PART I

THE WAY OF ALL EARTH

1

Five o’clock; and the lethargic slowness of the afternoon changed into activity with the abruptness with which light comes after the turning of an electric switch. The girls at the desks in the outer room—no bobbed locks in those days, but grotesque oddities of coiffure drooping low over foreheads and strangely puffed out over ears—stood up so unanimously, so instantly, that it was plain they had been waiting for the hands of the clock to mark the hour of liberation. The fugue of typewriters stopped; voices and the shuffling of feet sounded another rhythm. A stenographer closed a door behind her, came forward with red-ruled notebook and pencil and made her way to a desk near a window, a dissatisfied look on her face; she would have to get off those letters before she went home. Men opened and closed the drawers of their desks; then they, too, followed the girls down the stairs. One of them raised his arms and yawned.

“This spring weather gets you,” said he.

But nobody answered. The moment of release had come; in every man’s mind was the thought of getting away, just as eight hours before they had all been motivated by the idea of getting to work.

“Take the ferry?” Brice Denison asked a man whose shoulders brushed his as they went out the door.

“Tube’s quicker,” the other said.

“Well, I’ve got some grass seed to get.” He plunged into the human stream rushing westward, battling against the other stream forging to the east. Sometimes he could thread his way a step or two ahead of someone in front; sometimes he could do no more than keep pace with the onward moving crowd—a long step, a dozen short ones, looking for a gap, taking it, held again, then on. A street or two crossed, and the eastward stream grew less; it was possible to make better progress, to dodge more, to pass a couple of girls or a man; to walk swiftly under metal projections where halves of beef hung, and hogs with their sides held out by wooden pieces displayed the inner sheathing of their ribs, and crates and baskets of vegetables lay open to the dust, and fruit stands were piled high with oranges and apples, and vendors’ carts lined the curb with boxed strawberries. The air freshened as Brice reached the street lined on one side with ferries. He paused at the door of a shop, and stood for a moment looking at the blue and purple and yellow blooms.

“I’ll take a couple of those,” he said, and thrust his hand into a trousers-pocket.

Then over the broad street to the ferry house. Under a stairway the boy from whom he always bought the evening paper. He was recognized; the paper he wanted was snatched from the pile and thrust at him, his coins dropped into a waiting hand. Not a second was lost. Men hurrying to the ferry must not be delayed. Moments were precious, invaluable. They were hastening home.

There were trains waiting on the other side. The ferry docked. Men rushed off, parting to right and left. Some glanced at the clock, then began to walk more slowly; others raced, and others went stolidly on their way, through the gates, on to forward cars. The forward cars got there a moment sooner. Brice found a seat, put his baskets of pansies in the rack overhead, unfolded his evening paper. Other men were doing the same thing. Their movements might have been directed as by an orchestra leader. Headlines, first—they had seen them on news-stands, in other men’s hands, glanced at them in ferry or tube; then in unison, with a swishing sound, up and down the car the papers were turned, folded. The base-ball season was open. Tired men, with no time for play, lost themselves in the printed accounts of the game. The train moved out, a few late-comers passing along the aisle in the hope of finding seats. A hand fell on Brice’s shoulder.

“Why—hello there, Ned!” he said, as the other took the place at his side. “Haven’t seen you for ages!” A wave of self-consciousness passed over him; that was an inapt thing to say: no, he had not seen Ned Allen for ages. But the other man ignored any awkwardness there might have been.

“How’s things?” he asked. “How’s Anne?”

“Fine, fine! How’s Mabel?”

“She’s well. Billy’s had measles. I see you’re still the same old farmer, Brice!”

Brice glanced overhead at his pansies. “Yes. But I had to buy a lawn-mower when we moved, Ned. Gosh—those were great old days!”

The other grinned. “Yes. I miss your tool chest. Like your new house?”

“Not so new, now. Three years, nearly four, isn’t it? By Jove, it’s five!”

“Five—so it is! We still miss you. Movies near you?”

“Yes. Oh, yes. Anne’s sort of lost interest. Things come along, you know. You meet people, all that. I tell you what, Ned. We want you and Mabel to come up to dinner some night. Make it soon.”

“That’s indefinite. We’ll do better than that. Anything on tonight?”

“Not a thing.”

“Well then, you and Anne hop on a train and come down. Or maybe you keep a car?”

“No such luck!” said Brice, with a comforting warmth suddenly flaring within him; they had no car yet, but things were coming along.

“All right. You come down, and we’ll all go to the movies. Have a bite on the chafing-dish afterwards. We’ve got a new one—electric. Be like old times.”

“We’ll do it!” said Brice, as the train stopped and Allen arose. “In time for the second show, anyway.”

He did not open his paper again. Good, that, to meet Ned, especially today. Good to think of old times. That little two-family house, Ned and Mabel in the apartment above. The lawn-mower that he borrowed from Ned when his turn came to cut the small plot of grass. The tools that Ned borrowed in turn. Mabel and Anne going shopping together, sometimes on a matinée spree in town; small triumphs shared, simple pleasures—good old times, particularly good to think about tonight. Good to have had them, good to have gone on to something else; good, very good, still to be going on.

The train stopped at his station; he thrust his newspaper into a hip-pocket, took down the baskets of flowers. A short walk along the side of the tracks, a turn to the left and a block or two—it was not far to his house; its convenience had been one of their reasons for choosing it, but now its nearness to things had become insignificant. Its importance, its meaning had grown. It represented something more than any other house on the street, even than the other houses that he passed on the more important street. He never turned into the by-street without a quickening of the pulse. His eye never caught the gray stucco front with its roof of red tiles coming oddly down in a sweep incongruously borrowed from the Chinese without a warm sense of satisfaction. That house was not like other houses; it was not like any other house on that street, even. They were all set on low terraces. Some were shingled, some stuccoed; some had red roofs, and others had brown; some were painted in gray or yellow, with white trimmings and green blinds; some had two smaller windows on the front porch, some had one larger. Those differences were due to the effulgence of the builder’s imagination and to the real-estate man’s knowledge of salesmanship. This was a neighborhood that was meant for nice people with moderate incomes; at the time the houses were built there were no garages, though later several owners had built them, of cement or corrugated metal, in the tiny back yards. People who lived in nice neighborhoods, however convenient to the commuters’ trains, did not want to live in houses like all the other houses on the street. The floor plans of all those on Lammermoor Place were as like as right and left gloves; but outside no two were alike. Individuality was the keynote; individuality and a certain smart look. That was what made for quick sales. No need of substantial building. Looks, looks—that was what counted. It had counted with Brice and Anne; but now the house had taken upon itself for Brice a personality of its own. It was home. He was going home tonight with grass-seed for that bare spot on the lawn, and with pansies, and with something else. Anne would be pleased.

A little girl on roller skates skidded up to him as he turned the corner, threw herself upon him. He laughed, held out his hand, and the child set her feet together and let him drag her along.

“Mrs. Denison’s just come home. She came in an automobile,” she said. “See—? She hasn’t got out yet, but she’s there.”

A long gray runabout, “the latest sports model,” was at the curb in front of his house. Brice dropped the child’s hands as he reached it. His eyes met Anne’s.

“I’ve brought her safe home, you see,” said the man at the wheel.

“Thanks,” said Brice, dryly, without smiling.

Anne jumped down, spoke a laughing word of farewell over her shoulder. They went up the walk together. But in the hall she turned to him with a look of resentment that was like a hand thrusting him away.

“I think you might have been ordinarily polite to Ranney,” she said.

“I thought I was,” said Brice; but without replying Anne started upstairs. He set his baskets of pansies on the hall table. From the landing where the stairs turned she looked down.

“Of course if you really want to make a white spot on the hall table it’s quite all right to put those wet things there,” she said. He hastily took them up. “I can’t see why you like to come home looking like a delivery boy, anyway,” she added, and went on up to her room.

Brice carried the pansies through a swinging door into the kitchen. “Hello, Lucille,” he said to a young colored woman who turned from the stove to greet him with an exceptional dental display.

“My, ain’t them pretty!” she said.

“Yes. I’m going to plant them along the porch.”

“That’ll be grand! Mis’ Denison’s awful fond of flowers.”

“Got a tumbler or something?” Brice asked; he began picking off some of the larger blossoms. The girl brought him a small slim vase which he held under the faucet. Water splashed into the sink, spattered over his hands and coat.

“I’ll wipe you off,” said Lucille. “That faucet cuts up all the time.”

“Needs a new washer,” said Brice. “I’ll fix it tonight.” He carried the little vase into the dining-room, and in the doorway stopped short. There were flowers on the table, white lilacs and deep red roses, and thrust between them some purple orchids, such a forced mingling of the seasons as only the very rich can achieve. But Brice did not know that. He wondered vaguely what Anne had paid for them. Then he set his pansies in front of her place.

She came down in a moment; she was always deft in her changes of costume. It had not taken long, but she was fresh and elusively fragrant in a gown Brice had not seen before. She was smiling.

“You forgot to kiss me when you came in!” said she.

“I can make up for that,” Brice said. “You look like a party!”

“This?” she shrugged, turned herself about. “Do you like me?”

“You bet I like you!”

Lucille came in at the moment, and Anne slid into her chair at the table. She glanced at the pansies, set the vase out of the way. During the meal their talk was only casual. For the past few years Anne had insisted that their one maid should wait upon the table as nearly as possible in the manner of the more highly-paid and trained servants of her friends. For a time Brice found the result diverting. Often it was ludicrous enough. But even a humorous thing may become irksome; when the novelty began to wear off, he had protested.

