THE GIRLS

BY EDNA FERBER

GARDEN CITY, N. Y., AND TORONTO
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
1921

COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OF TRANSLATION
INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN

COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY THE CROWELL PUBLISHING COMPANY

PRINTED AT GARDEN CITY, N. Y., U. S. A.

TO
LILLIAN ADLER
WHO SHIES AT BUTTERFLIES
BUT NOT AT LIFE

Contents

THE GIRLS

CHAPTER I

It is a question of method. Whether to rush you up to the girls pellmell, leaving you to become acquainted as best you can; or, with elaborate slyness, to slip you so casually into their family life that they will not even glance up when you enter the room, or leave it; or to present the three of them in solemn order according to age, epoch, and story. This last would mean beginning with great-aunt Charlotte Thrift, spinster, aged seventy-four; thence to her niece and namesake Lottie Payson, spinster, aged thirty-two; finishing with Lottie's niece and namesake Charley Kemp, spinster, aged eighteen and a half—you may be certain nobody ever dreamed of calling her Charlotte. If you are led by all this to exclaim, aghast, "A story about old maids!"—you are right. It is. Though, after all, perhaps one couldn't call great-aunt Charlotte an old maid. When a woman has achieved seventy-four, a virgin, there is about her something as sexless, as aloof and monumental, as there is about a cathedral or a sequoia. Perhaps, too, the term is inappropriate to the vigorous, alert, and fun-loving Lottie. For that matter, a glimpse of Charley in her white woolly sweater and gym pants might cause you to demand a complete retraction of the term. Charley is of the type before whom this era stands in amazement and something like terror. Charley speaks freely on subjects of which great-aunt Charlotte has never even heard. Words obstetrical, psychoanalytical, political, metaphysical and eugenic trip from Charley's tongue. Don't think that Charley is a highbrow (to use a word fallen into disuse). Not at all. Even her enemies admit, grudgingly, that she packs a nasty back-hand tennis wallop; and that her dancing is almost professional. Her chief horror is of what she calls sentiment. Her minor hatreds are "glad" books, knitted underwear, corsets, dirt both physical and mental, lies, fat minds and corporeal fat. She looks her best in a white fuzzy sweater. A shade too slim and boyish, perhaps, for chiffons.

The relationship between Charlotte, Lottie, and Charley is a simple one, really, though having, perhaps, an intricate look to the outsider. Great-aunt, niece, grand-niece: it was understood readily enough in Chicago's South Side, just as it was understood that no one ever called Lottie "Charlotte," or Charley "Lottie," though any of the three might be designated as "one of the Thrift girls."

The Thrifts had been Chicago South Siders since that September in 1836 when Isaac Thrift had traveled tediously by rail, Sound steamer, river boat, canal boat, lake ship, and horse wagon from his native New York State to the unkempt prairie settlement on the banks of the sluggish stream that the Pottawatamie Indians called Che-ca-gou. Their reason for having thus named a city after the homely garlic plant was plain enough whenever the breeze came pungently from the prairies instead of from Lake Michigan.

Right here is the start of Aunt Charlotte. And yet the temptation is almost irresistible to brush rudely past her and to hurry on to Lottie Payson, who is herself hurrying on home through the slate and salmon-pink Chicago sunset after what is known on the South Side as "spending the afternoon."

An exhilarating but breathless business—this catching up with Lottie; Lottie of the fine straight back, the short sturdy legs, the sensible shoes, the well-tailored suit and the elfish exterior. All these items contributed to the facility with which she put the long Chicago blocks behind her—all, that is, except the last. An unwed woman of thirty-odd is not supposed to possess an elfish exterior; she is expected to be well-balanced and matter-of-fact and practical. Lottie knew this and usually managed to keep the imp pretty well concealed. Yet she so often felt sixteen and utterly irresponsible that she had to take brisk walks along the lake front on blustery days, when the spray stung your cheeks; or out Bryn Mawr way or even to Beverly Hills where dwellings were sparse and one could take off one's hat and venture to skip, furtively, without being eyed askance. This was supposed to help work off the feeling—not that Lottie wanted to work it off. She liked it. But you can't act Peter Pannish at thirty-two without causing a good deal of action among conservative eyebrows. Lottie's mother, Mrs. Carrie Payson, would have been terribly distressed at the thought of South Side eyebrows elevated against a member of her household. Sixty-six years of a full life had taught Mrs. Carrie Payson little about the chemistry of existence. Else she must have known how inevitably a disastrous explosion follows the bottling up of the Lotties of this world.

On this particular March day the elf was proving obstreperous. An afternoon spent indoors talking to women of her own age and position was likely to affect Lottie Payson thus. Walking fleetly along now, she decided that she hated spending afternoons; that they were not only spent but squandered. Beck Schaefer had taken the others home in her electric. Lottie, seized with a sudden distaste for the glittering enameled box with its cut-glass cornucopia for flowers (artificial), its gray velvet upholstery and tasseled straps, had elected to walk, though she knew it would mean being late.

"Figger?" Beck Schaefer had asked, settling her own plump person in the driver's seat.

"Air," Lottie had answered, not altogether truthfully; and drew a long breath. She turned away from the curb. The electric trundled richly off, its plate-glass windows filled with snugly tailored shoulders, furs, white gloves, vivid hats. Lottie held a hand high in farewell, palm out, as the gleaming vehicle sped silently away, lurched fatly around a corner, and was gone.

So she strode home now, through the early evening mist, the zany March wind buffeting her skirts—no, skirt: it is 1916 and women are knicker-bockered underneath instead of petticoated—and the fishy smell that was Lake Michigan in March; the fertilizer smell that was the Stockyards when the wind was west; and the smoky smell that was soft coal from the I. C. trains and a million unfettered chimneys, all blending and mellowing to a rich mixture that was incense to her Chicago-bred nostrils.

She was walking rapidly and thinking clearly, if disconnectedly:

"How we lied to each other this afternoon! Once or twice, though, we came nearer the truth than was strictly comfortable.... Beck's bitter.... There! I forgot Celia's recipe for that icebox cake after all.... Beck's legs ... I never saw such—uh—tumultuous legs ... gray silk stockings ought to be prohibited on fat legs; room seemed to be full of them.... That's a nice sunset. I'd love to go over to the lake just for a minute.... No, guess I'd better not with the folks coming to dinner.... People always saying Chicago's ugly when it's really.... Of course the Loop is pretty bad.... Tomorrow'd be a good day to go downtown and look at blue serges ... a tricotine I think.... I wonder if mother will want to go.... I do hope this once...."

Here Lottie drew a deep breath; the kind of breathing that relieves stomach nerves. She was so sure that mother would want to go. She almost always did.

Here we are, striding briskly along with Lottie Payson, while great-aunt Charlotte, a wistful black-silk figure, lingers far behind. We are prone to be impatient of black-silk figures, quite forgetting that they once were slim and eager white young figures in hoop-skirts that sometimes tilted perilously up behind, displaying an unseemly length of frilled pantalette. Great-aunt Charlotte's skirts had shaped the course of her whole life.

Charlotte Thrift had passed eighteen when the Civil War began. There is a really beautiful picture of her in her riding habit, taken at the time. She is wearing a hard-boiled hat with a plume, and you wonder how she ever managed to reconcile that skirt with a horse's back. The picture doesn't show the color of the plume but you doubtless would know. It is a dashing plume anyway, and caresses her shoulder. In one hand she is catching up the folds of her voluminous skirt, oh, ever so little; and in the other, carelessly, she is holding a rose. Her young face is so serious as to be almost severe. That is, perhaps, due to her eyebrows which were considered too heavy and dark for feminine beauty. And yet there is a radiance about the face, and an effect of life and motion about the young figure that bespeaks but one thing. Great-aunt Charlotte still has the picture somewhere. Sometimes, in a mild orgy of "straightening up" she comes upon it in its pasteboard box tucked away at the bottom of an old chest in her bedroom. At such times she is likely to take it out and look at it with a curiously detached air, as though it were the picture of a stranger. It is in this wise, too, that her dim old eyes regard the world—impersonally. It is as though, at seventy-four, she no longer is swayed by emotions, memories, people, events. Remote, inaccessible, immune, she sees, weighs, and judges with the detached directness of a grim old idol.

Fifty-five years had yellowed the photograph of the wasp-waisted girl in the billowing riding skirt when her grand-niece, Charley Kemp, appeared before her in twentieth century riding clothes: sleeveless jacket ending a little below the hips; breeches baggy in the seat but gripping the knees. Great-aunt Charlotte had said, "So that's what it's come to." You could almost hear her agile old mind clicking back to that other young thing of the plume, and the rose and the little booted foot peeping so demurely from beneath the folds of the sweeping skirt.

"Don't you like it?" Charley had looked down at her slim self and had flicked her glittering tan boots with her riding whip because that seemed the thing to do. Charley went to matinees.

Great-aunt Charlotte had pursed her crumpled old lips, whether in amusement or disapproval—those withered lips whose muscles had long ago lost their elasticity. "Well, it's kind of comical, really. And ugly. But you don't look ugly in it, Charley, or comical either. You look like a right pretty young boy."

Her eyes had a tenderly amused glint. Those eyes saw less now than they used to: an encroaching cataract. But they had a bright and piercing appearance owing to the heavy brows which, by some prank of nature, had defied the aging process that had laid its blight upon hair, cheek, lips, skin, and frame. The brows had remained jetty black; twin cornices of defiance in the ivory ruin of her face. They gave her a misleadingly sinister and cynical look. Piratical, almost.

Perhaps those eyebrows indicated in Charlotte Thrift something of the iron that had sustained her father, Isaac Thrift, the young Easterner, throughout his first years of Middle-Western hardship. Chicago to-day is full of resentful grandsons and -daughters who will tell you that if their grandsire had bought the southwest corner of State and Madison Streets for $2,050 in cash, as he could have, they would be worth their millions to-day. And they are right. Still, if all those who tell you this were granted their wish Chicago now would be populated almost wholly by millionaire real estate holders; and the southwest corner of State and Madison would have had to be as the loaves and the fishes.

Isaac Thrift had been one of these inconsiderate forebears. He had bought real estate, it is true, but in the mistaken belief that the city's growth and future lay along the south shore instead of the north. Chicago's South Side in that day was a prairie waste where wolves howled on winter nights and where, in the summer, flowers grew so riotously as to make a trackless sea of bloom. Isaac Thrift had thought himself very canny and far-sighted to vision that which his contemporaries could not see. They had bought North Side property. They had built their houses there. Isaac Thrift built his on Wabash, near Madison, and announced daringly that some day he would have a real country place, far south, near Eighteenth Street. For that matter, he said, the time would come when they would hear of houses thick in a street that would be known as Thirtieth, or even Fortieth. How they laughed at that! Besides, it was pretty well acknowledged by the wiseacres that St. Charles, a far older town, would soon surpass Chicago and become the metropolis of the West.

