Front matter (continued 4)

"I don't think nothink about it, Kid. When the time comes that you can do without me...."

"That time'll never come, Honey, after all you've done for me."

"I don't want yer to feel yerself bound by that."

"I don't feel myself bound by it; but—dash it all, Honey!—whatever you feel or don't feel about me, I'm fond of you."

He was still imperturbable. "Well, Kid, you wouldn't be the first, not by a lot."

"But if I can never be anything for you, or do anything for you...."

"There's one thing you could do."

"What is it? I don't care how hard it is."

"Well, when you're one o' them big lawyers, or bankers, or somethink—drorin' yer fifty dollars a week—you can have a shy at this 'ere lor o' proputty. It don't seem right to me that some people should have all the beef to chaw, and others not so much as the bones; but I can't git the 'ang of it. If nothink don't belong to nobody, then what about all your dough in the New York savin's bank, and mine in the one in Brooklyn? We're keepin' it agin yer goin' to college, ain't we? And don't that belong to us? Yes, by George, it do! So there you are. But if when yer gits yer larnin' yer can steddy it out...."

XXIII

The boy was adolescent, sentimental, and lonely. Mere human companionship, such as that which Honey gave him, was no longer enough for him. He was seeing visions and dreaming dreams. He began to wish he had some one with whom to share his unformulated hopes, his crude and burning opinions. He looked at fellows who were friends going two and two, pouring out their foolish young hearts to each other, and envied them. The lads of his own age liked him well enough. Now and then one of them would approach him with shy or awkward signals, making for closer acquaintance; but when they learned that he lived in Grove Street with a stevedore they drew away. None of them ever transcended the law of caste, to stand by him in spite of his humble conditions. Boys whose families were down wanted nothing to hamper them in climbing up. Boys whose families were up wanted nothing that might loosen their position and pull them down. The sense of social insecurity which was the atmosphere of homes reacted on well-meaning striplings of fifteen, sixteen, and seventeen, turning them into snobs and cads before they had outgrown callowness.

But during the winter of the year in which he became sixteen there were two, you might have said three, who broke in upon this solitude.

In walking to the Latin School from Grove Street he was in the habit of going through Louisburg Square. If you know Boston you know Louisburg Square as that quaint red-brick rectangle, like many in the more Georgian parts of London, which commemorates the gallant dash of the New England colonists on the French fortress of Louisburg in Cape Breton. It is the heart of that conservative old Boston, which is now shrinking in size and importance before the onset of the foreigner till it has become like a small beleaguered citadel. Here the descendants of the Puritans barricade themselves behind their financial walls, as their ancestors within their stockades, while their city is handed over to the Irishman and the Italian as an undefended town. The Boston of tradition is a Boston of tradition only. Like the survivors of Noah's deluge clinging to the top of a rock, they to whom the Boston of tradition was bequeathed are driven back on Beacon Hill as a final refuge from the billows rising round them. A high-bred, cultivated, sympathetic people, they have so given away their heritage as to be but a negligible factor in the State, in the country, of which their fathers and grandfathers may be said once to have kept the conscience.

But to Tom Whitelaw Louisburg Square meant only the dignified fronts and portals behind which lived the rich people who had no point of contact with himself. They couldn't have ignored him more completely than he ignored them. He thought of them as little as the lion cub in a circus parade thinks of the people of the city through which he passes in processions. Then, one day, one of these strangers spoke to him.

It was a youth of about his own age. More than once, as Tom went by, and the stout boy stood on the sidewalk in front of his own house, they had looked each other up and down with unabashed mutual appraisal. Tom saw a lad too short for his width, and unhealthily flabby. He had puffy hands, and puffy cheeks, with eyes seeming smaller than they were because the puffy eyelids covered them. The mouth had those appealing curves comically troubled in repose, but fulfilling their purpose in giggling. On the first occasion when Tom passed by the lips were set to the serious task of inspection. They said nothing; they betrayed nothing. Tom himself thought nothing, except that the boy was fat.

They had looked at each other some two or three times a week, for perhaps a month, when one day the fat boy said, "Hullo!" Tom also said, "Hullo!" continuing on his way. A day or two later they repeated these salutations, though neither forsook his attitude of reserve. The fat boy did this first, speaking when they had hullo'ed each other for the third or fourth time. His voice was high and girlish, and yet with a male crack in it.

"What school do you go to?"

Tom stopped. "I go to the Latin School. What school do you go to?"

"I go to Doolittle and Pray's."

"That's the big private school in Marlborough Street, isn't it?"

The fat boy made the inarticulate grunt which with most Americans means "Yes." "I was put down for Groton, only mother wouldn't let me leave home. I'm going to Harvard."

"I'm going to Harvard, too. What class do you expect to be in?"

The fat boy replied that he expected to be in the class of nineteen-nineteen.

Tom said he expected to be in that class himself.

"Now I've got to beat it to the Latin School. So long!"

"So long!"

Tom carried to his school in the Fenway an unusual feeling of elation. With friendly intent someone had approached him from the world outside. It was not the first time it had ever happened, but it was the first time it had ever happened in just this way. He could see already that the fat boy was not one of those he would have chosen for a friend; but he was so lonely that he welcomed anyone. Moreover, he divined that the fat boy was lonely, too. Boys of that type, the Miss Nancy and the mother's darling type, were often consumed by loneliness, and no one ever pitied them. Few went to their aid when other boys "picked" on them, but of those few Tom Whitelaw was always one. He found them, once you had accepted their mannerisms, as well worth knowing as other boys, while they spared him a scrap of admiration. It was possible that in this fat boy he might find the long-sought fellow who would not "turn him down" on discovering that he lived in Grove Street. Being turned down in this way had made him sick at heart so often that he had decided never any more to make or trust advances. In suffering temptation again he assured himself that it would be for the last time in his life.

On returning from school he looked for the boy in Louisburg Square, but he was not there. A few hundred yards farther, however, he came in for another adventure.

The January morning had been mild, with melting snow. By midday the wind had shifted to the north, with a falling thermometer. By late afternoon the streets were coated with a glaze of ice. Tom could swagger down the slope of Grove Street easily enough in the security of rubber soles.

But not so a girl, whose slippers and high French heels made her helpless on the steep glare. Having ventured over the brow of the hill, she found herself held. A step into the air would have been as easy as another on this slippery descent. The best she could do was to sway in the keen wind, keeping her balance with the grace of one of the blue spruces which used to be blown about at Bere. Her outstretched arms waved up and down, as a blue spruce waves its branches. Coming abreast of her, Tom found her laughing to herself, but on seeing him she laughed frankly and aloud.

"Oh, catch me! I'm going to tumble! Ow-w-w!"

Tom snatched at one hand, while she caught him by the shoulder with the other.

"Saved! Wasn't it lucky that you came along? You're the Whitelaw boy, aren't you?"

Tom admitted that he was, though his new sensations, with this exquisite creature clinging to him like a drowning man to his rescuer, choked the monosyllable in his throat. Though he had often in a scrimmage protected little boys, he had never before been thrown into this comic, laughing tussle with a girl. It had the excuse for itself that she couldn't stand unless he held her up. He held her firmly, looking into her dancing eyes with his first emotional consciousness of a girl's prettiness.

His arm supporting her, she ventured on a step. "I'm Maisie Danker," she explained, while taking it. "I see you going in and out the house."

"I've never seen you."

"Perhaps you've seen me and not noticed me."

"I couldn't," he declared, with vehemence. "I've never seen you before in my life. If I had...."

Her high heels so nearly slipped from under her that they were compelled to hold each other as if in an embrace. "If you had—what?"

He knew what, but the words in which to say it needed a higher mode of utterance. The red lips, the glowing cheeks, had the vitality of the lively eyes. A red tam-o'-shanter, a red knitted thing like a heavenly translation of his own earthly sweater, were bewitchingly diabolic when worn with a black skirt, black stockings, and black shoes.

As he did not respond to her challenge, she went on with her self-introduction. "I guess you haven't seen me, because I only arrived three days ago. I'm Mrs. Danker's niece. Live in Nashua. Worked in the woolen mills there. Now I've come to visit my aunt for the winter."

For the sake of hearing her speak, he asked if she was going to work in Boston.

"I don't know. Maybe I'll take singing lessons. Got a swell voice."

If again he was dumb it was because of the failure of his faculties. Nothing in his experience had prepared him for the give-and-take of a badinage in which the surface meanings were the less important. Foolish and helpless, unable to show his manly superiority except in the strength with which he held her up, he got a lesson in the new art there and then.

"Ever dance?"

"I'm never asked."

"Oh, it's you that ought to do the asking."

"I mean that I'm never asked where there's dancing going on."

"Gee, you don't have to be. You just find a girl—and go."

"But I don't know how to dance."

"I'll teach you."

Slipping and sliding, with cries of alarm on her part, and stalwart assurances on his, they approached their own doorstep.

"Ow-w-w! Hold me! I'm going!"

