PART I (continued 2)

At last Letty was in bed, the children were clean, the chops were broiled, the corn steamed on the platter, and with a last glance at the table, Catherine went to the living room door.

"Dinner is ready," she said. "We have a maid by the day, who goes home at six," she explained, and then stopped. She wouldn't apologize!

As they seated themselves, Letty's shout broke across the hall.

"Lady kiss duck! Lady kiss Ducky goo' ni'."

"Spencer, please tell Letty we are at dinner."

But Letty's shout gained energy.

"That's one of her rites," said Charles. "Miss Partridge might as well be initiated at once. Come along!"

Catherine laughed at Marian's distressed face.

"Muvver, isn't Letty awful! A strange lady——"

Charles and Miss Partridge were back, and Marian sank into embarrassed silence.

"Isn't she an amusing baby, Mrs. Hammond!" Miss Partridge unfolded her napkin with a lazy gesture; her smile disclosed her teeth, without touching her large dark eyes.

"She's the most stubborn one of the family," said Charles.

It was difficult to play a continuous part in the conversation when you had to leave half your mind free for food and drink, thought Catherine, as dinner moved along under her guidance. She didn't, she discovered, know half that Charles had been doing all summer. Miss Partridge had assisted in the summer-school work, to begin with. Time for salad, now. Spencer helped clear the first course away, breathing heavily as he pondered over his movements with the plates and silver. Catherine brought in the huge green bowl, filled with crisp, curling leaves, and Spencer followed with the plates of cheese and crackers. As Catherine poured the dressing over the leaves and stirred them, her hands moving with slow grace, she picked up the threads of the talk. Miss Partridge thought a family must be illuminating; you could watch instincts unfold. And Charles—"I tried Spencer, to see if he had that prehistoric monkey grip, and Catherine thought I was endangering his life. But you're so busy keeping them fed and happy that you haven't time to experiment."

When dinner was over, Catherine stood in the living room door.

"If I may be excused for a few minutes," she said.

"Is it dishes, Mrs. Hammond?" Miss Partridge turned from the window, where Charles had been pointing out the view. "I'm not a bit domestic, but I think I could wipe them."

"Oh, no, thank you." Catherine smiled. "Just the children."

They were in Spencer's room, arguing in low tones about which chair Marian was to have. Catherine adjusted the reading lamp, suggested that Spencer curl up on the end of his bed. "Now you may read for a whole hour," she said. "Then Marian must bathe. If you will call me, I'll rub your back for you." She started toward the door. "You will be quiet, won't you," she asked, "since we have a guest?"

"Of course, Muvver," said Marian. "Isn't she a handsome lady?"

"No, she isn't," said Spencer, loudly.

"Remember Letty's asleep just next door."

Catherine stopped outside their closed door. They were quiet, dropping at once into their stories. Good children. She brushed her hair from her forehead with an impatient hand. "I feel like—like a nonentity!" she raged. "Almost as if I were invisible. Not there to be even looked at. Perhaps I am jealous, but it doesn't feel like that. She's not the vamp type. Too smooth and egoistic. It's what Charles can do for her, not Charles that she is after. O, well——"

But before she had returned to the living room the bell rang. Henrietta and Bill!

Catherine held out her hands, one to each, and drew them into the hall.

"You dears!" she cried. "I am glad to see you. Come in."

She stepped back into visibility with their entrance. Henrietta had met Miss Partridge at Bellevue one day. William bowed with his usual courtly silence.

"Did you like Miss Kelly?" demanded Henrietta, as she settled into the wing chair before Miss Partridge had it again. "She came in, didn't she?"

"She's coming Monday."

"Is Monday the great day?" Bill was looking at her, and Catherine smiled swiftly at the warm, quiet friendliness of his eyes.

"Monday!" she declared. "I telephoned Dr. Roberts this morning."

"Isn't it fine, Miss Partridge"—Henrietta turned briskly to her—"this move of Mrs. Hammond's."