In books on early Chicago and its settlers you can see Isaac Thrift pictured as one of the stern and flinty city fathers, all boots and stock and massive watch-chain and side-whiskers. It was neither a time nor a place for weaklings. The young man who had come hopefully out of New York state to find his fortune in the welter of mud, swamp, Indians, frame shanties and two-wheeled carts that constituted Chicago, had needed all his indomitability.

It is characteristic of him that until his marriage he lived at the New Temperance Hotel (board and lodging $2.00 a week; clothes washed extra), instead of at the popular Saugenash Hotel on Market and Lake, where the innkeeper, that gay and genial Frenchman and pioneer, Mark Beaubien, would sometimes take down his fiddle and set feet to twinkling and stepping in the square-dance. None of this for Isaac Thrift. He literally had rolled up his sleeves and got to work. Little enough use he made of the fine bottle-green broadcloth coat with the gilt buttons, the high stock, and the pale gray pantaloons brought from the East. But in two years he had opened a sort of general store and real estate office on Lake Street, had bought a piece of ground for a house on Wabash (which piece he later foolishly sold) and had sent back East for his bride. That lady left her comfortable roof-tree to make the long and arduous trip that duplicated the one made earlier by her husband-to-be. It is to her credit that she braved it; but she had a hard time trying to adjust her New England viewpoint to the crude rough setting in which she now found herself. Her letters back East are so typical and revealing that extracts, at least, are imperative.

"... The times are exceedingly dull in this city of Chicago; there is little business, no balls, no parties, some shooting, some riding, and plenty of loafers, and to-day, after the rain, a plenty of mud which completes the picture.... The water here is first-rate bad and the only way we get along is by drinking a great deal of tea and coffee—two coffees to one tea.... The weather has been very mild. There has not been snow enough to stop the burning of the prairies.... If the waters of Lake Michigan continue to rise for a year or two more Chicago and all the surrounding country will be covered with one vast sheet of water, and the inhabitants of this place must find a home elsewhere—and I, for one, will find said home farther East.... Everyone admires my pretty things from New York; my cherry-colored scarf; my gingham dress with the silk stripe in it, my Thibet cloth cloak of dark mulberry color; and my fine velvet bonnet which cost only $3.50 in New York. It is prettier than any I have seen here. A milliner here said that it would have cost $8.00 in Chicago but I think that is exaggerated. The ladies here wear only one flounce to their skirts. Even my third best—the brown-and-white plaid merino—has three.... The mud here is so bad that the men wear hip boots and we women must go about in two-wheeled carts that sink to the hubs in many places. There are signs stuck up in the mud with the warning, 'No bottom here'.... Our new furniture has come. A beautiful flowered red and green carpet in the chamber and parlor. When the folding doors are open the stove will heat both rooms.... They have most excellent markets in this place. We can get meat of every description for four cents a pound, such as sausages, venison, beef, pork—everything except fowls. Of fruit there is little. I saw some grapes yesterday in the market, all powdered over with sawdust. They had come from Spain. They made my mouth water.... Every day great prairie schooners, as they call them, go by the house. They have come all the way from the East.... I am terrified of the Indians though I have said little to Isaac. They are very dirty and not at all noble as our history and geography books state...."

She bore Isaac Thrift two children, accomplishing the feat as circumspectly and with as much reticence as is possible in the achievement of so physical a rite. Girls, both. I think she would have considered a man-child indelicate.

Charlotte had been the first of these girls. Carrie, the second, came a tardy ten years later. It was a time and a city of strange contradictions and fluctuations. Fortunes were made in the boom of 1835 and lost in the panic of '37. Chicago was a broken-down speculative shanty village one day and an embryo metropolis the next. The Firemen's Ball was the event of the social season, with Engine No. 3, glittering gift of "Long John" Wentworth, set in the upper end of the dance-hall and festooned with flowers and ribbons. All the worth-while beaux of the town belonged to the volunteer fire brigade. The names of Chicago's firemen of 1838 or '40, if read aloud to-day, would sound like the annual list of box-holders at the opera. The streets of the town were frequently impassable; servants almost unknown; quiltings and church sociables noteworthy events. The open prairie, just beyond town, teemed with partridges, quail, prairie chicken. Fort Dearborn, deserted, was a playground for little children. Indians, dirty, blanketed, saturnine, slouched along the streets. "Long John" Wentworth was kinging it in Congress. Young ladies went to balls primly gowned in dark-colored merinos, long-sleeved, high-necked. Little girls went to school in bodices low-cut and nearly sleeveless; toe-slippers; and manifold skirts starched to stand out like a ballerina's.

These stiffly starched skirts, layer on layer, first brought romance into Charlotte Thrift's life. She was thirteen, a rather stocky little girl, not too obedient of the prim maternal voice that was forever bidding her point her toes out, hold her shoulders back and not talk at table. She must surely have talked at table this morning, or, perhaps, slouched her shoulders and perversely toed in once safely out of sight of the house, because she was late for school. The horrid realization of this came as Charlotte reached the Rush Street ferry—a crude ramshackle affair drawn from one side of the river to the other with ropes pulled by hand. Charlotte attended Miss Rapp's school on the North Side though the Thrifts lived South. This makeshift craft was about to leave the south shore as Charlotte, her tardiness heavy upon her, sighted the river. With a little cry and a rush she sped down the path, leaped, slipped, and landed just short of the ferry in the slimy waters of the Chicago River. Landed exactly expresses it. Though, on second thought, perhaps settled is better. Layer on layer of stiffly starched skirts sustained her. She had fallen feet downward. There she rested on the water, her skirts spread petal-like about her, her toes, in their cross-strapped slippers, no doubt pointing demurely downward. She looked like some weird white river-lily afloat on its pad in the turbid stream. Her eyes were round with fright beneath the strongly marked black brows. Then, suddenly and quite naturally, she screamed, kicked wildly, and began to sink. Sank, in fact. It had all happened with incredible swiftness. The ferry men had scarcely had time to open their mouths vacuously. Charlotte's calliope screams, so ominously muffled now, wakened them into action. But before their clumsy wits and hands had seized on ropes a slim black-and-white line cleft the water, disappeared, and reappeared with the choking struggling frantic Charlotte, very unstarched now and utterly unmindful of toes, shoulders, and vocal restraint.

The black-and-white line had been young Jesse Dick, of the "Hardscrabble" Dicks; the black had been his trousers, the white his shirt. He swam like a river rat—which he more or less was. Of all the Chicago male inhabitants to whom Mrs. Thrift would most have objected as the rescuer of her small daughter, this lounging, good-for-nothing young Jesse Dick would have been most prominently ineligible. Fortunately (or unfortunately) she did not even know his name until five years later. Charlotte herself did not know it. She had had one frantic glimpse of a wet, set face above hers, but it had been only a flash in a kaleidoscopic whole. Young Dick, having towed her ashore, had plumped her down, retrieved his coat, and lounged off unmissed and unrecognized in the ensuing hubbub. The rescue accomplished, his seventeen-year-old emotions found no romantic stirrings in the thought of this limp and dripping bundle of corded muslin, bedraggled pantalettes, and streaming, stringy hair.

Charlotte, put promptly to bed of course, with a pan at her feet and flannel on her chest and hot broth administered at intervals—though she was no whit the worse for her ducking—lay very flat and still under the gay calico comfortable, her hair in two damp braids, her eyes wide and thoughtful.

"But who was he?" insisted Mrs. Thrift, from the foot of the bed.

And "I don't know," replied Charlotte for the dozenth time.

"What did he look like?" demanded Isaac Thrift (hastily summoned from his place of business so near the scene of the mishap).

"I—don't know," replied Charlotte. And that, bafflingly enough, was the truth. Only sometimes in her dreams she saw his face again, white, set, and yet with something almost merry about it. From these dreams Charlotte would wake shivering deliciously. But she never told them. During the next five years she never went to a dance, a sleigh-ride, walked or rode, that she did not unconsciously scan the room or the street for his face.

Five years later Charlotte was shopping on Lake Street in her second-best merino, voluminously hooped. Fortunately (she thought later, devoutly) she had put on her best bonnet of sage green velvet with the frill of blond lace inside the face. A frill of blond lace is most flattering when set inside the bonnet. She had come out of her father's store and was bound for the shop of Mr. Potter Palmer where, the week before, she had flirted with a plum-colored pelisse and had known no happiness since then. She must feel it resting on her own sloping shoulders. Of course it was—but then, Mr. Palmer, when he waited on you himself, often came down in his price.

Chicago sidewalks were crazy wooden affairs raised high on rickety stilts, uneven, full of cracks for the unwary, now five steps up, now six steps down, with great nails raising their ugly heads to bite at unsuspecting draperies. Below this structure lay a morass of mud, and woe to him who stepped into it.

Along this precarious eminence Charlotte moved with the gait that fashion demanded; a mingling of mince, swoop and glide. Her mind was on the plum pelisse. A malicious nail, seeing this, bit at her dipping and voluminous skirt with a snick and a snarl. R-r-rip! it went. Charlotte stepped back with a little cry of dismay—stepped back just too far, lost her footing and tumbled over the edge of the high boardwalk into the muck and slime below.

For the second time in five years Jesse Dick's lounging habit served a good purpose. There he was on Lake Street idly viewing the world when he should have been helping to build it as were the other young men of that hard-working city. He heard her little cry of surprise and fright; saw her topple, a hoop-skirted heap, into the mire. Those same ridiculous hoops, wire traps that they were, rendered her as helpless as a beetle on its back. Jesse Dick's long legs sprang to her rescue, though he could not suppress a smile at her plight. This before he caught a glimpse of the face set off by the frill of blond lace. He picked her up, set her on her feet—little feet in cloth-gaitered side boots and muddied white stockings—and began gently to wipe her sadly soiled second-best merino with his handkerchief, with his shabby coat sleeve, with his coat-tail and, later, with his heart.

"Oh, don't—please—you mustn't—please—oh—" Charlotte kept murmuring, the color high in her cheeks. She was poised at that dangerous pinnacle between tears and laughter; between vexation and mirth. "Oh, please——"

Her vaguely protesting hand, in its flutterings, brushed his blond curly head. He was on his knees tidying her skirts with great deftness and thoroughness. There was about the act an intimacy and a boyish delicacy, too, that had perhaps startled her into her maidenly protest. He had looked up at her then, as she bent down.