"No you're not—not while I've got you."

"But I don't want to grab you so hard."

"That's all right. I can stand it."

"But I can't. I'm not used to it."

"Then it's a very good time to begin."

"What's the use of beginning if there's nothing to go on with?"

"How do you know there won't be?"

"Well, what can there be?"

Had Miss Danker always waited for answers to her questions Tom would have been more nonplussed than he was. But the game which he didn't know at all she knew thoroughly, according to her lights. She never left him at a loss for more than a few seconds at a time. Her method being that of touch-and-go, reserving to herself the right of coming back again, she carried his education one step farther still.

"Don't you ever go to the movies?"

He replied that he had gone once or twice with Honey, but not often. To be on the same breezy level as herself, he added in explanation: "Haven't got the dough."

"But the movies don't take dough, not hardly any."

"They take more than I've got."

"More than you've got? Gee! Then you can't have anything at all."

It was not so much a taunt as it was a statement, and yet it was a statement with a little taunt in it. For once driven to bravado, he gave away a secret.

"Well, I haven't—except what's in the bank."

"Oh, you've got money in the bank, have you?"

"Sure! But I'm keeping it to go to college."

She stared at him as if he had been a duck-billed rabbit, or some variety of fauna hitherto unknown.

"Gee! I should think a fellow who had money in the bank would want to blow some of it on having a good time—a fellow with any jazz."

Once more she spared him discomfiture. Slipping into the hallway, she said over her shoulder as he followed her: "How old are you?"

"Sixteen."

She flashed round at him. "Sixteen! Gee! I thought you was my age if you was a day. Honest I did. I'm eighteen, an old lady compared with you."

"Oh, but boys are always older than girls, for their age."

"You are, sure. Anyways, you saved me on that slippery hill, and I think you ought to have a kiss for it. Come, baby, kiss your poor old ma."

Though the hallway was dark, the kiss had to be given and taken furtively. Whatever it was to Maisie Danker, to Tom Whitelaw it was the entrance to a higher and an increased life. The pressure of her lips on his sent through his frame a dynamic glow he had not supposed to be among nature's possibilities. Moreover, it threw light on that experience as to which he had mused ever since he had first talked confidentially to Bertie Tollivant. Though instinct had taught him something in the intervening years, he had up to this minute gained nothing in the way of practical discovery. Now an horizon that had been dark was lifting to disclose a wonderland.

With her light laugh Maisie had run into her aunt's apartment, and shut the door. Tom began heavily, pensively, to climb the stairs. But halfway up he paused to mark off another stage in his perceptions.

"So that's what it's like! That's why they all think so much about it—and try to hush it up!"

XXIV

He himself found something to hush up when he recounted the incident to Honey in the evening. He told of meeting Mrs. Danker's niece on the ice-coated hill, and helping her down to the door. Of his sensations as she clung to him he said nothing. He said nothing of the kiss in the dark hallway. During the rest of the evening, and after he had gone to bed, he wondered why. They all hushed these things up, and he did as the rest; but what was the basic reason?

As his first emotional encounter the subject was sufficiently in his mind next day to make him duller than usual at school. On his way home from school it so preoccupied his thought that he forgot to look for the fat boy. It was the fat boy who first saw him, hailing him as he approached. There was already between them that acceptance of each other which is the first stage of friendship.

"What's your name?"

"Tom Whitelaw. What's yours?"

"Guy Ansley. How old are you?"

"Sixteen. How old are you?"

"I'm sixteen, too. What's your father do?"

"I haven't got a father. I live with—" it was difficult to explain—"with a man who kind o' takes care of me."

"A guardian?"

"Something like that. What does your father do?"

"He's a corporation lawyer. Makes big money, too." As Tom began to move along the fat boy went with him, keeping step. "What's your guardian do?"

"He does anything that'll give him a job. Mostly he's a stevedore."

"What's a stevedore? Sounds as if it had something to do with bull-fighting."

"It's a longshoreman. He loads and unloads ships."

They stopped at the corner of Pinckney Street The puffy countenance fell. Tom could follow his companion's progression of bewilderments.

"Where do you live?"

"I live in Grove Street."

It was the minute of suspense. All had been confessed. The countenance that had fallen went absolutely blank. To himself the tall, proud, sensitive lad was saying that his future life was staked on the response the fat boy chose to make. If he showed signs of wriggling out of an embarrassing situation he, Tom Whitelaw, would range himself forever with the enemies of the rich.

The fat boy spoke at last.

"So you're that kind of fellow."

"Yes, I'm that kind of fellow."

This was mere marking time. The decision was still to come. It came with an air on the fat boy's part of heroic resolution.

"Well, I don't care."

Tom breathed again, breathed with bravado. "Neither do I."

In the stress of so much big-heartedness the girlish voice became a croak. "I know guys who think that if another guy isn't rich they must treat him as so much dirt. I'm not that sort. I'm democratic. I wouldn't turn down a fellow just because he lived in Grove Street. If I liked him I'd stick to him. I'm not snobbish. How do you know you couldn't give him a peg up, and he'd be grateful to you all his life?"

Thinking this over afterward, Tom found it hard to disengage the bitter from the sweet; but he had not much chance to think it over. Any spare minute he found pre-empted by Maisie Danker, who seemed to camp in the dark hallway. If she was not there when he entered, she appeared before he could go upstairs. The ice having melted in the street, she had other needs of protection, an errand to do in the crowded region of Bowdoin Square, a shop to visit across the Common which was so wide and lonesome in winter twilights, a dance hall to locate in case they ever made up their minds to visit it. She was always timid, clinging, laughing, adorable. The embodiment of gayety, she made him gay, which was again a new sensation. Never before had he felt young as he felt young with her. The minutes they spent swamped in the throngs of the lighted streets, between five and seven on a winter's afternoon, were his first minutes of escape from a world of care. Care had been his companion since he could remember anything; and now his companion was this exquisite thing, all lightsomeness and joy.

He was later than usual in returning from school one afternoon, because a teacher had given him a commission to carry out which took some two hours of his time. As it had sent him toward the south end of the city, he had the Common to traverse on his way home. Snow had recently fallen; but through the main avenues under the trees the paths had been cleared. On the Frog Pond the drifts had been swept up, so that there could be a little skating. As Tom passed by he could hear the scraping and grinding of skates, and the hoarse shouts of hobbledehoys. At any other time he would have stopped, either to look on peacefully, or to take part in some bit of free-for-all, rough-and-tumble skylarking in the snow. But Maisie might be waiting. She might even have given up waiting, which would take all his pleasure from the afternoon.

To reach home more quickly he followed a short cut, scarcely shoveled out, on the slope of the Common below Beacon Hill. Here there were no foot passengers but himself. Neither, for some little distance, were there any trees. There was only the white shroud of the snow, freezing to a crust. A misty moon drifted through a tempest of scudding clouds, while wherever in the offing there was a group of elms the electric lights danced through their tossing branches as if they were wind-blown lanterns.

In spite of his hurry, the boy came to a standstill. It was a minute at which to fancy himself lost in Moosonee or Labrador. His voyageur guides had failed him; his dog team had run away; his pemmican—he supposed it would be pemmican—had given out. He was homeless, starving, abandoned, alone but for the polar bears.

It was not a polar bear that he saw come floundering down the hillside, but it might have been a black one. It was certainly black; its nature was certainly animal. It rolled and tumbled and panted and grunted, and now and then it moaned. For a few minutes it remained stationary, with internal undulations; then it scrambled a few paces, as an elephant might scramble whose feet had been sawn off. A dying mammoth would also have emitted just these raucous groans.

Suddenly it squealed. The squeal was like that of a pig when the knife is thrust into its throat. It was girlish, piercing, and yet had a masculine shriek in it. Tom Whitelaw knew what was happening. It had happened to himself so often in the days when he was different from other boys that his fists seemed to clench and his feet to spring before his mind had given the command. In clearing the fifty odd yards of snow between him and the wallowing monster, he chose a form of words which young hooligans would understand as those of authority.

"What in hell are yez doin' to that kid? Are yez puttin' a knife in him? Leave him be, or I'll knock the brains out of every one of yez."

He was in among them, laying about him before they knew what had landed in their midst. They were not brutal youngsters; they were only jocose in the manner of their kind. Having spied the fat boy coming down to watch the skating, it was as natural for them to jump on him as it would be for a pack of dogs who chanced to see a sloth. With the courage of the mob, and also with its rapidity of thought-transfer, they had closed in silently and rushed him. He was on his back in a second. In a second they were clambering all over him. When he staggered to his feet they let him run, only to catch him and pull him down again. So staggering, so running, so coming down like a lump of jelly in the snow, he had reached the top of the hill, his tormentors hanging to him as if their teeth were in his flesh, at the minute when Tom first perceived the black mass.

