LABYRINTH

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO · DALLAS
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MACMILLAN & CO., Limited
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THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd.
TORONTO

LABYRINTH

BY

HELEN R. HULL

AUTHOR OF "QUEST," ETC.

New York

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

1923

All rights reserved

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Copyright, 1923,

By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

Set up and electrotyped. Published September, 1923.

Press of

J.J. Little & Ives Company

New York, U.S.A.

To MABEL L. ROBINSON

LABYRINTH

In the old story of the labyrinth at Crete, the Minotaur dwelling there devoured in his day innumerable youths and maidens. He was slain finally by the hero Theseus. The story goes that Theseus escaped both monster and death in the blind alleys of the labyrinth only because Ariadne was wise enough to furnish egress by means of her slender silken thread.

There is a modern story of a labyrinth, differing from the old tale in that it has as yet no termination, no hero who has slain the Minotaur, no thread to guide those who enter its confusion of passages out to any clear safety beyond its winding darkness. This modern story differs from the old legend in other ways. The monster lurking in this labyrinth seems to many who hear the tale merely a phantom. His bellowings are soft and gentle, he writhes in so sentimental a fashion that he can scarcely be taken as a monster, and since he leaves his victims with their bones unbroken and their flesh unscarred, who is to say that he has devoured them? They themselves may deny their fate. And in that lies a final likeness to the old story. Until Theseus and Ariadne had between them destroyed the Minotaur, people had thought him an inevitable pest, and had looked upon the destruction he wrought as legitimate. Perhaps some of the youth were tragic about their fate, but after all, a monster and a labyrinth possess dignity and provoke indifference merely by their continued existence.

Ariadne alone might not have slain the monster. She might have traveled through the passageways, her silken thread between her fingers, and perished herself without some aid from Theseus.

Here is the modern story of the labyrinth.

CONTENTS

PART I

AN IDYLL—FROM THE INSIDE

I

"Tell Letty, Muvver. Tell Letty."

"Again? Oh, Letty!" Catherine opened her eyes. Letty, on her stomach, was pointing at a black ant slipping along a grass blade.

"'Nother ant. Tell Letty."

"Don't squirm off the rug, or the ant will crawl up your rompers and take a nip." Catherine looked up through the motionless leaves of the birch trees under which she had spread the rug. "Once there was a busy ant," she began, "and he went out for a walk to find a grain of sand to build his house. His brother went out for a walk, too——" Her thoughts drifted through the story: how close the sky looks, as if the heat had changed its shape, and it rested there just above the tree—— "The busy ant found a grain of sand and ran back to his hill to lay it on his house." The haze seems thicker; the forest fires must be worse, no rain forever——

"Uh-h," Letty grunted, and held up her small brown hand, the ant a black smear on her palm.

"Why, Letty!" Catherine pulled herself up on one elbow. "You squashed him!"

"Bad ant. Nip Letty."

Catherine reached for Letty's fist just as a pink tongue touched it.

"Going to eat him, are you? Little anteater." She brushed the ant away and rolled her daughter over into her arm. "You might wait until you are nipped."

Letty chuckled and lay quietly for a minute, while Catherine looked at her. Brown legs and arms, yellow rompers, yellow hair with sun streaks of palest gold, blue eyes squinted in mirth, a round and sturdy chin.

Catherine closed her eyes again. Out from the woods behind them came with the lengthening shadows the odor of sun-warmed firs and dried needles. Quiet—release from heat—from thought.

Suddenly Letty squirmed, pounded her heels vigorously against her mother's knee, rolled over, and began her own method of standing up. Her process consisted of a slow elevation of her rear, until she had made a rounded pyramid of herself. She stood thus, looking gravely around, her hands flat on the rug, her sandaled feet wide apart.

"Hurry up, anteater," jeered Catherine. "You'll have vertigo."

But Letty took her time. Finally erect, she started off across the meadow.

"Here, you!" Catherine sat up. "Where you going?"

"Get Daddy." Letty's voice, surprisingly deep, bounced behind her.

"Wait for me." Catherine stretched to her feet, reluctantly.

Letty would not have waited, except that she stumbled into an ant hill hidden in the long grass, and went down plump on her stomach. So she lay there calmly, turning her head turtle-wise to watch her mother.

Catherine had borne three children without adding a touch of the matron to her slender, long body. In knickers and green smock, her smooth brown hair dragging its heavy coil low down her slim neck, she looked young and strong and like the birch tree under which she stood. There was even the same suggestion of quiet which a breath might dispel, of poise which might at a moment tremble into agitation. The suggestion lay in her long gray eyes, with eagerness half veiled by thin lids and dark lashes, or perhaps in the long, straight lips, too firmly closed.

A shout came up the path between the alders, and Letty scrambled to her feet.

"Daddy!" she shrieked, and headed down the path, Catherine loping easily after her.

There they were, Charles and the two older children, Spencer carrying a string of flounders, Marian with the fish lines hugged under her arm, and Charles between them, each of his hands caught in one of theirs. They stopped as Letty pelted toward them.

"Fishy! Sweet fishy!" Letty reached for the string. Spencer drew it sternly away, and Letty reached again, patting the flat cold flounder on the end.

"Letty, you'll get all dirty and fish smelly." Spencer disapproved.

"Sweet fishy—" Letty's howl broke off as her father swung her up to his shoulder.

"Fine supper we got, Mother," said Charles, grinning.

"And I caught two," cried Spencer, "and Marian caught one——"

"It was bigger'n yours," said Marian, sadly, "if it was just one."

"Well, but Marian hollered so when a fish picked at her line and so she scared him off."

Marian peered up under her shock of dark bobbed hair, and finding a twinkle in Catherine's eyes, giggled.

"I did holler," she said. "I like to holler, and fish haven't any ears and couldn't hear me——"

"This being the ninth time this discussion has been carried on," said Charles, "I move we change the subject. Anything will do——"

Spencer sighed. The procession moved up the lane, Father at the head, with Letty making loud "Glumph! Glumphs!" as his rubber boots talked, Spencer next, trying to space his smaller boots just in his father's footsteps, and Marian with Catherine at the rear.

"Who's going to clean those fish?" Catherine wrinkled her nose.

"Well, we caught them. Division of labor, eh, Spencer?"

"The male has the sport, and the female the disgusting task of removing the vitals, I suppose."

"Amelia won't," announced Marian. "She said she couldn't clean fish, it turned her stomach."

"I wouldn't keep a maid that wouldn't clean fish." Charles dropped Letty on the broad granite step of the farmhouse, and settled beside her. "Who'll get me some shoes?" He hauled at his red rubber boot, and the clam mud flew off in a shower.

Letty grabbed again at the string of fish as Spencer stood incautiously near her.

"Take them into the sink, Spen," said Catherine. "Marian, can you find Daddy's sneakers? You'll all need a scrub, I'll say."

She looked at them a moment. Marian, dark; irregular small features, tanned to an olive brown; slim as witch grass. Spencer, stocky, with fair cropped head and long gray eyes like her own. Charles—he looked heavier, and certainly well; the sun had left a white streak under the brim of his battered hat and behind his spectacles, but the rest of his face was fiery.

"Cold cream for you, old man," she said. "You aren't used to our Maine sun and sea burn."

"I think I'll be a captain," said Spencer, seriously, turning from his opening of the door. "And fight. Like father." He gazed admiringly at the old service hat on the step.

Catherine's mouth shut grimly and her lids drooped over her eyes.

"Plan some other career, my son. Your father didn't fight, anyway. Did he say he did?"

"Now, Catherine, I just told them about the camp at Brest."

Catherine looked at her husband, a long, quiet glance. Then she followed Spencer into the kitchen.

"Oh, 'Melia!" The heat from the stove rushed at her. "You built a fire to-night!"

"Yes, I did." Amelia, a small, wiry, faded Maine woman, turned from the table. "That oil stove's acting queer, and anyways, it don't seem as if you could fry fish on it."

"We might eat them raw, then, instead of sweltering." Catherine pushed her sleeves above her elbows, and reached for a knife.

"Now that's a real pretty ketch, ain't it?" Amelia nodded at Spencer, who watched while the flounders were slipped from the cord into the sink.

Catherine cleaned the fish. She left Amelia to fry them while she set the table. The heat from the kitchen crept into the long, low dining room. Then Catherine drew Letty, protesting shrilly, into the bedroom, where she undressed and bathed her. When she had slipped the nightie over the small yellow head, she kissed her. "Now you find Daddy, and I'll have Amelia bring your milk out to the porch."

She called Marian, who came on a run, peeling her jumper over her head.

"Can I put on my white sailor suit to show Daddy, Muvver?" She dragged it from the clothes-press. "Oooh! That's cold water!" She wriggled under Catherine's swift fingers.

"There, little eel." Catherine knotted the blue tie. "Run along. Where's Spencer?"

"He's washing hisself, I think." Marian smoothed up her blue sock with a little preening motion, and vanished.

"Mis' Hammond!" came Amelia's thin call, and Catherine went back to the kitchen.

Letty was in bed on the porch, her smeary white duck sitting on the pillow beside her, her deep little voice running on in an unintelligible story of the day.

"Supper ready, Catherine?" Father stood in the doorway of the dining room, Marian and Spencer at his heels. "We fishermen are starved. Oh, you aren't dressed yet."

"I'm as dressed as I shall be." Catherine pushed her hair back from a moist forehead. "Let's eat."

"Well, we like to see you dressed up like a lady once a day, don't we?" Charles grinned at her as he pulled up his chair.

Catherine felt her hands twitch in her lap. "Steady," she warned herself. "He's just joking. I've been busy—I should have dressed this afternoon——"

"Some flounder!" Charles bit into the golden brown fish. "What you been doing all the time, Catherine, while we went provender hunting?"

"Thinking," said Catherine slowly. "That is, I thought in between Letty's demands for more story."

"What did you think about, Mother?" Spencer's face lighted with quick curiosity.

"Some about you, Spencer, and some about Marian and Letty, and some about Daddy, and mostly about—me." Catherine was serving the salad. She had deft, slim hands with long fingers, and her movements were slow and beautifully exact.

"What about us?" asked Marian.

"I have to think some more, first." Catherine looked up at Charles. "A lot more."

II

The house was a gray mass in the evening, with one pale yellow window where the kitchen lamp shone. Catherine lay motionless in the wicker lounge on the low front veranda. Amelia had gone home. Spencer and Marian were asleep. Charles had gone to the village store for tobacco. Down below the house the smoke and heat mist veiled the transparency of the sea. So still was the night that Catherine heard the faint "mrrr" of wings of a huge gray moth that flew against her cheek and then away.

"Queer," she thought. "If the house were empty, it would have many sounds, rustles and squeaks and stirrings. But because children sleep there, it is quiet. As if the old ghosts and spirits stood on tiptoe, peeking at the intruders."

She stretched lazily, and relaxed again. The loudest sound in the night was her own soft breathing. Then, faintly, the gravel in the path slipped. Charles was coming back.

Catherine dropped her feet over the edge of the couch and clasped her arms about her knees. When he comes, she thought, I will tell him. If I go on thinking in the dark, I'll fly to bits.

She could see him, darker than the bushes, moving toward her. Then she could smell his pipe.

"Hello!" she called softly, and he crossed the grass to the steps.

"Say, what a night! And what a place!" He slapped his hat beside him, and sat down at Catherine's feet, backed against the pillar. "It's been fierce in town to-day, I'll bet. You're lucky to be able to stay here." He puffed, and the smoke moved in a cloud about the indistinct outline of his face. "Wish I could!"

"When are you going?"

"To-morrow night." Charles sounded aggrieved. "I wrote you I had just the week-end."

"I hoped you might manage a little longer——"

"Can't manage that conference on Monday without being there."

"What conference is that?" Catherine swung one knee over the other; as she watched the face there in the dark, she could feel its expression, although the features were so vague.

"The committee on psychological work in the schools. You remember? Planning it all through the East. It's a big thing."

"Oh, that new committee." Catherine was apathetic.

"That woman I spoke of, Stella Partridge, is mighty keen. She's working out an organization scheme that beats any plan I've seen. I tell you what, old girl, it's great to see the world wake up and swing around to asking for what you want to give it!" Charles cuffed at her foot. "Remember that first year down here? With Spencer a baby, and buying this old house a tremendous undertaking, and me writing a book that I didn't dare hope would sell? Things are different now, aren't they?"

"They are different." Catherine's voice hardened subtly. "I helped with that book, didn't I?"

"Jove! I should say you did. All that typing, and correcting, and then the proof reading."

"And now——" Catherine hesitated.

"Well, now my work has broadened out so much, and there are the three children. I can afford to hire the typing done now, eh what?"

"Yes."

"What's the matter with you, Catherine? You've had a kind of chip about you somewhere ever since I came this time. I can't help it if I can't spend all my time playing in the country with you and the children, can I? After all, I have to see to my work, and it's increasingly demanding."

"I haven't any chip on my shoulder, Charles?" Catherine caught her breath. "I do want to talk to you."

"Fire ahead." Charles tapped out the ashes from his pipe and reached up for her hand. "What's eating you?"

"Oh, Charles!" Catherine's slender fingers shut inside his warm palm. "Help me out! You ought to understand." Her laugh shivered off abruptly. "You know I'm proud of you, just puffed up. Do you know I'm jealous, too? Jealous as—as nettles!"

"Huh? Jealous? What about? Come down here, where I can hug you."

"No. I don't want to be loved. I want to talk. I'm not jealous about your love. I guess you love me, when you think of it——"

"Now, Cathy, you aren't turning into a foolish woman."