"Why, you're the boy!" gasped Charlotte.

"What boy?" No wonder he failed to recognize her as she did him. Her mouth, at the time of the rescue five years before, had been wide open to emit burbles and strangled coughs; her features had been distorted with fright.

"The boy who pulled me out of the river. Long ago. I was going to school. Rush Street. You jumped in. I never knew. But you're the boy. I mean—of course you're grown now. But you are, aren't you? The boy, I mean. The——"

She became silent, looking down at him, her face like a rose in the blond lace frill. He was still on his knees in the mud, brushing at her skirts with a gesture that now was merely mechanical; brushing, as we know, with his heart in his hand.

So, out of the slime of the river and the grime of Lake Street had flowered their romance.

CHAPTER II

A short-lived and tragic enough romance. It wasn't that the Dicks were rowdy, or of evil repute. They were nobodies. In a day when social lines were so elastic as to be nearly all-inclusive the Dicks were miles outside the pale. In the first place, they lived out "Hardscrabble" way. That definitely placed them. The name designated a mean, tumble-down district southwest of town, inhabited by poor whites. A welter of mud, curs, barefoot babies, slatternly women, shirt-sleeved men lounging slackly against open doorways, acrid pipe in mouth.

Young Jesse Dick, sprung from this soil, still was alien to it; a dreamer; a fawn among wallowing swine; an idler with nothing of the villain about him and the more dangerous because of that. Isaac Thrift and his prim wife certainly would sooner have seen their daughter Charlotte dead than involved with one of the Dick clan. But they were unaware of the very existence of the riffraff Dicks. The Thrifts lived in two-story-and-basement elegance on Wabash near Madison, and kept their own cow.

There was a fine natural forest between Clark and Pine Streets, north, on the lake shore. Along its grassy paths lay fallen and decayed trees. Here the two used to meet, for it came to that. Charlotte had an Indian pony which she rode daily. Sometimes they met on the prairie to the south of town. The picture of Charlotte in the sweeping skirt, the stiff little hat, the caressing plume, and the rose must have been taken at about this time. There was in her face a glow, a bloom, a radiance such as comes to a woman—with too heavy eyebrows—who is beloved for the first time.

It was, as it turned out, for the last time as well. Charlotte had the courage for clandestine meetings in spite of a girlhood hedged about with prim pickets of propriety: but when she thought of open revolt, of appearing with Jesse Dick before the priggish mother and the flinty father, she shrank and cowered and was afraid. To them she was little more than a fresh young vegetable without emotions, thoughts, or knowledge of a kind which they would have considered unmaidenly.

Charlotte was sitting in the dining room window-nook one day, sewing. It was a pleasant room in which to sit and sew. One could see passers-by on Madison Street as well as Wabash, and even, by screwing around a little, get glimpses of State Street with its great trees and its frame cottages. Mrs. Thrift, at the dining room table, was casting up her weekly accounts. She closed the little leather-bound book now and sat back with a sigh. There was a worried frown between her eyes. Mrs. Thrift always wore a worried frown between her eyes. She took wife-and-motherhood hard. She would have thought herself unwifely and unmotherly to take them otherwise. She wore her frown about the house as she did her cap—badge of housewifeliness.

"I declare," she said now, "with beef six cents the pound—and not a very choice cut, either—a body dreads the weekly accounts."

"M-m-m," murmured Charlotte remotely, from the miles and miles that separated them.

Mrs. Thrift regarded her for a moment, tapping her cheek thoughtfully with the quill in her hand. Her frown deepened. Charlotte was wearing a black sateen apron, very full. Her hair, drawn straight back from her face, was gathered at the back into a chenille net. A Garibaldi blouse completed the hideousness of her costume. There quivered about her an aura—a glow—a roseate something—that triumphed over apron, net, and blouse. Mrs. Thrift sensed this without understanding it. Her puzzlement took the form of nagging.

"It seems to me, Charlotte, that you might better be employed with your plain sewing than with fancywork such as that."

Charlotte's black sateen lap was gay with scraps of silk; cherry satin, purple velvet, green taffetas, scarlet, blue. She was making a patchwork silk quilt of an intricate pattern (of which work of art more later).

"Yes, indeed," said she now, unfortunately. And hummed a little tune.

Mrs. Thrift stood up with a great rustling of account-book leaves, and of skirts; with all the stir of outraged dignity. "Well, miss, I'll thank you to pay the compliment of listening when I talk to you. You sit there smiling at nothing, like a simpleton, I do declare!"

"I was listening, mother."

"What did I last say?"

"Why—beef—six—"

"Humph! What with patchwork quilts and nonsense like that, and out on your pony every day, fine or not, I sometimes wonder, miss, what you think yourself. Beef indeed!"

She gathered up her books and papers. It was on her tongue's tip to forbid the afternoon's ride. Something occult in Charlotte sensed this. She leaned forward. "Oh, mother, Mrs. Perry's passing on Madison and looking at the house. I do believe she's coming in. Wait. Yes, she's turning in. I think I'll just——"

"Stay where you are," commanded Mrs. Thrift. Charlotte subsided. She bent over her work again, half hidden by the curtains that hung stiffly before the entrance to the window-nook. You could hear Mrs. Perry's high sharp voice in speech with Cassie, the servant. "If she's in the dining room I'll go right in. Don't bother about the parlor." She came sweeping down the hall. It was evident that news was on her tongue's tip. Her bonnet was slightly askew. Her hoops swayed like a hill in a quake. Mrs. Thrift advanced to meet her. They shook hands at arm's length across the billows of their outstanding skirts.

"Such news, Mrs. Thrift! What do you think! After all these years Mrs. Holcomb's going to have a ba——"

"My dear!" interrupted Mrs. Thrift, hastily; and raised a significant eyebrow in the direction of the slim figure bent over her sewing in the window-nook.

Mrs. Perry coughed apologetically. "Oh! I didn't see——"

"Charlotte dear, leave the room."

Charlotte gathered up the bits of silk in her apron. Anxious as she was to be gone, there was still something in the manner of her dismissal that offended her new sense of her own importance. She swooped and stooped for bits of silk and satin, thrusting them into her apron and work-bag. Though she seemed to be making haste her progress was maddeningly slow. The two ladies, eying her with ill-concealed impatience, made polite and innocuous conversation meanwhile.

"And have you heard that the Empress Eugénie has decided to put aside her crinoline?"

Mrs. Thrift made a sound that amounted to a sniff. "So the newspapers said last year. You remember she appeared at a court ball without a crinoline? Yes. Well, fancy how ridiculous she must have looked! She put them on again fast enough, I imagine, after that."

"Ah, but they do say she didn't. I have a letter from New York written by my friend Mrs. Hollister who comes straight from Paris and she says that the new skirts are quite flat about the—below the waist, to the knees——"

Charlotte fled the room dutifully now, with a little curtsey for Mrs. Perry. In the dark passageway she stamped an unfilial foot. Then, it is to be regretted, she screwed her features into one of those unadult contortions known as making a face. Turning, she saw regarding her from the second-story balustrade her eight-year-old sister Carrie. Carrie, ten years her sister's junior, never had been late to school; never had fallen into the Chicago River, nor off a high wooden sidewalk; always turned her toes out; held her shoulders like a Hessian.

"I saw you!" cried this true daughter of her mother.

Charlotte, mounting the stairs to her own room, swept past this paragon with such a disdainful swishing of skirts, apron, and squares of bright-colored silk stuff as to create quite a breeze. She even dropped one of the gay silken bits, saw it flutter to the ground at her tormentor's feet, and did not deign to pick it up. Carrie swooped for it. "You dropped a piece." She looked at it. "It's the orange-colored silk one!" (Destined to be the quilt's high note of color.) "Finding's keeping." She tucked it into her apron pocket. Charlotte entered her own room. "I saw you, miss." Charlotte slammed her chamber door and locked it.

She was not as magnificently aloof and unconcerned as she seemed. She knew the threat in the impish Carrie's "I saw you." In the Thrift household a daughter who had stamped a foot and screwed up a face in contempt of maternal authority did not go unpunished. Once informed, an explanation would be demanded. How could Charlotte explain that one who has been told almost daily for three weeks that she is the most enchanting, witty, beauteous, and intelligent woman in the world naturally resents being ignominiously dismissed from a room, like a chit.

That night at supper she tried unsuccessfully to appear indifferent and at ease under Carrie's round unblinking stare of malice. Carrie began:

"Mama, what did Mrs. Perry have to tell you when she came calling this afternoon?"

"Nothing that would interest you, my pet. You haven't touched your potato."

"Would it interest Charlotte?"

"No."

"Is that why you sent her out of the room?"

"Yes. Now eat your p——"

"Charlotte didn't like being sent out of the room, did she? H'm, mama?"

"Isaac, will you speak to that child. I don't know what——"

Charlotte's face was scarlet. She knew. Her father would speak sternly to the too inquisitive Carrie. That crafty one would thrust out a moist and quivering nether lip and, with tears dropping into her uneaten potato, snivel, "But I only wanted to know because Charlotte—" and out would come the tale of Charlotte's foot-stamping and face-making.

But Isaac Thrift never framed the first chiding sentence; and Carrie got no further than the thrusting out of the lip. For the second time that day news appeared in the form of a neighbor. A man this time, one Abner Rathburn. His news was no mere old-wives' gossip of births and babies. He told it, white-faced. Fort Sumter had been fired on. War!

Chicago's interest in the soldiery, up to now, had been confined to that ornamental and gayly caparisoned group known as Colonel Ellsworth's Zouaves. In their brilliant uniforms these gave exhibition drills, flashing through marvelous evolutions learned during evenings of practice in a vacant hall above a little brick store near Rush Street bridge. They had gone on grand tours through the East, as well. The illustrated papers had had their pictures. Now their absurd baggy trousers and their pert little jackets and their brilliant-hued sashes took on a new, grim meaning. Off they trotted, double-quick, to Donelson and death, most of them. Off went the boys of that socially elect group belonging to the Fire Engine Company. Off went brothers, sons, fathers. Off went Jesse Dick from out Hardscrabble way, and fought his brief fight, too, at Donelson, with weapons so unfit and ineffectual as to be little better than toys; and lost. But just before he left, Charlotte, frantic with fear, apprehension and thwarted love publicly did that which branded her forever in the eyes of her straitlaced little world. Or perhaps her little world would have understood and forgiven her had her parents shown any trace of understanding or forgiveness.

