[CHAPTER I, ] [ II, ] [ III, ] [ IV, ] [ V, ] [ VI, ] [ VII, ] [ VIII, ] [ IX, ] [ X, ] [ XI, ] [ XII, ] [ XIII, ] [ XIV, ] [ XV, ] [ XVI, ] [ XVII, ] [ XVIII, ] [ XIX, ] [ XX, ] [ XXI, ] [ XXII, ] [ XXIII, ] [ XXIV, ] [ XXV.]

THIS MARRYING

BY MARGARET CULKIN BANNING
NEW YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1920,
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
TO
VIOLA ROSEBORO

THIS MARRYING

CHAPTER I

“YOU should have been a bridesmaid,” said Aunt Caroline. “Everyone was so surprised that you weren’t. And the yellow would have been so becoming with you so dark.”

Horatia smiled and her smile carried no regrets for her lost opportunity. Everyone, as her aunt said, had been surprised at her refusal to be a bridesmaid at the wedding of her friend. But with a quick reminiscent glance back at the ceremony, Horatia congratulated herself again on the decision that had held out against the requests of Edna and the expostulations of her aunt. She recalled the hurried fussy little ceremony, and the curious people, the space reserved in the front parlor with its tall cathedral candles, its lavish ten yards of white satin ribbon and the rose pink prayer rug. A faint odor of candles and coffee and perfume clung to the memory. In the minds of her aunt and West Park these things were vastly suitable, just as to them Edna Wallace was still her “best” friend, because they had played together as children and gone through High School together. But Horatia realized that her college experience and her four years of absence from West Park had made great gaps between her and the bride of last night as well as between her and this middle-aged aunt and uncle with whom she sat at breakfast. She looked just then as if not only yellow but any color would become her. She was fairly tall and well made and carried herself with the easy distinctive swing that comes from perfect health and no corsets. Her hair was brown and heavy and shaded into the brown of her eyes to add still another tone to the whole that her aunt characterized as “you so dark.” Her clothes were simple for she scorned on principle all the minor affectations of dress and quick changes of fashion, but she had an eye for color and line which developed gowns which were sometimes beautiful and sometimes startling. Not that there was an unlimited number of them. Uncle George was generous but generous by West Park standards and by Aunt Caroline’s expenditures, and Aunt Caroline still considered fifty dollars a scandalous price for a suit or cloak. Horatia never grumbled about money or about clothes. This morning she was dressed for the City and her satin blouse and slim tailored suit set off her young health perfectly. Even her aunt and uncle were conscious of fresh energy at the breakfast table.

“I didn’t want to be a bridesmaid,” she answered. “It always makes me seasick to try to walk to music.”

“Horatia’s waiting,” said Uncle George, over the top of his newspaper, “until she can be the chief performer.”

Horatia smiled at him. “You want to get rid of me, don’t you, and you don’t care what I take. I’ll tell you what I am going to do. I’m going to town this morning to get a job. When I try that for a while I’ll decide whether I want to get married or not.”

“Get a job? What do you want a job for? You want to stay home with your aunt and me now.” Uncle George went so far as to put his paper down and repeat himself. “What do you want to do that for?”

“Earn money.”

He reached for his check book in all seriousness, but Horatia leaned over and put her hand on it.

“Truly I want to earn it. Everyone earns money nowadays, unless she is feeble-minded—or married. I don’t particularly want money just now anyway. I still have some of that last fifty. But I want to work. All the people I know are either married or going to be or working. I must get in some class. Of course I don’t mean to leave you. I’d be here nights, you see.”

“They’d probably find a position for you at the High School if you feel that way,” said Aunt Caroline, with the consciousness of being an important member of the community to whom even educational gateways were glad to open.

“Oh—teach,” said Horatia. “I don’t want to teach!”

Uncle George rose with heavy dignity.

“Well—let me know when you get broke.” He went out of the room with masculine indifference to these whims and in the knowledge that Horatia was only marking time in her own way until the inevitable happened. She’d marry. Of course she’d marry. And chuckling a little, he went down the street.

Aunt Caroline was more inquiring. She rose from the table, not being one to linger and keep the “help” waiting. But she followed her niece into the hall.

“Is it this social work you want to do?” she asked, remembering dimly things she had heard of new standpoints.

“Why, I don’t think so. I thought I’d try to get on a newspaper. And if that doesn’t work, I cut some ads out of the paper.”

“You don’t mean you’d do housework!” gasped her aunt to whom advertisements in newspapers meant “girl wanted for general housework.”

Horatia laughed in pure joy. It was one of those rare free moments which come at the beginning of new work and new adventures and she enjoyed shaking up Aunt Caroline.