"I haven't heard about it." Miss Partridge's dark, smooth brows lifted.

Did Charles look uneasy, almost guilty, as he stretched out in his armchair and fumbled in the box of cigars?

"You haven't?" Henrietta grinned slyly at Catherine. "Haven't you heard that Mrs. Hammond is renouncing the quiet, domestic life for a real job?"

"Why not say exchanging jobs?" Charles was intent on the end of his cigar.

"Or annexing a second job?" That was Bill's quiet voice.

"I am going to work at the Lynch Bureau," explained Catherine, "as investigator." She felt a flash of delight in the astonishment which rippled briefly over Miss Partridge's smooth face. Knocked down her first impression, she thought maliciously.

"Really? How interesting!" Miss Partridge smiled. "But what will your sweet children do?"

"They'll go to school and have an efficient nurse," said Henrietta abruptly, "and they'll be vastly better off when they aren't having the sole attention of an intelligent woman like their mother. And that's that!" She dangled her glasses over her forefinger. "Did you decide that girl was malingering, Miss Partridge? She certainly had no physical symptoms. Just a case we ran into the other day," she added, to Catherine.

Charles, in answer to a query from Bill, had started a long and eager explanation of an industrial test he had been working up.

Catherine noticed that even as Miss Partridge answered Henrietta's question, her eyes had turned to Charles and Bill. "Is your husband a doctor, too?" she finished.

"Heavens, no! Bill couldn't be anything so personal as a doctor." Henrietta laughed. "Could he, Catherine? He's an engineer."

And presently, maneuvering cleverly, Miss Partridge was talking industrial tests with Charles, while Bill, puffing on his old pipe, let his half-shut eyes rest on her face, and then move across to Catherine. Was he smiling?

Marian's call came just then, and Catherine rose.

"May I come along, Catherine? I haven't seen the kids since that night in Maine." Henrietta stopped at Spencer's door, and as Catherine draped Marian's slim body in the huge bath towel, she heard Spencer's eager voice and Dr. Henrietta's bluff tone. Marian, her face rosy and her dark hair rumpled, threw herself into Henrietta's arms. "Hello, my Doctor!" she cried.

They had a moment in the hall, when Henrietta looked firmly into Catherine's eyes.

"You stop your worrying," she said. "You won't swing your job unless you are clear of doubts. Brace up!" Her hand clasped Catherine's. "If I can help you any way, be sure you let me know."

"Oh, you are a brick!" Catherine's fingers were convulsive. "I do need you!"

The three in the living room looked up at their entrance.

"Spencer sent you his regards, Bill. He wished me to tell you that he thought the cows recovered from the alarm your car caused them."

Bill removed his pipe, a slow smile on his gaunt face.

"What cows?" demanded Charles.

"Ghost cows, Charles. Not in your lexicon. But we felt them in that old barn, behind those stanchions."

When they had gone, Charles followed Catherine into the dining room, gathered a handful of coffee cups, and walked after her into the disorderly kitchen.

"What'd you think of her?" he asked, casually.

"Her being the cat?" Catherine grinned at him. She was at ease again, confident, the sense of nonentity gone.

"Oh, Stella Partridge, of course. Fine person, isn't she! No nonsense about her. Mind like a man's."

"Is it?" Catherine stacked the dishes in the sink.

"Has the qualities which are conventionally labeled masculine. Like that better?"

The clatter of the garbage pail cover served for Catherine's answer.

"Bill's a queer duck, now, isn't he?" Charles lolled against the table, his long body making a hazardous oblique angle. "Never can make up my mind whether it's shyness or laziness."

"I don't think it's either of those things, if you mean his lack of loquaciousness."

"Loquaciousness!" Charles threw back his head in a laugh. "That's some word to use about Bill!"

"I suppose I might as well wash these confounded dishes to-night." Catherine turned the faucet and the water splashed into the sink.

"Where's your dusky maiden?"

"To-morrow's Sunday."