In all their meetings these two young things—the prim girl with the dash of daring in her and the boy who wrote verses to her and read them with telling effect, quite as though they had not sprung from the mire of Hardscrabble—had never once kissed or even shyly embraced. Their hands had met and clung. Touching subterfuges. "That's a funny ring you wear. Let's see it. My, how little! It won't go on any of my—no, sir! Not even this one." Their eyes had spoken. His fingers sometimes softly touched the plume that drooped from her stiff little hat. When he helped her mount the Indian pony perhaps he pressed closer in farewell than that fiery little steed's hoof quite warranted. But that was all. He was over-conscious of his social inferiority. Years of narrow nagging bound her with bands of steel riveted with turn-your-toes-out, hold-your-shoulders-back, you-mustn't-play-with-them, ladylike, ladylike.

A week after Sumter, "I've enlisted," he told her.

"Of course," Charlotte had replied, dazedly. Then, in sudden realization, "When? When?"

He knew what she meant. "Right away I reckon. They said—right away." She looked at him mutely. "Charlotte, I wish you'd—I wish your father and mother—I'd like to speak to them—I mean about us—me." There was little of Hardscrabble about him as he said it.

"Oh, I couldn't. I'm afraid! I'm afraid!"

He was silent for a long time, poking about with a dried stick in the leaves and loam and grass at their feet as they sat on a fallen tree-trunk, just as for years and years despairing lovers have poked in absent-minded frenzy; digging a fork's prong into the white defenceless surface of a tablecloth; prodding the sand with a cane; rooting into the ground with an umbrella ferrule; making meaningless marks on gravel paths.

At last: "I don't suppose it makes any real difference; but the Dicks came from Holland. I mean a long time ago. With Hendrik Hudson. And my great-great-grandmother was a Pomroy. You wouldn't believe, would you? that a shiftless lot like us could come from stock like that. I guess it's run thin. Of course my mother——" he stopped. She put a timid hand on his arm then, and he made as though to cover it with his own, but did not. He went on picking at the ground with his bit of stick. "Sometimes when my father's—if he's been drinking too much—imagines he's one of his own ancestors. Sometimes it's a Dutch ancestor and sometimes it's an English one, but he's always very magnificent about it, and when he's like that even my mother can't—can't scream him down. You should hear then what he thinks of all you people who live in fine brick houses on Wabash and on Michigan, and over on the North Side. My brother Pom says——"

"Pom?"

"Pomroy. Pomroy Dick, you see. Both the.... I've been thinking that perhaps if your father and mother knew about—I mean we're not—that is my father——"

She shook her head gently. "It isn't that. You see, it's business men. Those who have stores or real estate and are successful. Or young lawyers. That's the kind father and mother——"

They were not finishing their sentences. Groping for words. Fearful of hurting each other.

He laughed. "I guess there won't be much choice among the lot of us when this is over."

"Why, Jesse, it'll only last a few months—two or three. Father says it'll only last a few months.

"It doesn't take that long to——"

"To what?"

"Nothing."

He was whisked away after that. Charlotte saw him but once again. That once was her undoing. She did not even know the time set for his going. He had tried to get word to her, and had failed, somehow. With her father and mother, Charlotte was one of the crowd gathered about the Court House steps to hear Jules Lombard sing The Battle Cry of Freedom. George Root, of Chicago, George, whom they all knew, had written it. The ink was scarcely dry on the manuscript. The crowds gathered in the street before the Court House. Soon they were all singing it. Suddenly, through the singing, like a dull throb, throb, came the sound of thudding feet. Soldiers. With a great surge the crowd turned its face toward the street. Still singing. Here they came. In marching order. Their uniforms belied the name. Had they been less comic they would have been less tragic. They were equipped with muskets altered from flintlocks; with Harper's Ferry and Deneger rifles; with horse pistols and musketoons—deadly sounding but ridiculous. With these they faced Donelson. They were hardly more than boys. After them, trailed women, running alongside, dropping back breathless. Old women, mothers. Young women, sweethearts, wives. This was no time for the proprieties, for reticence.

They were passing. The first of them had passed. Then Charlotte saw him. His face flashed out at her from among the lines. His face, under the absurd pancake hat, was white, set. And oh, how young! He was at the end of his line. Charlotte watched him coming. She felt a queer tingling in her fingertips, in the skin around her eyes, in her throat. Then a great surge of fear, horror, fright, and love shook her. He was passing. Someone, herself and yet not herself, was battling a way through the crowd, was pushing, thrusting with elbows, shoulders. She gained the roadway. She ran, stumblingly. She grasped his arm. "You didn't let me know! You didn't let me know!" Someone took hold of her elbow—someone in the crowd on the sidewalk—but she shook them off. She ran on at his side. Came the double-quick command. With a little cry she threw her arms about him and kissed him. Her lips were parted like a child's. Her face was distorted with weeping. There was something terrible about her not caring; not covering it. "You didn't let me know! You didn't let me know!" The ranks broke into double-quick. She ran with them a short minute, breathlessly, sobbing.

CHAPTER III

It was a submissive enough little figure that they had hustled home through the crowded streets, up the front stoop and into the brick house on Wabash Avenue. Crushed and rumpled.

The crudest edge of the things they said to her was mercifully dulled by the time it penetrated her numbed consciousness. She hardly seemed to hear them. At intervals she sobbed. It was more than a sob. It was a dry paroxysm that shook her whole body and jarred her head. Her handkerchief, a wet gray ball, she opened, and began to stare at its neatly hemstitched border, turning it corner for corner, round and round.

Who was he? Who was he?

She told them.

At each fresh accusation she seemed to shrink into smaller compass; to occupy less space within the circle of her outstanding hoop-skirts, until finally she was just a pair of hunted eyes in a tangle of ringlets, handkerchief, and crinoline. She caught fragments of what they were saying ... ruined her life ... brought down disgrace ... entire family ... never hold head up ... common lout like a Dick ... Dick!... Dick!...

Once Charlotte raised her head and launched a feeble something that sounded like "... Hendrik Hudson," but it was lost in the torrent of talk. It appeared that she had not only ruined herself and brought lifelong disgrace upon her parents' hitherto unsullied name, but she had made improbable any future matrimonial prospects for her sister Carrie—then aged eight.

That, unfortunately, struck Charlotte as being humorous. Racked though she was, one remote corner of her mind's eye pictured the waspish little Carrie, in pinafore and strapped slippers, languishing for love, all forlorn—Carrie, who still stuck her tongue out by way of repartee. Charlotte giggled suddenly, quite without meaning to. Hysteria, probably. At this fresh exhibition of shamelessness her parents were aghast.

"Well! And you can laugh!" shouted Isaac Thrift through the soft and unheeded susurrus of his wife's Sh-sh-sh! "As if I hadn't enough trouble, with this war"—it sounded like a private personal grievance—"and business what it is, and real estate practically worth——"

"Sh-sh-sh! Carrie will hear you. The child mustn't know of this."

"Know! Everyone in town knows by now. My daughter running after a common soldier in the streets—a beggar—worse than a beggar—and kissing him like a—like a——"

Mrs. Thrift interrupted with mournful hastiness. "We must send her away. East. For a little visit. That would be best, for a few months."

At that Isaac Thrift laughed a rather terrible laugh. "Away! That would give them a fine chance to talk. Away indeed, madam! A few months, h'm? Ha!"

Mrs. Thrift threw out her palms as though warding off a blow. "Isaac! You don't mean they'd think—Isaac!"

Charlotte regarded them both with wide, uncomprehending eyes.

Her mother looked at her. Charlotte raised her own tear-drenched face that was so mutely miserable, so stricken, so dumbly questioning. Marred as it was, and grief-ravaged, Mrs. Thrift seemed still to find there something that relieved her. She said more gently, perhaps, than in any previous questioning:

"Why did you do it, Charlotte?"

"I couldn't help it. I couldn't help it."

Isaac Thrift snorted impatiently. Hetty Thrift compressed her lips a little and sighed. "Yes, but why did you do it, Charlotte? Why? You have been brought up so carefully. How could you do it?"

Now, the answer that lay ready in Charlotte's mind was one that could have explained everything. And yet it would have explained nothing; at least nothing to Hetty and Isaac Thrift. The natural reply on Charlotte's tongue was simply, "Because I love him." But the Thrifts did not speak of love. It was not a ladylike word. There were certain words which delicacy forbade. "Love" was one of them. From the manner in which they shunned it—shrank from the very mention of it—you might almost have thought it an obscenity.

Mrs. Thrift put a final question. She had to. "Had you ever kissed him before?"

"Oh, no!" cried Charlotte so earnestly that they could not but believe. Then, quiveringly, as one bereaved, cheated, "Oh, no! No! Never! Not once.... Not once."

The glance that Mrs. Thrift shot at her husband then was a mingling of triumph and relief.

Isaac Thrift and his wife did not mean to be hard and cruel. They had sprung from stern stock. Theirs was the narrow middle-class outlook of members of a small respectable community. According to the standards of that community Charlotte Thrift had done an outrageous thing. War, in that day, was a grimmer, though less bloody and wholesale, business than it is to-day. An army whose marching song is Where Do We Go From Here? attaches small significance to the passing kiss of an hysterical flapper, whether the object of the kiss be buck private or general. But an army that finds vocal expression in The Battle Cry of Freedom and John Brown's Body is likely to take its bussing seriously. The publicly kissed soldier on his way to battle was the publicly proclaimed property of the kissee. And there in front of the Court House steps, in full sight of her world—the Addison Canes, the Thomas Holcombs, the Lewis Fullers, the Clapps—Charlotte Thrift, daughter of Isaac Thrift, had run after, had thrown her arms about, and had kissed a young man so obscure, so undesirable, so altogether an unfitting object for a gently-bred maiden's kisses (public or private) as to render valueless her kisses in future.

Of Charlotte's impulsive act her father and mother made something repulsive and sinister. She was made to go everywhere, but was duennaed like a naughty Spanish princess. Her every act was remarked. Did she pine she was berated and told to rouse herself; did she laugh she was frowned down. Her neat little escritoire frequently betrayed traces of an overhauling by suspicious alien fingers. There was little need of that after the first few days. The news of Jesse Dick's death at Donelson went almost unnoticed but for two Chicago households—one out Hardscrabble way, one on Wabash Avenue. It was otherwise as unimportant as an uprooted tree in the path of an avalanche that destroys a village. At Donelson had fallen many sons of Chicago's pioneer families; young men who were to have carried on the future business of the city; boys who had squired its daughters to sleigh-rides, to dances, to church sociables and horseback parties; who had drilled with Ellsworth's famous Zouaves. A Dick of Hardscrabble could pass unnoticed in this company.