“Oh, let the girl eat her dinner in peace, Nance,” he said, “and give us a chance to be human and talk. I’m getting fed up with having her stand there by the pantry door, listening to every word we say, and staring at me every time I put the fork to my mouth like a dog waiting for a bone. Call it off, can’t you?”

“No,” said Anne, decidedly. “If I don’t train her properly while we are alone, what can we do when we have guests?”

“Let ’em get along as we do. Why not?”

“That’s absurd,” she replied.

It was not until their evening meal was ended and they went into the greater freedom of the living-room that there was anything more than broken, polite exchanges of phrases between them. Brice’s gift of small talk was largely lacking, and he saw that Anne had something on her mind. She was always preoccupied, when she had something on her mind.

“Coffee in the living-room, Lucille,” Anne said to the girl, from the doorway.

Brice, already lighting his pipe, chuckled. Dinner had rested him. His sense of humor was uppermost again, and Anne was lovely in the light-colored gown. “You do keep it up, don’t you, old girl? You’re a wonder!”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

He looked at her quizzically over the flaming match. “Coffee—and drawing-room. Gosh!” said he.

“Oh, I see the absurdity of it as well as you do,” she retorted. “This room——!”

Brice sobered a little. “Nothing the matter with this room,” he declared. “You’re a great hand at making a place home-like, old lady. Mighty cozy in here.”

She looked at him for a moment; then she asked, quietly, “Is that really your ideal, Brice? Cozy?”

“Well, why not? Looks good to me.”

She bit her lip, crossed the floor to press the little button in an electric lamp. He looked after her, added, “Not that I don’t wish it were—well, finer, and larger, and all that—for your sake.”

She came slowly back. He had thrown himself into a stuffed arm-chair which was worn into a permanent impress of his figure. They had bought it during the first year of their marriage, made an event of buying it, called it his birthday present, that birthday being two months in the future. He had never been willing to have it banished to those regions above where most of their early purchases filled spaces that would otherwise be vacantly gaping. Pipe-smoke was whirling about his head. He looked at her through its comforting haze.

“Look here, Nance,” he said. “Old Grant is going to resign. I’ve asked for his job.”

Instantly her expression changed.

“Oh, Brice! That will give us—how much does he get?”

“Well, twelve hundred, maybe fifteen hundred, more than I’m getting. But I suppose they wouldn’t start me off with that, you know. Getting the job’s the first thing.”

“But you will get it. Of course you will. And even twelve hundred more! Oh, Brice!”

“Don’t count on it too soon, old girl. There’s Farren, you know. He has more right to it than I have. And there’s always the chance of their bringing in a man from outside.”

“Oh! That wouldn’t be fair! And you’ve been there longer than Farren. Twelve hundred——”

The colored maid, with her cap awry and a grin on her face, at that moment backed through the portières that separated the dining-room from the living-room, bearing a tray too large for the two coffee-cups it held. She swung around to face Anne, and the coffee splashed over the rims of the cups to the saucers.

“Where you want it at?” she asked, cheerily.

“I will take it,” said Anne, with dignity, fully conscious of her husband’s suppressed amusement. “And the smaller tray next time, Lucille.”

The girl disappeared. “None of that for me,” said Brice. “Keeps me awake.”

Anne’s eyelids flickered. “You will need it tonight,” said she. “We are going out.”

“That’s so!” said Brice, cheerfully, reaching up for a cup. “How’d you know? Seen Mabel?”

She looked at him, plainly surprised. “Mabel?”

“Yes, Mabel. Ran into old Ned on the train. Said he and Mabel had been wanting us over in the evening for a long time, and why not tonight. So I said we’d go. Of course. Don’t like to drop away from old friends.”

Old friends. Ned, and Mabel. There flashed across Anne’s mind those first years of their married life, when she and Brice had had the downstairs apartment; those days when Ned was beginning his career of selling insurance, when Brice had been so triumphant over getting the new job with Whitten & Company. Yes, they were old friends. They had shared the lawn-mower, taken turns in clearing off the snow, gone to the movies together, compared the price of groceries, run in and out half a dozen times a day. Those grubby years, that she was so glad to have come away from. She hated to be reminded of them.

“I’m sorry, Brice, I promised Tessie Ogden we’d go there for bridge.”

“Oh, but look here! Mrs. Ogden won’t mind. Can’t hurt old Ned’s feelings.”

“I don’t want to hurt them. We’ll have them here to dinner some time.”

“But it’s been years since we were there, Nance. And I said we’d go. They’ll have gotten things ready—you know how hospitable Mabel is.”

Anne knew. The latest record for the phonograph, perhaps a game of five-hundred or the movies, and at the end of the evening something on the chafing-dish, with Mabel explaining where she had discovered the recipe. Anne knew all of it. The scurrying of Mabel to get things in order, Ned hurrying across the tracks to the delicatessen store. Mabel’s discussion with ten-year-old Florence about bed-time, Billy’s calls for a drink of water. An endless retailing of jokes Ned had read in the paper, by way of conversation. Oh, Anne knew it all; whenever she thought of it she thanked the stars of her destiny that they had helped her get away from it. Even as it was, she had not got very far; but not back to that, not back to that. She thought of Tessie Ogden, with her languid voice, thought of the richness of Tessie’s house, of the people who would be there.

“I’ll telephone Mabel, Brice,” she said. “I can’t possibly disappoint Tessie.”

Brice sat up. His pipe had gone out, and he sent an exploring thumb into its depths. “I can’t see Tessie’s being disappointed, Nance, by our not turning up. But Mabel—and old Ned——”

“I’m sorry, Brice. We shall have to go to Tessie’s. It’s bridge.”

“Well—that’s all the more reason, then. I told you before, Nance, I am not going to play bridge with that bunch.”

She got up, moved about restlessly. If only Brice would not make himself so hard to manage.

“Oh, you need not be afraid, this time, of losing,” she said. “Tessie told me to say that she’d be your partner. She always wins.”

Brice stood up, crossed to the mantel for tobacco. “Sweet thing, Tessie,” said he.

Anne flared. “She’s no worse than the facts. The fact is that my husband is too—too——”

Brice supplied the word. “Stingy.”

“You said it, not I! But there it is, and everybody knows it, taunts me about it. Laughs at me, probably, when I’m not there.”

“What do you care?” Brice looked at her with an oddly lifted eyebrow, a trick of his that she used to love. Now it exasperated her because it was always the sign that Brice was opposing his will to hers. “What do you care what those people think or even say, Nance? What the dickens do they matter?”

“They are my friends.”

“But are they? What do they mean to you, what would they do for you, what——”

“Tessie, at least, would play as my husband’s partner to keep him from losing.”

Brice sat down. He leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, his fingers fumbling over his pipe, his eyes on an unimportant figure of the rug.

“Anne,” he said slowly, after a moment of thought, “it does seem funny to have to try to make you understand. Can’t you, without our saying anything?”

She managed to smile; one prettily shod foot was swaying a little. “But if you play with Tessie, Brice, this time you’ll win,” she told him.

He bit his lip. “Look here, Nance,” he said, looking across at her. “I hate like the dickens to can anything you want to do, or anything you like to do. But this playing bridge for money. Honest, old girl, I can’t choke it down. It’s not playing a square deal with our life, our income being what it is.”

“Everybody does it. And you’ll win, if you——”

“Everybody does not do it. You may call me anything you like, but under the circumstances I don’t think it’s decent. Even if you can afford it—and you and I cannot, Nance—it’s a mere rushing into something for the sake of excitement, unwholesome excitement. If you can’t afford it, it’s all the worse. I am not gambling. If I have anything to do with it, my wife doesn’t gamble, either.”

“You played the other night.”

“I did. I’m sorry I did. I felt like a cheap skate while I was doing it. But we were there, and I’d have broken up the party if I stayed out. My having lost has nothing to do with my being unwilling to play again. I’m glad I lost. Served me right for being a coward.”

“You lost three dollars and forty cents. Was that much, for an evening’s amusement?”

“No. But it has nothing whatever to do with it. I gambled, and I am not going to gamble again.”

For a moment she was too angry to speak; then she stood up. “Brice,” she said, “I don’t think you quite appreciate what I am trying to do for you.”

“I think you’re a peach, Nance.”

Her head moved impatiently. “You don’t know how hard I have tried to know the right people. You——”

“What’s the matter with Alice’s set?”

“Nothing. Alice is my best friend. She has always been, ever since we were born. I met you at her house. But you know what Alice is, as well as I do. She’s always had everything. She doesn’t want anything more. She’s in a rut, and glad she’s in a rut, so long as George and the children are there with her. The people I have worked hard to know and make friends with, for your sake, are people who are not in a rut. They are rising people. And they’re the right people. You don’t understand how hard it is to keep up with them. I struggle and struggle, and you don’t try to help me at all.”

“Sure I’ll help you! But after all, why the struggle? Where’s it going to get you?”

“I’m not thinking about myself. I’m thinking about you, your future. It’s all so I can further your interests.”

His face clouded. “Where do my interests come in? We’re getting along.”