The fat boy had not lacked courage. He had fought. That is, he had kicked and bitten and scratched, with the fury of vicious helplessness. He had not cried for mercy. He had not cried out at all. He had struggled for breath; he had nearly strangled; but his pantings and gruntings were only for breath just as were theirs. Strong in spite of his unwieldiness, he was not without the moral spunk which can perish at a pinch, but will not give in.

None of them had struck him. That would have been thought cowardly. They had only plastered him with snow, in his mouth, in his ears, in his eyes, and down below his collar. This he could have suffered, still without a plea, had not their play become fiercer. They began to tear open his clothing, to wrench it off the buttons. They stuffed snow inside his waistcoat, inside his shirt, inside his trousers. He was naked to the cold. And yet it was not the cold that drew from him that piglike squeal; it was the indignity. He was Guy Ansley, a rich man's son, in his native sanctified old Boston a young lordling; but these muckers had mauled the last rag of honor out of him.

They were good-natured little demons, with no more notion of his tragedy than if he had been a snowman. As soon as the strapping young giant had leaped in among them, they ran off with screams of laughter. Most of them were tired of the fun in any case; a few lingered at a distance to "call names," but even they soon disappeared. Tom could only help the lumbering body to its feet.

Cleaning him of snow was more difficult, and since it was melting next his skin, it had to be done at once. The shirt and underclothing being wet, and a keen wind blowing, his teeth were soon chattering. Even when buttoned tightly in his outer clothes he was dank and clammy within. It helped him a little that Tom should strip off his own overcoat and exchange with him; but nothing could really warm him till he got into his own bed.

They would have run all of the short distance to Louisburg Square only that young Ansley was not a runner at any time, and at this time was exhausted. Tom could only drag him along as a dead weight. Except for the brief observations necessary to what they had to do, they hardly spoke a word. Speech was nearly impossible. The only aim of importance was covering the ground.

The old manservant who admitted them in Louisburg Square went dumb with dismay. Having brought his charge into the hall, Tom was obliged to take the lead.

"He's been tumbling in the snow. He's got wet. He may have caught a chill. Better call his mother."

The fat boy spoke. "Mother's in New York. So's father. Here, Pilcher, help me up to my room."

As the two went up the stairs, Tom was left standing in the hall. A voice at the head of the stairs arrested his attention because it was a girl's. Since knowing Maisie Danker, all girls' voices had begun to interest him. This voice was clear, silvery, peremptory, a little sharp, like the note of a crystal bell. Pilcher explained something, whereupon the owner of the voice ran down. On the red carpet of the stairs, with red-damasked paper as a background, her white figure was spiritlike beneath a dim oriental hall light.

"I'm Hildred Ansley," she said, with a cool air of self-possession. "I see my brother's had an accident. Pilcher is putting him to bed. I'm sure we're very much obliged to you."

She was only a child, perhaps fourteen, but a competent child, who knew what to say. Not pretty, as Maisie was, she had presence and personality. In this she was helped by her height, since she was tall, and would be taller, and more by her intelligence. It was the first time he had ever had occasion to observe that some faces were intelligent, though it was not quite easy to say why. "Little Miss Ansley knows what's what," he commented silently, but aloud he said that if he were in her place he would send for a doctor. Though her brother had had no bones broken, he might easily have caught a bad cold.

"Thank you! I'll do it at once."

She made her way to a table, somewhat belittered with caps and gloves, behind the stairs, at the back of the hall. Taking up the receiver, she called a number, politely and yet with a ring of command. While she was speaking he noticed his surroundings.

If to him they seemed baronial it was because his experience had been cramped. Louisburg Square is not baronial; it is only dignified. For the early nineteenth century its houses were spacious; for the early twentieth they are a little narrow, a little steep, a little lacking in imaginative outlet. But to Tom Whitelaw, with memories that went back to the tenements of New York, to whom the homes of the Tollivants and the Quidmores had meant reasonable comfort, who found the sharing of one room with George Honeybun endurable, these walls with their red paper, these stairs with their red carpet, this lofty gloom, this sense of wealth, were all that he dreamed of as palatial.

When Miss Ansley returned from the telephone, he asked if he might have his overcoat. Her brother had worn it upstairs on going to his room. "That's his," he explained, pointing to the soggy Burberry he had thrown down on a carved settle.

"Oh, certainly! I'll run up and get it. I won't ask you to go upstairs to the drawing-room; but if you don't mind taking a seat in here...."

Throwing open the door of the dining room, which was on the ground floor, she switched on the light. Tom entered and stood still. So this was the sort of place in which rich people took their meals!

It was a glow of rich gleaming lights, lights from mahogany, lights from silver, lights from porcelain. In the center of the table lay a round piece of lace, on which stood a silver dish with nothing in it. He knew without being told, though he had never thought of it before, that it needed nothing in it. There were things so beautiful as to fulfil their purpose merely in being beautiful. From above a black-marble mantelpiece a man looked down at him with jovial eyes, a man in a high collar and huge black neckerchief, who might have been the grandfather or great-grandfather of Guy and Hildred Ansley. He had the fat good humor of the one and the bright intelligence of the other, the source in his genial self of types so widely different.

Young Miss Ansley tripped in with the coat across her arm. "I'm sure my father and mother will want to thank you when they come back. Guy's been very naughty. He's always forbidden to leave the Square when he goes out of doors. He wouldn't have done it if papa and mamma hadn't been away. I can't make him mind me. But you must come back when everybody's here, so that you can be thanked properly. I suppose you live somewhere near us?"

Tom found it easiest to answer indirectly. "Your brother knows everything about me. I've seen him once or twice in the Square, and I've told him who I am."

"That'll be very nice."

She held out her hand, and he accepted his dismissal. But before having closed the door behind him, he turned round to her as she stood under the oriental lamp.

"I hope your brother will soon be all right again. I think they ought to give him a hot drink. He's—he's got big stuff in him when you come to find it out. He'll make his way."

The transformation in her was electric. She ceased to be starched and competent, with a manner that put a thousand miles between him and her. The intelligence he had already noted in her face was aflame with a radiance beyond beauty.

"Oh, I'm so glad you can say that! No one outside the family has ever said it before. He's a lamb!—and hardly anybody knows it."

She held out her hand again. As he took it he saw that her eyes, which he thought must be dark, were shining with a mist of tears.

Going down the hill he repeated the two names: Maisie Danker! Hildred Ansley! They called up concepts so different that it was hard to think them of a common flesh. Though Maisie Danker was a woman and Hildred Ansley but a child, there were points at which you could compare them. In the comparison the advantages lay so richly with the girl in Louisburg Square that he fell back on the fact, stressing it with emphasis, that Maisie was the prettier. "After all," he reflected, with comfort in the judgment, "that's all that matters—to a man."

XXV

A few days after his rescue of Guy Ansley from the snow Tom Whitelaw found himself addressed by that young gentleman's sister, aged fourteen. She had plainly been watching for him as he went through Louisburg Square on his way from school. He had almost passed the Ansley steps before the tall, slight girl ran down them.

"Oh, Mr. Whitelaw!"

As it was the first time he had ever been honored with this prefix, he felt shocked and slightly foolish.

"Yes, Miss Ansley?"

A little breathless, she was, as he had noticed during their previous meeting, oddly grown up for her age, as one who takes responsibilities because there is no one else to bear them. She had the manner and selection of words of a woman of thirty.

"I hope you won't mind my waylaying you like this, but my brother would so much like to see you. You've been so awfully kind that I hope you'll come up. He's in bed, you know."

"When does he want me to come?"

"Well, now, if it isn't troubling you too much. You see, my father and mother are coming home to-night, and he'd like to have a word with you before then. He won't keep you more than a few minutes."

What Tom obscurely felt as an honor to himself she put as a favor he was doing them. It was an honor in that it admitted him a little farther into privacies which to him seemed tapestried with privilege and tradition. His one brief glimpse of their way of living had not made him discontented; it had only appealed to his faculty for awe.

Awe was what he was aware of in following his young guide up the two red staircases to the room where the fat boy lay in bed. It was a mother's-darling's room, amusingly out of keeping with the pudgy, fleshy being whom it housed. Flowered paper on the walls, flowered hangings at the windows, flowered cretonnes on thickly upholstered armchairs, flowered silk on the duvet, garlands of flowers on the headboard and footboard of the virginal white bedstead, made the piggy eyes and piggy cheeks, bolstered up by pillows of which some were trimmed with lace, the more funnily grotesque. Tom Whitelaw saw neither the fun nor the grotesqueness. All he could take in was the fact that beauty could gild the lily of this luxury. He knew nothing of beauty in his own denuded life. The room with two beds which he still shared with Honey at Mrs. Danker's was not so much a sanctuary as a lair.

The fat boy's giggles were those of welcome, and also those of embarrassment.

"After the scrap the other night got sick. Bronchitis. Sit down."

Tom looked round to see what Miss Ansley was doing, but slipping away, she shut the door behind her. He sank into the flowered armchair nearest to the bed. The cracked girlish voice, which now had a wheeze in it, went on.