There came to Charlotte a desperate and quite natural desire to go to his people; to see his mother; to talk with his father. But she never did. Instinctively her mother sensed this (perhaps, after all, she had been eighteen herself, once) and by her increased watchfulness made Hardscrabble as remote and unattainable as Heaven.

"Where are you going, Charlotte?"

"Just out for a breath of air, mother."

"Take Carrie with you."

"Oh, mother, I don't want——"

"Take Carrie with you."

She stopped at home.

She had no tangible thing over which to mourn; not one of those bits of paper or pasteboard or linen or metal over which to keen; nothing to hold in her two hands, or press to her lips or wear in her bosom. She did not even possess one of those absurd tintypes of the day showing her soldier in wrinkled uniform and wooden attitude against a mixed background of chenille drapery and Versailles garden. She had only her wound and her memory and perhaps these would have healed and grown dim had not Isaac Thrift and his wife so persistently rubbed salt in the one and prodded the other. After all, she was little more than eighteen, and eighteen does not break so readily. If they had made light of it perhaps she would soon have lifted her head again and even cast about for consolation.

"Moping again!"

"I'm not moping, father."

"What would you call it then?"

"Why, I'm just sitting by the window in the dusk. I often do. Even before—before——"

"There's enough and to spare for idle hands to do, I dare say. Haven't you seen to-day's paper nor heard of what's happened again at Manassas that you can sit there like that!"

She knew better than to explain that for her Jesse Dick died again with the news of each fresh battle.

She became curiously silent for so young a girl. During those four years she did her share with the rest of them; scraped lint, tore and rolled bandages, made hospital garments, tied comforters, knitted stockings and mittens, put up fruit and jellies and pickles for the soldiers. Chicago was a construction camp. Regiments came marching in from all the states north. Camp Douglas, south of Thirty-first Street, was at first thick with tents, afterward with wooden barracks. Charlotte even helped in the great Sanitary Fairs that lasted a week or more. You would have noticed no difference between this girl and the dozens of others who chirped about the flag-decked booths. But there was a difference. That which had gone from her was an impalpable something difficult to name. Only if you could have looked from her face to that of the girl of the old photograph—that girl in the sweeping habit, with the plume, and the rose held carelessly in one hand—you might have known. The glow, the bloom, the radiance—gone.

People forget, gradually. After all, there was so little to remember. Four years of war change many things, including perspective. Occasionally some one said, "Wasn't there something about that older Thrift girl? Charlotte, isn't it? Yes. Wasn't she mixed up with a queer person, or something?"

"Charlotte Thrift! Why, no! There hasn't been a more self-sacrificing worker in the whole—wait a minute. Now that you speak of it, I do believe there was—let's see—in love with a boy her folks didn't approve and made some kind of public scene, but just what it was——"

But Isaac and Hetty Thrift did not forget. Nor Charlotte. Sometimes, in their treatment of her, you would have thought her still the eighteen-year-old innocent of the photograph. When Black Crook came to the new Crosby Opera House in 1870, scandalizing the community and providing endless food for feminine (and masculine) gossip, Charlotte still was sent from the room to spare her maidenly blushes, just as though the past ten years had never been.

"I hear they wear tights, mind you, without skirts!"

"Not all the way!"

"Not an inch of skirt. Just—ah—trunks I believe they call them. A horrid word in itself."

"Well, really, I don't know what the world's coming to. Shouldn't you think that after the suffering and privation of this dreadful war we would all turn to higher things?"

But Mrs. Thrift's caller shook her head so emphatically that her long gold filigree earrings pranced. "Ah, but they do say a wave of immorality always follows a war. The reaction it's called. That is the word dear Dr. Swift used in his sermon last Sunday.

"Reactions are all very well and good," retorted Mrs. Thrift, tartly, "but they don't excuse tights, I hope."

Her visitor's face lighted up eagerly and unbeautifully. She leaned still closer. "I hear that this Eliza Weathersby, as she's called, plays the part of Stalacta in a pale blue bodice all glittering with silver passamenterie; pale blue satin trunks, mind you! And pale blue tights with a double row of tiny buttons all down the side of the l——"

Again, as ten years before, Mrs. Thrift raised signaling eyebrows. She emitted an artificial and absurd, "Ahem!" Then—"Charlotte, run upstairs and help poor Carrie with her English exercise."

"She's doing sums, mother. I saw her at them not ten minutes ago."

"Then tell her to put her sums aside. Do you know, dear Mrs. Strapp, Carrie is quite amazing at sums, but I tell her she is not sent to Miss Tait's finishing school under heavy expense to learn to do sums. But she actually likes them. Does them by way of amusement. Can add a double column in her head, just like her father. But her English exercise is always a sorry affair.... M-m-m-m.... There, now, you were saying tiny buttons down the side of the leg——" Charlotte had gone.

When the war ended Charlotte was twenty-two. An unwed woman of twenty-two was palpably over-fastidious or undesirable. Twenty-five was the sere and withered leaf. And soon Charlotte was twenty-five—twenty-eight—thirty. Done for.

The patchwork silk quilt, laid aside unfinished in '61, was taken up again in '65. It became quite famous; a renowned work of art. Visitors who came to the house asked after it. "And how is the quilt getting on, dear Charlotte?" as a novelist is sounded about an opus with which he is struggling or a painter his canvas. Mrs. Hannan, the Lake Street milliner, saved all her pieces for Charlotte. Often there was a peck of them at a time. The quilt was patterned in blocks. Charlotte, very serious, would explain to the caller the plan of the block upon which she was at the moment engaged.

"This one has a purple satin center, you see. I always think purple is so rich, don't you? Then the next row will be white uncut velvet. Doesn't it have a sumptuous sound! Next blue velvet and the last row orange-colored silk." (No; not the same piece. Carrie had never relinquished her booty.) "Now, this next block is to be quite gay. It is almost my favorite. Cherry satin center—next, white velvet again—next, green velvet—and last, pink satin. Don't you think it will be sweet! I can scarcely wait until I begin that block."

The winged sweep of the fine black brows was ruffled by a frown of earnest concentration as she bent intently over the rags and scraps of shimmering stuffs. Her cheated fingers smoothed and caressed the satin surfaces as tenderly as though they lingered on a baby's cheek.

When, finally, it was finished—lined with turkey red and bound with red ribbon—Charlotte exhibited it at the Fair, following much persuasion by her friends. It took first prize among twenty-five silk quilts. A day of great triumph for Charlotte Thrift. The prize was a basket worth fully eight dollars.

CHAPTER IV

When Charlotte was thirty Carrie—twenty—married. After all, the innocent little indiscretion which had so thoroughly poisoned Charlotte's life was not to corrupt Carrie's matrimonial future, in spite of Mrs. Thrift's mournful prediction. Carrie, whose philosophy of life was based on that same finding's-keeping plan with which she had filched the bit of orange silk from her sister so many years before, married Samuel Payson, junior member of the firm of Thrift and Payson, Real Estate, Bonds and Mortgages. Charlotte, it may be remembered, had disdained to pick up the scrap of orange silk on which Carrie had swooped. Just so with Samuel Payson.

Samuel Payson was destined to be a junior partner. Everything about him was deferential, subservient. The very folds of his clothes slanted away from you. He was as oblique and evasive as Isaac Thrift was upright and forthright. In conversation with you he pronounced your name at frequent intervals. Charlotte came to dread it: "Yes, Miss Charlotte.... Do you think so, Miss Charlotte?... Sit here, Miss Charlotte...." It was like a too-intimate hand on your shrinking arm.

The fashion for men of parting the hair in the middle had just come in. Samuel Payson parted his from forehead to nape of neck. In some mysterious way it gave to the back of his head an alert facial expression very annoying to the beholder. He reminded Charlotte of someone she had recently met and whom she despised; but for a long time she could not think who this could be. She found herself staring at him, fascinated, trying to trace the resemblance. Samuel Payson misinterpreted her gaze.

Isaac and Hetty Thrift had too late relaxed their vigilant watch over Charlotte. It had taken them all these years to realize that they were guarding a prisoner who hugged her chains. Wretched as she was (in a quiet and unobtrusive way) there is the possibility that she would have been equally wretched married to a Hardscrabble Dick. Charlotte's submission was all the more touching because she had nothing against which to rebel. Once, in the very beginning, Mrs. Thrift, haunted by something in Charlotte's eyes, had said in a burst of mingled spleen and self-defense:

"And why do you look at me like that, I should like to know! I'm sure I didn't kill your young man at Donelson. You're only moping like that to aggravate me; for something that never could have been, anyway—thank goodness!"

"He wouldn't have been killed," Charlotte said, unreasonably, and with conviction.

Had they been as wise and understanding as they were well-meaning, these two calvinistic parents might have cured Charlotte by one visit to the Dicks' Hardscrabble kitchen, with a mangy cur nosing her skirts; a red-faced hostess at the washtub; and a ruined, battered travesty of the slim young rhyme-making Jesse Dick there in the person of old Pete Dick squatting, sodden, in the doorway.

As the years went on they had, tardily, a vague and sneaking hope that something might happen among the G.A.R. widowers of Chicago's better families. During the reunions of Company I and Company E Charlotte generally assisted with the dinner or the musical program. She had a sweet, if small, contralto with notes in it that matched the fine dark eyebrows. She sang a group of old-fashioned songs: When You and I Were Young, Maggie; The Belle of Mohawk Vale; and Sleeping I Dream, Love. Charlotte never suspected her parents' careful scheming behind these public appearances of hers. Her deft capable hands at the G.A.R. dinners, her voice lifted in song, were her offerings to Jesse Dick's memory. Him she served. To him she sang. And gradually even Isaac and Hetty Thrift realized that the G.A.R. widowers were looking for younger game; and that Charlotte, surrounded by blue-uniformed figures, still was gazing through them, past them, into space. Her last public appearance was when she played the organ and acted as director for Queen Esther, a cantata, which marked rather an epoch in the amateur musical history of the town. After that she began to devote herself to her sister's family and to her mother.

But all this was later. Charlotte, at thirty, still had a look of vigor, and of fragrant (if slightly faded) bloom, together with a little atmosphere of mystery of which she was entirely unconscious; born, doubtless, of years of living with a ghost. Attractive qualities, all three; and all three quite lacking in her tart-tongued and acidulous younger sister, despite that miss's ten-year advantage. Carrie was plain, spare, and sallow. Her mind marched with her father's. The two would discuss real estate and holdings like two men. Hers was the mathematical and legal-thinking type of brain rarely found in a woman. She rather despised her mother. Samuel Payson used to listen to her with an air of respectful admiration and attention. But it was her older sister to whom he turned at last with, "I thought perhaps you might enjoy a drive to Cleaversville, since the evening's so fine, Miss Charlotte. What do you say, Miss Charlotte?"