“Oh—getting along! You’ll never be a success until you know the right people. There’s DeLancey Hunt—he’s made over a hundred thousand this last year, they say. Meg’s got a new sedan, and Jack gave her a sapphire bracelet on her birthday. There’s Burson, and Harry Claflin, and the Averys. I don’t have to go over the list. The thing is that they are successful. And you will never be successful until you get in with them, know their ways, make friends of them. They can do things for you.”

“I can’t thrill over that, you know. I don’t want to climb by means of friends. Nor of people you and I play around with.”

“I know you don’t. That’s just what I’ve been telling you. You don’t help——”

“How much’ll it help to let Mrs. Ogden keep me from losing money at bridge?”

She ignored that. “There’s Ranney Copeland—you think so much of George and Alice, you ought to approve of Ranney. He’s George’s brother. But what do you do, the very first time he offers to help you? You turn him down flat.”

“I don’t like Ranney Copeland. And I will not play stocks.”

“Because you’re afraid!”

“Yes. I am afraid. I’m not ashamed of that.”

“Well, I am! You’ve got to push ahead as these other men do, if you’re going to get anywhere.”

There was silence between them for a full minute. Then he said, slowly, “Anne, we seem to be talking a different language, these days.”

“Then it’s because you won’t look at life as it is. You won’t put your hand out nor make any move to get ahead. You wait until some change in the office shoves you into a better place. You won’t see things that——”

“But life has a good many sides to it, old girl. We used to look at the same side, together, and not think it so bad.”

“And what was it? What was it, but——”

“Not so bad,” he repeated, “not so bad. Just what a good many millions of other men and other women are looking at, and finding it good.”

She waved a hand, indicating the room they were in, and laughed—not joyously. “This?”

“Well, yes, this—or something like it. Looks all right to me. Meant a good deal to us, getting these things together. Watched the house being built—remember? Pretty good, first time I came home to it and found you in the kitchen with a smudge on your nose. Still is pretty good.”

“Honestly, Brice, is that all the ambition you have?”

“Not all. No. I’d like to see you in a limousine of your own, and a house on a hill-top, if you wanted it. But, after all, whether they’re big and showy or not, the things men work for and want are just about the same. Those other fellows, the ones whose wives you’re running around with, don’t have any more.”

“Don’t have any more!” she repeated, incredulously.

“No. Home. Money enough to get by with. A wife, and—and children.”

She clasped her hands together. “Oh! I’m glad, glad, glad there are no children!”

He was staring again at the figure in the rug. “Yes,” he said, slowly, “I have known your feeling about that for some time.”

She jumped up, started to speak, but, instead, went out of the room. He heard her step overhead. Presently he went to the telephone and spoke with Ned Allen. Then for an hour or more he sat in the arm-chair, his body in its familiar sag to the left; sat there with his pipe, his eyes still exploring the intricacies of the pattern of the rug as a sick man will follow the lines of the wall-paper, idly, perhaps—or perhaps weaving into them strange figures.

2

In the morning she awoke to a spatter from the bath-room—Brice, as usual, running off all the hot water while he shaved. But immediately another thought came to her. Old Mr. Grant was going to resign. Twelve hundred a year more, maybe fifteen.

At the breakfast table she was smiling, debonnair, fresh and youthful looking in one of the simple ginghams that Brice loved. Owing to the demands of the day’s work, at breakfast the maid did not preside, and no cap was in evidence. Brice liked his coffee hot from the stove, so Anne brought it in herself and poured in a goodly portion of cream. Always, with Brice, each day began itself; there was no hanging over of the discussion of the night before.

“When does Mr. Grant go?” she asked.

Brice grinned across at her. “Now don’t you go counting on that too much, old lady.”

“But of course you’ll get it. I am going to see Alice about it today.”

He looked blank. “Alice?”

“Yes, of course. George Copeland is a stockholder in Whitten & Company. A word from him——”

“Oh, please, Nance! You don’t understand.”

Her good humor was not to be shaken. “That is just what I was trying to tell you last night, my dear. Everything is done through friendship, nowadays. That is just the value of my having worked so hard to make the friends I have. A word from George Copeland—I rather think nobody will disregard that!”

“Oh, my dear girl! Look here—you can’t do that. I won’t have it. It wouldn’t do any good, but I won’t have it. Think of the position it’d put me in.”

“Oh, very well. You’ll get it, of course, anyway. And Brice, the Dodsons want to sell their car.”

He got up, laughed, came around the table and bent over her. “Don’t you go thinking about a car yet, my child. Plenty of time for that.”

He came back from the hall and kissed her again. She was all but unconscious of it, yet when the front door had closed behind him she sat there thinking about him. Brice, and their life together. Ten years. What was it that Barrie had called it? Mid-channel, where the waters were deepest, the seas most rough. Mid-channel, where the danger was. But there could be no danger in her case. As a matter of fact, she thought any woman was rather stupid to let danger come after ten years of experience. Of course, those first years of adjustment were difficult enough. She remembered days when she had thrown herself on the bed and wept, for reasons long since forgotten. She remembered those moments when little futile discussions had arisen between them until they loomed like horrible dark barriers they could never cross to come heart to heart together again. She remembered how furious she was when Brice brought carnations on their first anniversary, forgetting that she loathed the stiff scent-laden things and adored daffodils. And she remembered how the next day she wept, and kissed the empty sleeve of his coat in the closet, because Ned Allen had let it out that Brice had gone without luncheon for four days in order to buy them. Oh, it was difficult enough to adjust one’s self to marriage, at first. But one learned. Certainly she had learned in those ten years what to avoid, where to persist, how to work quietly, when to be tender and yielding. Men did not learn as readily. Even now Brice did not trust her to know what was best for them. Yet she knew how to manage him. In the end he always came round to her way of thinking. He was going to do that now. For she wanted things, so many things. There was no harm in wanting them. The other women whom she had come to know during the past three or four years all had them. Their husbands were no cleverer than Brice. It was only that their attitude towards life was different, their way of looking at things that made them successful men. She could discover no other reason for it. She must, must, somehow, make Brice see things as they did. The rest would follow; and she wanted the rest, wanted it so.

She looked at the flowers on the dining-table for a moment, and a slow smile came to her face. It was good of Ranney Copeland to have sent them; he was always doing things like that. They must have fresh water. She divided them, taking some into the living-room. In the merciless revealing sunlight not even her determination could make it look gay like Tessie Ogden’s. Nor like Alice Copeland’s, with its sedate expensiveness. There was Brice’s old chair, with the cushions sagging to the left. That, alone, kept it in the class of the one-living-room house. The other things had been bought when they moved here from the two-family house. Then they had been achievements, definite advances in price and taste over anything they had possessed before. Now she saw them for what they were, understood their incongruity, their—her mind formed the word—their hideousness. Chairs, department-store Colonial. Too glossy. The rug that had seemed so fine, and the one small Oriental in front of the mantel, a later purchase whose price she had managed to keep from Brice. The one good piece, an Empire sofa, that somehow made all the rest look sordid. That, too, a later purchase, bought under Alice Copeland’s advice, at a price which Alice declared a real bargain, but one that had cost Anne some heart-burnings when Brice sat for two evenings over their household accounts because he would not consent to buying on the installment plan. That lamp on the table was an earlier purchase. Mabel and Ned had come down to admire it the day it came home. Perhaps she had been a little hard about Mabel and Ned last night; but one had to do hard things, sometimes, for good to come out of them. It was like surgery. Not pleasant, but sometimes necessary.

The door bell buzzed in the back of the house. She jumped up, then sat down again and took up a piece of embroidery. It rang again, and Lucille poked her head around the door from the kitchen.

“You answer the do’ bell?” she asked cheerfully.

“Certainly not,” said Anne. “Don’t forget your white apron.”

The girl brought in a couple of letters and a magazine. “Get the little tray from the hall-table and bring them in on that, please, Lucille,” Anne said.

The letters were not interesting. She usually found herself bored with magazines. One had to look them over, just as one had to read the novels that were being talked about and the headlines of newspapers. She went to the telephone and called up the grocery-man. More than once Brice had suggested that she could do better by going to the store herself, that the morning walk would do her good. But what was the use? You were only tempted to buy more when you saw things displayed, and she hated to dress for the street early in the morning. Besides, with this new prospect ahead of them, this new increase of salary, there would be less need of being careful. Careful—how she hated being careful. Brice even wanted her to keep accounts, as if it helped any to know what the money had been spent for, after it was gone. Brice didn’t realize how much she saved, anyway. On her clothes, for example. She had rather a flair for clothes. It interested her to contrive them out of little or nothing. Yes, little or nothing, since all she paid for was the material. People wondered how she managed to have so many dresses, but that was because she made them, of course with the help of a cheap little seamstress. There was a dress on the figure upstairs now that the seamstress had left for her to finish. She went up. If she hurried, she could wear it that afternoon. Alice Copeland was coming to take her to the country club. It was horrid, not having a car of one’s own. The Dodsons bought a new car every year; the one they would sell now was really as good as new. Brice would not refuse her that. She would not have to contrive for it as she had for the country-club dues. And he would not refuse to use the car, as he had persistently refused to go to the club with her, say what she would about the desirable people to be met there. The dues were only a hundred and eighty, after all; and one did not have to have extras, in spite of what Brice maintained. But that twelve hundred more they were going to have, or fifteen hundred, would certainly ease things. Perhaps she would not get the car this year, after all. That would make Brice happier. How he did love to save. And there was always Alice. Alice was always willing to give her a lift. Everyone knew they were almost like sisters.