"They've wired for dad and mother, and they're coming home to-night. Thought that before they got here I'd put you wise to something I want you to do."

Waiting for more, Tom sat silent, while the poor piggy face screwed itself up as if it meant to cry.

"Dad and mother think that because I'm so fat I'm not a sport. But they're dead wrong, see? I am a sport; only—only—" he was almost bursting into tears—"only the damn fat won't let me get it out, see?"

"Yes, I see. I now you're a sport all right, old chap. Of course!"

"Well, then, don't let them think the other thing, if they were to ask you."

"Ask me what?"

"Ask you what the row was about the other afternoon. If they do that tell 'em we were only playing nigger-in-the-henhouse, or any other snow game. Don't say I was knocked down by a lot of kids. Make 'em think I was having the devil's own good time."

Tom Whitelaw knew this kind of humiliation. If he had not been through Guy Ansley's special phase of it he had been through others.

"I'll tell them what I saw. You and a lot of other fellows were skylarking in the snow, and I went by and got you to knock off. As I had to pass your door we came home together; but when I found you were wet to the skin I advised Miss Ansley to see that you hit the hay. That's all there was to it."

In the version of the incident the strain of truth was sufficiently clear to allow the fat boy to approve of it. He didn't want to tell a lie, or to get Tom Whitelaw to tell a lie; but sport having been the object with which he had stolen away on that winter's afternoon, it was easy to persuade himself that he had got it. Before Tom went away Guy Ansley understood that he would figure to his parents not as a victim but as something of a tough.

"Gee, I wish I was you," he grinned at Tom, who stood with his hands on the doorknob.

"Me!" Tom was never so astonished in his life. His eyes rolled round the room. "How do you think I live?"

"Oh, live! That's nothing. What I'd like to do is to rough it. If they'd let me do that I shouldn't be—I shouldn't be wrapped up in fat like a mummy in—in whatever it is they're wrapped up in. You can get away with anything on looks."

Sincere as was this tribute, it meant nothing to Tom Whitelaw, looks being no part of his preoccupations. What, for the minute, he was thinking about was that nobody in the world seemed to be quite satisfied. Here he was envying Guy Ansley his down quilt and his comfortable chairs, while Guy was envying him the rough-and-tumble of privation.

"I shouldn't look after him too much," he said to the young sister whom, on coming downstairs, he found waiting at the front door. "There's nothing wrong with him, except that he's a little stout. He's got lots of pluck."

Her face glowed. The glow brought out its intelligence. The intelligence set into action a demure, mysterious charm, almost oriental.

"That's just what I always say, and no one ever believes me. Mother makes a baby of him."

"If he could only fight his own way a little more...."

"Oh, I do hope you'll say that if they speak to you about him."

"I will if I ever get the chance, but...."

"Oh, you must get the chance. I'll make it. You see, you're the only boy Guy's ever taken a fancy to who didn't treat him as a joke."

Tom assured her that her brother was not the only fellow who had a hard fight to put up during boyhood. He had seen them by the dozen who, just because of some trifling oddity, or unusual taste, were teased, worried, tormented, till school became a hell; but that didn't keep them from turning out in the end to be the best sports among them all. Very likely the guying did them good. He thought it might. He, Tom Whitelaw, had been through a lot of it, and now that he was sixteen he wasn't sorry for himself a bit. He used to be sorry for himself, but....

Seeing her for the second time, and in daylight, her features grew more distinct to him. He mused on them while continuing his way homeward. To say she was not pretty, as he had said the other night, was to use a form of words calling for amplification. It was the first time he had had occasion to observe that there are faces to which beauty is not important.

"It's the way she looks at you," was his form of summing up; and yet for the way she looked at you he had no sufficient phraseology.

That her eyes were long, narrow, and yellow-brown, ever so slightly Mongolian, he could see easily enough. That her nose was short, with a little tilt to it, was also a fact he had no difficulty in stating. As for her coloring, it was like that of a russet apple when the brown has a little gold in it and the red the brightness of carmine. Her hair was saved from being ugly by running to the quaint. Straight, black—black with a bluish gloss—it was worn not in the pigtail with which he was most familiar, but in two big plaits curved behind the ears, and secured he didn't know how. She reminded him of a colored picture he had seen of a Cambodian girl, a resemblance enhanced by the dark blue dress she wore, straight and formless down the length of her immature, boylike figure, and marked at the waistline by a circle of gold braid.

But all these details were subordinate to something he had no power of defining. It was also something of which he was jealous as an injustice to Maisie Danker. If this girl had what poor Maisie had not it was because money gave her an advantage. It was the kind of advantage that wasn't fair. Because it wasn't fair, he felt it a challenge to his loyalty.

Nevertheless, he could not accept Maisie's offhand judgments when between five and six that afternoon he told her of the incident.

This was at The Cherry Tree, one of those bowers of refreshment and dancing recently opened on their own slope of Beacon Hill. Bower was the word. What had once been the basement-kitchen and coal cellar of a small brick dwelling had been artfully converted into a long oval orchard of cherry trees, in paper luxuriance of foliage and blossom. Within the boskage, and under Chinese lanterns, there were tables; out in the open was a center oval cleared for dancing. Somewhere out of sight a cracked fiddle and a flat piano rasped out the tango or some shred of "rag." With the briefest intervals for breath, this performance was continuous. The guests, who at that hour in the afternoon numbered no more than ten or twelve, forsook their refreshments to take the floor, or forsook the floor to return to their refreshments, just as the impulse moved them. They were chiefly working girls, young men at leisure because out of jobs, or sailors on shore. Except for an occasional hoarse or screechy laugh, the decorum was proper to solemnity.

It was the fourth or fifth time Tom and Maisie had come to this retreat, nominally that Tom should learn to dance, but really that they should commune together. To him the occasions were blissful for the reason that he had no one else in the world to commune with. To talk, to talk eagerly, to pour out the torrent of opinions boiling within him, meant more than that Maisie should understand him. Maisie didn't understand him. She only laughed and joked with pretty inanity; but she let him talk. He talked about the books he liked and didn't like, about the advantages college men possessed over those who weren't college men, about what he knew of the banking system, about the good you conferred on the world and yourself when you saved your money and invested it. In none of these subjects was she interested; but now and then she could get a turn to talk of the movies, the new dances, and love. That these subjects made him uneasy was not, from Maisie's point of view, a reason for avoiding them.

Each was concerned with the other, but beyond the other each was concerned most of all with the mystery called Life. To live was what they were after, to live strongly and deeply and vividly and hotly, and to do it with the pinched means and narrow opportunities which were all they could command. In his secret heart Tom Whitelaw knew that Maisie Danker was not the girl out of all the world he would have sought of his own accord, while Maisie Danker was equally aware that this boy two years younger than herself couldn't be the generous provider she was looking for. They were only like shipwrecked passengers thrown together on an island. They must make the best of each other. No other girl, hardly any other human being except Honey, had entered the social isolation in which he was marooned, and as for her....

She was so cheery and game that she never referred to her home experiences otherwise than allusively. From allusions he gathered that she was not with her aunt, Mrs. Danker, merely for pleasure or from pressure of affection. Her father was living; her stepmother was living too. There was a whole step-family of little brothers and sisters. Her father drank; her stepmother hated her; there was no room for her at home. All her life she had been knocked about. Even when she worked in the woolen mills she couldn't keep her wages. She had had fellows, but none of them was ever any good. The best of them was a French Canadian who made big money, but he wouldn't marry her unless she "turned Catholic." "If he couldn't give up his church for me I couldn't give up mine for him; so there it was!" There was another fellow.... But as to him she said little. In speaking of him at all her face grew somber, which it did rarely. Either because he had failed her, or to get her out of his clutches, Tom was not sure which, her aunt had offered her a home for the winter. "Gee, it makes me laff," was her own sole comment on her miseries.

As Tom had dropped into the habit of telling her the small happenings of his uneventful life, he gave her, across the ice-cream sodas, an account of what had just occurred between himself and Guy and Hildred Ansley.

She listened with what for her was gravity. "You've got to give some of them society girls the cold glassy eye," she informed him, judicially. "If you don't you'll get it yourself, perhaps when you ain't expecting it."

"Oh, but this is only a little girl, not more than fourteen. She just seems grown up. That's the funny part of it."

"Not more than fourteen! Just seems grown up! Why, any of that bunch is forwarder at ten than I'd be at twenty. That's one thing I'd never be, not if men was scarcer than blue raspberries—forward. And yet some of them society buds'll be brassier than a knocker on a door."

"Oh, but this little Miss Ansley isn't that sort."

"You wouldn't know, not if she was running up and down your throat. Any girl can get hold of a man if she makes him think she needs him bad enough."

"It wasn't she who needed me; it was her brother."

"A brother'll do. A grandmother'd do. If you can't bait your hook with a feather fly, you can take a bit of worm. But once a fella like you begins to take a shine to one of them...."

"Shine to one of them! Me?"