"I'm turning into something awful! That's why I've got to do something. It's your work, I'm jealous of."

"Why, my work doesn't touch my feeling about you."

"That's not what I mean. I mean I'm proud of you, every one is, and you aren't proud of me. No one is. No one could be. I'm——"

"Why, Cathy! I am! You're a wonder with the children. And the way you've stood back of me. What are you talking about?"

"I don't want to get emotional. I want to make you see what I've been thinking about. All the nights this summer while I've sat here at the end of the day. I've tried to think—my mind is coated with fat, my thoughts creak. Charles"—her voice trembled—"can you imagine yourself in my place, all summer, or all last year, or the year before? Planning meals or clothes—instead of conferences? Telling stories to Letty. Holding yourself down on the level of children, to meet them, or answer them, or understand them, until you scarcely have a grown-up thought? Before Letty was born, and the year after, of course I wasn't very well. That makes a difference. But now I am. What am I going to do? Could you stand it?"

"But, Catherine, a man——"

"If you tell me a man is different, I'll stop talking!" Catherine cried out.

"I was going to make a scientific statement." Charles stopped, the tolerant good nature of his voice touching Catherine like salt in a cut finger. "To the effect," he went on, "that usually a man's ego is stronger, and a woman's maternal instinct drowns her ego, so that she can live in a situation which would be intolerable to a man."

"Well, then, I'm egoistic to the root." Catherine jerked her hand away from his grasp. "At any rate, the situation is intolerable."

"Poor old girl!" Charles patted her knee. "The summer has been dull, hasn't it?"

"It's not just that. Do you know, I was almost happier while you were in France and I was working—than I am now!"

"Didn't care if I did get hit by a shell, eh? Didn't miss me at all?"

"I did, and you know it." Catherine was silent, her eyes straining toward him in the darkness.

"That was part of the war excitement, wasn't it?"

"No. But something happened in me when you told me you were going. I had been living just in you, you and the two children. I thought that was all I ever wanted. And I thought you felt toward me the same way. Then—you could throw it over—because you wanted something else."

"Catherine, we've had that out dozens of times. You know it was a chance for the experience of a lifetime, psychological work in those hospitals. And then—well, I had to get in it."

"I know. I didn't say a word, did I? But I went to work and I liked it. Then you came back——"

"Well?" His word hung tenderly between them.

"Yes." Catherine sighed. "Like falling in love again, wasn't it? Only deeper. And we wanted Letty." Her voice quavered again. "That's it! I love you so much. But you don't sit down in your love—and devour it—and let it devour you. It isn't right, Charles, help me! I"—she laughed faintly—"I'm like your shell-shocked soldiers. You couldn't really cure them until peace came. Then they weren't shell-shocked any more. I'm shell-shocked too, and I can't cure myself, and I see no armistice. I'm growing worse. I know why women have hysterics and all sorts of silly diseases. I'll have 'em too in a day or so!"

"Funny, isn't it, when I'd like nothing better than a chance to loaf here with the kids. But you'll get back to town soon and see people, theaters, club——"

"And hear about the whooping cough the Thomases had—and—oh, damn!" Catherine was crying suddenly, broken, stifled sobs.

Charles pulled her down into his arms, holding her firmly against his chest.

"There, old girl! Stop it! What do you want?"

Catherine pushed herself away from him, her hands braced against him.

"I won't be silly." She flung her hand across her eyes. "I'm sorry. But I've tried to figure it out, and I just drop into a great black gulf, and drown!"

"What are you figuring on?" Charles let his fingers travel slowly along the curve of her cheek until they shut softly about her throat.

Catherine held herself sternly away from the comfort of touch.

"I can't endure it, day after day, the same things. Petty manual jobs. And I'm older every day. And soon the children will be grown up, and I'll be flat on the dump heap."

"In a few more years, Cathy, I'll have more money. Now you know we can't afford more servants, I'm sorry."

"I don't want more from you!" Catherine cried out. "I want to do something myself!"

"You know how much you do." Charles scoffed at her, but she caught the hint of scratched pride in his voice. "In the middle-class family the wife is the largest economic factor."

"Charles, if I work out a scheme which puts no more burden on you"—Catherine's breath quickened—"would you mind my going back to work? I've figured it out. How much I'd have to earn to fill my place——"

"You mean—take a job?"

"Yes."

Charles reached for his pipe.

"What would you do about the children?" He cleared his throat. "They seem to need a mother."

"Well, they need a father, too, but not to be a door-mat."

"Everything I think of saying, Catherine, sounds awfully mid-Victorian."

"I know what it all is! You needn't think I don't. But I know the answer to it all, too, so you needn't bother saying it."

"I suppose I better consider myself lucky you aren't expecting me to stay home and take care of Letty. You aren't, are you?"

Catherine laughed. She knew Charles wanted to laugh; he was tired of this serious talk.

"You won't mind, then?" she added, tensely. "You see, if you aren't willing, and interested, I can't do it."

"Try it. Go ahead. I'll bet you'll get sick of it soon enough. After all, you women forget the nuisance of being tied to appointments, rain or shine, toothache or stomachache——"

"Ah-h"—Catherine relaxed in his arms, one hand moving up around his neck. "It has seemed so awful, so serious, thinking it out alone. You are an old dear!"

"All right. Have it your own way." Charles struck his match and held it above the pipe bowl. The light showed his eyes a little amused, a little tender, a little skeptical. It flared out, leaving dancing triangles of orange in the darkness. Catherine shivered. Was he just humoring her, like a child? Not really caring? But she shut her eyes upon the mocking flecks of light and slipped off to the step below him, her head comfortably against his arm.

She was tired, as if she had cut through ropes which had held her erect and taut. She could feel the slight movement of muscles in the arm under her cheek, as Charles sucked away at his pipe. The soft darkness seemed to move up close and sweet about them, with faint rustles in the grass at her feet. Queer that just loving couldn't be enough, when it had such sweetness. Her thoughts drifted off in a warm, tranquil flood of emotion; her self was gone, washed out in this nearness, this quiet. Charles stirred, and unconsciously she waited for a sign from him out of the perfect, enclosed moment.

He spoke.

"I want you to meet Miss Partridge when you come back to town. Great head she's got. We're using her plan of organization in the small towns."

Catherine sat very still. After an instant she lifted her head from his shoulder and yawned audibly.

"I'm sleepy. The day has been so warm," she said, and rose. She kicked against something metallic and stooped to pick up Letty's red pail and shovel, as she passed into the house.

III

"Dark o' the moon! Dark o' the moon! Dark—Mother, see what I found!" Spencer broke his slow chant with a squeal, and dangled above his head the great purple starfish. Sure-footed, like a lithe brown sea animal, he darted over the slippery golden seaweed toward Catherine, who looked up from the shallow green pool over which she had been stooping.

"Lemme see too!" Marian's dark head rose from behind a rock and she stumbled after her brother. Plump! she was down in the treacherous kelp, her serious face scarcely disconcerted. Marian always slipped on the seaweed.

"Isn't he 'normous? He's the 'normousest yet." Spencer laid the star on the rock, bending over to straighten one of the curling arms.

"I found one almost as big," declared Marian, "only pink. And pink's a nicer color. Isn't it, Muvver?"

"If you like it." Catherine took Spencer's sea-chilled fingers in hers and drew them down to the under side of the ledge over the pool. "Feel that?"

"What is it?" Spencer's gray eyes darkened with excitement.

"Lemme feel too!" Marian sat down on the seaweed and slid along to the ledge. "Where?"

Catherine guided her fingers. How like sea things those cold little hands felt! "What does it feel like?"

"Kinda soft and kinda hard and——Oh, it's got a mouth!" Marian squirmed away. "Tell us, Muvver! What is it?"

"Can you guess, Spen?"

"May I look, Mother? I think it's—snail eggs."

Catherine laughed.

"Lean over and look. I'll hold you." She seized his belt, while he craned his neck over the bit of rock.

"Purple, too!" He came back, flushed. "I know!"

"Lemme see!" Marian plunged downward, her legs waving. "It's full of holes. What is it?"

"Sponges," said Spencer, importantly.

"Sponges is brown and bigger," cried Marian.

"These are alive and not the same kind as your bath sponge."

Catherine straightened her back and looked out over the sea. Opal, immobile, so clear that the flat pink ledges beyond the lowest tide mark were like blocks of pigment in the water. Something strange in this dark of the moon tide, dragging the water away from hidden places, uncovering secret pools. Once every summer Catherine rowed across to the small rocky point that marked the entrance to the cove, to see what the tide disclosed. There was a thrill about the hour when the water seemed to hang motionless, below the denuded rocks. Spencer felt it; Catherine had touched the sensitive vibration of his fingers as he searched. Marian found the expedition interesting, like clam digging! Catherine remembered the year the fog had come in as the tide swung back, suddenly terrifyingly thick and gray about them, so that she had wondered whether they ever would find their own mooring; she could see the ghostly shore, with unfamiliar rocks looming darkly out of the grayness, as she rowed slowly around the cove, trying to keep the shore line as guide. Charles had come out to meet them; his "Hullo!" had been a whisper first, moving through the mist and seeming to recede. Then he had come alongside them, the fog drops thick on his worried face. Spencer had liked that, too, although Marian had crouched on her bow seat, shivering.

No fog to-day. The horizon line was pale and clear. She should go back for Letty. They had left her behind them on a sandy stretch of beach, with a pile of whitened sea-urchin shells.

"Mother!" Spencer repeated his summons. "What is dark o' the moon?"

Catherine explained vaguely as they scrambled up the rounded, slippery rocks to the patch of coarse grass at the top of the small point. Where was Letty? She had been visible from there. Catherine began to run, down to the muddy flats that separated the point from the mainland. Only a few minutes since she had last seen her head, like a bit of bright seaweed. The water was so far out, surely—— Panic nipped at her heels as she flew. "Letty! Let-ty!" There was the pile of shells. "Letty!" A spasm of fear choked her breathing. Then a call, deep and contented.

"Letty here." Around the clump of beach peas and driftwood— The yellow head nodded out of a mud hole left by a clam digger on the beach. "Letty swim."

Catherine picked up her daughter.

"Letty, darling! You little imp——" The gray mud dripped from rompers and sandals.

"Oh, she's all wet." Marian puffed up. "And dirty!"

"Now how are we going to get you home without a cold, young woman!" Catherine stood her on the beach, and sighed. Letty, her fingers full of the soft mud, looked up with bright, unremorseful eyes.

"My sweater's in the dory, Mother." Spencer frowned at his sister. "You haven't any sense, Letty."

Letty's rompers served as a bath towel, and the sweater made a cocoon. She sat beside Marian, while Catherine and Spencer rowed the old dory across the half mile of quiet water. The children chattered about their discoveries, and Catherine listened while her thoughts moved quickly beneath the surface of the talk. Fear like that—it's terrific, unreasoning, overwhelming. How would you bear it if anything happened! You have to be all eyes, and be with them every instant. How can you plan, thinking of anything else? And yet, things happen to children, of any mothers——

"Dark o' the moon—pulls the ole water—away from the earth——" Spencer chanted as he rowed. "Dark o' the moon——"

"What makes you say that all the time, Spencer?" demanded Marian.

"I like to say it. Pulls the ole water—away from the earth——"

"Not so deep, Spencer. You drag your oar. See—" Catherine pulled the blades smoothly along, just beneath the surface.

"I know. I meant to." Spencer was intent on his oars again.

IV

The mail bag hung on the post. Catherine drew out its contents. A letter from Charles. The paper. Her fingers gripped over an envelope. From the Bureau, in answer to hers. A piece of fate, in that square white thing. She thrust it into her pocket. Later, when the children were asleep. She could think then.

Now the air was full of the children. Letty's deep squeals of mirth, a strange noise from Spencer, meant to be whinnying, as he pranced up the path dragging Letty's cart, protests from Marian, "You are silly, I think!" Would Marian always be so serious? And Spencer—he was always exhausting himself by the very exuberance of his fancy. Catherine followed them slowly. Suddenly the sounds broke off for an instant of surprised silence; Catherine lifted her head. The children were out of sight around the bend, and she could not see the house yet. Other voices, and a shriek from Letty. She hurried past the alder growth. There was a car by the side door, and people. Marian flew toward her.

"Muvver! Mr. Bill and Dr. Henrietta! They've come to see us!"

"Good gracious! What can I feed them?" thought Catherine. Then, as she came nearer and saw them, she thought, "I'm getting to be the meanest kind of domestic animal."

Dr. Henrietta Gilbert, fair, plump, serene, immaculately tailored, looked up from her seat on the step, one arm around Letty, who was gleaming brown and sleek from the carelessly draped red sweater. Spencer hovered at her shoulder, his face lighted with pleasure.

"Hello, Catherine!" she held up one hand.

William Gilbert stood behind them, his dark, tired face smiling a little, his long, lean body sagging lazily. Catherine reached for his hand.

"Well, you two!" she cried. "How'd you find this place?"

"Charles gave us minute directions." Dr. Henrietta rose neatly. "He wouldn't come. He's too important for trips. What's happened to Letty? She seems to be clothed for a prize fight."

"Letty swim!" shouted Letty proudly.

"You drove from New York?" Catherine lifted Letty into her arms, and enveloped her in the sweater. "I didn't know you could get away."

"Labor Day," said Bill. He was gazing at the children, his eyes half shut behind his thick glasses.

"If you can't put us up, Catherine, we'll hunt for a boarding house. But we wanted to see you."