They had always been like that, except a little less intimately during the first few years of her marriage, when she was in that first flush of excitement at being married to Brice and having a place of their own, and Alice was busy with her babies. She and Alice and Nicky—they had had good times together when they were children in the up-state town where her father, Professor Warren, was principal of the high school, and Alice’s father had owned the big mills. Anne, motherless, was in a sense everyone’s child. There was old Miss Willy, her father’s housekeeper, who did what she could; and Veronica’s mother on one side and the doctor’s family on the other. Anne was as much at home in both houses as in her father’s. Doctor Clark she adored, but there was a perpetual feud between herself and the doctor’s only son, Ambrose. Neither Anne nor Ambrose ever thought about the reason for the feud. It was enough that Veronica was Anne’s “most intimate friend,” and that Ambrose was forever wanting Nicky to stop playing with the girls and help him with some of the strange machines he was always trying to make. As for Nicky, her disposition towards the opposite sex was ordained before she was born. There awaited her arrival five brothers of her own and one Ambrose, who lived only two houses away, one ever-adoring Ambrose. Emphatically, Veronica took them all lightly. Alice was a plump, homely, shy little girl, an adoring slave of both Anne and Nicky, and always a little afraid of the boys. Naturally enough, it was Alice who had married first, just as it was natural that she should have married even more money than her father possessed. She was still a good deal the same sort of person as ever, plump and mild, generous, sentimental; having no troubles of her own, she wore the burden of others’ troubles on her heart, was forever being distressed about something. Lately it had been about Veronica. Why should Nicky persist in scorning marriage? Why wouldn’t she take Ambrose? Why did she live in that horrible, slummy part of the city? Why did she let herself come into contact with all sorts of grubby people, even have them at her rooms? Why should any woman on earth want to work, when she might have a nice home of her own and darling children? Those were Alice’s arguments, at which Nicky laughed and wrinkled up her eyes at Anne, or at Ambrose if he were present. Yet in her heart Anne agreed more with Alice than with Veronica.

They talked about it that afternoon on the way to the country club. “Yes,” Anne said, “I do think she’d be happier married. Ambrose would be easy to manage.”

“They are both coming out to dinner tomorrow,” Alice said. “Will you and Brice come, too?”

“Love to. I don’t think Brice and Ambrose see very much of each other, these days.”

“Men are not like us in that,” Alice remarked. “When women don’t see each other often there seems to be a lessening of intimacy after a while, with most of us, anyway. Men take up where they left off.”

“I’ve never thought about it,” Anne returned lightly. “I know Brice and Ambrose are awfully fond of each other. Of course, Ambrose detests me. He’s never forgiven me for marrying Brice, though he did introduce us. He thinks I’m not good enough for Brice.”

“Anne, you do exaggerate so,” Alice protested.

“Oh no I don’t. I never got on with Ambrose when we were children. I don’t get on with him now. I think he’s stupid, if you ask me. But he’s done awfully well. I don’t see why Nicky won’t have him. She’d still have her own way.”

On that mild spring afternoon some of the women were out on the links; others followed along, commenting, chatting, languidly paying tribute to the call of the season. Others sat for a while in the sun on the great rounded porch that hung above the first tee, Anne among them. A few days of brisk breeze had dried the grass, but Anne did not like walking. She waited with Mrs. Ogden until Alice and the others returned. Then, in the sudden coolness of the late afternoon, they all went indoors together.

“Tea, all you people,” Alice Copeland said. “My party.”

That was the hour that Anne liked best. Usually a man or two dropped in. Today there was only one, Ranney Copeland, who was devoting himself to a young bride. But now and again his eyes turned towards Anne. She appeared oblivious, though as the talk went on her gayety increased. She was standing at one end of the mantel, teacup in hand. The firelight slid on the silk over her arm, played on the long line of her hip, touched one side of her face to rosiness, emphasizing her slimness, enhancing her air of youthfulness that for all her thirty-two years was not wholly fictitious. She was conscious of being well placed. She liked to feel herself poised, graceful, elegant from the arch of her foot to the smooth bands of hair under the close hat. She liked to be standing at ease while other women were seated.

“Now I,” she was saying across the steaming tea, “am what the scientists call a throw-back. I’m the typical old-fashioned woman. It’s the mental attitude that counts. Mine, you know very well, Jane, is the sweet, old-fashioned one. I’m sure you have noticed it.”

“In a Callot model,” Ranney Copeland remarked. “Or is it a Paquin?”

Anne threw him a swift smile, and stirred her tea; but not before she had caught an exchange of glances between two of the women, and a raised eyebrow. Oh yes, the women understood about her clothes. Still, she knew how to wear them. Even Alice, with all her money, never succeeded in looking as well turned out.

“Is that why you didn’t show up for bridge last night?” Mrs. Ogden inquired. “So you could hold Brice’s hand in front of the fire, or something?”

“Of course,” Anne said calmly.

“Didn’t the old-fashioned woman always capture her husband’s pay-envelope on Saturday nights?” another woman asked.

Anne tilted her chin a little, looked down. “Darling,” she drawled, with an emphasis too tender.

“What Nance means to imply,” said Tessie Ogden, who had been twice divorced, “is that she is all for the sweet sanctity of the family.”

“Thanks, dear,” Anne laughed. “How well you understand me.”

“Just the same, I don’t blame Nellie Callum for going to Reno,” said the speaker Anne had first answered. “Though goodness knows, even that’s getting to be old-fashioned enough.”

“I hope she stayed at the hotel I advised,” Mrs. Ogden remarked. “And I gave her a letter to my lawyer.”

Anne smiled again. “I’m so old-fashioned that I think marriage is absolutely sacred. I think I even go further. It’s so sacred that one ought to keep on trying and trying it, until everyone’s satisfied. Like you, Tessie dear.”

The little bride’s eyes were round, but the others laughed. Only Alice Copeland looked distressed. “Nance never means half she says,” she protested.

“Oh, but I do, dear. That’s part of my Early Victorianism, my utter sincerity,” Anne returned.

Mrs. Copeland stood up, and the party drifted towards the place where their wraps were. On the wide porch of the club-house Anne heard a voice at her shoulder.

“You are wonderful, Nance,” Ranney Copeland was saying. “Just how much of that did you mean?”

Anne smiled. “I wonder!” she said, demurely.

But Alice had heard, too. She turned, gave her brother-in-law a direct look. “She didn’t mean a word of it, Ranney. And I won’t have you talking to Anne like that, in whispers.”

Ranney grinned. “Sweet small Cerberus,” said he.

“You needn’t be rude,” Mrs. Copeland said. “I just stated a fact. Are you coming, Anne?”

“Pardon me,” said Ranney. “Not my intention to be rude, my dear girl. But, Alice—one has often thought of it—just how much good as a watch-dog do you suppose old Cerberus was? One seems to have heard of a good many people who successfully crossed that river.”

Alice had stepped into her car. “Come on, Anne,” she said, with no further look at the man.

He stepped between Anne and the car, with a flash of the eyes at her that she did not lose. “Anne promised to let me take her home. What else do you suppose I came out for?” he said coolly to Alice.

Alice Copeland turned her head. Anne said, rather too quickly, “Sorry, dear. I forgot to mention it. You don’t mind?” Whereupon Mrs. Copeland’s car sped ahead.

When they had spun through the country-club gates, Anne spoke. “It is really very thoughtful of you to give me a lift,” she said. “You knew, as I did, that Alice was longing to get home to the babies. And I do live so out of the way!”

The man at the wheel looked at her with a slow smile. “As you remarked to Tessie just now, ‘Thanks, dear. How well you understand me.’”

They laughed. Then Anne gave him an upward glance. “The flowers were lovely, Ranney.”

“I can do so little,” he said, in a low tone.

They went on for half a mile in silence, then abruptly Anne spoke, her hands folded tightly together in her lap, her look straining ahead. “Oh, I hate it all! All!”

His lips twisted. “Then you put up a pretty good front, my dear girl.”

“But I do hate it. The petty economies, the subterfuges that they all see through.”

“You should worry! You can out-talk the best of them.”

“Oh—talk! As if that were all of it. I know what I have a right to—I know what I owe myself. I know how I get it, I know what I have to put up with to keep it. No one else knows, though they think they do. They can’t, because there’s so much of it. And I hate it, hate not having things, not being able to meet them on their own ground, hate living as I do, where I do. I hate not having even a car of my own, having to depend on charity.”

His car rounded a turn of the road, slipped ahead. “The charity is from you to me,” he told her. “And I’ve told you how you can very easily manage the rest.”

“I know, Ranney. But Brice will not hear of it. Money in the bank. That’s as far as his imagination will let him go.”

“But it’s perfectly safe, my dear girl. Didn’t you tell him that?”

“Oh, I told him.”

“It’s done every day. I can’t quite get his point of view, you know. A quick turn-over. No need of putting back any more than your original investment. You’d always have that, and the profits are yours to do as you like with. It’s perfectly simple. I should be very glad——”

“It’s no use, Ranney. He simply will not.”

“Let him go to some other broker, then. I can’t bear to see you——”

She shook her head. “To see it——! But I have to endure it.”

They were silent a moment. Then he asked, “Look here, Anne, just how much of all that did you mean?”