"Well, I suppose you'll be taking a shine to some girl some day. Why shouldn't you?"

"If I was going to do that...."

The point at which he suspended his sentence was that which piqued her especially. Her eyes were provocative; her bright face alert.

"Well, if you were going to do that—what of it?"

The minute was one he was trying to evade. As clearly as if he were fifty, he knew the folly of getting himself involved in an emotional entanglement. Though he looked a young man, he was only a big boy. The most serious part of his preparation for life lay just ahead of him. If he didn't go to college....

And even more pressing than that consideration was the fact that in bringing Maisie to The Cherry Tree that afternoon he had come down to his last fifteen cents. At the beginning of their acquaintance he had had seven dollars and a half, hoarded preciously for needs connected with his education. Maisie had stampeded the whole treasure. To expect a man to spend money on her was as instinctive to Maisie as it is to a flower to expect the heavens to send rain. She knew that at each mention of the movies or The Cherry Tree Tom squirmed in the anguish of financial disability, and that from the very hint of love he bolted like a colt from the bridle; but when it came to what she considered as her due she was pitiless.

No epic has yet been written on the woes of the young man trying, on twenty-five dollars a week, let us say, to play up to the American girl's taste for spending money. His self-denials, his sordid shifts, his mortifications, his sense at times that his most unselfish efforts have been scorned, might inspire a series of episodes as tensely dramatic as those of Spoon River.

Tom had had one such experience on Maisie's birthday. She had talked so much of her birthday that a present became indispensable. To meet this necessity the extreme of his expenditure could be no more than fifty cents. To find for fifty cents something worthy of a lady already a connoisseur he ransacked Boston. Somewhere he had heard that a present might be modest so long as it was the best thing of its kind. The best thing of its kind he discovered was a toothbrush. It was not a common toothbrush except for the part that brushed the teeth. The handle was of mother-of-pearl, with an inlay in red enamel. The price was forty-five cents.

Maisie laughed till she cried. "A toothbrush! A toothbrush! For a present that's something new! Gee, how the girls'll laff when I go back to Nashua and tell them that that's what a guy give me in Boston!"

The humiliation of straitened means was the more galling to Tom Whitelaw, first because he was a giver, and then because he knew the value of money. With the value of money his mind was always playing, not from miserly motives, but from those of social economy. Each time he "blew in," as he called it, a dollar on the girl he said to himself: "If I could have invested that dollar, it would have helped to run a factory, and have brought me in six or seven cents a year for all the rest of my life." He made this calculation to mark the wastage he was strewing along his path in the wild pace he was running.

There was something about Maisie which obliged you to play up to her. She was that sort of girl. If you didn't play up, the mere laughter in her eye made you feel your lack of the manly qualities. It was not her scorn she brought into play; it was her sense of fun; but to the boy of sixteen her sense of fun was terrible.

It was terrible, and yet it put him on his guard. He couldn't wholly give in to her. If she could make moves he could make them too, and perhaps as adroitly. Her tantalizing question was ringing in his ears: If he was going to take a shine to any girl—what of it?

"Oh, if I was going to do that," he tossed off, "it would be to you."

"So that you haven't taken a shine to me—yet?"

"It depends on what you mean by a shine."

"What do you mean by it yourself?"

"I never have time to think." This was a happy sentiment, and a safeguard. "It takes all I can do to remember that I've got to go to college."

"Damn college!"

He was so unsophisticated that the expression startled him. He hadn't supposed young ladies used it, not any more than they sneaked into barns or under bridges to smoke cigarettes.

"What's the use of damning college, when I've got to go?"

"You haven't got to go. A great strong fella like you ought to be earning his twenty per by this time. If you've got money in the bank, as you say you have...."

He trembled already for his treasure. "I haven't got it here. It's in a savings bank in New York."

"Oh, that's nothing! If you got it anywheres you can get at it with a check. Gee, if I had a few hundreds I'd have ten in my pocket at a time, I'll be hanged if I wouldn't. I don't believe you've got it, see. I know a lot o' guys that loves to put that sort of fluff over on a girl. Makes 'em feel big. But if they only knew what the girl thinks of them...." She jumped to her feet, allowing herself a little more vulgarity than she generally showed. "All right, old son, c'me awn! Let's have another twist. And for Gawd's sake don't bring down that hoof of yours till I get a chance to pull my Cinderella-slipper out of your way."

XXVI

It was after he had spent the first ten dollars he drew from his fund in New York that Tom felt the impulse to tell Honey of the way in which he was becoming involved with Maisie Danker. The ten dollars had melted. In signing the formalities for drawing the amount, he expected to have enough to carry him along till spring, when Maisie's visit was to end. He dreaded its ending, and yet it would have this element of relief in it; he would be able to keep his money. At a pinch he could spare ten dollars, though he couldn't spare them very well. More than ten dollars....

And before he knew it the ten dollars had vanished as if into air. Once Maisie knew what he had done her caprices multiplied. To her as to him ten dollars to "blow in"—she used the airy expression too—was a small fortune. It was only their instincts that were different. His was to let it go slowly, since the spending of a penny was against the protests of his conscience; hers to make away with it. If Tom could "draw the juice" for a first ten, he could draw it for a second, and for a third and a fourth after that. It was not extravagance that whipped her on; it was joy of life.

Tom's impulse to tell Honey was not acted on. It was not acted on after he drew the second ten; nor after he drew the third. After he had drawn the fourth his unhappiness became so great that he sought a confidant.

And yet his unhappiness was not absolute; it was rather a poisoned bliss. Had Maisie been content with what he could afford, the winter would have been like one in Paradise. But almost before he himself was aware of the promptings of thrift, she vanquished them with her ridicule.

"There's nothing I hate so much as anything cheap. If a fella can't give me what I like, he can keep away."

Time and time again Tom swore he would keep away. He did keep away, for a day, for two or three days in succession. Then she would meet him in the dark hallway, and, twining her arms around his neck without a word, would give him one of those kisses on the lips which thrilled him into subjection. He would be guilty of any folly for her then, because he couldn't help himself. Ten, twenty, thirty, forty dollars, all the hoarded inheritance from the Martin Quidmore who was already a dim memory, would be well thrown away if only she would kiss him once again.

He lost the healthy diversion which might have reached him through the Ansleys because they had taken the fat boy to Florida. Tom learned that from little Miss Ansley a few days after the return of the father and mother from New York. One afternoon as both were coming from their schools they had met on their way toward Louisburg Square. Even in her outdoor dress, she was quaintly grown-up and Cambodian. A rough brown tweed had a little gold and a little red in it; a brown turban not unlike a fez bore on the left a small red wing tipped with a golden line. Maisie would have emphasized the red; she would have been vivid, eager to be noticed. This girl didn't need that kind of advertisement.

Seeing her before she saw him, he wondered whether she would give him any sign of recognition. At Harfrey the girls whom he saw at the Tollivants, and who proclaimed themselves "exclusive," always forgot him when they met him on the street. This had hurt him. He waited in some trepidation now, fearing to be hurt again. But when she saw him she nodded and smiled.

"Guy's better," she said, without greeting, "and we're all going off to Florida to-morrow. Guy and I don't want to go a bit; but mother's afraid of his catching cold, and father has to be in Washington, anyhow. So we're off."

Though he walked by her side for no more than a few yards, Tom was touched by her friendliness. She was the first girl of that section of the world for which he had only the term "society" who had not been ashamed to be seen with him in a street. Little Miss Ansley even paused for a minute at the foot of her steps while they exchanged remarks about their schools. She went to Miss Winslow's. She liked her school. She was sorry to be going away as it would give her such a lot of back work to make up. She might go to Radcliffe when Guy went to Harvard, but so far her mother was opposed to it. In these casual observations she seemed to Tom to lose something of her air of being a woman of the world. On his own side he lost a little of his awe of her.

The snuffing out of this interest threw him back on the easing of his heart by confidence. It was not confidence alone; it was also confession. He was deceiving Honey, and to go on deceiving Honey began to seem to him baser than dishonor. Had Honey been his father, it would have been different. Fathers worked for their sons as a matter of course, and almost as a matter of course expected that their sons would play them false. There was no reason why Honey should work for him; and since Honey did work for him, there was every reason why he who reaped the benefit should be loyal. He was not loyal. He had even reached the point, and he cursed himself for reaching it, at which Honey was an Old Man of the Sea fastened on his back.

He told himself that this was the damnedest ingratitude; and yet he couldn't tell himself that it wasn't so. It was. There were days when Honey's way of speaking, Honey's way of eating, the smell of Honey's person, and the black patch on his eye, revolted him. Here he was, a great lump of a fellow sixteen years of age, and dependent for everything, for everything, on a rough dock laborer who had been a burglar and a convict. It was preposterous. Had he jumped into this situation he would not have borne it for a week. But he had not jumped into it; it had grown. It had grown round him. It held him now as if with tentacles. He couldn't break away from it.