"Oh, thank you—I'm not properly dressed for driving—perhaps Carrie——"

"Nonsense!" Mrs. Thrift would interpose tartly.

"But Miss Charlotte, you are quite perfectly dressed. If I may be so bold, that is a style which suits you to a marvel."

There he was right. It did. Hoops were history. The form-fitting basque, the flattering neck-frill, the hip sash, and the smart (though grotesque) bustle revealed, and even emphasized, lines of the feminine figure—the swell of the bust, the curve of the throat—that the crinoline had for years concealed. This romantic, if somewhat lumpy, costume well became Charlotte's slender figure and stern sad young face. In it Carrie, on the other hand, resembled a shingle in a flower's sheath.

This obstacle having been battered down, Charlotte raised another. "They say the Cleaversville road is a sea of mud and no bottom to it in places. The rains."

"Then," said Samuel Payson, agreeably, "we shall leave that for another time"—Charlotte brightened—"and go boating in the lagoon instead. Eh, Miss Charlotte?"

Charlotte, born fifty years later, would have looked her persistent and unwelcome suitor in the eye and said, "I don't want to go." Charlotte, with the parental eyes upon her, went dutifully upstairs for bonnet and mantle.

The lagoon of Samuel Payson's naming was a basin of water between the narrow strip of park on Michigan Avenue and the railway that ran along the lake. It was much used for boating of a polite and restricted nature.

It was a warm Sunday evening in the early summer. The better to get the breeze the family was sociably seated out on what was known as the platform. On fine evenings all Chicago sat out on its front steps—"the stoop" it was called. The platform was even more informal than the stoop. It was made of wooden planks built across the ditches that ran along each side of the street. Across it carriages drove up to the sidewalk when visitors contemplated alighting. All down Wabash Avenue you saw families comfortably seated in rockers on these platforms, enjoying the evening breeze and watching the world go by. Here the Thrifts—Isaac, Hetty, and their daughter Carrie—were seated when the triumphant Samuel left with the smoldering Charlotte. Here they were seated when the two returned.

The basin reached, they had hired a boat and Samuel had paddled about in a splashy and desultory way, not being in the least an oarsman. He talked, Miss-Charlotteing her so insistently that in ten minutes she felt thumbed all over. She looked out across the lake. He spoke of his loneliness, living at the Tremont House. Before being raised to junior partner he had been a clerk in Isaac Thrift's office. It was thus that Charlotte still regarded him—when she regarded him at all. She looked at him now, bent to the oars, his flat chest concave, his lean arms stringy; panting a little with the unaccustomed exercise.

"It must be lonely," murmured Charlotte, absentmindedly if sympathetically.

"Your father and mother have been very kind"—he bent a melting look on her—"far kinder than you have been, Miss Charlotte."

"It's chilly, now that the sun's gone," said Charlotte. "Shall we row in? This mantle is very light."

It cannot be said that he flushed then, but a little flood of dark color came into his pallid face. He rowed for the boat-house. He maneuvered the boat alongside the landing. Twilight had come on. The shed-like place was too dim for safety, lighted at the far end with one cobwebby lantern. He hallooed to the absent boatman, shipped his oars, and stepped out none too expertly. Charlotte stood up, smiling. She was glad to be in. Sitting opposite him thus, in the boat, it had been impossible to evade his red-rimmed eyes. Still smiling a little, with relief she took his proffered hand as he stood on the landing, stepped up, stumbled a little because he had pulled with unexpected (and unnecessary) strength, and was horrified suddenly to see him thrust his head forward like a particularly nasty species of bird, and press moist clammy lips to the hollow of her throat. Her reaction was as unfortunate as it was unstudied. "Uriah Heep!" she cried (at last! the resemblance that had been haunting her all these days), "Heep! Heep!" and pushed him violently from her. The sacred memories of the past twelve years, violated now, were behind that outraged push. It sent him reeling over the edge of the platform, clutching at a post that was not there, and into the shallow water on the other side. The boatmen, running tardily toward them, fished him out and restored him to a curiously unagitated young lady. He was wet but uninjured. Thus dripping he still insisted on accompanying her home. She had not murmured so much as, "I'm sorry." They walked home in hurried silence, his boots squashing at every step. The Thrifts—father, mother, and daughter—still were seated on the platform before the house, probably discussing real estate values—two of them, at least. Followed exclamations, explanations, sympathy, flurry.

"I fell in. A bad landing place. No light. A wretched hole."

Charlotte turned abruptly and walked up the front steps and into the house. "She's upset," said Mrs. Thrift, automatically voicing the proper thing, flustered though she was. "Usually it's Charlotte that falls into things. You must get that coat off at once. And the.... Isaac, your pepper-and-salt suit. A little large but.... Come in.... Dear, dear!... I'll have a hot toddy ready.... Carrie...."

It was soon after the second Chicago fire that Isaac Thrift and his son-in-law built the three-story-and-basement house on Prairie avenue, near 29th Street. The old man recalled the boast made almost forty years before, that some day he would build as far south as Thirtieth Street; though it was not, as he had then predicted, a country home.

"I was a little wrong there," he admitted, "but only because I was too conservative. They laughed at me. Well, you can't deny the truth of it now. It'll be as good a hundred years from now as it is to-day. Only the finest houses because of the cost of the ground. No chance of business ever coming up this way. From Sixteenth to Thirtieth it's a residential paradise. Yes sir! A res-i-den-tial paradise!"

A good thing that he did not live the twenty-five years, or less, that transformed the paradise into a smoke-blackened and disreputable inferno, with dusky faces, surmounted by chemically unkinked though woolly heads, peering from every decayed mansion and tumble-down rooming house. Sixteenth Street became a sore that would not heal—scrofulous, filthy. Thirty-first Street was the centre of the Black Belt. Of all that region Prairie Avenue alone resisted wave after wave of the black flood that engulfed the streets south, east, and west. There, in Isaac Thrift's day, lived much of Chicago's aristocracy; millionaire if mercantile; plutocratic though porcine. And there its great stone and brick mansions with their mushroom-topped conservatories, their porte-cochères, their high wrought-iron fences, and their careful lawns still defied the years, though ruin, dirt, and decay waited just outside to destroy them. The window-hangings of any street are its character index. The lace and silk draperies before the windows of these old mansions still were immaculate, though the Illinois Central trains, as they screeched derisively by, spat huge mouthsful of smoke and cinders into their very faces.

Isaac Thrift had fallen far behind his neighbours in the race for wealth. They had started as he had, with only courage, ambition, and foresight as capital. But they—merchants, pork-packers—had dealt in food and clothing on an increasingly greater scale, while Isaac Thrift had early given up his store to devote all his time to real estate. There had been his mistake. Bread and pork, hardware and clothing—these were fundamental needs, changing little with the years. Millions came to the man who, starting as a purveyor of these, stayed with them. At best, real estate was a gamble. And Isaac Thrift lost.

His own occasional short-sightedness was not to blame for his most devastating loss, however. This was dealt him, cruelly and criminally, by his business partner and son-in-law, the plausible Payson.

The two families dwelt comfortably enough together in the new house on Prairie. There was room and to spare, even after two children—Belle, and then Lottie—were born to the Paysons. The house was thought a grand affair, with its tin bathtub and boxed-in wash-bowl on the second floor, besides an extra washroom on the first, off the hall; a red and yellow stained-glass window in the dining room; a butler's pantry (understand, no butler; Chicago boasted no more than half a dozen of these); a fine furnace in the lower hall just under the stairway; oilcloth on the first flight of stairs; Brussels on the second; ingrain on the third; a liver-colored marble mantel in the front parlor, with anemic replicas in the back parlor and the more important bedrooms. It was an age when every possible article of household furniture was disguised to represent something it was not. A miniature Gothic cathedral was really a work-basket; a fauteuil was, like as not, a music box. The Thrifts' parlor carpet was green, woven to represent a river flowing along from the back parlor folding doors to the street windows, with a pattern of full-sailed ships on it, and, by way of variety, occasional bunches of flowers strewn carelessly here and there, between the ships. On rare and thrilling occasions, during their infancy, Belle and little Lottie were allowed to crawl down the carpet river and poke a fascinated finger into a ship's sail or a floral garland.

Carrie's two children were born in this house. Isaac and Hetty Thrift died in it. And in it Carrie was left worse than widowed.

Samuel Payson must have been about forty-six when, having gathered together in the office of Thrift & Payson all the uninvested moneys—together with negotiable bonds, stocks, and securities—on which he could lay hands, he decamped and was never seen again. He must have been planning it for years. It was all quite simple. He had had active charge of the business. Again and again Isaac Thrift had turned over to Payson money entrusted him for investment by widows of lifelong friends; by the sons and daughters of old Chicago settlers; by lifelong friends themselves. This money Payson had taken, ostensibly for investment. He had carefully discussed its investment with his father-in-law, had reported such investments made. In reality he had invested not a penny. On it had been paid one supposed dividend, or possibly two. The bulk of it remained untouched. When his time came Samuel Payson gathered together the practically virgin sums and vanished to live some strange life of his own of which he had been dreaming behind that truckling manner and the Heepish face, with its red-rimmed eyes.

He had been a model husband, father, and son-in-law. Chess with old Isaac, evenings; wool-windings for Mrs. Thrift; games with the two little girls; church on Sundays with Carrie. Between him and Charlotte little talk was wasted, and no pretense.

A thousand times, in those years of their dwelling together, Mrs. Thrift's eyes had seemed to say to Charlotte, "You see! This is what a husband should be. This is a son-in-law. No Dick disgracing us here."

The blow stunned the two old people almost beyond realising its enormity. The loss was, altogether, about one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Isaac Thrift set about repaying it. Real estate on Indiana, Wabash, Michigan, Prairie was sold and the money distributed to make good the default. They kept the house on Prairie; clung to it. Anything but that. After it was all over Isaac Thrift was an old man with palsied hands. Hair and beard whose color had defied the years were suddenly white. Hetty Thrift's tongue lost its venomous bite. After Isaac Thrift's death she turned to Charlotte. Charlotte alone could quell her querulousness. Carrie acted as an irritant, naturally. They were so much alike. It was Charlotte who made broths and jellies, milk-toast and gruel with which to tempt the mother's appetite. Carrie, the mathematical, was a notoriously poor cook. Her mind was orderly and painstaking enough when it came to figuring on a piece of property, or a depreciated bond. But it lacked that peculiar patience necessary to the watching of a boiling pot or a simmering pan.