She had forgotten her wild talk at the club. Her mind had been traveling fast and far, had come back into more familiar country than that speaker’s platform by the mantelpiece. “Of what?” she asked.

“What you said about marriage. Just—how—old-fashioned are you?”

Her heart seemed to leap. She felt a cold breeze on her cheek. Her lips could scarcely articulate. She leaned forward a little. “I—don’t—know,” she whispered.

“Better let me out at the corner,” she said, later, and walked slowly up the little street with the houses all trying to be different yet all so alike. Brice was already home. He had set out the pansies along the front of the porch, and was running a lawn-mower. She hated the lawn-mower, but at sight of Brice a quick touch of compunction swept over her. A sandy-haired man somewhere in his middle thirties, his broad frame was already becoming stooped from desk work. His clothes were inconspicuous, a little shabby, everyday clothes worn season before last for best, now thriftily used for the office. There was a sort of doggedness in the way he pushed the lawn-mower. Anne knew he was tired.

He stopped when she turned into the short cement walk that led to the porch, and laughed, rubbing a hand upward over his brow. “Hello, old girl! Thought I’d get done before you caught me at it,” he said.

Anne smiled at him. His eyes took in all her spring prettiness. “I believe you really do like it,” she said. “Just the same, I wish you wouldn’t.”

“Oh, it’s good exercise. Gosh—a day like this makes you want to get out and dig, or go fishing or something, doesn’t it?”

“It was lovely at the country club,” she told him. “Alice and some of the others played golf. The dogwood is out.”

There was no news as to who would be chosen for Grant’s place. “Don’t count on it too much,” he told her when he kissed her good-by the next morning. “It may be a week before we know, anyway.”

She put her hands on his arms. “Don’t think of it that way, Brice. You let things slide along so. Make them give it to you. You know you’re a better man for the job than Farren.”

His face softened. “Think a lot of the old man, don’t you?”

“Well—of course,” she said, and kissed him again.

She went upstairs still with that sense of compunction. All the evening before, all this morning, she had been very gentle with Brice. He was so good. Of course he needed prodding. With another sort of wife he would not have gotten ahead at all. He would have been like all the other men on the street, humdrum, satisfied, smug. When they first moved there he had rather tentatively scraped acquaintance with some of them. She had been right, quite right, to put a stop to that. She had learned her lesson. Their earlier friendship with Mabel and Ned Allen had blocked their making other friends until they moved. Even before the new house was ready she had made up her mind to know only the right people thereafter. She had met some at Alice’s; through them she told herself she would meet more. And she had. Brice might walk up the street with the men, or talk a little when he was out with that miserable lawn-mower; she bowed to the women, and saw to it that their acquaintance went no further. Impossible to mix sets. Now things were coming their way at last. That extra fifteen hundred. Poor old Brice. It had not been quite fair of her to talk like that, even among the women she had to amuse. For she did have to amuse them. Wild talk, quick talk—what else had she to offer them? They liked it, accepted her assumption that she was one of them, that only by the circumstance of Brice’s not having got on as fast as other men was she unable to go the whole pace with them. They were kind enough, for the most part. Occasional snubs did not matter. Tessie Ogden was a good sort, in spite of her varied matrimonial ventures; she had no end of money. One could not afford to be too conservative, unless, of course, one had wealth and position like Alice’s. Alice could afford to hold Mrs. Ogden at arm’s length. Alice could afford anything. Any Copeland could. Ranney Copeland, as well as Alice’s humdrum George.

Her thoughts brought her up short, there. What had Ranney meant by his question of the afternoon before? She flushed. After all, what she had said was true. They had thought it a joke, all those others. She really was an old-fashioned woman. Divorce? It was grubby, rather disgusting, on the whole. A woman’s job was not to go hunting for one man after another, but to make the man she had married. As she intended to make Brice. Good old Brice. She had forgotten to tell him to get home early. They were going to Alice’s. Perhaps he would like to meet Ambrose, come out with him. She went to the telephone.

3

Alice’s dinners were always sedate and somewhat elaborate; Anne envied the perfection of service, and always had an eye to the novelty of the hors d’œuvres. This evening there were only the six of them and Alice’s older little girl, who had begged to stay up to see Aunt Nicky. She was a dark, spindling little thing, with a rather disconcerting habit of staring. After dinner she slipped her hand in Veronica’s, and when her mother insisted that she must go up to bed wound her arms and legs about Nicky and clung to her.

“But I don’t want to go,” she protested.

Nicky somehow unwound her, held her off a little in front of her. “Elizabeth,” she said, seriously, “that’s the best reason in the world for not doing a thing. Never do anything you don’t want to do. Unless you have to. This is one of the times that you have to. So—scoot!”

When the child had departed George Copeland laughed. “You know I don’t altogether go along with your philosophy, Veronica, my child,” said he. He was a tall man, heavy and dark, usually shy. It was generally supposed that he liked everyone a little, no one very much, and that in business he knew how to drive a sharp bargain. Alice adored him.

“George,” Nicky said, looking up at him, “you’re six feet of sham. It’s precisely your own philosophy.”

Alice flushed a little. “At any rate, Nicky,” said she, “we’ll admit it is yours. You certainly do only what you want to. And I must say I think they’re queer things, sometimes.”

Veronica stared for an instant, then settled back in her chair. “Ah,” said she. “I thought you and Ambrose had your heads together at dinner. I see he’s told you.”

“What is it?” asked Anne. “You’re always quarreling, you two.”

“I have not been quarreling,” Ambrose declared, setting his coffee cup on a table. “But there are things I object to. I’ll admit I said that.”

“And I think you are right, Ambrose,” said Alice. “Nicky will persist in living alone in a queer part of the city. That’s stupid, as I see it. Anne agrees with me. I don’t think any woman living alone ought to fill up her place with people off the street.”

Nicky laughed. “One person, please. But it does rather fill up the place. I have to sleep on the sofa.”

“You don’t even know the girl,” Ambrose affirmed.

“Her name seems to be Stella,” said Nicky. “She says she’s a thief. And none too straight otherwise. Also she was uncommonly hungry. So what could I do?”

“What will you do?” Brice Denison asked, smiling a little, leaning forward.

“That’s what I came out for,” said Nicky, calmly. “I’ve got to give her a chance to get away from her man, you see. And I’m broke.”

“It’s not your affair, I tell you,” said Ambrose, savagely. “Turn her out, if she hasn’t already left with everything you possess.”

“It certainly is not your affair, Ambrose,” Nicky returned. “How much is it yours, George?”

“Why do you put it up to George?” Alice asked quickly. “If it’s money you want——”

“Well, I do,” said Nicky.

“Is she married?” Alice asked again.

George Copeland said, kindly, ponderously, “Oh, come now, Alice. How much do you need, Nicky?”

Nicky grinned up at him. “It’s not one of the times you have to, you know, George!”

George’s hand went into his pocket.

An hour or two later, when the women had gone upstairs for wraps, Anne said, “Why not come back with us for the night, Nicky? You won’t have to sleep on the sofa and I think I have some clothes you might use for your—thief.”

Nicky laughed. “Thanks. I’ll come. So I won’t have to go back in the train with Ambrose.”

Alice looked troubled. “Why do you pretend to hate Ambrose?” she asked. “You don’t really, you know!”

Nicky was putting on her hat in front of a glass. “Well, no. I think I’m rather in love with him, really. Anyway, part of the time. But this business of marriage——!”

“It’s the only real happiness,” Alice said solemnly.

Veronica turned, eyebrows raised. “Are you happy, Alice? Are you, Anne? Are George and Brice happy?”

“Of course we are!” Alice cried, flushing. Anne echoed, “Of course we are!”

Nicky looked from one to the other. “Of course and of course you are! Great institution, this marriage, isn’t it? Nothing to equal it.”

The next morning Anne watched Brice and Veronica walk off towards the station together. She had gone through her closets and found a number of last year’s things for Nicky. She and Nicky’s protégée were about the same size, it seemed, and she had a pleasant sense of having been generous. They were mostly things that could have been made over for herself. There was a glow of kindliness about her. She even joked a little with Lucille, and told her about the clever sandwiches that preceded the dinner at Mrs. Copeland’s. She went upstairs and threw all the windows open to the soft breeze. Things were lovely today. It would have been a day to play in, but there were no engagements. Well, anyway, she intended to stay at home and mend. Brice had been rather pathetic that morning, searching for a shirt with all its buttons. She smiled at herself indulgently. Good old Brice. She really neglected him a little, sometimes. She loved to make pretty things; mending was stupid. But this day she would give up to Brice, make up to him a little, however secretly, for her moment’s disloyalty at the club the other day. Not that it was really disloyalty. It was nothing worse than silly, wild talk.

The door-bell sounded. In a moment Lucille came up with a florist’s box. “Mist’ Denison cert’n’y do think a heap o’ you-all,” said she. “I’m going to git me a husband.”

Anne laughed. When the girl had left the room she opened the box. Tulips, this time, and Ranney Copeland’s card among them. She arranged the flowers about the house, smiling a little. Then she went back to her sewing. She sewed on some buttons, and reached for a basket piled high with stockings. Mending was stupid work. The curtains blew inward. Everyone would be out on Main Street. She had not telephoned the order for dinner. It would please Brice if she went to the store herself. There was no darning-cotton, after all. There never was, when you wanted it. She laughed a little at the eternal elusiveness of things like darning-cotton, put the basket aside, got into her trimmest street things.