And yet Honey and he were bound to grow apart. It was in the nature of the case that it should be so. Always of a texture finer than Honey's, schooling, association, and habits of mind were working together to refine the grain, while Honey was growing coarser. His work, Tom reasoned, kept him not only in a rut but in a brutalizing rut. Loading and unloading, unloading and re-loading, he had less use for his mind than in the days of his freebooting. Then a wild ass of the desert, he was now harnessed to a dray with no relief from hauling it. From morning to night he hauled; from night to morning he was stupefied with weariness. In on this stupefaction Tom found it more and more difficult to break. He was agog with interests and ideas; for neither interests nor ideas had Honey any room.

Nor had he, so far as Tom could judge, any room for affection. On the contrary, he repelled it. "Don't you go for to think that I've give up bein' a socialist because I got a soft side. No, sir! That wouldn't be it at all. What reely made me do it was because it didn't pay. I'd make big money now and then; but once I'd fixed the police, the lawyers, and nine times out o' ten the judge, I wouldn't have hardly nothink for meself. If out o' every hundred dollars I was able to pocket twenty-five it'd be as much as ever. This 'ere job don't pay as well to start with; but then it haven't no expenses."

Self-interest and a vague sense of responsibility were all he ever admitted as a key to his benevolence. "It's along o' my bein' an Englishman. You can't get an Englishman 'ardly ever to be satisfied a'mindin' of his own business. Ten to one he'll do that and mind somebody else's at the same time. A kind o' curse that's on 'em, I often thinks. Once when I was doin' a bit—might 'a been at Sing Sing—a guy come along to entertain us. Recited poetry at us. And I recolleck he chewed to beat the band over a piece he called, 'The White Man's Burden.' Well, that's what you are, Kid. You're my White Man's Burden. I can't chuck yer, nor nothink. I just got to carry yer till yer can git along without me; and then I'll quit. The old bunch'll be as glad to see me back as I'll be to go. There's just one thing I want yer to remember, Kid, that when yer've got yer eddication there won't be nothink to bind me to you, nor—" he held himself very straight, bringing out his words with a brutal firmness—"nor you to me. Yer'll know I'll be as glad to go the one way as you'll be to go the t'other, so there won't be no 'ard feelin' on both sides."

It was a Sunday night. Tom had taken his troubles to bed with him, because he had nowhere else to take them. In bed you struck a truce with life. You suspended operations, at least for a few hours. You could sleep; you could postpone. He slept as a rule so soundly, and so straight through the night, that, hunted as he was by care, he had once in the twenty-four hours a refuge in which the fiendish thing couldn't overtake him.

It had been a trying Sunday because Maisie had tempted him to a wilder than usual extravagance. There was enough snow on the ground for sleighing. She had been used to sleighing in Nashua. The singing of runners and the jingling of bells, as a sleigh slid joyously past her, awakened her longing for the sport. By coaxing, by teasing, by crying a little, and, worst of all, by making game of him, she had induced him to find a place where he could hire a sleigh and take her for a ride.

Snow having turned to rain, and rain to frost, the landscape through which they drove was made of crystal. Every tree was as a tree of glass, sparkling in the sun. A deep blue sky, a keen dry wind, a little horse which enjoyed the outing as briskly as Maisie herself, made the two hours vibrant with the ecstasy of cold. All Tom's nerves were taut with the pleasure of the motion, of the air, of the skill, acquired chiefly at Bere, with which he managed the spirited young nag. The knowledge of what it was costing him he was able to thrust aside. He would enjoy the moment, and face the reckoning afterward. When he did face the reckoning, he found that of his fourth ten dollars he had spent six dollars and fifty-seven cents. Only three days earlier he had had the crisp clean bill unbroken in his hand....

He had been hardly able to eat his supper, and after supper the usual two hours of study to which he gave himself on Sunday nights were as time thrown away. Luckily, Honey's consideration left him the room to himself. Honey was like that. If Tom had to work, Honey effaced himself, in summer by sitting on the doorstep, in winter by going to bed. Much of Tom's wrestling with Virgil was carried on to the tune of Honey's snores.

This being Sunday evening, and Honey less tired than on the days on which he worked, he had gone to "chew the rag," as he phrased it, with a little Jew tailor, who lived next door to Mrs. Danker. Tom was aware that behind this the motive was not love for the Jew tailor, but zeal that he, Tom, should be interfered with as little as possible in his eddication. Tom's eddication was as much an obsession to Honey as it was to Tom himself. It was an overmastering compulsion, like that which sent Peary to find the North Pole, Scott to find the South one, and Livingstone and Stanley to cross Africa. What he had to gain by it had no place in his calculation. A machine wound up, and going automatically, could not be more set on its purpose than Lemuel Honeybun on his.

But to-night his absenting of himself was of no help to Tom in giving his mind to the translation from English into Latin on which he was engaged. When he found himself rendering the expression "in the meantime" by the words in turpe tempore, he pushed books and paper away from him, with a bitter, emphatic, "Damn!"

Though it was only nine, there was nothing for it but to go to bed. In bed he would sleep and forget. He always did. Putting out the gas, and pulling the bedclothes up around his ears, he mentally waved the white flag to his carking enemy.

But the carking enemy didn't heed the white flag; he came on just the same. For the first time in his life Tom Whitelaw couldn't sleep. Rolling from side to side, he groaned and swore at the refusal of relief to come to him. He was still wide awake when about half past ten Honey came in and re-lit the gas, surprised to see the boy already with his face turned to the wall. Not to disturb him, Honey moved round the room on tiptoe.

Tom lay still, his eyes closed. He loathed this proximity, this sharing of one room. In the two previous years he hadn't minded it. But he was older now, almost a man, able to take care of himself. Not only was he growing more fastidious, but the self-consciousness we know as modesty was bringing to the over-intimate a new kind of discomfort. Long meaning to propose two small separate rooms as not much dearer than the larger one, he had not yet come to it, partly through unwillingness to add anything to their expenses, and partly through fear of hurting Honey's feelings. But to-night the lack of privacy gave the outlet of exasperation to his less tangible discontents.

He rolled over on his back. One gas jet spluttered in the antiquated chandelier. Under it a small deal table was heaped with his books and strewn with his papers. Beside it stood an old armchair stained with the stains of many lodgers' use, the entrails of the seat protruding horribly between the legs. Two small chairs of the kitchen type, a wash-stand, a chest of drawers with a mirror hung above it, two or three flimsy rugs, and the iron cots on which they slept, made a setting for Honey, who sat beneath the gaslight, sewing a button on his undershirt. Turned in profile toward Tom, and wearing nothing but his drawers and socks, he bent above his work with the patience of a concentrated mind. He was really a fine figure of a man, brawny, hairy, spare, muscled like an athlete, a Rodin's Thinker all but the thought, yet irritating Tom as the embodiment of this penury.

So not from an impulse of confession, but to ease the suffering of his nerves, Tom told something about Maisie Danker. It was only something. He told of the friendship, of the dancing lessons, of the movies, of the sleigh-ride that afternoon, of the forty dollars drawn from the bank. He said nothing of their kisses, nor of the frenzy which he thought might be love. Honey pulled his needle up through the hole, and pushed it back again, neither asking questions nor looking up.

"I guess we'll move," was his only comment, when the boy had finished the halting tale.

This quietness excited Tom the more. "What do you want to move for?"

"Because there's dangers what the on'y thing you can do to fight 'em is to run away."

"Who said anything about danger? Do you suppose ...?"

In sticking in his needle Honey handled the implement as if it were an awl. "Do I suppose she's playin' the dooce with yer? No, Kid. She don't have to. You're playin' the dooce with yerself. It's yer age. Sixteen is a terr'ble imagination age."

"Oh, if you think I'm framing the whole thing...."

"No, I don't. Yer believes it all right. On'y it ain't quite so bad as what yer think. It don't do to be too delikit with women. Got to bat 'em away as if they was flies, when they bother yer too much. Once let a woman in on yer game and yer 'and can be queered for good."

"Did I say anything about letting a woman in on my game?"

"No, yer on'y said she'd slipped in. It's too late now to keep her out. She's made the diff'rence."

"What difference?"

Honey threaded his needle laboriously, held up the end of the thread to moisten it with his lips, and tied a knot in it. "The diff'rence in you. Yer ain't the same young feller what yer was six months ago. You and me has been like one," he went on, placidly. "Now we're two. Been two this spell back. Couldn't make it out, no more'n Billy-be-damned; and now I see. The first girl."

Tom lashed about the bed.

"It was bound to come; and that's why—yer've arsked me about it onst or twice, so I may as well tell yer—that's why I never lets meself get fond o' yer. Could'a did it just as easy as not. When a man gits to my age a young boy what's next o' kin to him—why, he'll seem like as if 'twould be his son. But I wouldn't be ketched. 'Honey,' I says to meself, 'the first girl and you'll be dished.'"

"Oh, go to blazes!"