"Oh, say, it's too bad I brought a guest in to-night, eh?" Charles waited comfortably for her assurance that it wasn't too bad.

"We'd hate the mess in the morning," was Catherine's dry retort.

Charles was in extraordinary humor, the purring kind, thought Catherine, as her hands moved deftly among the dishes. And I'm not. I feel as if I should like to yell! She bent more swiftly to her task. Charles straightened his long angle and reached for a dish towel. He needn't be magnanimous about wiping dishes! As he rubbed the towel round and round a plate, he began to sing. Somewhere—rub—the sun—rub—is shi-i-ining—rub! And Catherine had, suddenly, a flash of a picture, smarting in her throat. The shabby little flat where they had first lived, before Spencer was born; Charles wiping the dishes, singing, and Catherine singing with him, ridiculous old hymns and sentimental tunes. And always after the occasional guests had gone, the "gossip party," as they labeled it, speculation, analysis, discussion of the people who had gone, friendly, shrewd, amusing, ending when the dish towel was flapped out and the dish-pan stowed under the sink with the ritualistic but none the less thrilling, "There's no one can touch my girl for looks or charm or brains!" and Catherine's, "I'm sorry for everyone else—because they can't have you!"

Charles was echoing that old custom. But he didn't realize it. And Catherine thought, with a stabbing bitterness, "He has this feeling of comfort, not because we are here together, but because the evening has pleased him."

"What do you think is Bill's secret, then?" Charles broke out.

"He's thinking of something else, not of that; he's keeping me off his real center," hurried Catherine's thoughts. "I won't be horrid and cross."

"Isn't it lack of conceit?" She reached for the heavy frying pan. "Most of us have to talk to assert ourselves, to make folks listen to us. Bill hasn't any ego——"

"Oh, he's got one, all right." Charles balanced the pile of dishes precariously near the edge of the table. "Looks more conceited just to sit around with that cryptic expression——"

"I don't think so!" Catherine scrubbed vigorously at the sink. "He never looks critical."

"Couldn't get a harsh word out of you about Bill, could I?" Charles jested a little heavily. "He's always been that way, ever since he was a kid."

"Now when Miss Partridge"—Catherine resisted the impulse to say "your Miss Partridge"—"when she is silent, she looks too superior for words."

"Nonsense! I felt you were misjudging her. Now, she's awake, ready to talk——"

"About herself."

"Meow!" Charles grinned. "Though we did talk a good deal about the work. But, of course, that's only natural."

"She didn't even see me until Henrietta pointed at me and yanked me out of the pigeon-hole where she had me stuck."

"I hope you aren't going to dislike her, Catherine." Charles was serious. "Since I have to see her in connection with the clinic, it might be awkward——"

"Thank the Lord, those are done!" Catherine turned from the sink. "Don't worry, old thing," she said, lightly. "I don't hate her. We never have insisted on love me, love all my dogs, you know."

"I thought you'd appreciate her." Charles was sulky.

"She's extremely handsome."

"She's as warm hearted as she is brilliant, too."

"Like a frog, she is!" thought Catherine. But she reached for the button and snapped out the light.

"I'll hurry with my shower," she said, preceding him up the hall. "Then you can have the tub. It's late."

The bathroom was littered with the children's discarded clothes. Little sluts! thought Catherine, gathering socks and shirts and bloomers. My fault, I suppose. I can't make 'em neat! Like a nice warm tub myself, she growled, but Charles is waiting. Someone's always waiting.

She sat in the dark by the window in their room, while Charles splashed and hummed. Yellow cracks edged a few of the windows of the opposite wall, not many, as it was so late. Above the rim of the building she could see one great blue-white star with a zigzag of pale stars after it. Vega, she thought. Smiting its—what is it? Wonder if you could see stars at noon from the bottom of this court? It's like a well. She drew her dressing gown close over her throat. It feels nasturtium colored, even in the dark, she thought, running her fingers over the heavy silk. Her one extravagance last spring, lovely flame-orange thing. Why, she hadn't braided her hair. Her fingers were tired. They moved idly through the heavy softness.