"Of course I can. Do you think I'd let you escape, when I'm starving for human beings?"

"With all of these?" Bill nodded at the group.

"They are animals, not human beings, aren't you, Marian?" Dr. Henrietta laughed at Marian's distressed face. "Your woman in the kitchen"—she dropped her voice mysteriously—"thought we were bandits and didn't ask us in."

Amelia was pleased to meet them, when Catherine ushered them properly into the house.

"Don't that beat all!" she said, loudly, as they followed Spencer to the guest room. "I thought they was peddlars. Drove all the ways from New York! Don't that beat all!" She made flurried rushes about the kitchen, pulling open the cupboard doors. "Now don't you fuss, Mis' Hammond. If baked beans is good enough I can make out a meal, I guess. She's a doctor, eh?"

After a fleet half hour Catherine had Letty bathed, fed, and tucked into her cot. She had slipped out of her knickerbockers and smock into a soft green dress. No time to brush her hair; she adjusted a pin in the heavy brown knot, and glanced at her reflection. Letty's voice rose in deep inarticulate demand from the porch. Catherine stepped to the door. Bill stood outside.

"She wants you to say good night to Ducky Wobbles." Catherine smiled at him; she had, at times, a lovely smile, unreserved in its warm friendliness. She was fond of Bill; his dark silence piqued her, but she felt that it was a silence of steady, quiet wisdom, which couldn't break itself up into tiny words.

"Can't I say good night to Letty instead?"

"No! Nice Ducky!" Letty wobbled her duck at him. "Goo'ni' to my Ducky!"

"Well, then, good night to Ducky and to his Letty."

Letty dropped back into her pillow, content.

"Now you go to sleep, old lady." Catherine closed the door, and stopped for a moment to supervise Marian's preparations.

Spencer had filled the wood basket with shining pink-white birch logs. Catherine drew out the crane with the kettle and laid a fire on the andirons in the huge old fireplace. Dr. Henrietta came out, dangling her eyeglasses on a long black ribbon over her sturdy white finger.

"This is a charming old place, Catherine. You all look well, too. A summer in the country certainly sets the children up."

Catherine glanced at her, as the flame crept around the logs.

"You ought to try it, if you want to know what it does to you—" she paused. "Moss in every cranny of your brain—" Bill was coming in. "After supper I'll tell you!"

Supper was over. Spencer had piloted Bill and the car safely into the barn, running back to tell Catherine, "Moth-er! Mr. Bill thinks his car scared all the old cow ghosts in the stalls." When he and Marian were in bed, Catherine came back to the living room, the square envelope from the Bureau in her hand.

"It's queer you two should come to-night," she said. "I need you to talk to."

Bill had settled in the old fiddle-back walnut chair, the smoke from his pipe turning his lined face into a dim gargoyle. Dr. Henrietta was fitting a cigarette into her long amber holder.

"Charles hasn't been here much this summer, has he?" she asked.

"Only occasional week-ends." Catherine sat down on the footstool on the hearth. The light shone through the loosened brown hair about her face and turned her throat to pale ivory. "He was here a week ago."

"Your sister? Has she been here?"

"No. She decided to spend her vacation in the mountains with that friend of hers. Nobody's been here! I haven't seen anyone since last May, except for flying shots at Charles. If I begin to spout a Mother Goose rhyme at you, you might understand why."

"Well, you haven't the mossy look I connect with mothers," said Henrietta, as she smoked in quick little spurts. "Have a cigarette?" She tossed her silver case into Catherine's lap.

"Sworn off." Catherine ran her finger over the monogram. "Amelia would know I was a fallen woman—haven't lighted one since—oh, since Charles came back from France."

"Didn't he care for those home fires?" Bill took his pipe out of his teeth, drawled his question, and went on with his inspection of the flames.

Catherine laughed.

"Tell me what you two have been doing since I saw you."

Henrietta retrieved her case and extracted a second cigarette.

"Same things. Babies, clinics, babies. Bill's had a bridge over in Jersey. The Journal's taken a series of articles I did on that gland work last year. Public school on the East Side is going to let me run sort of a laboratory clinic on malnutrition. Mother instinct down there feeds its infants on cabbage, fried cakes, and boiled tea."

"You're a wonder, Henry." Catherine sighed. "Putting over what you want."

"It's only these last few years, you know, that I've had any recognition."

"You're a wonder, just the same. Isn't she, Bill?"

"Um." Bill's grunt gave complete assent.

Catherine looked steadily at her friend. Even in the soft firelight Dr. Henrietta Gilbert retained her smooth, competent neatness. A smoothness like porcelain, thought Catherine. Porcelain with warmth in it, she added hastily to herself, as if she had made an unfair accusation. Firm, kindly lips; contented, straightforward blue eyes; plump, ungraceful body; Dr. Henrietta had a compact, assured personality, matter of fact, intelligent, enduring. Catherine wondered: do I give, as she looks at me, as complete an impression of me? I feel hidden away. Then she thought, quickly, of the grim days when Spencer lay so piteously still except when he struggled for breath, when he had so nearly died—pneumonia—and Henrietta had seemed to hold herself between the child and death itself, calm, untroubled. She was a wonder!

"You couldn't have done it, could you," she said suddenly, "if you had had children?" Then she stopped, aghast at her heedlessness. She had never said that when Bill was there to hear her. But Henrietta's response was cheerful and prompt.

"Certainly not. That's why we haven't any."

Catherine glanced shyly toward Bill. His eyes, inscrutable as ever, did not lift from the fire.

"That's"—Catherine hesitated—"that's what I want to talk about."

"What?" Henrietta was on her guard.

"Oh, I don't mean you. I mean me?" She balanced the letter on her knee and pointed at it. "That letter. I haven't opened it, but it's an omen."

"Don't be mysterious," Henrietta jibed at her.

"I want to go to work. I wrote to the Bureau, where I had that job while Charles was in France. This is their answer."

Bill leaned forward to tap his pipe out on the fire tongs. Catherine felt his eyes on her face.

"Catherine! Bully for you!" Henrietta clapped her hand on Catherine's shoulder. "Have you told Charles? Can you manage it?"

"I told him." Catherine drank eagerly of the bluff encouragement in Henrietta's voice. "He calls it my 'unsatisfied trend.' But he wouldn't object, of course."

"I thought you didn't care much for that work. Statistics, wasn't it?" Bill put his question quietly.

"Part of it I didn't." Catherine admitted that reluctantly. "But a new investigation is being started, on teaching. I am interested in that. I taught, you know, before I married, and I think that is as important as anything in the world."

"Read the letter, woman!" Henrietta shook Catherine's shoulder.

Catherine ran her finger under the flap and unfolded the square page. As she bent near the firelight, a log rolled off the burning pile, sending a yellow flame high into the chimney, touching into relief the wistful, tremulous lines of her mouth.

"They want me." Her voice was hushed, as she looked up at Henrietta. "At once. Dr. Roberts says he had been looking for someone. He thought I was unavailable."

A shrill, frightened cry darted into the room, sharp as a flame. Catherine leaped to her feet.

"Spencer. He has nightmares." She went hastily out to the sleeping porch.

He was moaning in his sleep, one hand brushing frantically over his blanket. Catherine's hand closed over his. "There, Spencer," she said, softly, "it's all right, dear." He did not wake, but the moaning dropped into regular, quiet breathing, and his hand relaxed warmly in hers. She stood a moment, listening. Then she stole to the other two beds, bending over each. Letty's breathing was so soft that her heart stood still an instant as she listened. At the door of the porch she clasped her hands over her breast.

"Am I wicked?" she thought. "When I have them—to care about—" A passion of tenderness for them shook her; she felt as if the three of them lay at the very core of her being, and she enclosed them, crouching above them, fiercely maternal.

Slowly she went back to the living room. She heard Bill's low voice, and then Henrietta's,

"Catherine can do it. She has brains and strength——"

Her entrance broke off the sentence.

"I'll light a lamp," she said briefly. "This firelight's too sentimental. I want hard common sense."

"Here, let me." Bill flicked a match with his thumb nail, and Catherine fitted the heavy orange globe down over the lamp.

She seated herself in the straight chair near the desk.

"Well," said Henrietta, "I don't see any more clearly than I did in the dark. If you have the nerve to try this, Catherine, go ahead. I'm all for you."

"You think, professionally, that it won't harm the children?"

"You can hire some woman, can't you, to take your place as slave? I suppose you still can look at them occasionally."

"Yes. I suppose"—Catherine twisted her fingers together—"I suppose I am as conceited as most mothers, wondering whether they can get along eight hours a day without me."

"You aren't happy, are you?" Henrietta flung at her, abruptly. "You have the blues, black as ink. You have to hang on to yourself about trifles. You——"

"Oh, yes, yes!" Catherine's laugh shrilled a little. "Don't go on with my disgraceful disposition. I admit it. But don't women have to put up with that?"

"My Lord, no. No longer than they are willing to. Most of them find it easier to lie down. You've got too much brains to be sentimental, Catherine Hammond."

"What do you think, Bill?" Catherine appealed to him suddenly. She felt him, in his motionless silence, probing, inspecting, and never saying what he saw.

"It is for you to decide," he answered.

"You know you can't get advice out of Bill! It's a wonder he ever can serve on an engineering commission." Henrietta laughed at him, in friendly, appreciative amusement. "He has to offer technical advice there. He won't give any other kind."

"You won't consider my specifications?" Catherine was a trifle piteous, under her light tone. "Even if I need—well, it is rebuilding, isn't it?" She wondered why his opinion seemed so necessary. She had Henrietta's, and Henrietta was a woman. But she wanted to reach across, to pull at those passive, restrained hands, to beg him to speak.

"I really think that you have to decide yourself." He paused. "You realize, probably, that it will be like handling a double job. Charles would find it difficult to take over a new share of your present job. Most men would."

"I don't want him to. I couldn't bear to do the slightest thing to interfere with him. His career is just starting—and brilliantly. It wouldn't be right to bother him."

"Why not?" Henrietta sat up, hostility bristling in her manner. "Why not a fair sharing of this responsibility? He wanted the children, didn't he? You're as bad as some of my clinic mothers. They go out to work by the day, and they come home to work by the night. I asked one of them why she didn't let her man help with the dishes and the wash, and she said, 'Him? He's too tired after supper.' And she was earning more scrubbing than the man!"

"You wouldn't make Bill sit up with your patients, would you?" cried Catherine, hotly, "or typewrite your articles?"

"Of course Henrietta has only one job," said Bill.

"Charles has expected the children to be my job." Catherine spoke slowly. "He is in competition with other men whose wives have no other thought. Like Mrs. Thomas, for instance. You met her?"

"I've met scores of them. Most of them haven't brains enough to think with," said Henrietta, crisply. "You have. That's the trouble with you. Now think straight about this, too."

"I am trying to." Catherine's cry hung in the pleasant room, a sharp note of distress.

"It is true, as Catherine sees"—Bill leaned forward—"that the average man grows best in nurture furnished by the old pattern of wife. But you can't generalize. This is Catherine's own problem." He rose. "I wish you luck, you know. Good night." He went slowly across the hall, and closed the door of the guest room.

"You can't drag Bill into an argument," said Henrietta. "Now he's gone." She pulled her chair around to face Catherine. "I want to see you make a go of this. To see if it can be done. It's got to be, some day. I wouldn't take the chance, you see."

"But it was children I most wanted." Catherine groped among her familiar thoughts. "I didn't know I wouldn't be contented. I'm not sure I shouldn't be."

"You aren't. The signs are on you, plain as day. And you've hit straight at the roots of your trouble. I've seen it, longer than you have, and I've just been waiting. When Charles went off for his adventure, he left you space to see in!"

"Are you—happy?"

"Me? Of course. Reasonably."

"You don't want any children?"

"Good heavens, no! I see enough of children."

"But you like them. You couldn't handle them as you do——"

"I take out my well-known maternal instinct that way, if you like."

"You're hard as nails, Henry."

"Catherine"—Henrietta's face was grim under its fair placidity—"when I was sixteen, I saw my mother die in childbirth. She had eight children. Two of them are alive now. She was only thirty-three when she died. She died on a farm in Michigan, and my father thought she picked a poor time, because he was haying. I swore then I'd be something besides a female animal. William knew what I wanted. It's a fair deal to him. He knew he was getting a wife, but not a mother. That's all there is to that. I like you. When you fell for Charles so hard, I was afraid you were ended. Now I have hopes!" Her hand, firm and hard, shut about Catherine's. "Only, don't handicap yourself with this clutter of feelings."

Something in the clutch of the firm fingers gave Catherine a quick insight. Henrietta wasn't hard! Not porcelain. A shell, over a warm, soft creature—a barnacle, hiding from injury as deep as that her childhood had shown her.

"You're a nice old thing." Catherine laid her other hand over Henrietta's. "And"—she came back to her own maelstrom—"you think it will be fair to the children? I ought to be more decent—better for them—if I can get some self-respect."

"That's talking. You write and take that job, instanter! I'll look around for a woman for you. When can you come down?" Henrietta withdrew her hand.

"That's another thing." Catherine frowned. "Dr. Roberts says as soon as possible. School doesn't open, though, for two weeks. I don't like to drag the children back."

"You see?" Henrietta made an impatient lunge with her foot.

"I'll have to think that out."

They sat in silence for a few moments. Then Henrietta rose.

"I'm glad we blew in," she said. "But we have to start off early."

"You've helped." Catherine stood in front of her friend, her hands clasped loosely. "I'll hunt you up in town, when I need an injection of common sense."