"Oh, it's done by now," she would cry, and dump a pan's contents into a dish. Oftener than not it was half-cooked or burned.

Charlotte announced, rather timidly, that she would give music lessons; sewing lessons; do fine embroidery. But her tinkling tunes were ghostly echoes of a bygone day. People were even beginning to say that perhaps, after all, this madman Wagner could be played so that one might endure listening. Hand embroidery was little appreciated at a time when imitations were the craze.

Carrie it was who became head of that manless household. It was well she had wasted her time in doing sums instead of being more elegantly occupied while at Miss Tait's Finishing School, in the old Wabash Avenue days. She now juggled interest, simple and compound, with ease; took charge of the few remaining bits of scattered property saved from the ruins; talked glibly of lots, quarter-sections, sub-divisions. All through their childhood Belle and Lottie heard reiterated: "Run away. Can't you see mother's busy! Ask Aunt Charlotte." So then, it was Aunt Charlotte who gave them their bread-and-butter with sugar on top. Gradually the whole household revolved about Carrie, though it was Charlotte who kept it in motion. When Carrie went to bed the household went to bed. She must have her rest. Meals were timed to suit Carrie's needs. She became a business woman in a day when business women were practically unheard of. She actually opened an office in one of the new big Clark Street office buildings, near Washington, and had a sign printed on the door:

MRS. CARRIE PAYSON
Real Estate
Bonds Mortgages
Successor to late Isaac Thrift

Later she changed this to "Carrie Thrift Payson." Change came easily to Carrie. Adaptability was one of her gifts. In 1893 (World's Fair year) she was one of the first to wear the new Eton jacket and separate skirt of blue serge (it became almost a uniform with women); and the shirtwaist, a garment that marked an innovation in women's clothes. She worked like a man, ruled the roost, was as ruthless as a man. She was neither a good housekeeper nor marketer, but something perverse in her made her insist on keeping a hand on the reins of household as well as business. It was, perhaps, due to a colossal egotism and a petty love of power. Charlotte could have marketed expertly and thriftily but Carrie liked to do it on her way downtown in the morning, stopping at grocer's and butcher's on Thirty-first Street and prefacing her order always with, "I'm in a hurry." The meat, vegetables, and fruit she selected were never strictly first-grade. A bargain delighted her. If an orange was a little soft in one spot she reckoned that the spot could be cut away. Such was her system of false economy.

With the World's Fair came a boom in real estate and Carrie Payson rode on the crest of it. There still were heart-breaking debts to pay and she paid them honestly. She was too much a Thrift to do otherwise. She never became rich, but she did manage a decent livelihood. Fortunately for all of them, old Isaac Thrift had bought some low swampy land far out in what was considered the wilderness, near the lake, even beyond the section known as Cottage Grove. With the Fair this land became suddenly valuable.

There's no denying that Carrie lacked a certain feminine quality. If one of the children chanced to fall ill, their mother, bustling home from the office, had no knack of smoothing a pillow or cooling a hot little body or easing a pain. "Please, mother, would you mind not doing that? It makes my headache worse." Her fingers were heavy, clumsy, almost rough, like a man's. Her maternal guidance of her two daughters took the form of absent-minded and rather nagging admonitions:

"Belle, you're reading against the light."

"Lottie, did you change your dress when you came home from school?"

"Don't bite that thread with your teeth!" Or, as it became later, merely, "Your teeth!"

Slowly, but inevitably, the Paysons dropped out of the circle made up of Chicago's rich old families—old, that is, in a city that reckoned a twenty-year building a landmark. The dollar sign was beginning to be the open sesame and this symbol had long been violently erased from the Thrift-Payson escutcheon. To the ladies in landaus with the little screw-jointed sun parasols held stiffly before them, Carrie Payson and Charlotte Thrift still were "Carrie" and "Charlotte dear." They—and later Belle and Lottie—were asked to the big, inclusive crushes pretty regularly once a year. But the small smart dinners that were just coming in; the intimate social gayeties; the clubby affairs, knew them not. "One of the Thrift girls" might mean anyone in the Prairie Avenue household, but it was never anything but a term of respect and meant much to anyone who was native to Chicago. Other Prairie Avenue mansions sent their daughters to local private schools, or to the Eastern finishing schools. Belle and Lottie attended the public grammar school and later Armour Institute for the high school course only. Middle-aged folk said to Lottie, "My, how much like your Aunt Charlotte you do look, child!" They never exclaimed in Belle's presence at the likeness they found in her face. Belle's family resemblance could be plainly traced to one of whom friends did not speak in public. Belle was six years her sister's senior, but Lottie, with her serious brow and her clear, steady eyes, looked almost Belle's age. Though Belle was known as the flighty one there was more real fun in Lottie. In Lottie's bedroom there still hangs a picture of the two of them, framed in passepartout. It was taken—arm in arm—when Lottie was finishing high school and Belle was about to marry Henry Kemp; high pompadours over enormous "rats," the whole edifice surmounted by a life-size chou of ribbon; shirtwaists with broad Gibson tucks that gave them shoulders of a coal-heaver; plaid circular skirts fitting snugly about the hips and flaring out in great bell-shaped width at the hem; and trailing.

"What in the world do you keep that comic valentine hanging up for!" Belle always exclaimed when she chanced into Lottie's room in later years.

Often and often, during these years, you might have heard Carrie Payson say, with bitterness, "I don't want my girls to have the life I've had. I'll see to it that they don't."

"How are you going to do it?" Charlotte would ask, with a curious smile.

"I'll stay young with them. And I'll watch for mistakes. I know the world. I ought to. For that matter, I'd as soon they never married."

Charlotte would flare into sudden and inexplicable protest. "You let them live their own lives, the way they want to, good or bad. How do you know the way it'll turn out! Nobody knows. Let them live their own lives."

"Nonsense," from Carrie, crisply. "A mother knows. One uses a little common sense in these things, that's all. Don't you think a mother knows?" a rhetorical question, plainly, but:

"No," said Charlotte.

CHAPTER V

Anyone who has lived in Chicago knows that you don't live on the South Side. You simply do not live on the South Side. And yet Chicago's South Side is a pleasant place of fine houses and neat lawns (and this when every foot of lawn represents a tidy fortune); of trees, and magnificent parks and boulevards; of stately (if smoke-blackened) apartment houses; of children, and motor cars; of all that makes for comfortable, middle-class American life. More than that, booming its benisons upon the whole is the astounding spectacle of Lake Michigan forming the section's eastern boundary. And yet Fashion had early turned its back upon all this as is the way of Fashion with natural beauty.

We know that the Paysons lived south; and why. We know, too, that Carrie Payson was the kind of mother who would expect her married daughter to live near her. Belle had had the courage to make an early marriage as a way of escape from the Prairie avenue household, but it was not until much later that she had the temerity to broach the subject of moving north. She had been twenty when she married Henry Kemp, ten years her senior. A successful marriage. Even now, nearing forty, she still said, "Henry, bring me a chair," and Henry brought it. Not that Henry was a worm. He was merely the American husband before whom the foreign critic stands aghast. A rather silent, gray-haired, eye-glassed man with a slim boyish waistline, a fair mashie stroke, a keen business head, and a not altogether blind devotion to his selfish, pampered semi-intellectual wife. There is no denying his disappointment at the birth of his daughter Charlotte. He had needed a son to stand by him in this family of strong-minded women. It was not altogether from the standpoint of convenience that he had called Charlotte "Charley" from the first.

Thwarted in her secret ambition to move north, Belle moved as far south as possible from the old Prairie Avenue dwelling; which meant that the Kemps were residents of Hyde Park. Between the two families—the Kemps in Hyde Park and the Paysons in Prairie Avenue—there existed a terrible intimacy, fostered by Mrs. Carrie Payson. They telephoned each other daily. They saw one another almost daily. Mrs. Payson insisted on keeping a finger on the pulse of her married daughter's household as well as her own. During Charley's babyhood the innermost secrets of the nursery, the infant's most personal functions, were discussed daily via the telephone. Lottie, about sixteen at that time, and just finishing at Armour, usually ate her hurried breakfast to the accompaniment of the daily morning telephone talk carried on between her mother and her married sister.

"How are they this morning?... Again!... Well then give her a little oil.... Certainly not! I didn't have the doctor in every time you two girls had a little something wrong.... Oh, you're always having that baby specialist in every time she makes a face. We never heard of baby specialists when I was a.... Well, but the oil won't hurt her.... If they're not normal by to-morrow get him but.... You won't be able to go to the luncheon, of course.... You are! But if Charley's.... Well, if she's sick enough to have a doctor she's sick enough to need her mother at home.... Oh, all right. Only, if anything happens.... How was the chicken you bought yesterday?... Didn't I tell you it was a tough one! You pay twice as much over there in Hyde Park.... What are you going to wear to the luncheon?..."

Throughout her school years Lottie had always had a beau to squire her about at school parties and boy-and-girl activities. He was likely to be a rather superior beau, too. No girl as clear-headed as Lottie, and as intelligently fun-loving and merry, would tolerate a slow-witted sweetheart. The word sweetheart is used for want of a better. Of sweethearting there was little among these seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds. Viewed through the wise eyes of to-day's adolescents they would have seemed as quaint and stiff as their pompadours and high collars.

In a day when organised Social Work was considered an original and rather daring departure for women Lottie Payson seemed destined by temperament and character to be a successful settlement worker. But she never became one. Lottie had too much humour and humaneness for the drab routine of school-teaching; not enough hardness and aggressiveness for business; none of the creative spark that marks the genius in art. She was sympathetic without being sentimental; just and fair without being at all stern or forbidding. Above all she had the gift of listening. The kind of woman who is better-looking at thirty-five than at twenty. The kind of woman who learns with living and who marries early or never. With circumstance and a mother like Mrs. Carrie Payson against her, Lottie's chances of marrying early were hardly worth mentioning. Lottie was the kind of girl who "is needed at home."