Her elbows on the window sill, she stared up at the star. Monday, she thought. Monday I shall have something else to think about. Just as Charles does. This dreadful mulling over words and looks, hanging on the wave of an eyelash. That's what women do, poor fools, trying to keep all the first glamor. Love. She heard the water gulping out of the tub. Love needs to be back of your days, there, but not the thing you feed on every second. Terrible indigestion, eating your heart out forever. Ugh, the sill was gritty with dust. She rubbed her elbows resentfully. That song Charles had hummed in the kitchen had sent her back through the years. She hadn't wanted anything else in those days. Passion, its strange, erratic light making everything else seem tinsel. Tenderness, making all else in life seem cold. And quarrels—the still, white silence, swift product of some unexpected moment, so that you felt yourself imprisoned in an iceberg, from which you never could escape—that was part of the struggle of admitting another person, your lover, into yourself. And child-bearing. Peculiar, ecstatic, difficult; commonplace physical preoccupation for long stretches of your life. Catherine shrugged. Perhaps, if you weren't husky—she twisted from her cramped position—perhaps some women never got over childbirth. It did eat you up. Her mother would say she was thinking too much. She rose, stretching her arms above her head, the silk slipping away from them. Then, as she heard Charles scuffling along the hall—he did need some new slippers—suddenly her heart opened and poured a golden flood over her being. Why, now, this instant, she loved him, and all the earlier passion was a thin tinkle against this sound—sunlight in the wide branches of a tree, and cold earth deep about the roots, and liquid sap flowing.

Her fingers closed about the crisp curtain edge as Charles pushed open the door.

"You in bed?" His whisper was cautious. "Oh, no." He snapped on the light, while Catherine gazed at him, waiting. His pink pajama coat flopped open.

"There isn't a damned button on the thing. Got a pin?" He shuffled across to the dressing table. "My wife's been to the country."

"Poor boy." Catherine rushed to the sewing table in the corner. "I'll sew 'em on if your wife won't." Ridiculous, enchanting. She pulled him down beside her on the bed, seized the coat, burying her knuckles against the hard warmth of his chest. "Don't wriggle, or you'll have it sewed to your diaphragm."

Charles was silent. Catherine's wrist flexed slowly with the drawing of the thread. It's like weaving a spell, she thought, with secret passes of my hand, to melt that hard resentment he won't admit. She broke the thread and glanced up. Charles, with a quick motion, laid his cheek against the sweet darkness of her hair.

"First time you've so much as seen me since you came back," he said.

"Too bad about you!" Catherine jeered softly.

XI

"It's the Thomases on the 'phone." Charles came out of the study. "They want us to come out this afternoon to see their house."

"Out where?" Catherine looked up from her book, while Spencer and Marian fidgeted for the reading to continue.

"Croton. They've moved, you know. Bought a farm."

"Walter Thomas?" asked Spencer. "Has he got a farm?"

"Thomas says there are trains every hour, and we can stay for Sunday-night supper."

"But the children——"

"I thought your mother was coming in."

"She may not wish to stay late."

"Well, you'll have to decide. Thomas is waiting. It would be rather nice to get out of town for a few hours."

Catherine's brows drew together.

"We're all right," said Marian. "Go on away!"

"Yes, you are." Catherine sighed briefly. Charles had his air of "Are you going to deprive me of a pleasant hour?"

"You wouldn't go without me?" she asked. "Tell Mr. Thomas that if mother wishes to stay, we'll come. We can telephone him."