She went through the quiet house, setting the screen in front of the crimson ash of the fire, turning down the lamp, hanging away the red sweater Letty had worn home, placing a row of damp little sandals on the kitchen steps where the morning sun would dry them. She stood there for a moment, looking off across the water. A huge crimson star hung low in the east; she thought she caught a flicker of reflection in the dark stretch of water. Perhaps it was only a late firefly.

For hours she lay awake, staring out at the great birch tree, watching the faint motion of its leaves, and the slipping through them of the Big Dipper as it wheeled slowly down its arc.

V

They all stood in the sunshine in front of the house, watching the tan top of the Gilberts' car disappear into the alders.

Spencer sighed ostentatiously.

"Wisht we had a nottomobul," he said. "Mr. Bill let me help him squirt oil and I filled a grease cup and put it back."

"Should say you did!" scoffed Marian. "Look at your sleeve! You're awful dirty."

"Aw, shut up," growled Spencer.

"Shut up! Shut up!" shrieked Letty, dancing on her toes, and pulling at Catherine's hand. "Shut up!"

Catherine, who had been caught in a tight knot of confused thought by Henrietta's final mockery, "You won't come down for weeks, I know. And here's your job, waiting for you! You can't break through!" came back with a little start.

Spencer was staring dolefully down the lane; Marian hovered at his smeared elbow, ready to taunt him again if he stayed silent; Letty pranced as if she wanted to say, "Sic 'em!"

Catherine smiled. She knew how they felt. The arrival of the Gilberts was a large stone dropped into the smooth evenness of their days. Their departure—she couldn't carry on that figure, but she knew the emptiness it left, a funny little sickish feeling, almost a fear lest the days would stay empty.

"Well, isn't he a dirty pig, Muvver?"

"You hush up!" Spencer flushed as Catherine's grave eyes rested on his.

"Amelia says she wants some peas picked. The basket is in the woodshed."

"I picked 'em last," said Marian.

"You never did!" Spencer's anger bubbled up. "You——"

"And some potatoes," continued Catherine, calmly. "If you aren't too cantankerous, Spencer might dig those, and Marian might pick the peas."

Spencer dug his toe into the turf.

"Letty dig!" Letty pulled at Catherine's hand, her lower lip piteously imploring. "Letty dig, Muddie!"

"I have some letters to write." Catherine picked up Letty and started for the house. "I hope you two can see to the vegetables."

With a brief glance as she opened the door, she saw Spencer with a gruff "Aw, come along!" heading for the woodshed.

Letty twisted and squirmed in her arms. "Dig!" she declared.

"You can dig in your sand pile." Catherine set her down. "Where is your red pail? You find that, while I find my pen."

She couldn't go back to town before school opened. Her pen made tiny involved triangles at the edge of the blotter. Charles wouldn't like it if she brought the children down so early. Still, that would give her a few days to set the house in order, to find a woman to take her place. What a queer thought! Henrietta had one in mind, she had said, a sort of practical nurse and housekeeper. There were the children's clothes to see to. When could she do that? She wouldn't have time for sewing. She dropped her head down on the table, her hands clasped under her forehead. I can't do it, she thought. Too many things. Things! That's it. Clothes, and laundry, and dirt in the corners. One hand groped out for the letter from Dr. Roberts, and she lifted her head. Her mouth set in a hard, thin line; the smears under her gray eyes made them larger, weary with a kind of desperation.

"I remember so well your admirable work," he had written. "I can think of no one with whom I should prefer to entrust this new piece of work."

If I don't do it now, I never will, she thought. Never. Perhaps I haven't the courage, or the endurance.

"Mis' Hammond!" came Amelia's nasal call. "D'you want a fish? Earle's here and wants to know."

"Yes." Catherine drew her paper near.

"Huh? D'you want one?"

Catherine rose abruptly and hurried into the kitchen.

"Buy one, Amelia," she said. "Good morning, Earle."

"Well, he's got cod and haddock and hake." Amelia was stern.

"Haddock," said Catherine. "There's change there in my purse."

When she came back to the porch, Letty was not in sight, nor did she answer Catherine's call. Her red pail lay beside the sand pile.

"Oh, damn!" thought Catherine, as she flung her pen on to the table and started in quest of Letty. "If I don't find her, I'll regret it. Letty! Mother wants you!"

Incredible that those small legs could travel so fast. Catherine peeked into the poultry yard. Last week she had found Letty there, trying to catch an indignant rooster. But Letty seldom repeated.

As she rounded the corner of the house, she saw the child, and her own heart contracted terribly. Letty was lying on her stomach on a broad stone, part of the well curb, her small yellow head out of sight, her heels in the air.

"Who left that cover off! If I call her, I may startle her——"

Amelia appeared at the door, a water pail in her hand, her pale eyes popping out in her tight face.

"Sh-h!" Catherine laid a finger on her lips, as she stole softly toward Letty, with knees that trembled. Her hand closed firmly over a kicking foot, and she dragged the child suddenly back. Then she sat down on the grass.

Letty wriggled violently to be free.

"Letty fish!" she waved a bit of string. "Fish!"

"Well, don't that beat all!" Amelia stood over them. "Who left that well cover off?"

"You didn't?" asked Catherine wearily.

"My land, no. I was just coming out to draw a bucket. I'll bet that Earle done it."

"Letty, be still!" Catherine's tone hushed the child. "I have told you never to go near that well, haven't I?"

Letty smiled, beguilingly.

"Pretty Muddie. Letty fish." Her small face wrinkled into the most ingratiating smile she possessed.

"You are a naughty Letty." Catherine rose. "Come along and be tied up, like a bad little dog."

Letty's wrinkled nose smoothed instantly, and her eyes closed for a scream. Catherine lifted her firmly into her arms, one hand over the open mouth.

She sat in her room, waiting for Letty's shrieks to subside. They did, soon, and she heard her chirrup. "Get ap! Get ap!" and knew the rope which tied her had become a horse.

Fiercely she seized her pen and wrote. If she stopped to think again— Anything might happen, anyway! She stopped long enough to see clearly that if anything happened while she, the mother, was away, she might have a load of self-reproach heavier than she could endure. It's part of the struggle, she thought. Someone else can play watchdog, surely. There! She had committed herself. A note to Charles. She was glad his conference had been so interesting. She had just accepted a position at the Bureau, like her old job there. She might come down a few days early. With love——

VI

The porter dropped the bags on the platform beside them, and held out his pink palm. Then he swung up to the step, as the long train began to move. Until the train was out of sight down the curving track, Catherine knew it was useless to start her procession. A fine drizzle filled the air under the shed, and the roofs of the street below them gleamed dull and sordid.

"Spencer, will you take that bag? And Marian, this one——" Catherine pulled Letty up into her arm and with a suitcase dragging at her shoulder, piloted the children toward the stairs. "Daddy may be downstairs. Careful, Marian, on those wet steps."

There he was, at the bottom of the narrow, dark stairs. Catherine's heart gave its customary little jump—always, when she saw Charles again, even after the briefest separation.

Marian clung to his arm, Spencer let himself be hugged, Letty squealed with delight. Catherine looked at him, her eyes bright. He did look well! And he had a new suit, in all this rain!

"Here's a taxi, right here. Jump in. Where are your checks?" he bundled them in and handed the checks to the driver.

"This is a crowded street, Mother, and awful loud!" said Spencer, his nose against the glass.

"I like the big station better," said Marian, adjusting herself with interest on the little folding seat. "Why can't we get out there?"

"This is nearer home, dear."

Daddy sat next to Mother, and the taxi rattled off, spurting slimy mud.

"Hard trip, old girl?" Charles put his arm around Catherine's shoulders.

"Fair." Catherine shone at him softly. "Sort of a job, putting the family to bed on a sleeper. But it's over."

"An awful homely street," muttered Spencer, his face doleful.

"It's got lots of things in it," said Marian, wiggling down from her seat, and thrusting her face against the door. "See the folks and the stores and the street cars."

"It's dirty." Spencer turned from the window and looked darkly at Catherine. "I want to be back home," he said.

Catherine smiled at him. Poor boy! The little quiver of his nostrils was eloquent of nostalgia, of the rude necessity of adjustment.

"Our street isn't like this, Spencer," she assured him. "You will like that better."

"Turned into a country kid, have you?" Charles reached for the boy's arm. "Fine muscle! You'll have to try some handball with me this winter."

Spencer lost his forlornness at once. "In the court? Oh, gee!"

"I've got muscle too, Daddy." Marian bounced across to her father's knees. "Feel me! Can't I play ball with you?"

"Letty play!" wailed Letty.

The taxi jolted to a standstill in the traffic, and Letty was diverted by a large and black mammy descending from the street car close to the cab.

"Girls can't play," said Spencer conclusively.

"They can, too, can't they, Muvver!"

"Your mother agrees with you, Marian," said Charles. "But not on our handball courts, eh, Spencer?"

Catherine flushed at the submerged note in Charles's words.

"Don't you give my daughter an inferiority complex!" she said, lightly.

But Charles went on, the note rising to the surface.

"You won't find the house in very good shape. I wasn't expecting you so early."

The glow of the meeting was disappearing under the faint, secret friction. Catherine thought quickly, "He didn't like it—the job, or my coming down. But he isn't admitting it." Aloud she said, "Did Flora desert you?"

"Oh, no. She's there, her mouth larger than ever. I meant the finishing touches."

"We can give those."

"There's Morningside Park!" Spencer's shout was full of delight. "Rocks and trees an' everything!" The taxi had left One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street and was bumping along the side street which bordered the park. The rocks shouldered up gray and wet through brown, worn shrubbery.

"There's where we had the cave," cried Marian. "I remember it."

Up to the Drive, a few blocks south, and just around the corner the taxi halted.

"Here we are!" Out they all scrambled, to stare up at the gray front, tessellated with windows, while Charles maneuvered the luggage. Catherine felt Spencer's cold hand creep into hers; she held it firmly, knowing that he, too, had the sinking depression with which that monotonous dingy structure filled her.

But Sam, the elevator boy, came out, all white grin and shiny eyes, to greet them and carry in the bags. Letty, as of old, clasped her hands over her stomach as the elevator shot up. The key clicked in the lock and the door opened on the familiar long hall. They were home again.

"When we have breakfast," declared Catherine, "we won't feel so much like lost cats!"

Flora, her gold tooth gleaming in her dark face, was loudly and cheerfully glad to see them. Catherine scurried for towels, and left the children scrubbing their hands, while she walked back through the hall with Charles, who had said he must go to his office immediately.

They faced each other in the dim light. Catherine struggled to throw off the constraint which had settled upon her.

"That's a grand suit," she said, laying her hand on his sleeve. "You better take your rain coat."

"It's at the office. I am afraid I can't come in for luncheon. I made this engagement downtown before I knew you were coming to-day."

"That's good." Catherine smiled at him. "Leaves me more time—there are endless things to do."

He looked at her, a curious reserve in his eyes.

"You are really going to do it, take that job?"

"I wrote you——"

"When do you start?"

"Monday. That's why I'm here." She couldn't help that air of defense! "I had to have a few days to shop for the children, and get the house running."

"Hard on them, isn't it?"

"I thought a few days couldn't matter so much to them as to me."

"No." Charles turned the doorknob.

"Charles!" Catherine seized his hand. "Are you—cross?"

"Of course not." He sounded impatient. "But I have to get over to college sometime to-day."

"Have you changed your mind about my trying this?"

"No." He pursed his under lip, hesitatingly. "I didn't know you were going to jump in so immediately. But it's quite all right."

Catherine released his hand, and he pulled open the door. He stood a moment on the threshold, and then wheeled.

"I—I'm glad you're home." Catherine was in his arms, her lips quivering as he kissed her.

"There, run along!" She patted his shoulder, her eyes misty.

But when he had gone, she leaned against the door, brushing hot tears from her lashes. She could hear the children, their voices raised in jangling. It was going to be hard, harder than she had thought. Bill was right; she would have a double job. She might have more than that, if Charles really carried a secret antagonism to her plan. Perhaps he was only gruffy; perhaps this was only a flicker of his unadmitted dislike of anything which threatened change, anything at least which he had not originated. But she saw, clearly, what she had felt as a possibility, that she had, for a time, his attitude as further weight to carry. That he wouldn't admit his attitude made the weight heavier, if anything. As she went slowly towards the sounds of squabbling, she saw her attempt as a monstrous undertaking, like unknown darkness into which she ventured, fearing at every step some unseen danger; and heaviness pressed down physically upon her.

VII

Breakfast restored the temper of the children, and lifted part of her own heaviness. The day then stretched into long hours. The children couldn't go out into the park, as the drizzle of the morning increased to cold rain. Toward noon Dr. Henrietta telephoned, and Catherine found her voice like a wind blowing into flame her almost smothered intentions. Henrietta was sending over that evening the woman she had mentioned: Miss Kelly. She could come at once, if Catherine liked her. She would have to come by the day, as she had an invalid mother. "We'll run in soon, Catherine, Bill and I. Don't you weaken!"