She had barely turned the corner when a low, brown car swung up to the curb and stopped just in front of her.

“Now don’t tell me you were trying to dodge me,” said Ranney Copeland’s gay voice.

Anne laughed. “I had forgotten you,” she said, giving him a teasing look.

Ranney’s composure was not shaken at that. He had stepped to the sidewalk beside her. “I believe you were coming to meet me,” said he, laughing with her. “Let me give you a lift, won’t you?”

It was not in Anne to resist stepping into that car; but when Copeland, at the next corner, turned away from the main street where the shops were, she protested. “Oh, I mustn’t, Ranney. I’ve an errand—really.”

“So have I,” he declared, cheerfully. “I’ve got to show you something I came across the other day. Won’t take a minute.”

Yet the minute prolonged itself into an hour. The car spun out of the town, climbed a hill or two with no lessening of speed, sped away to the open country. Good company, was Ranney. After all there was all day for the mending. It had waited so long that it could very well wait a while longer.

It was past noon when at last the car stopped before a little gray roadhouse, once the place where a tollkeeper lived, the old tollgate now standing upright at one side of the road like a gaunt arm held high in surrender before the exigencies of modern life. Inside, in the tiny dining-room, beside a window that looked into budding apple trees, a table was prepared for two. At her look Ranney laughed.

“You didn’t think I was going to let you stay in that house of yours on a day like this, did you?” he asked.

She flushed. “It is the house that I live in,” she said. But her attempt at dignity made no impression upon him.

“Oh, come now! You hate it, and I thought you’d like this! They give you chicken and waffles. Not bad.”

Her lip quivered a little as she sat down. This was it. This was the power she wanted, the power these people had with their magic of money. To be able to get away from the little rooms of life, to ignore distance, to speak a word over the telephone and find things prepared for you, things, any kind of things.

Only a minute or two, and some of those things were there on the table before them. When the waitress had left the room, Copeland leaned across towards Anne.

“I didn’t mean to be brutal, you know. Honestly, I wanted to give you a good time. Anne——?”

“I know, Ranney,” she said, a little wearily. “You’re a good friend.”

“That’s what I want to be,” said he. Presently he added, “Anne, I wonder if you know what you’ve meant to me, these past months.”

“I don’t know, Ranney. Sometimes I’m numb. Sometimes I don’t know anything, don’t feel anything.” Why was it that, with him, a sense of utter helplessness against her fate, against the web she was caught in, seemed always to close her in? Twelve hundred, fifteen hundred more added to Brice’s salary. What, after all, would that little bit give them? How far would she ever be able to get away from that eternal grubbiness?

“It’s been a good deal, Anne. I wish I could tell you.”

“No. Don’t.”

“But I wish I could. I want to. You’ve been good, letting me see so much of you.”

For the first time she thought of that. A good deal. Yes, it had been that to herself, too. It had seemed natural enough, yet it was, it had been, a good deal. Her eyes widened. She gave him a startled look. “Too much, perhaps, Ranney. Perhaps I had better——”

“Oh, come now, Nance! Don’t begin to play the prude, just because the old hens are cackling. You’re too good a sport for that. Don’t you listen to Alice.”

He was leaning towards her again.

“Look here, Anne! Just how much did you really mean of what you said yesterday?”

“Not one word,” she declared.

“I thought that. But why not? Why not, after all? Why not make a break for it? A woman like you can get anything she wants.”

Her thought flew to Brice. Abruptly it was as though his good old red head, his bowed shoulders, were there before her instead of young Copeland’s sleek one and his shoulders so carefully tailored.

“But I have everything I want,” she said, her lips trembling a little.

He laughed. “I said you were a good sport. But I do want to do something for you, Anne. I wish you’d make your husband give me that money to invest for him. There’s a good thing I know of, right now. You’d have a mighty nice turn-over in only a month or two.”

She leaned back, and he let her think it out. The morning’s revulsion of feeling was not entirely banished by the hour with Ranney. She was still feeling Brice, in that subconsciousness where a woman’s thought of her husband is ever present, as the dear old blunderer who must be protected and cared for. Her mood was still but little different from what it had been when she had wanted to mend his stockings and sew on his buttons. Old Brice—to do something for him—somehow to protect him from those queer ideas of his, from his inhibitions. That money. If only he would! Ease for them both. Yes, for Brice as well as for herself. Oh, she knew how he thought about it. He called it gambling. As if everybody didn’t do it. He said they must have something on hand, something always available, in case anything happened. As if men could not always borrow. He loathed credit accounts, he made himself an object of gloom over every bill. As though credit were not to be used! Besides, she could be careful. She would be.

“Ranney,” she said, her face suddenly a little pale, “I will do it. We have a common account at the bank. I will give you the money to invest for us. And be very grateful.”

4

Even more than before she was full of the feeling of wanting to do something for Brice. As she stepped out of the tub she remembered that she had not ordered dinner. She got into a bathrobe and called down to Lucille.

“No’m, they ain’t any meat,” the girl told her. “I thought maybe you-all was going out to dinner again, or else you forgot.”

Anne’s good humor held. “You ought to have reminded me, Lucille,” she said gently. “But never mind. You just put on your hat and run over to Main Street, won’t you? Get a steak, a good thick one. You’ll have to hurry.”

“Yes’m, I’ll go. It’s plenty o’ time yet.”

Anne heard the pleased note in the girl’s voice. Ordinarily, of course, it would be wretched discipline to let her go out except on her regular days. But this time was exceptional. It was too late for delivery by the market-man. She went back to her dressing. Fresh things, everything fresh, the prettiest she had, and an old dress he was fond of. She would make herself beautiful.

She was all the gentle wife when he returned, all grace, all fragrance. Her consciousness was pervaded by the feeling of having done something for him, even though he was unaware of it, of having protected him against himself in the matter of the investment through Ranney. She felt motherly towards him, and wifely, too. She would be very sweet to him, yielding, caressing. She felt that she was quite up to being gay and soothing, as well. As soon as he came in she knew that there would have to be soothing. He was a little late, and more than a little frowning. She went at once to the kitchen to have dinner put on the table. She talked about light things, little things. He was unresponsive. When the steak had been served he looked at the hovering maid and frowned again.

“You may wait in the kitchen, Lucille,” he said. As the door to the pantry swung to Anne looked at him with raised eyebrows.

“Something has gone wrong. I can see that,” she said, gently. “But you can’t talk here. She’ll be listening just the same, you know.”

Brice ignored that. “Look here, Anne,” said he. “Mrs. Ogden was on the train tonight. Damned chatterer. She told me she saw you driving with Copeland this morning. It’s the second time I’ve had that sort of thing flung at me within the week. I won’t have it.”

Anne looked at him, her eyebrows slightly raised. Two little red spots appeared in her cheeks. She pressed her lips together, touched her foot to the bell under the table.

“Potatoes, Lucille,” she said, quietly. “And remain in the room, please.”

The rest of the meal passed in silence. In silence they passed into the living-room. Brice went for his pipe, was about to speak when the dusky face under the white cap appeared between the curtains.

“You-all want any coffee?”

“No!” snapped Brice; and Anne took a seat by the table under the lamplight.

The pipe under way, Brice, from the hearth-rug, turned to her. “You heard what I said. I won’t have it.”

Anne’s tongue touched her lips. She was finding her rôle of maternal patience difficult, yet something still remained of that warm protective feeling. Brice’s furies were soon over.

“I don’t like that man, anyway. I don’t like his confounded impertinence in trying to get you to give him that money to invest. When I have any investments to make I can do it myself. He’s an idler, a philanderer. I don’t want you seen with him.”

“You are speaking of a very good friend of mine, Brice.”

“Well, he’s not! None of them are. Another thing that Ogden woman told me. That speech of yours at the country club, all that rot about divorce. If that’s the sort of thing you’ve got to spout to keep up with them——!”

“You needn’t be vulgar!”

“I’m not as vulgar as they are. Hang it all, Anne, I don’t like these new friends of yours. They’re not our sort. I don’t like them.”

“What do you mean by our sort?”

“We’re not in their class. Not financially or any other way. And don’t want to be. That’s what I mean.”

She was angry enough now. “Have we got to go over this every night?” she demanded, standing and facing him. “I tell you, Brice, I am getting tired of it.”

“And God knows I am!”

“There was no harm in my driving with Ranney. In this year of grace a married woman can do as she likes. It’s cheap to be jealous.”

“I wouldn’t insult you by being jealous of you. You see that, Anne, you must see that! But I don’t like it. Anne—” his voice shook a little, “Anne, what’s the matter with things the way they used to be?”

She laughed, but her eyes did not soften. “Warmed-up meats, and the movies, and a thrill when somebody gave us a drive in a Ford! Oh, I’m long past that, Brice.”

He looked at her. His pipe had gone out, and he lighted it again as carefully as though he were going through with a ceremony, finally flicking the match behind the gas-log. Anne stooped and took it out again, deliberately depositing it in the ash-tray on the table. Her eyes avoided his. Presently he crossed the room to the desk they shared, the desk where the check-book lay, and in the left-hand pigeonholes, Brice’s side, neatly bound together with elastic bands, the household receipts and bills. The desk was a cheap one. The lid stuck a little, and as he pulled it open a vase toppled over.

“Damn—!” he ejaculated.

Anne said nothing, but picked up the tulips. Then she went to the pantry door.