Don't think that she hadn't young men to walk home with her from school. She had. But they were likely to be young men whose collars were not guiltless of eraser marks; who were active in the debating societies; and whose wrists hung, a red oblong, below their too-short sleeves. The kind of young man destined for utter failure or great success. The kind of young man who tries a pecan grove in Carolina, or becomes president of a bank in New York. None of these young men ever kissed Lottie. I think that sometimes, looking at her serious pretty lips closed so firmly over the white teeth, they wanted to. I'm sure that Lottie, though she did not know it, wished they would. But they never did. Lottie absolutely lacked coquetry as does the woman who tardily develops a sense of sex power. In Lottie's junior year these gawky and studious young men narrowed down to one. His name was Rutherford Hayes Adler and he was a Jew. There is no describing him without the use of the word genius, and in view of his novels of to-day (R. H. Adler) there is no need to apologise for the early use of the word. He was a living refutation of the belief that a brilliant mathematician has no imagination. His Armour report cards would have done credit to young Euclid; and he wrote humorous light verse to Lottie and sold insurance on the side. Being swarthy, black-haired, and black-eyed he was cursed with a taste for tan suits and red neckties. These, with the high choker collar of the period, gave him the look of an end-man strayed from the minstrel troupe. Being naturally shy, he assumed a swagger. He was lovable and rather helpless, and his shoe strings were always coming untied. His humour sense was so keen, so unerring, so fastidious as to be almost a vice. Armour students who did not understand it said, "He's a funny fellow. I don't know—kind of batty, isn't he?"

This young man it was who walked home with Lottie Payson all through her junior and senior years; sat next to her at meetings of the debating society; escorted her to school festivities; went bicycling with her on Saturday afternoons. The Payson household paid little attention to him or to Lottie. Belle was busy with her love affair. Henry Kemp had just appeared on her horizon. Mrs. Payson was deep in her real estate transactions. On the few occasions when Rutherford Hayes actually entered the house and sat down to await Lottie the two were usually on their way to some innocuous entertainment or outing. So that it was Aunt Charlotte, if anybody, who said "How do you do, young man. Oh yes, you're Mr. Adler. Lottie'll be right down." A little silence. Then kindly, from Aunt Charlotte, "H'm! How do you like your school work?" Years afterwards Adler put Aunt Charlotte into one of his books. And Lottie. And Mrs. Carrie Payson, too. He had reason to remember Mrs. Carrie Payson.

It was at the end of Lottie's senior year that Mrs. Payson became aware of this young man whose swart face seemed always to be just appearing or disappearing around the corner with Lottie either smiling in greeting or waving a farewell. End-of-the-year school festivities were accountable for this. Then, too, Belle must have registered some objection. When next young Adler appeared at the Prairie Avenue house it was Mrs. Payson who sailed down the rather faded green river of the parlor carpet.

"How do you do," said Mrs. Payson; her glance said, "What are you doing here, in this house?"

Rutherford Hayes Adler wanted to get up from the chair into which his lank length was doubled. He knew he should get up. But a hideous shyness kept him there—bound him with iron bands. When finally, with a desperate effort, he broke them and stumbled to his feet it was too late. Mrs. Payson had seated herself—if being seated can describe the impermanent position which she now assumed on the extreme edge of the stiffest of the stiff parlor chairs.

The sallow, skinny little Carrie Thrift had mellowed—no, that word won't do—had developed into an erect, dignified, white-haired woman of rather imposing mien. The white hair, in particular, was misleadingly softening.

"May I ask your father's name?" she said. Just that.

The boy had heard that tone used many times in the past nineteen hundred years. "Adler," he replied.

"Yes, I know. But his first name. What is his first name, please?"

"His first name was Abraham—Abraham I. Adler. The I stands for Isaac."

"Abraham—Isaac—Adler," repeated Mrs. Payson. As she uttered the words they were an opprobrium.

"Your father's name was Isaac too, wasn't it?" said the boy.

"His name was Isaac Thrift." An altogether different kind of Isaac, you would have thought. No relation to the gentleman in the Bible. A New England Isaac not to be confused with the Levantine of that name.

"Yes. I remember I used to hear my grandfather speak of him."

"Indeed! In what connection, may I ask?"

"Why, he came to Chicago in '39, just about the time your father came, I imagine. They were young men together. Grandfather was an old settler."

Mrs. Payson's eyebrows doubted it. "I don't remember ever having seen him mentioned in books on early Chicago."

"You wouldn't," said Adler; "he isn't."

"And why not?"

"Jew," said Rutherford Hayes, pleasantly, and laconically.

Mrs. Payson stood up. So did the boy. He had no difficulty in rising now. No self-consciousness, no awkwardness. There was about him suddenly a fluid grace, an easy muscular rhythm. "Of course, grandfather has been dead a good many years now," he went on politely, "and father, too."

"I'm afraid Lottie won't be able to go this evening," Mrs. Payson said. "She has been going out too much. It is bad for her school work. Young girls nowadays——"

"I see. I'm sorry." There was nothing of humility in the little bow he made from the waist. Ten minutes earlier you would never have thought him capable of so finished an act as that bow. He walked to the folding doors that led to the hall. On the way his glance fell on the portrait of old Isaac Thrift over the liver-coloured marble mantel. It was a fine portrait. One of Healy's. Adler paused a moment before it. "Is that a good portrait of your father?"

"It is considered very like him."

"It must be. I can see now why my grandfather took his part to the last."

"Took his part!" But her tone was a shade less corroding. "In what, if you please?"

"Grandfather lost his fortune when a firm he trusted proved—well, when a member of it proved untrustworthy."

When he grew older he was always ashamed of having thus taken a mean advantage of a woman. But he was so young at the time; and she had hurt him so deeply. He turned again now, for the door. And there stood Lottie, brave, but not quite brave enough. She was not wearing her white dress—her party dress, for the evening. Her mother had forbidden her to come down. And yet here she was. Braver—not much, but still braver—than Charlotte had been before her.

"I—I can't go, Ford," she faltered.

"It's all right," he said, then. And there, before the white-haired, relentless, and disapproving Carrie Payson he went up to her, put one lean dark hand on her shoulder, drew her to him and kissed her, a funny little boyish peck on the forehead. "Good-bye, Lottie," he said. And was gone.

Lottie's being needed at home began before the failure of Aunt Charlotte's sight. Aunt Charlotte had to go to the eye specialist's daily. Lottie took her. This was even before the day of the ramshackle electric. Lottie never begrudged Aunt Charlotte the service. Already between these two women, the one hardly more than twenty, the other already past sixty, there existed a curious and unspoken understanding. They were not voluble women, these two. Lottie never forgot those two hours in the waiting room of the famous specialist. Every chair was occupied, always. Silent, idle, waiting figures with something more crushed and apprehensive about them than ordinarily about the waiting ones in a doctor's outer room. The neat little stack of magazines on the centre table remained untouched. Sometimes, if the wait was a long one, Lottie would run out for an hour's shopping; or would drop in at her mother's office. Mrs. Payson usually was busy with a client; maps, documents, sheafs of blue-bound papers. But if one of her daughters came downtown without dropping in at the office she took it as a deliberate slight; or as a disregard of parental authority. Lottie hated the door marked:

CARRIE THRIFT PAYSON
Real Estate
Bonds Mortgages

"Oh, you're busy."

Mrs. Payson would glance up. There was nothing absent-minded about the glance. For the moment her attention was all on Lottie. "Sit down. Wait a minute."

"I'll come back."

"Wait."

Lottie waited. Finally, "Aunt Charlotte will be wondering——"

"We're through now." She would sit back in her desk chair, her hands busy with the papers, her eyes on her client. "Now, if you'll come in again on Monday, say, at about this time, I'll have the abstract for you, and the trust deed. In the meantime I'll get in touch with Spielbauer——"

She would rise, as would her client, a man, usually. With the conclusion of the business in hand she effected a quick change of manner; became the woman in business instead of the business woman. Sometimes the client happened to be an old time acquaintance, in which case Carrie Payson would put a hand on Lottie's shoulder. "This is my baby."

The client would laugh genially, "Quite a baby!" This before the word had taken on its slang significance.

"I wouldn't know what to do without her," Mrs. Payson would say. "I have to be here all day."

"Yes, they're a great help. Great help. Well—see you Monday, Mrs. Payson. Same time. If you'll just see Spielbauer——"

The door closed, Mrs. Payson would turn again to Lottie. "What was the girl doing when you left?"

"Why—she was still ironing."

"How far had she got?"

"All the fancy things. She was beginning on the sheets."

"Well, I should think so! At that hour."

Lottie turned toward the door. "Aunt Charlotte'll be waiting."

Mrs. Payson must have a final thumb on the clay. "Be very careful crossing the streets." And yet there was pride and real affection in her eyes as she looked after the sturdy vigorous figure speeding down the corridor toward the elevator.

Once, when Lottie returned to the oculist's after a longer absence than usual Aunt Charlotte had gone. "How long?" The attendant thought it must be fifteen minutes. Chicago's downtown streets, even to the young and the keen-sighted, were a maelstrom dotted at intervals by blue-uniformed figures who held up a magic arm and blew a shrill blast just when a swirl and torrent of drays, cabs, street-cars, and trucks with plunging horses threatened completely to engulf them. Added to this was the thunderous roar of the Wabash Avenue L trains. Even when the crossing was comparatively safe and clear the deafening onrush of a passing L train above always caused Aunt Charlotte to scuttle back to the curb from which she was about to venture forth. The roar seemed to be associated in her mind with danger; it added to her confusion. Leading a horse out of a burning barn was play compared with ushering Aunt Charlotte across a busy downtown street.

"Just let me take my time," she would say, tremulously but stubbornly immovable.

"But Aunt Charlotte if we don't go now we'll be here forever. Now's the time."

Aunt Charlotte would not budge. Then, at the wrong moment, she would dart suddenly across to the accompaniment of the startled whoop or curse of a driver, chauffeur, or car conductor obliged to draw a quick rein or jam on an emergency brake to avoid running her down.

Lottie, knowing all this, sped toward Wabash Avenue with fear in her heart, and a sort of anger born of fear. "Oh, dear! It does seem to me she might have waited. Mother didn't want a thing. Not a thing. I told her——"

She came to the corner of Wabash and Madison where they always took the Indiana Avenue car. She saw a little group of people near the curb and her heart contracted as she sped on, but when she came up to them it was only a balky automobile engine that had drawn their attention. She looked across at the corner which was their car-stop. There stood Aunt Charlotte. At once cowering, brave; terrified, courageous. At sight of that timorous, peering, black-garbed figure Lottie gave a little sob. The blood rushed back to her heart as though it had lain suspended in her veins.

"Aunt Charlotte, why did you do it?"

"I got across alone."

"But why didn't you wait for me? You knew——"

"I got across alone. But the street car—the wagons never stopping so a body can get out to the street car. And no way of telling whether it was an Indiana or a Cottage Grove. But I got across alone." She had her five-cent piece in her black-gloved trembling hand.