Lucky Miss Kelly wouldn't want a place to sleep, thought Catherine, as she went about the business of unpacking and reordering the apartment. With New York rents where they were it was all they could do to shelter the family decently. Was it really decent, she wondered, as she laid the piles of Spencer's clothes away in the white dresser, and looked about the little court room where he slept. She went to the window. A hollow square, full of rain and damp odors; windows with drab curtains blowing out into the rain; window sills with milk bottles, paper bags—the signs of poor students, struggling to wrest education out of the jaws of hunger! And yet, when she and Charles had found this apartment, they had thought it fine. A large, wide, airy court; none of your air shafts. She glanced up where the roof lines cut angles against the sodden sky. Spencer did watch the stars there, on clear nights. She picked up the laundry bag, stuffed with soiled clothes, and left the room. Marian's room was next, a little larger. She had planned to have Letty's bed moved in there this fall, opposite Marian's. Flora was on her knees, her yellowed silk blouse dangling from her tight belt, as her arm rotated the mop over the floor.

"Had a pleasant summer, Flora?" asked Catherine, as she opened Marian's bag.

"Land, yes, Mis' Hammond." Flora whisked her cloth. "I'm gonna get married to a puhfessional man. He's been showing me tenshions all summer. He ain't committed hisself till last week."

"You are!" Catherine looked at her in dismay. "When?"

"Oh, I ain't gonna give up my work, Mis' Hammond. Not till I sees how he pans out. I tried that once, and my las' husband, he couldn't maintain me as I was accustomed to be. So I says to my intended, I'll get married to you for pleasure, but I keeps my job. He don't care."

Catherine laughed. She knew that Flora had made earlier experiments in marriage, once to the extent of going back to Porto Rico. But she had, through all her changes of name, kept her good humor, her cleverness, and her apparent devotion to Catherine.

She rose swiftly from her knees, her long string of green beads clinking against her pail of water.

"I believes in keeping men in his place," she said, with an expanding grin. "If you don't, they keeps you in yours."

Catherine, adding the pile of Marian's dirty clothes to the jammed laundry bag, laughed again.

"I suppose so," she said. "What am I going to do with all this laundry! You'd think we hadn't washed all summer, the way things pile up."

"I'll take that right home to-night, Mis' Hammond. My sister can do it for you. My gentleman friend is stopping by for me in his car."

Catherine smoothed the cretonne scarf on the dressing table, adjusted the bright curtains, moved the little wicker chair to make room for Letty's bed, and with a grimace at the glimpse of the court even through the curtains, went on to the living room. Letty was asleep in Catherine's room. Spencer and Marian had scorned her hint that a nap might be good for them, and were sitting disconsolately in chairs drawn near the windows. Here, at least, was something beside too intimate suggestion of neighboring lives, even if the rain held it to-day in somber dullness. Beneath the windows the tops of trees pricked through the mist, as if one looked down into a forest; they were only the poplars and Balm of Gilead that grew on the steep slope of Morningside, but as Spencer had said, they were trees. And beyond them, extending far off into the dim gray horizon, the city—flat roofs, with strange shapes of chimneys, water tanks, or elevator sheds, merged to-day into dark solidity. On clear days, there was a hint of water in the distance, and the balanced curve of a great bridge. After all, thought Catherine, there was air in the bedrooms—you couldn't expect birch trees and stars in the city—and they did have distance and sometimes the enchantment of the varying city from these windows. But it was queer—she smiled as Spencer eyed her over his book—queer that beauty, sunlight, air, should be things for which you paid money; that you had to think yourself fortunate if you could afford one window which did not open upon sordidness.

"Moth-er, do you think I'd get too wet if I just went outdoors for five minutes?" Spencer was dolorous. "My throat is all stuffed up, and I'll lose my muscle, just sitting still."

"No fun going out here," grumped Marian.

"In a little while I am going out shopping for dinner. Would you like to go?"

VIII

In raincoats and rubbers, each with a bobbing umbrella, Catherine sighing at the lost summer comfort of knickerbockers and boots, the three went out into the rain. The children sparkled as if they had escaped from jail. Spencer peered from under his umbrella at the heavy sky.

"Mebbe when the tide turns the wind'll change," he said.

"Huh!" Marian giggled. "In the city? That's only in the country."

"I guess there is wind in town, too, and tides, aren't there, Moth-er?"

"Wind, all right!" The gust at the corner of Amsterdam Avenue caught their umbrellas like chips. They ducked into the wet wind, rounded the corner, and bent against it down the avenue.

"Isn't there any tide?" insisted Spencer.

"Yes, of course," Catherine answered, absently. Too far such a day, she supposed, to go down to her old market. That restaurant had changed hands again; a man behind the large window was even then drawing outlines for new gilt letters. The same hairdresser, the same idle manicure girl, intent on her own fingers, the drug store. They crossed the street, their feet wobbling over the cobblestones, slipping through the guttered water. There they were, at the market.

"Where's the kitty?" demanded Marian, her eyes bright in her rose-tanned face.

"Kitty?" Catherine weighed the oranges in her fingers, and looked about for a clerk.

"Why, yes, Muvver. That little gray kitty——"

"He'd probably be grown into an old gray alley cat by this time."

Catherine frowned a little over her list. She should have come out earlier; everything looked wilted, picked over. Vitamins, calories, and the budget. The old dreary business of managing decently, reasonably. The country and a garden of your own did spoil you for these dejected pyramids.

"There's another thing," she thought, as she watched the clerk hunt for a satisfying head of lettuce, stripping off brownish, slimy leaves. "When can I market, if I am downtown at nine? Perhaps this Miss Kelly can do it, with Letty, as I always have done." A swift picture of Letty in her go-cart, herself with the basket hanging from the handle. Marketing had been her most intellectual pursuit.

Back to the meat counter, with its rows of purplish fowls, their feathered heads languishing on their trussed wings, and the butcher, wiping his hands on the apron spotted and taut over his paunch.

Marian, her eyes round and black, watched him sharpen his knife, while Spencer lingered near the door. Spencer didn't, as he said, like dead things. Neither did Catherine, shivering as the butcher shoved aside the quivering lump of purplish-black liver. Queer, the forms that the demands of ordinary living took; forms you never dreamed of, when you entered living.

"We should have brought two baskets!" Catherine looked at the bundles.

"Send 'em over, lady?"

"It's so late."

"I can carry some, Moth-er." Spencer came back from his post at the door.

Marian had the bag of oranges under her arm, Spencer the basket, Catherine a huge bag of varied contents. A scramble at the door to open the three umbrellas, and they started up the street, the wind gusty at their heels.

"Be careful crossing the street," warned Catherine. Marian, darting ahead, reached the curb, slipped, and sat down plump in a puddle, the oranges rolling off, bright spots on the wet cobblestones. Marian, dismayed, sat still, her mouth puckered.

Catherine pulled her to her feet with a hand abrupt, almost harsh. The throbbing behind her temples which had begun the day before, in the steady drive of closing the house and getting off, had increased to a heavy drum. "Pick them up," she said. "Don't stand there like a ninny!"

Spencer's grin faded at the tone of her voice, and her flare of weary temper subsided as she watched them scurry after the fruit. They stowed the oranges into pockets, and corners of the basket.

Finally they were home again. Flora's loud "Glory, glory, halleleuia," swept down the hall as they opened the door, and Letty's accompaniment.

"She's found my drum!" Spencer fled to the kitchen, and a wail followed as Letty was reft of her instrument.

Catherine pressed her lips firmly together as she hung her dripping coat on the rack. "Steady," she said. "They are as tired as I am." Then she thought: that's the great trouble with being a mother. You never get away for a chance to sulk and indulge your bad temper.

Charles came in, with his blandest air of preoccupation. Flora had prepared the dinner, and then gone home when her gentleman friend called for her, to cook her own evening meal, leaving Catherine to broil the steak and set things on the table. Since Letty had slept so long, she was permitted to sit in her high-chair during dinner, where she conducted an insuppressible and very little intelligible conversation.

"She certainly needs training," declared Charles.

"She isn't often on hand for dinner," said Catherine, wearily.

Spencer and Marian cleared away the table, while Catherine bathed Letty, deafening herself to the crash which came from the kitchen. What had Marian dropped this time?

Then she heard them, chattering away to their father, with the occasional interruption of Charles's deep laugh. She hung away Letty's towels and garments, and let the water run for Marian's bath. Wasn't that Kelly person coming in? Would she, Catherine wondered, give the children their baths? Could she let anyone else do that? Those slender, rounded bodies, firm, ineffably young and sweet, changing so subtly from the soft baby curves of Letty into young strength. Oh, at every second there waited for her some coil of sentiment, of devotion, to hold her there, solid, unmoving, in the round of the past few years.

She was too tired to-night to think straight. She called Marian from the door, and was answered by a demonstrating wail.

"Not yet, Muvver. I have to see my Daddy."

But at last both she and Spencer were bathed and in bed. As Catherine turned out Spencer's light, she heard the doorbell.

"Who is it, Moth-er?" Spencer's head came up from his pillow.

"I don't know, son. But you go to sleep."

"Mother—" His voice was low, half ashamed. "Mother, what makes me ache in here?"

"Where?" Catherine hung over his bed. He drew her hand to his chest.

"When I think about my porch—an' everything."

"You better think about something here, Spencer." Catherine's words were tender. "Something you like here. That will cure your ache."

"But I can't think up anything to think about! You tell me something nice——"

"'F you talk to Spencer, you'd ought to talk to me, too," came Marian's sleepy protest from the adjoining room.

"Sh-h! You'll wake Letty." Catherine's mind moved numbly over Spencer's city likes. "Spencer, you might think about Walter Thomas. You can see him soon——"

"Well." Spencer sounded very doubtful. But Charles called her, and Catherine said good night to him and to Marian.

It was Miss Kelly who had rung. Catherine sat down in the living room, brushing her hair away from her face, to which weariness had given a creamy pallor under the summer tan, and wished furiously that she was not so tired, that she could see into this rather plump, sandy, stubby person who sat opposite her, with calm, light blue eyes meeting her gaze. She looked efficient, if not imaginative. Well, the children had imagination enough, and if Henrietta thought Miss Kelly would do, surely she would. Charles had retired into his study. Miss Kelly folded her plump hands in her lap and looked down at her round, sensible shoes as Catherine spoke of Dr. Gilbert's high recommendation.

She couldn't come before Monday. She liked nursing better, but the hours were so uncertain, and her mother needed her. Yes, she had cared for children before. She had always, for several years, had twenty-five dollars a week, when she lived in her own home.

H-m, thought Catherine, that will make one large dent in my wages! But I must have someone, and I can't fill my place for nothing. So Monday morning, about eight. Too bad the children were in bed, but then on Monday Miss Kelly could see them.

When Catherine had closed the door on the last descending glimpse of Miss Kelly's round face behind the elevator grill, she hurried back to the study. Charles looked up from his book.

"Did you like her, Charles? You do think she looks capable?"

"She has an air of honest worth." Charles laid aside his book. "Did you hire her?"

Catherine nodded.

"I shouldn't care to have you supplanted by that face, if I were Letty—or Spencer—or——"

Catherine moved around to the desk to the side of his chair, her fingers twisting together in a nervous little gesture.

"She looks sensible and good natured, and Henrietta says she is fine. I've got to try someone."

"I suppose you must."

Catherine, balancing on the edge of the desk, looked steadily at her husband. He was holding his thoughts away from her, out of his eyes.

"It's mostly Letty, of course," she said. "The others will be in school." She sighed. "She can come Monday, the day I start."

Then they were silent. Charles rubbed his thumb along the edge of his book, and Catherine watched him, her gray eyes heavy.

No use talking about it to-night, when she was so tired. She pushed the affair away.

"Poor Spencer is homesick for Maine," she said. "He wanted to know why he ached——"

"He needs to get out with boys more," said Charles sharply. "He's too notional for a boy his age."

Catherine felt a quick flicker of heat under her eyelids. Charles had said that before this summer.

"I want him to be a man," he continued, "not a sentimental little fool."

"I think you needn't worry about that." Catherine was icy. Then suddenly she slipped forward to the arm of his chair, her head down on his shoulder, one hand up to his cheek. "Good Lord, I'm tired! Don't talk about anything, or I'll fight!"

Charles pulled her down into his lap and held her close.

"That's more like it." His mouth was close to her ear. "Sitting off and staring at me! Silly old girl——"

Catherine laughed, just a weak flutter of sound.

"Call me names! But hug me, tighter!" She laughed again. Words, she thought—you can't get a person with words. They stand between you like a wall.

"You'd better go to bed. You feel limp as a dead leaf."

"Yes." She stretched comfortably. "In a minute——"

IX

Catherine sat at one of the living room windows, the floor about her chair littered with packages, the result of her shopping for the children. She unwrapped them methodically, clipped a name from the rolls of tape in her basket, and sewed the label in place. Spencer Hammond; Marian Hammond; Letitia Hammond. She was thankful that none of them had a longer name! After three gloomy days the sun shone again, pricking out spots of red in the roofs of the distance, falling in splotches of brilliance on the white stuff Catherine handled. The children were playing in the dining room, where the east windows admitted the broad shafts of sunlight. Poor kids! They had begged her to go outdoors with them, but her mother had telephoned that she was coming in.

Catherine had not known she was in town. She had been visiting her son in Wisconsin, George Spencer. Catherine had seen little of that brother since her own departure for college; he had married and gone west, sending back, at astonishingly frequent intervals, photographs of his increasing family. Mrs. Spencer visited him at least once each year, returning always with delighted accounts of the children, of George's business, of his wife.

Catherine folded the striped pajamas and laid them on the pile at her right. Her thoughts drifted around her mother and the small apartment in the Fifties where she kept house for Margaret, the youngest of the family. Letty came in a little rush toward her.

"Letty draw." She spread the paper on Catherine's knee. "For Gram." Her yellow head bent over it intently.