“Lucille, bring a mop and the dust-pan, please,” she said. The tone put Brice hopelessly in the wrong.

He bit his lip. He had to wait while the girl gathered the bits of broken glass and dried the floor. Then he sat down.

Anne looked at his back. What had he gone to the desk for? She thought quickly. That check-book. She had not filled in the stub, but the check was gone. This was no time tonight, when he was in such a mood. She watched him covertly, thinking quickly, planning. It was not the first time they had quarreled, come to a place where going on seemed impossible, where both had tacitly agreed to stop, where both had adopted a new manner that dropped a curtain of silence behind them, shutting out the sordidness and the threatening disaster of such a scene as they had just been living through. She found her cue. A change of voice, of attitude, of manner.

She went to him, passed a hand lightly over his hair. It cost her something to do that, but the price was, after all, paid to herself in self-satisfaction at her magnanimity.

“You’re tired. Don’t work tonight. Let’s have a game of cribbage or something,” she said.

Brice laid his pipe on the top of the desk—it had gone out again—and reached up for her hand. He raised his head, and his eyes were moist. “You’re a good old girl, Nance!” he said, gruffly.

“What shall we play?” she asked. “Come along—you’re so tired!”

“In a minute. I took out new life-insurance policy today. Got to write the check for it. They made me pay high—I’m a bit below par, it seems. Nothing to worry about.”

New life-insurance. Then he, too, was counting on that coming increase in salary. But—that check-book.

“How much—is the premium?” she asked. Her lips felt dry.

“Two hundred.”

Two hundred, and she had drawn down to less than that. For his sake, all for his sake; and of course they would get it back, “turn it over,” but—

“Brice, don’t write the check tonight.”

“It won’t take a minute.”

“Brice, I—Brice—you can’t!”

Something in her voice made him turn again. If it had only been any other night than this, when he was overtired. “Brice, I drew some money today.”

His face fell. “How much?” he asked, quietly.

“Four thousand.”

That incredulity in his face, that bewilderment. “What do you mean? What’s happened?”

“Nothing has happened, my dear, except that I am determined to make you do the right thing, the sort of thing other men do. You worked hard for that money, Brice, and you were just keeping it idle there in the bank. I have invested it for you, for us.”

He stood up. His face was very white. “Would you mind telling me just what you have done?”

She laughed a little. “Why, I have told you! You would not do it yourself, so I’ve done it for you. That’s all. We’ll make a quick turn-over with it.”

“You have drawn out four thousand dollars?”

“Yes. And we’ll make money by it.”

He swallowed, started to speak, swallowed again. “I have taken out a new policy——”

“But I did not know that!”

“There’s six hundred due on the house on the first of May. One hundred and eighty-odd in bills. Anne——”

“You’ll have twelve hundred a year more, maybe fifteen.”

“Anne! It’s not true! You haven’t drawn out that money! You know I’ve never been willing to touch it. We’ve saved it little by little. I oughtn’t have left it there in the drawing account. Anne!”

“Oh, where’s your nerve, Brice? You’ll get it all back, and more, ever so much more. Ranney promises that.”

“Ranney!” His face flooded with color. “That damned scoundrel! Anne, you haven’t put that money in his hands? Good God, Anne!”

He had grasped her wrists. His face was close to hers, a new face, furious, threatening, outraged, a terrible male face. His grasp hurt her. She felt herself shaking, swept by an anger that was beyond any other anger she had ever known, anger that was dismay, that was shame, and fear, and physical pain.

“Anne, what’s this man Copeland to you, that he’s able to make you do such a thing to me? What’s he to you?”

Oh, she wanted to hurt him, to hurt him. To strike him where it would hurt him most.

“Just whatever I want him to be!” she said.

He dropped her wrists. The moment was eternal, a chaos in which new worlds were forming.

“How much of that talk—at—the—at the country club—did you really mean?”

“Perhaps you will find that out,” said Anne, “and sooner than you expect.”

They stared at each other, new people, strange people. His face grew crimson. A vein stood out in his forehead.

“You will take those words back,” he said, his eyes narrowing. “You will take those words—back!”

“I will not. I mean them, every one of them. I could have Ranney Copeland any moment I wanted him. And if I did take him, it would be no worse than other women do all the time. I can’t go on like this. I tell you I will not, I will not——!”

His lips were pressed together. He had become a strange man, with new things at work, in him, things she had never seen before, things she had not thought possible.

“You are quite right,” he said in a moment. “You shall not go on like this!”

“What do you mean?”

“I shall see Copeland tomorrow. I’ll put an end to it. I promise you that. The damned scoundrel.”

“Do you mean you will ask him for that money?”

He laughed shortly.

“You shall not! I tell you, Brice Denison. You’ve shamed me enough, grubbing along in this hole of a place, making me go without things, making me— O-o-oh! You’re no man!”

His face grew pale. “And you think Copeland is?”

“I know he is.”

He turned away, and turned back to her. His hands were shaking, but his face was still. “You will think better of this by tomorrow, Anne.”

She looked back at him from the doorway. “I’ll never think better of it. Never differently, anyway. You’ll see. Oh, you’ll see!”

5

On the morning after her quarrel with Brice she was brought abruptly out of sleep by a sense of disaster, of things shattering and falling about her. Then she remembered.

She had left him downstairs the night before and lain awake for hours before he came up. She had pretended to be asleep, had listened to his quiet movements, at last to his breathing from the bed beside her own. For a long while she lay there awake, knowing that he was awake, too, wondering whether he was as tense with anger as she was, whether she had hurt him enough, hurt him to a realization of his failure, his weakness. She was not sorry she had hurt him. She could have hurt him more, more.

At last sleep came; now, when she awoke, it was to find that he had dressed and left the room. A glance at the clock told her that he must also, long since, have left the house.

Very well. After that crisis of last night it would not be easy to gloss over this quarrel as they had always done before. There had never been anything like this. He had misjudged her, set at naught everything she had done for him. He had scoffed at her friends, behaved utterly outrageously about Ranney Copeland. He intended to shame her further by getting that money back. Well, he shouldn’t. Anyway, he could not do it at once. Before she and Ranney had parted yesterday there had been words that came back to her now.

“Anne, do you know how much I think of you? Do you, Anne?”

She had parried that. “I know we’re good friends, Ranney.”

He had put a hand over hers for an instant. “Friends! Anne, you don’t know what you’ve been to me, these past months.”

“You too,” she had murmured.

“I’ve got to go away tomorrow. Only a few days. When I come back I am going to tell you something.”

After she had given him the check he had looked at her intently. She had read things in that look. “You’re not afraid, Anne?”

She had stepped away from him, laughed a little. “What could I be afraid of—with you, Ranney?” she had asked.

Yes, she remembered that, now. Yesterday she had been afraid to think of what meaning there might lie in his words, in his manner. Today what stood out was that he would be away for a few days, so Brice could not get the check back at once, not until she had further chance to bring him to his senses.

She got up, began to dress. There were small faint marks on her arm where Brice’s fingers had pressed, and her anger was fanned to new vigor when she saw them. That she should have had to stand there, held like that, hurt like that! Like any common fishwife, her husband a brute, a brawler. To be forced to listen, to look at him. Oh yes, she had answered him. “Whatever I want him to be!” “I am not going on!” Oh, she had hurt Brice. She was glad she had hurt him. “I could have Ranney Copeland any moment I wanted him.” She had watched those words sting.

How could they go on, with those words, stark, between them? She left the table, went into the living-room. A bit of the broken vase that Lucille had overlooked gleamed in the sunlight; she picked it up. The petals of some of the tulips had fallen. A newspaper lay on the rug. There were matches and burned tobacco on a tray on the table, and a match on the floor. The desk was still open. Brice had forgotten his pipe. The room wore a dissolute air. It was a place where passion had broken loose and left its débris. In the cool morning light it looked haggard. She ran up the stairs to her bedroom.

How was she to go on? If she and Brice really broke, what would she do? What could she do? What did any woman do, unless she married again? What else was there? Work? She had no yearnings for work. She knew nothing about it, but all that she wanted to know. She wanted other things. Life. That was what she wanted so, life. Hadn’t she a right to it?

She paced up and down the room, still in its disorder of the night, the sheets thrown back on the beds, Brice’s soiled collar on the bureau, the dress she had tossed aside drooping over a chair. Intolerable. She went to a window. Those houses across the street. Stupid people. Oh, why wouldn’t Brice see, why wouldn’t he do what other men did? Why, why? Oh, hideous, the whole thing, hideous, useless, senseless. That child across the way on her roller-skates. Such a noise.

Then she started. Ranney Copeland’s brown car had turned the corner, was stopping at the curb in front of her house. She drew back, a hand to her cheek. Then he had not gone away. Perhaps Brice had seen him already. Her face flamed, her heart quickened its beat. She laid a hand on the curtain. Then she felt weak. Not Ranney. Not Ranney getting out of the car, but Alice. Alice, running up the cement walk to the steps.

Hastily she looked into the mirror again. Then she went down. The bell had rung twice. Not like Alice, that haste. Where was Lucille? She opened the door herself.

Alice came in. Strange, how anyone as small as Alice could give such an effect of bustling. Anne took in at a glance the clothes she had on, and the haste with which she had donned them.

“Nance! I’m so glad you are home. I’ve come begging.”

“This room is a sight,” Anne said. “What’s the matter?”