Having finished his button, Honey made it doubly secure by winding the thread around it. "Not that I blame yer, Kiddy. I ain't never led no celebrant life meself, not till I had to take you on, and cut out all low company what wouldn't 'a been good for you. But I figured it out that we might 'a got yer through college before yer fell for it. Well, we ain't. Maybe now we'll not git yer to college at all. But we'll make a shy at it. We'll move."

"If you think that by moving you'll keep me from seeing her again...."

"No, son, not no more'n I could keep yer from cuttin' yer throat by lockin' up yer razor. Yer could git another razor. I know that. All the same, it'd be up to me, wouldn't it, not to leave no razors layin' round the room, where yer could put yer 'and on 'em?"

This settling of his destiny over his head angered Tom especially.

"I can save you the trouble of having me on your mind any more. To-morrow I'll be out on my own. I'm going to be a man."

"Sure, you're going to be a man—in time. But yer ain't a man yet."

"I'm sixteen. I can do what any other fellow of sixteen can do."

"No fella of sixteen can do much."

"He can earn a living."

"He can earn part of a livin'. How many boys of sixteen did yer ever know that could swing clear of home and friends and everythink, and feed and clothe and launder theirselves on what they made out'n their job?"

"Well, I can try, can't I?"

"Oh, yes, yer can try, Kid. But if you was me, I wouldn't cut loose from nobody, not till I'd got me 'and in."

Tom raised himself on his elbow, his eyes, beneath their protruding horizontal eyebrows, aglitter with the wrath which puts life and the world out of focus.

"I am going to cut loose. I'm going to be my own master."

"Are you, Kid? How much of yer own master do yer expect to be, on the ten or twelve per yer'll git to begin with—if yer gits that?"

"Even if it was only five or six per, I'd be making it myself."

"And what about college?"

"College—hell!"

The boy fell back on his pillow. Feeling he had delivered his ultimatum, he waited for a reply. But Honey only stowed away his sewing materials in a little black box, after which he pulled off the articles of clothing he continued to wear, and set about his toilet for the night. At the sound of his splashing water on his face Tom muttered to himself: "God, another night of this will kill me."

Honey spoke through the muffling of the towel, while he dried his face. "Isn't all this fuss what I'm tellin' yer? The minute a girl gits in on a young feller's life there's hell to pay. That's why I'd like yer to steer clear of 'em as long as yer can hold out."

Tom shut his eyes, buried his face in the pillow, and affected not to hear.

"They don't mean to do no harm; they're just naterally troublesome. Seems as if they was born that way, and couldn't 'elp theirselves. There's a lot of 'em as is never satisfied till they've got a man like a jumpin'-jack, what all they need to do is to pull the string to make him jig. This girl is one o' them kind."

Tom continued to hold his peace.

"I've saw her. Pretty little thing she is all right. But give her two or three years. Lord love you, Kid, she'll be as washed out then as one of her own ribbons after a hard rain. And yet them is the kind that most young fellers'll run after, like a pup'll run after a squirrel."

Tom was startled. The figure of speech had been used to him before. He could hear it drawled in a tired voice, soft and velvety. It was queer what conclusions about women these grown men came to! Quidmore had thought them as dangerous as Honey, and warned him against them much as Honey was doing now. Mrs. Quidmore had once been what Maisie was at that minute, and yet as he, Tom, remembered her.... But Honey was going on again, spluttering his words as he brushed his teeth.

"It can be awful easy to git mixed up with a girl, and awful hard to git unmixed. She'll put a man in a hole where he can't help doin' somethink foolish, and then make out as what she've got a claim on him. There's a lot o' talk about women bein' the prey o' men; but for one woman as I've ever saw that way I've saw a hundred men as was the prey o' women. Now when a girl of eighteen gits a young boy like you to spend the money as he's saved for his eddication...."

The boy sprang up in bed, hammering the bedclothes. "Don't you say anything against her. I won't listen to it."

With that supple tread which always made Tom think of one who could easily slip through windows, Honey walked to the closet where he kept his night-shirt. "'Tain't nothink agin her, Kid. Was on'y goin' to say that a girl what'll git a young boy to do that shows what she is. And yer did spend the money a-takin' her about, now didn't yer?"

Tom fell back upon his pillow. Putting out the gas, Honey threw himself on his creaking cot.

"You're a free boy, Kiddy," he went on, while arranging the sheet and blanket as he liked them. "If yer wants to beat it to-morrer, beat it away. Don't stop because yer'll be afraid I'll miss yer. Wasn't never no hand for missin' no one, and don't mean to begin. What I'd 'a liked have been to fill yer up with eddication so that yer could jaw to beat the best of 'em, if yer turned out to be the Whitelaw baby."

Tom had almost forgotten who the Whitelaw baby was. Not since that Sunday afternoon nearly three years ago had Honey ever mentioned him. The memory having come back, he made an inarticulate sound of impatience, finally snuggling to sleep.

He tried to think of Maisie, to conjure up the rose in her cheeks, the laughter in her eyes; but all he saw, as he drifted into dreams, was the quaint Cambodian face of little Hildred Ansley. Only once did Honey speak again, muttering, as he too fell asleep:

"We'll move."

XXVII

They did not move for the reason that Maisie did. Not for forty-eight hours did Tom learn of her departure. As Mrs. Danker kept not a boarding house but a rooming house, and her guests went days at a time without seeing their landlady, he had no sources of information when Maisie, as she sometimes did, kept herself out of sight. Watching for her on the Monday and the Tuesday following his Sunday night talk with Honey, he thought it strange that she never appeared in the hallway, though he had no cause to be alarmed. He was going to leave Honey, get a job, and be independent. When he had added a little more to his fund in New York, he would propose to Maisie, and marry her if she would take him. He would be eighteen, perhaps nineteen by the time he was able to do this, an early, but not an impossible, age at which to be a husband.

On both these days he had gone to school from force of habit, but on the Wednesday he was surprised by a letter. Though he had never seen Maisie's writing, the postmark said Nashua. Before tearing the envelope he had a premonition of her flight.

A telegram on Monday morning had bidden her come home at once, as her stepmother was dying. She had died. Till her father married again, which she supposed would be soon, she would have to care for the four little brothers and sisters. That was all. On paper Maisie was laconic.

Since his mother's death no revolution in his inner life had upset the boy like this. The Tollivant experience had only left him a little hard and skeptical; that with the Quidmores had passed like the rain and the snow, scarcely affecting him. With Honey his need for affection had always been unfed, and for reasons he could not fathom. Maisie had made the give and take of life easy, natural. She had her limitations, her crude, and sometimes her cruel, insistences; but she liked him. He loved her. He was ready to say it now, because of the blank her loss had hollowed in his life. For the unformed, growing hot-blooded human thing to have nothing on which to spend itself is anguish. Sitting down at his deal table, he wrote to her out of a heart fuller and more passionate than poor Maisie could ever have understood.

All he had been planning in rebellion against fate he poured out now as devotion. He had meant to cut loose, to go to work, to live on nothing, to save his money, and be ready to marry her in a year or two. And yet, on second thoughts, if he went through college, their position in the end would be so much better that perhaps the original plan was the best one. He thought only of her, and of what would make her happiest. He loved her—loved her—loved her.

Maisie wrote back that she saw no harm in their being engaged, and she wouldn't press him for a ring till he felt himself able to give her one. For herself she didn't care, but if she told the girls she was engaged to a fellow, and had no ring to corroborate her word, she wouldn't be believed. In case he ever felt equal to the purchase she was sending him the size in the circlet of thread inclosed.

Tom was heroic. He had never thought of a ring, and a ring would mean more money. Be it so! He would spend more money. He would spend more money if he mortgaged his whole future to procure it. Maisie should not be shamed among her friends in Nashua.

Giving all his free hours to wandering about and pricing rings, he found them less expensive than he feared. Maisie having once confided to him her longing for a diamond, a diamond he meant to make it if it cost him fifty dollars. But he found one for twenty, as big as a small pea, and flashing in the sunshine like a lighthouse. The young Jew who sold it assured him that it would have cost a hundred, except for a tiny flaw which only an expert could detect. On its reception Maisie was delighted. He felt himself almost a married man.

The rest of the winter went by peaceably. With Honey he declared a truce of God. He would go to college, and live up to all that had been planned; but Honey must look on his own self-sacrifice as of the nature of a loan which would be repaid. Honey was ready to promise anything, while, in the hope of getting through college in three years instead of four, Tom worked with increased zeal. Then, one day, when spring had come round, he stumbled on Guy and Hildred Ansley.

It was in Louisburg Square, as usual. Having arrived from the south the night before, they were sailing soon for Europe.

"Rotten luck!" the fat boy complained. "Got to trail a tutor along too, so that I shan't fall down on the Harvard exam when it comes. Wish I was you."

"If you were Mr. Whitelaw, Guy," his sister reminded him, "you'd find something else to worry you. We all have our troubles, haven't we, Mr. Whitelaw?"