"What is it, Letty?" Catherine laid a finger softly on the little hollow just at the base of Letty's neck, an adorable hollow with a twist of pale hair above it.

"She says it's a picture of her fishing," called Marian. "Catching cunners. But I'm painting a good picture of our house for Grandma——"

"Letty paint?" Letty looked up, her eyes crinkled.

"Grandma will like a drawing just as well." Catherine picked up a set of rompers. "Mother's going to sew your name right on the band." Letty watched a moment and then trudged back to her corner on the dining room floor.

What would her mother think when Catherine told her of her plan? Catherine's hands dropped into her lap. She wouldn't say much. She never did. But that little crinkle of Letty's eyes was like hers! You saw her laughing at you. Since her own marriage Catherine had wondered about her mother, and the last few months, while she had struggled with her moods and desires, she had found that the admiration she had always felt had gathered a tinge of curiosity, or speculative wonder. How had her mother attained the lively serenity, the animated poise, the quiet, humorous tranquillity with which she bore herself? Catherine remembered her father only as a somewhat irritable invalid; the accident which had injured him and finally killed him had happened when she was young, and Margaret a mere baby. And yet, somehow, her mother had seemed to keep a whimsical invulnerability. She had sent them all to college, however she had managed even before the cost of living gained its ominous present-day sound. Only for the last few years, since Margaret, the last of them, had grown into a youthfully serious welfare worker, had Mrs. Spencer's income been adequate to the uses for it. And yet—Astonishing adjustment, thought Catherine. As if she had found what she most wanted in life. As if things outside herself couldn't scratch her skin.

There was a scramble of children to the door at the ring of the bell, and Catherine rose, her work sliding to the floor. They loved her, the children. Was that the answer to her curiosity? That her mother was essentially maternal? Catherine smiled as the delighted shouts of greeting moved down the hall toward her. No, that wasn't the answer. They had never felt, Catherine, or George, or Margaret, that they were the core of her life; what was?

"Cathy, dear!" How pretty she was, thought Catherine, as she bent to kiss her. A moment of encounter while she gazed at her; always Catherine had to pause that moment to regather all the outward details which during absence merged into her feeling of the person as a whole. She hadn't remembered how dark the blue of her mother's eyes was. Or was it only the small blue hat with the liberty scarf, and the new blue cape?

"How smart you look!" she said. "And a new dress, too!"

Mrs. Spencer slipped off her cape with a little twirl. "Paris model, reduced." She handed the cape to Spencer.

"It's pretty, Grandma." Marian touched the blue silk. "Little beads all over the front."

"You certainly look well!" Mrs. Spencer settled herself in a rocker, unpinned her veil, let Marian take her hat, and upon insistence from Letty, allowed her to hold the silk handbag. "Now please put my things all together, won't you?" She ran her fingers through her soft gray hair. Catherine watched her with tender eyes. Something valiant about those small hands, white and soft, with enlarged knuckles and fingers a little crooked, marked by hard earlier years.

Not until after luncheon did Catherine talk with her mother. The children had to show her their pictures; Charles came in, and Mrs. Spencer wanted to know about his new work; dinner had to be planned. Finally Letty was stowed away for her nap, and Spencer and Marian, with the promise of a walk when she woke, went off to read.

"I'll help you with that sewing." Mrs. Spencer threaded her needle. "You've done your shopping in a lump, haven't you? I thought you usually made some of these things."

"I won't have time this year."

Catherine was half afraid to tell her. Her proposition sounded absurd, as if she heard it through her mother's ears. But Mrs. Spencer listened quietly.

"That's what Charles meant, then," she said.

"He spoke of it?" Catherine looked up.

"He asked if I had heard how modern you had suddenly become."

Catherine snapped her thread. She wondered why she had felt this desperate need to make her mother approve of her scheme, and Charles, too. Wouldn't approval come after she had carried it through, if she could?

"Do you think me foolish—or wicked?"

Mrs. Spencer patted the tape into place on the blouse she held.

"Not at all, Cathy," she said.

"But you don't think I ought to do it?"

"That is for you to decide. You say you have found a nurse?"

"Yes."

"Did Dr. Henrietta Gilbert suggest this to you?"

Catherine's head came up at that, but her irritation scurried off into amusement; her mother looked so guileless, stitching with busy fingers.

"You don't see, then, that I can't help it? That I must try something? Oh, Mother, I've thought and thought——"

"Yes, that's just it. You think too much. You always thought, Cathy. That's why I was relieved when you met Charles. You didn't think much for a while, at least, and I hoped"—Mrs. Spencer was looking at her, her head on one side, her eyes bright, her mouth turning up in a funny little smile—"I hoped your thinking days were over. But it's in the air so. Women seem to take pride in being restless, unhappy. We were taught to consider that a sin."

"Is that why you're so nice?"

"No." Mrs. Spencer smiled. "Maybe my children were smarter than yours. I didn't find them such bad company."

"Oh, that's not it!" Catherine cried out. Then she laughed. "Mother, you're outrageous. You're making fun of me, just as if——"

"As if you wanted to be a missionary again."

"But I was only a child then. That was amusing."

"Yes. You didn't think so, then." Mrs. Spencer folded the blouse neatly. "Hasn't Spencer grown tall! I see you're buying eleven-year-old clothes for him."

"Well"—Catherine's mouth was stubborn—"I'll just have to show you! And Charles, too. He thinks it's a whim, I know."

"He hasn't objected?"

"Oh, no. Not in words. He wouldn't."

"Poor Charles. These modern women in your own home!" Mrs. Spencer's eyes crinkled almost shut. "Do you know why I came back early? Your sister Margaret has a modern turn, too."

"But she's not in town yet."

"No. She wrote, asking if I wouldn't like to stay with George this winter."

"Why?"

"I suppose she thinks a mother is a sort of nuisance. She wants to set up housekeeping with her friend."

"The little wretch!"

"Not exactly. But I did want that apartment myself, as I am fond of it. I think I'll take a roomer."

"Mother!" Catherine stared at her.

"She's been reading something a German wrote. What is his name? Freud. She's been thinking, too, I am afraid."

Catherine was silent; she recognized her instinctive protest as a flourish of habit, of righteousness for someone else. After all——

"She needn't be so apologetic," said Mrs. Spencer deliberately. "If she doesn't need me, I shall be glad to find someone nearer my own age."

Letty's deep voice announced her awakening. Mrs. Spencer decided to walk over to Riverside with Catherine and the children, as she could go on downtown from there by bus. After several minutes of agitated preparation, a frantic search for roller skates, they were in the hall, Letty rolling noisily along on her wooden "Go-Duck," her busy legs waving like plump antennæ. Catherine held the strap of Marian's skates firmly; Marian was all for skating right down the hall. Then, just as the elevator came, Catherine remembered that she hadn't paid Flora for the week.

Flora's gold tooth flashed as Catherine handed her the money.

"I certainly is obliged," she said. "My frien' and I, we're going on the Hudson River boat to-morrow, and I suspicions he's short of cash."

"You'll be in early on Monday, Flora? Miss Kelly is coming, and she'll need you to show her about things."

"Sakes, yes. You can go about your business, Mis' Hammond, with a light soul."

Flora was delighted at this venture of Catherine's. Catherine thought, a little grimly, as she hurried after the family, that Flora was the only one in the house who was pleased. It's her dramatic sense, she speculated, waiting for the elevator. I wish I had more of it myself, and Charles, too.

The sharp blue clarity of the air was like a sudden check rein, pulling Catherine's head up from doubtful thoughts. As they waited at Amsterdam Avenue for the car to rumble past, she glanced up the street; in the foreground the few blocks of sharp descent, and then the steady climb for miles, off to the distance where street and marginal buildings seemed as blue as the sky. It was like a mountain, with blue-gray shadows across the canyon of the street, and jagged cliffs of buildings merging into solid rock up the slope. She reached for the head of Letty's red duck. "You better walk across the street, Letty."

"No! Ducky go!" and bumping over the cobblestones it went, propelled vigorously, while Spencer and Marian stumbled along on their skates.

The walk through the half block of park behind the University buildings was smooth sailing. Catherine and her mother followed the children. "Wait for us at the gate!" warned Catherine.

At last they were across the Drive and safe on the lower walk of the park.

"Here's my old bench." Catherine sat down with her mother. "I can see clear to those steps from here."

Spencer was off with a whoop, his figure balancing surely as he sped. Marian chased him, a determined erectness in her body. Letty paddled after them, chanting loudly to her duck.

"When school opens," Catherine sighed, "they'll have some exercise, poor chickens. City life isn't easy for them."

"It's no place for children." Mrs. Spencer watched a passing group, a beruffled little girl yanking fretfully at the hand of her nurse, a small, fat boy howling in tearless monotony. "Not even a yard."

"We talked about a suburb last year. But Charles hates the idea of commuting, and he is so busy with his additional work that he'd never be home at all."

"Won't you miss these little expeditions with your children?"

Catherine looked hastily at her mother. But the bright blue eyes were apparently intent on a tug steaming along the river. The tide was running swiftly down, swirling off into the quiet water near shore bits of refuse, boxes, sticks, which caught the sun in dazzling sham before they drifted into ugly lack of movement.

"They don't need me when they are playing here," said Catherine. "Anyone would do, just to watch them."

"I wonder," said her mother. "I see some of these nurses do outlandish things."

"Miss Kelly looks intelligent and kind." Again stubbornness in Catherine's mouth, in her lowered eyelids. "And I might as well admit, I'm reaching the place where I won't be either of those things. You'd be ashamed of your daughter if you knew how peevish she can get!"

"Catherine, dear"—Mrs. Spencer laid her hand softly on Catherine's—"you know I don't mean to interfere. But are you sure you haven't just caught the general unrest, in the air and everywhere?"

"Where did it come from?" The children were coasting toward them, down the little hill. "Why do I feel it?"

"Oh, the war, no doubt."

"The war! Blame that for my hatred of this dreadful monotony, my lack of self-respect, my—my grubby, dingy, hopeless feeling!"

"I can see you have your mind made up." Mrs. Spencer caught Marian as she tumbled, laughing, against the seat.

"I beat Spencer back!"

"Come on and I'll beat up the hill!" Spencer wiggled to a standstill.

A wail went up. Letty and her duck were upside down, a jumble of legs and red wheels. Spencer clattered away to rescue her, Marian after him.

Mrs. Spencer began with a little chuckle a story of George's two youngest children. Catherine relaxed, content to leave her own problem. Her mother had said all she meant to say. The sun dropped lower and lower, until it seemed to catch on the sharp margin of the New Jersey shore and hang there, red, for long minutes. The tide had slackened and the water caught a metallic white luster. The park was almost deserted now. Finally Catherine called the children. They came; she smiled at their scarlet cheeks and clear eyes, their smudged hands and knees.

"Home now, and dinner."

"See the gold windows!" Spencer pointed to the massed gray buildings above the park.

"That's the sun," explained Marian, panting up the steps.

They waited with Grandmother until a bus lumbered to a halt, and they could wave her off down the Drive.

X

Charles came into the hall as they entered, clattering skates and duck.

"Hello!" He pinched Letty's cheek. "Where you been?" He moved close to Catherine and continued, in a confidential undertone, "I thought you'd be here. I brought Miss Partridge in. Don't you want her to stay to dinner?"

Catherine, with a swift glance at the disheveled group, and a swifter consideration of food—what had she told Flora to prepare?—shrugged.

"Of course," she said. She concealed a secret grin at the relief which ran over Charles's nonchalance. In the old days—how long ago!—one of her most sacred lares had been just that, that Charles should feel free as air about bringing any one in at any time. What was home for? But with three children, perhaps she burned less incense at that altar. She was moving toward the door of the living room as she thought.

"Here's my wife and family, Miss Partridge."

"I am glad you waited for us." Catherine disengaged herself from Letty's fingers and went to meet the woman who was rising from the window. "I have wished to meet you." Catherine smiled as she spoke; her smile touched her face with a subtle irradiance, charming, completely personal. She's younger than I had supposed, Catherine was thinking, and quite different.

"Dr. Hammond urged me to wait." Her voice was clear and hard, like a highly polished instrument. Her manner was as cool and detached as the long white hand she extended. "And this is the family?"

"Letitia, Marian, and Spencer," announced Charles. Catherine watched them make their decorous greetings with a little flicker of pride. Sometimes Marian had ridiculous fits of shyness and wouldn't curtsey. "You'll have to test them, Miss Partridge," Charles went on. "See if my paternal bias misled me in my tests. Their I.Q.'s seem satisfactory."

"Of course they would!" Miss Partridge's smile lifted her short upper lip from a row of even teeth so shining that they looked transparent. "Such a handful must keep you busy, Mrs. Hammond. You've just come in from the country, haven't you?"

"Good Lord!" thought Catherine. "I'm to be treated like an adoring mother." Her level glance met the dark brown eyes for an instant; she felt a queer clatter, as if she had struck metal. Aloud she said, "Won't you have dinner with us, Miss Partridge? I should enjoy hearing your side of all these new schemes."

"That's it." Charles was hearty, insistent. "Let me take your wraps."

Elegant, slim, in soft taupe tailor-made, close-fitting velour hat. She gets herself up well; Catherine was aware suddenly of her own appearance in rough tweed coat and last year's hat with its bow of ribbon rather wilted. Not so hasty, she warned herself; look out, or you'll have a rooted dislike out of this feeling. Queer, how some women heighten their femininity by tailored clothes. Miss Partridge, without a demur, had stripped off her jacket and removed her hat. Her blouse of dull gleaming silk fitted closely about her throat, her dark hair was wound in a heavy braid about her smooth, small head; lovely skin, with a pale luster. Catherine noted in a flash the heavy jade cuff links, the small bar of jade that fastened the collar, the chain of dull silver and jade which looped into the belt. She's the sort that affects the masculine for more subtle results, was the swift conclusion, as she ushered the children out of the room.