“George is going to Boston, and I want to go with him.”

“Why on earth don’t you?”

“It’s the children. You know how I feel about leaving the children alone with the servants. I tried to get Miss Whitney, but she’s out on a baby case. Oh, Anne, darling, couldn’t you and Brice stay at the house just for two or three nights? I telephoned Nicky, but she’s getting that miserable girl off somewhere today. You wouldn’t have a thing to do, really. But you know how I feel about the children.”

Anne’s mind jumped. She and Brice. Two or three nights. She had wanted to get away, anywhere, just for a time until things blew over.

“Don’t be silly, Alice,” she said. “Of course we’d just love to come.”

“You couldn’t come right away, could you? You can telephone Brice from the house. I’ll drive you over. I’ve got Ranney’s car. He’s away, and George took ours down to have something done to it.”

“I’ll have to get a bag, and speak to Lucille.”

“But hurry, like a love, won’t you? George wants to start early. He’ll probably be there in a fidget by the time we get back.”

Anne went upstairs, for a moment stood in her bedroom with her hands pressed to her cheeks. Then she laughed. Oh, this time Fate had played into her hands! Not Brice. No, not with Brice. She would go, not leave him a word, but just go. For two nights. Only for two nights. It would give him a chance to think. Give him time to find out, to cool off, to come to his senses.

She pulled open a drawer, brought a suitcase from the closet. She would not need much. Five minutes later she ran down the stairs.

“I must speak to Lucille,” she said.

But Alice Copeland was already opening the front door. “Oh, you can telephone from the house,” she said. “You don’t mind, do you? I don’t want to keep George waiting.”

As they turned the corner Anne looked back. Lucille was standing on the porch, gazing after the car.

That day and the two following, in the Copelands’ house, gave Anne much time for thinking. The rich restfulness of the house itself, the quiet perfection of food and service, even the bed she slept on, with its deep box spring and mysteriously soft mattress and embroidered linen, all were as balm to her. For in such a mood as that in which Anne was it is physical things that soothe tense nerves. She did not see much of the children. With childhood’s prescience they understood well enough that Aunt Nance was not one who greatly desired their presence.

She had waved farewell to Alice and the impatient George. Alice had come back three times to kiss the children over again or to leave more directions with their nurse.

A New York decorator had “done” Alice’s drawing-room—old Georgian paneling, furniture whose dignity matched it, mellow things that were restful and beautiful and costly. Things, things that she, Anne, ought to have. Why not? Why had Alice Copeland, and the women like Alice Copeland, a house like this? And why, oh, why, had not Anne Denison one like it?

She drifted upstairs to Alice’s sitting-room. She knew it well, but saw it afresh today. Here were bright printed linens. Almost unconsciously she computed their cost by the yard. Here were soft chairs, a deep couch with embroidered pillows, magazines and books, a telephone under a lacy French doll. She remembered that she had not spoken to Lucille before she left, and crossed to the telephone. But she stopped, the receiver still on its hook. Why should she? Why, after all, should she give Brice a clew to where she was? She smiled as the thought came. This was the last place he would think of her being in, here, domiciled in the Copeland house as its mistress for the time. She wanted to punish him, wanted to worry him, to make him suffer. That was the way to manage him, this time. Had she not tried other ways, at other times, and had it all to go over again? She would let him have time to think, time to realize what she was to him, time to come to his senses. She raised the receiver, but instead of her own number she gave that of the market where she dealt. A roast. He liked the cold-meat régime. Let him try it. A large roast, that would last for three dinners; for the rest, she would trust to Lucille’s ingenuity.

At luncheon she spoke to the maid. “If anyone calls or telephones, you need not say that I am staying here while Mrs. Copeland is away. It will not be necessary. You may just make a note of the calls, and we will give them to Mrs. Copeland when she gets back.”

Three quiet days, two nights of soft sleep. On Friday Alice returned.

“What a darling you’ve been, Nance! The children look splendid,” she said, as though she had left them for a month and dreaded to find them small shadows of themselves.

Anne laughed; she was in the mood to laugh easily, well pleased with herself. “But it’s been heavenly,” she said.

“I hope Brice didn’t mind. I do hope they made him comfortable.”

Brice. She had not thought of it, but Alice, of course, would discover that Brice had not been there. “To tell you the truth, dear,” she said, “I didn’t bring Brice. He’s such an old stay-at-home.”

Alice’s face fell. “Oh, my dear, then I shouldn’t have begged you to come.”

“Nonsense. Brice was probably glad to get rid of me.”

Anne laughed as she said it, but Alice’s face was still serious. “Of course you don’t mean that,” she said. “But just the same, I feel conscience-stricken. You know I’m a perfect goose about leaving the children, but I’d rather leave them than be separated from George, even for a day or two. Silly, isn’t it?”

It was mid-afternoon when she drove home. From the car she noticed that the front window shades were all at different heights. But aside from that the whole house, even the street itself, struck her as though she had been away from it for a year. The same, all too precisely the same, with nothing changed. Yet the details stood out in new aspects, and aspects not beautiful. In the haste of her departure she had forgotten her key. A disheveled Lucille, capless, untidy, opened the door for her and stared.

Anne turned and waved to Alice. “Good-by! I’ve had a wonderful time,” she called out. The car slowly gathered speed and went on down the narrow street.

“Well, Lucille! You have not changed for the afternoon, have you?” she said, but still smiling a little. She was not going to be severe. They all let themselves go, unless you were right there to stand over them.

“My land! I thought you-all wasn’t coming back any more,” said the girl. Anne had started up the stairs. Lucille was following with the suitcase.

“I have been away with Mrs. Copeland,” said Anne. “Did you and Mr. Denison get along all right? Did the roast come?”

“Yes’m, it come. Mist’ Denison ain’t been home las’ night.”

Anne stood still for an instant, went on into her room. She thought quickly. Must carry it off. “Oh, that’s true. I forgot he had to go away. Well, we must have an extra good dinner for him tonight.”

Again she ordered by telephone. Tomorrow, really, she would begin to go to the store. Then, alone at last in her own room, she put her things to rights, slept for an hour, dressed herself in her prettiest. She was not going to plan the coming interview with Brice. Oh, he would be glad enough to see her. Time would have done its work. They had both been rather foolish. After dinner there would be a little pretty penitence on her part, embraces on his.

She waited dinner an hour. Brice did not come. She thought of telephoning the office, realized that everyone would have gone home. At last she ate alone. The dinner was good, and her appetite was good. How childish Brice was. Once or twice she smiled as she visualized his coming in, the quiet, cautious opening of the door, his fumbling in the hall, her placid self there under the lamp, quite as though nothing unpleasant or unusual had ever passed between them, quite as though there had been no absence. “Hello, dear! Late, aren’t you?” Yes, she smiled. She could afford to wait. She knew how to manage Brice.

Nine, ten o’clock came, and Brice did not come. Until long past twelve she sat there, a slowly returning anger mounting within her. So he had not got over it yet. He was playing her own game. Lucille had said that he had not come home at all, the night before. Oh, if that was what he was going to do, all right! All right!

Yet she lay far into the night, sleepless, angry, restless, thinking. It was despicable, his turning the tables like this. But she would not worry. He needn’t think she would worry.

In the morning she was aware of Lucille’s curious eyes. Before noon she telephoned to the office of Whitten & Company. No, Mr. Denison was not there. Would the person who answered be so kind as to leave a message on his desk, asking him to call up his house when he came in? Then she dressed for the street. On the way to the door she stepped into the kitchen, and said, quite casually:

“By the way, Lucille, when Mr. Denison calls up, just say that Mrs. Denison wants to have dinner a little early this evening, will you?” He would know, from that.

That afternoon she spent at the country club, went there and back in Mrs. Ogden’s car. Gayer than usual, she followed the other women around the links. She must take some lessons in golf. You weren’t in it, really, unless you played.

“No’m. Ain’t anybody telephoned,” said Lucille, on her return. Then she remembered—Saturday! The office closed early. He would not have gotten her message.

Again she sat at dinner alone, sat there, not eating. No appetite. But of course, that tea at the club. No other reason.

Sunday. No Brice. The long day alone. Again she lay awake.

On the morrow her anger began to be mixed with sheer fright. This was not like Brice. Never would Brice go as far as this, just to frighten her, just to get even. Something had happened. By mid-afternoon she realized that she could not, again, sit alone at that table, wait alone in that room for him. She must know. Yet something of pride, pride waiting to turn again into anger, made her want, as it were, to cover her tracks. Foolish—oh, she knew it was foolish. Nothing could, could have happened. Later she would laugh at her panic. And it might get into the papers. House telephone numbers could be traced. She went out to a drugstore, one where she was not known. She had to gather her courage before she could drop a coin into the telephone. The police-station. No accident reported. The hospitals. Nothing. No use calling up places in town.

She leaned against the wall of the booth for a moment before she came out of its fetid air. Brice. Brice. What was it? What was it?

6

Yet it was not until the following day that she found courage enough to do what she knew must be done. Go to him. That was it. He had always hated to have her go to the office, yet she had been there five or six times, knew some of the men there. The meeting would be none the easier with others around. She would have to make it casual. She could. Just walk in a little hurriedly. “Sorry to interrupt, my dear, but I wanted to tell you——” and so on. That. Just to see him. Just to show him that she was willing to take things up where they used to be. She knew she could count upon Brice to do the same thing.