Mrs. Spencer said she would like nothing better than a chance at the children without their interfering parents, and in the late afternoon Catherine and Charles set forth. The cross-town car was jammed; Catherine, from an uncomfortable seat just under the conductor's fare box, watched the people about her with remote eyes. She hated these humid, odorous jams. She always crawled off into a dark corner of herself, away from the jostling and pushing of her body. Heavy, dull faces—she lifted her head until her eyes could rest on the firm solidity of Charles's shoulder and head. Nothing professorial about that erect head, the edge of carefully shaved neck between collar and clipped fair hair that showed under the soft gray hat. But even the back of his head looked intelligent, alive. He turned suddenly, and over the crowd their eyes met in a mysteriously moving flare of acknowledgment. He grinned at her—he knew her hatred of such crowds; and turned away again. Catherine shivered a little. That was what she wanted to keep, that awareness of each other, that intimate self-recognition. She couldn't keep it if she was worn down into dullness and drabness and stupidity. She had, she knew, stirred Charles out of his easy acceptance of her as an established custom, and for the day, at least, she had submerged his resentment. As the car stopped under the tracks she was thinking, if I can win him over to believe in what I am, what I want, inwardly, in his feeling, not in words,—then I can do anything!

They sat together on the train and talked. Charles had spent one Sunday during the summer with the Thomases; they had a tennis court and chickens. Thomas had been promoted to Assistant Professor, but he kept his extension classes still, as the oldest boy was entering college this fall.

"He was crazy about some old French verse forms that day. Couldn't talk about anything else. Mrs. Thomas wanted to talk about the refinishing of the walls."

"I'll wager she did. Verse forms interest her only as a means to the salary end."

"But she's a fine type of woman, don't you think?"

Catherine shrugged.

"She's about as intellectual as a—a jellyfish. She's not a jellyfish, though."

"Thomas gets enough enjoyment from his own mind."

They walked from the station through the crowded, dingy houses near the river, climbed a long hill, and at the top found the country, soft and lovely in the hazy September sunlight. As they climbed, the river dropped beneath them, opal-blue and calm, the hollows of the wooded Westchester hills gathered purple shadows, and on the slopes toward which they climbed a branch of maple flamed at times like a shrill, sweet note in the mellow silence.

"It must be good for their children, living out here." Charles sniffed at the air. "Smell that wood smoke! Bonfires, and nuts——"

"How'd you like to climb that hill every night?"

"Thomas has a flivver. There, you can see the house through those poplars."

The Thomases were on the porch, rising to meet them with a flurry of innumerable children and dogs and cats. Mrs. Thomas, small, pink, worried, with curly gray hair and a high voice; Mr. Thomas, of indifferent stature, with an astonishingly large head, smooth dark hair, nearsighted eyes behind heavy glasses, and a large, gentle mouth; the children—there were only five, after all, from Theodore, the eldest, who was curly and pink like Mrs. Thomas, down to Dorothy, the youngest, who already wore glasses as thick as her father's.

"I wanted Theodore to drive down for you, but you said you wanted to walk." Mrs. Thomas jerked the chairs into companionable nearness. "Quite a climb up our hill."

"Mrs. Thomas can't imagine any one liking to walk," said her husband.

"Not a mother and wife, at least. Men don't know what being on their feet means, do they, Mrs. Hammond?"

Inquiries about the children, mutually. Admiration expressed for the view, for the house, room by room, for the poultry run which Theodore had constructed, for the tennis court, for the asparagus bed.

"Now that the Cook's Tour is ended, what about something to eat, Mother?"

The dining room was small, and warm from the sunning of the afternoon; the Thomas children chattered in high voices; Catherine sighed in secret as she looked at the elaborate salad, the laborious tiny sandwiches, the whipped-cream dessert in the fragile stemmed sherbet glasses, the frosted cake. But Mrs. Thomas, the lines in her pink cheeks a trifle more distinct, hovered in anxious delight over each step in the progress of this evidence of her skill and labor.

"No, Dorothy, no cake. She has to be very careful of sweets, they upset her so easily. Do your children hanker for everything they shouldn't have?"