It was a nuisance, having a maid who couldn't stay to serve dinner. But in other ways Flora couldn't be touched, and they did like not having to house her. Catherine heard the tone of that clear, hard voice as she moved from bathroom to kitchen, lighting the gas under the vegetables, supervising Letty's supper and bath. Is she brilliant, or shrewd, she wondered, as she directed Spencer in his grave attempt to lay another place at the table. She is young to have achieved her reputation. Has she one, or has she made Charles think she has? Don't be a cat!

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

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

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

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

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

But Letty's shout gained energy.

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

Catherine laughed at Marian's distressed face.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Remember Letty's asleep just next door."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"She's coming Monday."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What cows?" demanded Charles.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Where's your dusky maiden?"

"To-morrow's Sunday."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"About herself."

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

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

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

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

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

"She's extremely handsome."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Too bad about you!" Catherine jeered softly.

XI

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

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

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

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

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

"But the children——"

"I thought your mother was coming in."

"She may not wish to stay late."

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

Catherine's brows drew together.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Catherine shrugged.

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

"Thomas gets enough enjoyment from his own mind."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PART II

BOTH ENDS OF THE CANDLE

I

Catherine clicked the telephone into place on her desk and sat for a moment with her hands folded on the piles of paper before her. Her cheeks felt uncomfortably warm. Ridiculous, that Dr. Roberts should have come to the door just as she told Charles where to find the shirts he wanted! He might have found them if he had tried. She wondered whether her voice had conveyed her embarrassment; Charles had said good-by abruptly. He was sorry not to see her, but he had to catch the one o'clock for Washington. No, he couldn't stop for luncheon with her. He might be back Sunday night. She had a vivid picture of him, plowing through drawers and closets in frantic search for things right under his nose.

Her hand reached for the telephone. She would call him for a moment, just for a good-by not so hasty. But Dr. Roberts, in the doorway, clearing his throat, said, "Can you let me have those tables now, Mrs. Hammond?" He pulled a chair to the opposite side of the desk and sat down. Charles and the messy packing of his handbag disappeared from Catherine's thoughts. She spread several sheets of figures between them, the flustered shadow in her eyes gone, and hard clarity in its place. Dr. Roberts, head of the educational section of the Lynch Bureau of Social Welfare, was a dapper little man with a pointed beard, whose fussy, henlike manner obscured the intelligent orderliness of his mind.

"The state laws of requirements for teachers." Catherine pointed to one table. "County requirements, country schools. I made a separate table for each. Now I'll work out a comparative table."

"Excellent. Clear, graphic. May I take those?" He rose. "If you aren't working with them now?"

"No. I'm going through these catalogues now." The dusty pile was at her elbow. "If I may have those sheets this afternoon, I'll try some graphs."

When he had gone, Catherine's eyes rested briefly on the telephone. Oh, well, Charles wouldn't want the interruption anyway. He would be home again on Sunday. She opened the catalogue on top of the pile and glanced through its pages, making swift notes on the pad under her hand.

Finally she leaned back in her chair, twisting her wrist for a glimpse of her watch. Whew! Half past twelve, and she was to meet her sister Margaret for luncheon. She stood a moment at the window. Beyond the neighboring buildings the spires of the Cathedral splintered the sunlight; a flock of pigeons whirled into view, their wings flashing in the light, then darkening as they swirled and vanished—like the cadence of a verse, thought Catherine. Far beneath her lay an angle of the Avenue, with patches of shining automobile tops crawling in opposing streams.

She gave a great sigh as she turned back to the office. A long, narrow room, scarcely wider than the window, lined with shelves ceiling-high, between them the flat desk piled with her work. Her work! Almost a week of it, now, and already she had won back her old ability to draw that thin, sliding wall of steel across her personal life, to hold herself contained within this room and its contents.

She hadn't seen Margaret since her return from Maine. She was to meet her at the St. Francis Luncheon Club for Working Women. As she stepped into the sunlight of the street, the slow flowing of the emulsion of which she was suddenly another particle, she had a sharp flash of unreality. Was it she, walking there in her old blue suit, her rubber heels padding with the other sounds, her eyes refocusing on distance and color after the long morning? She loved the long, narrow channel of the Avenue, hard, kaleidoscopic; the white clouds above the line of buildings, the background of vivid window displays. She laughed softly as she recalled the early days of the week. Rainy, to begin with. She had thought, despairingly, that she couldn't swing the job. The children stood between her and the sheets of paper. She had flown out at noon to telephone Miss Kelly, to demand assurance that life in the apartment hadn't gone awry in the four hours since she had left. Queer. You seized your own bootstraps and lugged, apparently in vain, to lift yourself from your habits of life, of thought, of constant concern, and then, suddenly, you had done it, just when you most despaired. She walked with a graceful, long stride, her head high. An excellent scheme, Dr. Roberts had said. He had really entrusted her with the entire plan for this investigation. And she could do it!

Margaret was waiting at the elevator entrance, a vivid figure in the milling groups of befurbished stenographers and shoddier older women. She came toward Catherine, and their hands clung for a moment. How young she is, and invincible, thought Catherine, as they waited for the elevator to empty its load. Margaret had Catherine's slimness and erect height; her bright hair curled under the brim of her soft green hat; there was something inimitably swagger about the lines of her sage-green wool dress and loose coat, with flashes of orange in embroidery and lining. In place of the sensitive poise of Catherine's eyes and mouth, Margaret had a downright steadiness, an untroubled intensity.

"How's it feel to be a wage-earner?" She hugged Catherine's arm as they backed out of the pushing crowd into a corner of the car. "You look elegant!"

"Scarcely that." Catherine smiled at her. "Now you do! Did you design that color scheme?"

"I matched my best points, eyes and high lights of hair." Margaret grinned. Her eyes were green in the shadow. "Ever lunched here? I thought you might find it convenient. Lots of my girls come here."

They emerged at the entrance of a large room full of the clatter of dishes and tongues.

"I'll take you in on my card to-day. If you like it, you can get one." Margaret ushered Catherine into the tail of the line which filed slowly ahead of them. "This is one of the gracious ladies—" Margaret shot the half whisper over her shoulder, as she extended her green card. "A guest, please." Catherine looked curiously at the woman behind the small table; her nod in response to the professionally sweet smile was curt.

"The patronesses take turns presiding," explained Margaret, as she manipulated trays and silver. "That's the sweetest and worst. Notice her dimonts!"

They found a table under a rear window, where they could unload their dishes of soup and salad around the glass vase with its dusty crêpe-paper rose.

"It's really good food," said Margaret, shooting the trays across the table toward the maid. "And reasonable. It's not charity, though, and the dames that run it needn't act so loving."

Two girls saw the vacant chairs at the table, and rushed for them. One slipped her tweed coat back from shoulders amazingly conspicuous in a beaded pink georgette blouse; the other opened her handbag for a preliminary devotional exercise on her complexion.

Margaret hitched her chair closer to Catherine.

"Now tell me all about it." She tore the oiled paper from the package of crackers; her hand had the likeness to Catherine's, and the difference, which her face suggested. Fingers deft and agile, but shorter, firmer, competent rather than graceful. "Mother says you've hired a wet-nurse and abandoned your family. I didn't think you had it in you!"

"I know. You thought I was old and shelved."

"Just a tinge of mid-Victorian habit, old dear."

"You young things need to open your eyes."

"I have opened 'em. See me stare!"

Were those girls listening? The georgette one was eying Margaret. The other, her retouching finished, snapped her handbag shut and began a story about the movies last night. Catherine was hungry; good soup—why, it was fun to gather an unplanned luncheon on a tray in this way.

"Your old job?" proceeded Margaret.

"A new study—teaching conditions in some middle-western states. I am to organize the work."

Margaret's questions were direct, inclusive. She did have a clear mind. Her business training has rubbed off all the blurry sentiment she used to have, thought Catherine.

"And you can manage the family as well?"

"This woman Henrietta sent me is fine. It's a rush in the morning, baths and breakfast. Flora can't come in until eight, and I have to get away by half past eight. No dawdling."

"And the King doesn't mind?"

Catherine flushed. Margaret had dubbed Charles the King years ago, but the nickname had an irritating flavor. "He's almost enthusiastic this week," she said. "Now tell me about yourself. What's this about your leaving Mother?"

"Oh, I thought she might like to stay with George. Instead of that, she's turned me out, neck and crop, and taken on a lady friend. I'm house-hunting." Margaret laughed. "Trust Mother! You can't dispose of her."

"But I thought you were so comfortable——"

"Too soft. You don't know—" Margaret was serious. "I can't be babied all my life. All sorts of infantile traits sticking to me. You got away."

"Mother said you'd been reading a foreigner named Freud."

"Well!" Margaret was vigorously defensive. "What of it?"

Catherine dug her fork into the triangle of cake.

"I thought Freud was going out. Glands are the latest."

"I bet Charles said that." Margaret grinned impishly as she saw her thrust strike home. "Well, tell him I'm still on Freud. Anyway, I want to try this. Amy and I want to live together. When you wanted to live with Charles, you went and did it, didn't you?"

"I'm not criticizing you, Marge. Go ahead! Don't bristle so, or I'll suspect you feel guilty."

"I do." Margaret had a funny little smile which recognized herself as ludicrous. "That's just the vestige of my conflict."

"There's another influx"—Catherine looked at the moving line—"we'd better give up these seats."

"There are chairs yonder." They wound between the tables to the other end of the room, where wicker chairs and chaise longues, screens, tables, and a mirror suggested the good intentions of the patronesses of the St. Francis Club.

"You can lie down behind the screen if you're dead, or read"—Margaret flipped a magazine—"read old copies of respectable periodicals. Here." She motioned to a chaise longue. "Stretch out. I'll sit at your feet. I have a few seconds left."

"How's the job?"

"All right. I spent the morning hunting for a girl. She's been rousing my suspicions for a time. Going to have an infant soon. That's the third case in two months." Margaret clasped her hands about her knees; her short skirt slipped up to the roll of her gray silk stocking. "But I've got a woman who'll take her in. She can do housework for a month or so before she'll have to go to the lying-in home."

Catherine watched her curiously. There was something amazing about the calm, matter-of-fact attitude Margaret held.

"Do you hunt for the father?"

"Oh, the girl won't tell. Maybe she doesn't know."

"If I had your job, I'd waste away from anger and rage and hopelessness about the world."

"No use." Margaret shrugged. "Wish I could smoke here. Too pious. No." She turned her face toward her sister, her eyes and mouth dispassionate. "Patch up what can be patched, and scrap the rest. I'm sick of feelings."

Catherine was silent. Margaret, as the only woman in a responsible position in a chain of small manufacturing plants, occasionally dropped threads which suggested fabrics too dreadful to unravel.

"Time's up." Margaret rose. "Directors' meeting this afternoon, and I want to bully that bunch of stiff-necked males into accepting a few of the suggestions I've made. I have a fine scheme." She laughed. "I make a list pages long, full of things, well, not exactly preposterous. Women would see them all. But they sound preposterous. And buried somewhere I have the one thing I'm hammering on just then. Sometimes I get it, out of their dismay at the length of the list."

"Here, I may as well go along." Catherine slid out of the chair.

"Will you be home Sunday?" Margaret stopped at the corner. Catherine had a fresh impression of her invincible quality, there in the sunlight with the passing crowds.

"Charles is in Washington. Come in and see the children."

"The King's away, eh?" Margaret waved her hand in farewell. "I'll drop in."

At five Catherine was again on the Avenue, walking steadily north, an eye on the occasional buses. If she could get a seat! As the traffic halted, she saw a hint of movement at the rear of a bus ahead of her. Someone was just getting out. She rushed for it, and clambered to the top just as the jam moved stickily ahead. Just one seat, at the front. This was luck. She relaxed, lazily conscious only of small details her eyes seized upon. When the bus finally swung onto the Drive, she straightened, drawing a deep breath of the fresh wind across the river. A taste of salt in it. She liked the sweep and curving dips of the Drive; the ride gave her a breathing space, a chance to shut off the hours behind her and to take on the aspect of the other life that awaited her. I'll patch up that old fur coat, she thought, and ride all winter. Perhaps I may even afford a new one. Twenty-five a week for Miss Kelly. Another five for my luncheons and bus rides. If Flora will do the marketing, I'll have to pay her more. I ought to help with the food bills, if we feed Miss Kelly, and pay for the clothes I buy for the children, since I would otherwise be making them. Oh! This domestic mental arithmetic sandpapered away the shine of the two hundred and fifty a month which was her salary. But Charles couldn't have additional expenses this year. It wasn't fair, when he had just reached a point at which they found a tiny margin for insurance and saving. Catherine rubbed her hand across her forehead; foolish to do this reckoning in her head; it always left her with that sense of hopeless friction, like fitting a dress pattern on too small a piece of cloth—turning, twisting, trying. Charles had said, "Well, you know my income. We can't manage any more outgo there. Not this year." And at that, she didn't see where she was going to get the first three twenty-five dollars for Miss Kelly. Next month, after she had her own first check—but now! She'd saved the first twenty-five on her own fall clothes. If Charles hadn't had that heavy insurance premium this month, she might have borrowed. It would be fine, some day, to reach a place where their budget was large enough to turn around in without this fear of falling over the edges. Dr. Roberts had said, "Three thousand is the best we can do for you now, but later——"

II

Sunday was a curious day. Miss Kelly, who was to have alternate Sundays off, had this one on, and had taken the children out. Catherine caught a lingering, backward glance from Spencer as they all went down the hall, a silent, wondering stare. He had said nothing about Miss Kelly, nothing about the new order of things; Catherine felt that he held a sort of baffled judgment in reserve. Letty, as always, was cheerfully intent on her own small schemes. Marian had confided last night that Miss Kelly was nice, but her stories sounded all the same, not like Muvver's. Next Sunday, thought Catherine, I'll have them. It's absurd to feel pleased that Spencer doesn't adjust himself at once. I want him happy.