"She's got nothing to worry her," the brother protested. "If she was me, with mother scared all the time that I'll be too hot or too cold or too tired or too hungry, or that some damn thing or other'll make me sick...."

"All the same," Tom broke in, "it's something to have a mother to make a fuss."

The girl looked sympathetic. "You haven't, have you?"

"Oh, I get along."

"Guy says you live with a guardian."

"You may call him a guardian if you like, but the word is too big. You only have a guardian when you've something to guard, and I haven't anything."

"Yes, but how did you ever ...?"

Once more Tom said to himself, "It's the way she looks at you." He knew what she was trying to ask him, and in order to be open and aboveboard, he gave her the few main facts of his life. He did it briefly, hurriedly, throwing emphasis only on the point that, to keep him from becoming a State ward the second time, his stevedore friend had brought him to Boston and sent him to school.

"He must be an awfully good man!"

He was going to tell her that he was when the brother gave the talk another twist.

"What are you going to do in your holidays?"

"Work, if I can find a job."

"What kind of job?"

He explained that for the last two summers he had worked round the Quincy and Faneuil Hall markets, but that he had outgrown them. A two-fisted, he-man's job was what he would look for now, and had no doubt that he would get it.

"After you've left Harvard what are you going to be?"

"Banking's what I'd like best, but most likely I'll have to make it barbering. What are you going to be yourself?"

"Oh, I've got to be a corporation lawyer. My luck! Just because dad'll have the business to take me into."

"But what would you like better?"

The piggy face broke into one of its captivating grins. "Hanged if I know, unless it'd be an orphan and an only child."

The meeting was important because of what it led to. A few days later Tom heard the wheezy girlish voice calling behind him in the street: "Tom! Tom!"

He turned and walked back. During the winter the fat boy had expanded, not so much in height as in girth and jelliness. He came up, puffing from his run.

"Can you drive a car?"

Tom hesitated. "I don't know that you'd call it driving a car. I can drive—after a fashion. Mr. Quidmore used to let me run his Ford, when we were alone in it, and no one was looking. Since then I've sometimes driven the market delivery teams for a block or two, nothing much, just to see what it was like. I know I could pick it up with a few lessons. I'm a natural driver—a horse or anything. Why?"

"Because my old man said that if you could drive, he might help you get your summer's job."

"Where? What kind of job?"

"I don't know. He said that if you wanted to talk it over to come round to our house this evening at nine o'clock."

At nine that evening Tom was shown up into another of those rooms which marked the gulf between his own way of living and that of people like the Ansleys, and at the same time woke the atavistic pang. His impression was only a blurred one of comfort, color, shaded lights, and richness. From the many books he judged that it was what they would call the library, but any judgment was subconscious because the human presences came first. A man wearing a dinner jacket and scanning an evening paper was sunk into one deep armchair; in another a lady, demi-décolletée, was reading a book. It was his first intimation that people ever wore what he called "dress-clothes" when dining only with their families.

He was announced by Pilcher, who had led him upstairs. "This is the young man, sir."

Having reached something like friendly terms with the son and daughter, Tom had expected from the parents the kind of courtesy shown to strangers when you shake hands with them and ask them to sit down. Mr. Ansley only let the paper drop to his knees with an "Oh!" in response to the butler, and looked up.

"You're the young fellow my son has spoken of. He tells me you can drive a car."

Repeating what he had already said to Guy as to his experience with cars, Tom expressed confidence in his ability to obtain a license, if it should become worth his while.

"It wouldn't be difficult driving such as you get in the crowded parts of a city. It would be chiefly station work, over country roads."

He explained himself further. In the New Hampshire summer colony where the Ansleys had their place, the residents were turning a large country house into an inn which would be like a club, or a club which would be like an inn. It would not be open to ordinary travelers, since ordinary travelers would bring in people whom they didn't want. The guests would be their own friends, duly invited or introduced. He, Mr. Ansley, was chairman of the motor-car committee, but as he was going to Europe he was taking up the matter in advance. On general grounds he would have preferred an older man and one with more experience, but the inn-club was a new undertaking and not too well financed. More experienced men would cost more money. For the station work they could afford but eighty dollars a month, with a room in the garage, and board. Moreover, the jobs they could offer being only for the summer, the promoters hoped that a few young men and women working for their own education might take advantage of the scheme.

Eighty dollars a month, with a room to himself, even if it had only been in a stable, and board in addition, glittered before Tom's eyes like Aladdin's treasure house. Having thanked Mr. Ansley for the kind suggestion, he assured him he could give satisfaction if taken on. All the chauffeurs who had let him have a few minutes at the steering-wheel had told him that he possessed the eye, the nerve, and the quickness which make a good driver, in addition to which he knew that he did himself.

"How old are you?"

It was a question Tom always found difficult to answer. He could remember when his birthday had been on the fifth of March; but his mother had told him that that had been Gracie's birthday, and had changed his own to September. Later she had shifted to May, to a day, so she told him, when all the nurses had had their children in the Park, and the lilacs had been in bloom. He had never asked her the year, not having come to reckoning in years before she was taken from him. Though latterly he had been putting his birthday in May, he now shifted back to March, so as to make himself older.

"I'm seventeen, sir."

Mrs. Ansley spoke for the first time. "He looks more than that, doesn't he?"

Tom turned to the lady who filled a large armchair with a person suggesting the quaking, flabby consistency of cornstarch pudding. "I suppose that's because I've knocked about so much."

"The hard school does give you experience, doesn't it, but it's a cruel school."

He remembered his promise to Guy, if ever he got the opportunity. "Boys can stand a good deal of cruelty, ma'am. Nine times out of ten it does them good."

"Still there's always a tenth case."

He smiled. "I think I ought to have made it ten times out of ten. I never saw the boy yet who wasn't all the better for fighting his way along."

Mrs. Ansley's mouth screwed itself up like Guy's when it looked as if he were going to cry. "Fight? Why, I think fighting's something horrid. Why can't boys treat each other like gentlemen?"

"I suppose, ma'am, because they're not gentlemen."

The cornstarch pudding stiffened to the firmness of ice-cream. "Excuse me! My boy couldn't be anything but a gentleman."

"He couldn't be anything but a sport. He is a fighter, ma'am—when he gets the chance."

"Then I hope he won't often get it."

"But, Sunshine," Mr. Ansley intervened, "you don't make any allowance for differences in standards. You're a woman of forty-five. Guy's a boy of sixteen—he's practically seventeen, like Whitelaw here—your name is Whitelaw, isn't it?—and yet you want him to have the same tastes and ways as yourself."

"I don't want him to have brutal tastes and ways."

"It's a pretty brutal world, ma'am, and if he's going to take his place he'll have to get used to being hammered and hammering back."

"Which is what I object to. If you train boys to be courteous with each other from the start...."

"They'll be quite ladylike when they get into the stock exchange or the prize ring. Look here, Sunshine! The country's over feminized as it is. It's run by women, or by men who think as women, or by men who're afraid of women. Congress is full of them; the courts are full of them; the churches—the churches above all!—are full of them; and you'd make it worse. If Guy hadn't the stuff in him that he has...."

Mrs. Ansley was more than ever like a cornstarch pudding, quivering and undulating, when she rose. "You make it very hard for me, Philip. I was going to ask Whitelaw, here, if when he's anywhere where Guy is—I know Guy will have to go among young men, of course—he'd keep an eye on him, and protect him."

"He doesn't need protection, ma'am. He can take his own part as easily as I can take mine. If there's a row he likes to be in it; and if he's licked he doesn't mind it. If he only had a chance...."

She raised her left hand palm outward, in a gesture of protest. "Thank you! I'm not asking advice as to my own son."

Sailing from the room with the circumambient dignity of ladies when they wore the crinoline, she left Tom with the crestfallen sense of presumption. Half expecting to be ordered from the room, he turned toward his host, who, however, simply reverted to the subject of the summer. He told Tom where he could have lessons in driving, adding that he would charge them to club expenses, as he would the uniform Tom would have to wear. When Mr. Ansley picked up his paper the young man knew the interview was over. With a half-articulate, "Good-night, sir," to which there was no response, he turned and left the room.

The occasion left him with much to think of, chiefly on his own account. It marked his status more clearly than anything that had happened to him yet. He had not been shaken hands with; he had not been asked to sit down. He had not been greeted on arriving; his "good-night" had not been acknowledged when he went away. Mr. Ansley had called him Whitelaw, which was all very well; but when Mrs. Ansley did it, the use of the name was significant. This must be the way in which rich people treated their servants.

Here he had to reason with himself as to what he had been looking for. It was not for recognition on a footing of equality. Of course not! He had no objection to being a servant, since he needed the money. He objected to ... and yet it was not quite tangible. He didn't mind standing up; he didn't mind the absence of a greeting; he didn't mind any one thing in itself. He minded the combination of assumptions, all fusing into one big assumption that he was in essence their inferior. Having this assumption so strongly in their minds, they couldn't but betray it when they spoke to him.