Theodore broke in with an account of the psychological tests he had taken for college entrance; there was a suggestion of pimples on his round, pink chin. Walter wanted to know when Spencer could come out; Walter was Spencer's age, a chubby, choleric boy who kept rabbits and sold them to the neighbors for stews. Clara, just older, had reached an age of gloomy suspicion; her hair, which her mother was allowing to grow, now that Clara was older, fell about her thin shoulders in lank concavity. Catherine wondered whether the contention between Marian and Spencer sounded to outsiders like the bickering which ran so strongly here. Dorothy was a year older than Letty, but she did not talk so plainly. And that other boy, Percy—why name him that!—was being sent away from the table because he had pinched Clara.

Inevitably the talk stayed on the level of the children, in spite of attempted detours on the part of Charles. Mr. Thomas ate with an absent myopic eye on Dorothy and the next older boy.

But when at length they left the dining room, he was saying to Charles, "You recall those songs I spoke of? Thirteenth century? I've found a girl who does beautiful translations. A graduate student. She has an astonishing sense for the form." He had come alive, suddenly, the blank, gentle mask of his face breaking into sharp, vivid animation. Catherine watched him, peering at his wife, glancing back at him. She didn't care about the old verse forms, neither did his wife; but his wife didn't care that he could come alive like that, apart from her. Perhaps when they are alone, thought Catherine, he has some feeling for her that compares with this—but I doubt it!

"He's as keen about those musty old papers as if they were worth huge sums." Mrs. Thomas laid her hand on Catherine's arm, as they stood on the edge of the porch, looking far down the valley. Mrs. Thomas had a way of offering nervous little caresses. "Men are queer, aren't they?" Her forehead puckered.

Catherine endured the hand, light, with an insinuating effect of a bond between them, the bond of their sex. We women understand, those fingers tapped softly.

Later, half defiantly, in answer to a suggestion of Mrs. Thomas that Catherine take her place on the faculty women's committee for teas, Catherine explained that she would be much too busy. She saw in the quick pursing of Mrs. Thomas's little mouth the contraction of her eyelids, the rapid twists her announcement made as it entered Mrs. Thomas's mind. Disapproval, hearty and determined; a small fear, quickly over, lest some discredit reflect on her position; a chilly covering of those emotions with her words, "Why, Mrs. Hammond, you've seemed so devoted to your children!"

"Naturally." Catherine was curt. "I am. But they needn't suffer, any more than they did before while Charles was in France and I worked. I can't see any loss to them."

"I hope you won't regret it." Mrs. Thomas drew her own brood into a symbolic shelter, as she flung her arm around Dorothy, who was at her knee with a picture book, clamoring unintelligibly to be read to.

"Fine for you, Hammond. A family needs several wage earners, in these postwar days."

Charles laughed, but Catherine saw the flicker of uneasiness in his face.

"But I'd hate to have to find a cook to supplant Mrs. Thomas."

"Ah, but you see, I can't cook that way." Catherine's lightness covered the glance she sped at Charles. She hadn't, then, touched his real feeling about this. Just a scratch, and she could see it.

"I don't know what's to become of us poor men"—he rose lazily—"unless we turn into housewives."

"You better take a turn at it, just to see what it's like." That was Mrs. Thomas, vigorously exalting her ability.

"It was called husbandry once, wasn't it?" Mr. Thomas smiled in enjoyment of his joke. "Must you go? It's very early. Let us drive you down."

"The walk will be just what we need——"

The evening was soft and black, with faint rustle in the autumn-crisped leaves of the trees that massed against the blue-black sky. Below them the river gleamed silver-dark. They went in silence down the hill, the gravel slipping under their heels. Then Catherine felt Charles groping for her hand, the warm pressure of his fingers.

"Rummy bunch of kids," he said. And then, "That woman can cook, but that's about all. She can't impart gentle manners." Catherine relaxed in content. He wasn't huffy. "Too bad you have to tell people like that what you're going to do. Let 'em see after you've succeeded, I say!"

"Oh!" Catherine's voice was sharp with delight. "You think I will!"

"Lord, yes. Of course. You've got the stuff."

Their clasped hands swinging like children's, they came to the foot of the hill.