She sat at the breakfast table, too listless to bestir herself about the endless things that waited for her. The morning sun was sharp and hard on the stretch of city beneath the window, picking out slate roofs and chimneys. Alone in the empty apartment, its silence enclosed and emphasized by the constant sounds outside—the click of the elevator, the staccato of voices in the well of the court, the rumble of a car climbing the Amsterdam hill—Catherine relaxed into complete lethargy, her hands idle in her lap.

The week had been drawn too taut. Surely coming weeks would be less difficult, once she had herself and the rest of the family broken into the new harness. She wished that Charles were sitting across from her, the Sunday paper littering the floor about his feet. She would say, "One week is over." And he—what would he say? "How do you like it, old dear?" And she, "You know, I think I am making a go of it." Then if he said, "Of course! I knew you would," then she could hug his shoulder in passing, and go quite peacefully about the tasks that waited. She sighed. If I have to be bolstered at every step, I might as well stop, she thought.

She would like to sit still all day, not even thinking. Instead, she pulled herself to her feet and cleared the breakfast dishes away methodically. Then she opened the bundles of laundry, sorted the clothes and laid them away, found fresh linen for the beds, laid aside one sheet with a jagged tear to be mended later, investigated Flora's preparations for dinner, and, finally, with a basket of mending, sat down at the living room window. Perhaps Flora could see to the laundry, although Catherine always had done that; she must plan, in some way, to have Sunday reasonably free. Miss Kelly had offered to take care of the children's mending; but—Catherine's fingers pushed out at the heel of the black sock—Charles had to be sewn up!

How still and empty the house lay about her! Perhaps Charles was even then on his way home—she had a swift picture of him at the window of the train, hurling toward her.

Ridiculous to feel so tired. She stretched her arms above her head, and then reached for the darning ball. Henrietta had said, "Don't weaken. You'll find the first stages of adjustment the most difficult." True, all right. The texture of her days rose before her, a series of sharp images. Morning, an incredible packing of the two hours: breakfast, the three children to bathe and help dress, Miss Kelly arriving like clockwork to supervise the final departure for school, Catherine's hasty glimpse at her face, flushed under the brim of her hat, before she hurried out for the elevator. Then the bus ride; herself a highly conscious part of the downward flood of workers, the fluster of the morning dropping away before the steady rise of that inner self, calm, clear, deliberate. The office—deference in the manner of the stenographers—she was the only woman there with her own office, with a man-size job. Occasional prickings of her other life through that life—eggs she had forgotten to order. The ride home again, the warm cheeks and soft hands of the children, and their voices, eager to tell her a thousand things at once. Dinner, and Charles. What about Charles? Her fingers paused over the crossing threads of the darn. He had been busy with crowds of new students and opening classes. Under that, what? She fumbled in her mist of images. She had scarcely seen him, except at dinner. Usually he had a string of stories about the day. He had gone back to the office two evenings, and to Washington on Friday. She didn't know much about his week. Had he withheld it? Had she been too engrossed?

The telephone in the study rang. Catherine hurried. Perhaps it was Charles.

"Is Dr. Hammond in?"

"This is Mrs. Hammond." That clear, metallic voice! "Dr. Hammond is out of town."

"Oh, yes. I thought he might be back. Would you give him a message for me? Miss Partridge. Please ask him to call me as soon as he comes in."

"Certainly." Catherine waited, but the only sound was the click of the telephone, terminating the call.

"Well!" Catherine sat down at the desk. Now, there's nothing to be irritated about, she told herself. Her eyes traveled over the bookshelves, low, crowded, piled with monographs and reviews. That curtness is part of her pose—manlike. But she certainly hits my negative pole!

Miss Kelly came in with the children, noisy and hungry, and the five had dinner together. Catherine tried to talk with Miss Kelly. Her round, light eyes met Catherine's solemnly, and she replied with calm politeness to Catherine's ventures.

"No, Marian, dear," she said suddenly. "One helping of chicken is enough for a little girl your age."

"Spencer had two!" Marian turned to her mother. "Why can't I?"

Catherine smiled a little wryly. She thrust under the sudden flash of resentment. Of course, Miss Kelly had them in charge. What was the matter with her to-day! She seemed to react with irritation to everything.

"Marian's stomach seemed a little upset yesterday," confided Miss Kelly.

"We'll have our salad now." Catherine dismissed the question.

But after dinner, when Letty had been led protestingly away for her nap, and Miss Kelly, armed with a volume of Andersen's "Fairy Tales," reappeared in the living room, Catherine couldn't resist the swift entreaty of Spencer's eyes.

"Miss Kelly," she said, placatingly, "if you would like to go home now, I can read to the children. I am quite free this afternoon."

Miss Kelly agreed placidly. When she had gone, Spencer stood a moment beside Catherine, his eyes intent on her face; Catherine saw a wavering tenseness in his look. He wanted to hurl himself at her, and he didn't want to. She couldn't reach out for him, if he felt too grown-up for such expression. She smiled at him, and with a huge sigh he settled into the wicker chair, one foot curled beneath him.

"She was glad to go home, wasn't she?" he said.

"I'm glad she went," announced Marian. "She bosses me."

"Good for you," said Spencer. "Mother, read us 'Treasure Island.' I'm sick of old fairies."

Margaret came in, her ring waking Letty. Catherine laughed at the unconcealed expectancy with which the children welcomed their aunt.

"You've ruined them," she said, as Marian danced up the hall, her eyes wide with anticipation for the packages Margaret carried.

"Well, they are delighted to see their old aunt, anyway!" Margaret dropped to the floor, scattering the bundles, her hands held over them in teasing delay.

"Your dress, Marg! On the floor in that?"

"Just a rag. Here, Letitia, your turn first."

Catherine went back to her chair to watch the orgy. Margaret was extravagant as water.

"It isn't really a rag, Aunt Margie, is it?" Spencer had his head on one side, deliberating. "It looks like—like pigeons."

"If I could find a gentleman of your discrimination, Spen, I'd grab him in a jiffy!"

"It is like pigeons, isn't it, Mother?" Spencer looked perplexed.

"Yes." Catherine wished Margaret wouldn't tease him. She was lovely, her gray-silver draperies floating around her slim, curving figure, the purple glinting through. It was like a pigeon's breast, that dress.

Letty had a doll, soft and round and almost as large as Letty herself.

"Company for you, when your mother's off at work."

Letty's arms were fast about it, and her deep voice intoned a constant, "Pretty doll! pretty doll!" until Marian's present appeared from its wrappings.

"You stand on it and jump, this way." Margaret was on her feet, her suède toes balancing on the crosspiece.

"Letty jump!"

"Not in here!" Catherine reached for the stick. "You idiots! You'll knock the plaster off."

"Letty jump!" Catherine bundled Letty and the doll into her lap.

"Let's see what Spencer draws."

"Spencer was a difficult proposition." Margaret smiled at him. "I thought of a rubber ball, and then I remembered he had one. So I got this." She poked the box into his hands.

"It's as good as Christmas, isn't it, Muvver?" Marian was on tiptoe, her Pogo stick clasped to her side, her head close to Spencer's as he tore off the papers.

"Thought I'd help make him practical, to please the King."

"What is it?" Spencer knelt beside the box full of pieces of steel.

"You stick them together, and make skyscrapers and bridges and water towers and elevators. The clerk said you could build a city."

"Let me help, Spencer?" Marian flung herself on the floor beside Spencer.

"Me help!" Letty squirmed down from Catherine's lap.

"You might take the things into the dining room," suggested Catherine.

Spencer gathered up the box.

"I'm much obliged, Aunt Margie," he said, and Marian and Letty echoed him as they followed into the next room.

Margaret settled herself in a chair at the window.

"I thought your nurse would be in charge." Her eyes wandered out to the distant glint of water. "Thought you'd given up the heavy domestic act."

"I sent her home." Catherine smiled. "Weak minded, wasn't it?"

Margaret nodded.

"Certainly. You look fagged. You ought to be out horseback riding or something. You know"—she turned, her face serious—"if you're going to do a real job, you have to look out. You have to relax sometime."

"I have to read the d'rections first, don't I?" came Spencer's firm tones. "You can sit still and watch."

"Now I didn't budge from my bed until noon," went on Margaret, "and then Amy had breakfast ready for me, and then I jumped in a taxi and came up here. I have to run along in a minute, high tea down in the Village. But you've been at work since early dawn, haven't you?"

"Oh, there were a few things——"

"Why don't you find a real housekeeper in Flora's place?"

"I can't afford to pay more, yet. And Flora is too good to throw out. I can manage."

"You know"—Margaret's eyes were bright with curiosity—"I should like to know what started this, your leaving your happy home, I mean. I thought you were the devoted mother till eternity."

"I am," said Catherine, calmly. Then she leaned forward. "Do you realize that the loneliest person in the world is a devoted mother? This summer, Margaret, I thought I'd really go crazy. I was so sorry for myself it was ludicrous. I'm trying to find out if I am a person, with anything to use except a pair of hands—on monotonous, silly tasks."

"Of course, the trouble is just that. You are a person. I'm glad you've waked up, Catherine. You know, there isn't a man in the world that I'd give up my job for."

"I want a man, too." Catherine's mouth was stubborn. "And my children. I want everything. Perhaps I want too much."

"Oh, children." Margaret glanced through the wide doors. "Maybe I'll want some, some day. Nice little ducks. Now I've got Amy—and love enough to keep from growing stale. I want you to meet Amy some day." She rose, adjusting the brim of her wide purple hat. "Amy's waiting now. Tell Charles I'm longing for a glimpse of him." She made a humorous little grimace. "Want to see how he likes this new arrangement."

Margaret telephoned for a taxi, and then hung over the children, offering impossible suggestions, until the hall boy announced her cab.

Marian wanted to go down to the Drive, to jump. Catherine waved good-by to Margaret, her other hand restrainingly on Marian's shoulder.

"Not Sunday afternoon, Marian. There are so many people down there, you'd jump right on their toes. You watch Spencer."

The children played in reasonable quiet. Catherine finished her darning, her mind playing with the idea of the graphs she was working on. As she rolled up the last stocking, she wondered what she used to think about, as she sat darning or sewing. Nothing, she decided. Plain nothing. I could let my hands work, and my ears listen for the children, and the rest of me just stagnate.

She delayed supper a little, hoping that Charles might come. She wasn't sure about the Sunday trains. Finally she gave the children their supper and put Letty to bed.

Spencer was still engrossed in the construction of a building when Bill Gilbert came in.

"Henrietta isn't here?"

"No, but do come in." Catherine led him into the living room. "Is Henry coming?"

"She had a call, and said she'd stop here on her way home."

"Charles hasn't come yet. He's been in Washington since Friday."

"Friday? I thought I saw him downtown, with Miss Partridge. He probably went later."

"He went at one."

"This couldn't have been Charles, then. It was about four. I thought their committee had been meeting. Hello, Spencer. What you doing?"

Spencer had come in, his hands full of steel girders.

"Mr. Bill, you're a nengineer, aren't you? Well, could you show me about this bridge?"

More than an hour later, when Henrietta did come, Bill was stretched full length, his feet under the dining room table, his eyes on the level of the completed bridge, a marvelous thing of spans and girders, struts and tie-beams.

"I'm too weary to stay, Cathy." Henrietta set her case on the table; her fair skin looked dusted over with fatigue. "Convulsions. One of those mothers who won't believe in diet or doctors for her child. The father sent for me. The child is alive in spite of her."

"Do sit down and rest, at least."

"No. I'm too ugly. Do you want to come, Bill, or are you staying?"

Bill pulled himself awkwardly to his feet, one hand reaching for his pipe.

"This piece of work is done," he said, smiling down at Spencer's engrossed head. "I've had a fine evening, Catherine."

He had. When they had gone, and Catherine was supervising the children's preparations for bed, she still had the feeling of the evening; she had pulled her chair into the dining room, to watch them; Bill had looked up at her at long intervals, with a faint, queer smile in his eyes; he had said nothing, except to offer solemn, technical advice, simplified to meet Spencer's eagerness.

"I'm going to be a nengineer," said Spencer sleepily, as she bent over him. "An' build things."

"I want to be one, too," called Marian.

"You can't! You're only a girl."

"Mr. Bill said I could if I wanted to. He said I could be anything."

"So you can." Catherine tucked her in gently. "But you have to go to sleep first."

At eleven Catherine telephoned to the station, to ask about trains from Washington. No express before morning. Charles wouldn't take a local; he must have decided to take a sleeper. She set the sandwiches she had made for him away in the ice chest. No use worrying. She had to have some sleep, for to-morrow. Had Bill seen him, Friday afternoon? She hated the queer way waiting held you too tight, as if you were hung up by your thumbs. Charles might have wired her. But he knew she never meant to worry.