the writing of ‘Certain People of Importance,’ and the work shows infinite research.
“The novel is a grand canvas peopled with figures. It depicts a long family whose last member is important to the author because the family is of California. And what is important to a skilled author is important to a skilled reader.
“I feel sure that Kathleen Norris’s name will be one for future scholars to doff their mortarboards to, because she lives life, reads people, and writes folks.
“This novel is rather a mosaic than a canvas, made up of an amazing number of individual lives, into one great scheme.
“Big as the monumental work may be, itKATHLEEN NORRIS
has nothing of the ponderous or the dismal.
“It is human altogether. Its dignity and its veracity have won it the highest praise of the severest critics. Its humanity makes it what Horace Greeley called ‘mighty interesting reading.’ ”
Her latest novel, “Butterfly” tells how a girl solved the age old question of Marriage versus Career in a way that no one but Kathleen Norris can tell it. At present just a few weeks after its publication, it bids fair to become the most popular of all her stories.
WORKS OF KATHLEEN NORRIS
The Beloved Woman Certain People of Importance Harriet and the Piper The Heart of Rachel Josselyn’s Wife Lucretia Lombard
MARTIE THE UNCONQUERED Mother
Saturday’s Child Sisters
The Story of Julia Page Butterfly