“Not—especially.” Then from the foot of the steps she turned to wave back at the stout lady on the doorstep.

“Don’t fret,” she called. “Home for dinner.”

“Everyone,” she sang to herself as she went down the hill, “has the right to shock an older person once in a while. It’s the breath of youth. And the old dears really love it. So long as you are respectable—they love it.”

As she turned the corner she looked back for a moment at the house she had left, dramatizing her new freedom and the house too as a sober symbol of what she was so gladly leaving. The Grant house stood high on a hill overlooking the lake. It was built of blackish stone, which at one time had been the material of wealth and dignity in the city, and it still looked down on the stucco and plaster new houses which clustered beneath it, with a kind of glum faith in its superiority. But the illusion was its own. It awed no one any more, least of all Horatia, who had been brought up to respect it.

Inside were rooms papered in browns and streaked green and filled with walnut furniture which had all the ugliness of an ugly outworn fashion and yet none of the interest of antiques. There were several unsoftened leather sofas—unsoftened because the Grants had never been a family to “lie down in the daytime,” and the chairs were chairs—so many places to sit down, but boasting neither beauty nor comfort. At the windows curtains of imitation Brussels lace gave the finishing touch to the unimaginative furnishings. They too were stiff and artificial, like the stone dog who sat so grimly on the terrace outside. Horatia had called the place home since she was six years old. She had no quarrel with it but it had ceased to interest her. It stood still—impassive—and she, like the breeze and the sunlight, was moving.

It was a clear morning—a bright morning, one of the days on which someone always should start out to seek a fortune. There was energy in the wind and good luck in the sunlight and romance in the face of everyone she met. Even on the way to the suburban train, though she knew nearly everyone she met, they all seemed imbued with new spirit and more interesting qualities. She met Miss Pettikin, and saw not the shabby little dressmaker but the heroine of some blighted romance. She saw the Reverend Williams, not as the man who had read the marriage service so stupidly the night before but as a man with a holy mission. She saw Joe Peter, the neighborhood gardener, and he became Labor just as Mr. Jeffry panting on his way to the train became Capital. She saw herself as a lovely and interesting young woman in whom everyone on the train was interested and she hoped that behind every newspaper lurked a man with a brain, worth her knowing. The world was full of life and interest and she was going to get her share of it. And as the train swayed and jerked as only a suburban train can do, she pulled out her notebook and speculated on her first adventure.

She had listed the newspapers with their addresses. There were four and it was quite within possibility that one of them would want her. She had several courses in journalism to her credit at the university and if there was a vacancy in any office she meant to press her claims hard. The mere idea of working stimulated her and as the train stopped at the city station she pushed out with the hurrying crowd, almost feeling already that she was one of those to whom being “on time” was a necessity.

The newspaper offices were down near the water-front. Below the main street of big shops and glittering restaurants, the streets became grey and businesslike. Wholesale houses, impassive and undecorated, with great trucks backed up before their entrances, dingy employment offices, the repair shops of garages that fronted gaily on the other street, and straggly buildings, without elevators, housing a multitude of little businesses, lived on this street. A block above, the streets were already filled with shoppers, looking in windows, loitering along, wondering what they would do next. But on Market Street everyone seemed to know where he was going and to be going there quickly. Horatia hastened her own footsteps, though her time was all her own. It made her feel less conspicuous.

The Times was the morning paper and the presence of it on the breakfast table all her life made Horatia feel more acquainted with it than with the others. Besides her picture had appeared in it three times after she had done something worth newspaper notice at the University, and while she was vaguely amused at those reasons for going there first she argued further that as it was the paper with the largest circulation there might be more opportunities open. Its dinginess surprised her. The offices were housed in a nondescript wooden building and the manager’s office to which Horatia found herself referred by the boy in the general office was reached by a worn stairway.

“He’s probably not in yet,” said the boy, “doesn’t get here until eleven o’clock, usually.”

But Horatia’s luck was working. A stout, shirt-sleeved man looked her over without getting up from his desk.

“We don’t take on women reporters except in the society department,” he told her. “There’s to be a change there shortly. What experience have you had?”

“No experience except journalism courses at the University.”

“They can’t teach newspaper work at any university,” growled the man. “Can teach them more here in a week than they’d get in ten years at any school, don’t care where it is. Leave your name and if anything does turn up, or Miss Eliot—she’s society editor—needs help—I’ll have her take it up with you. Of course you understand she wants hack work. We’ve no room for essays, you know.”

Horatia looked him over without a blush at his semi-insolence.

“No—I don’t suppose you have,” she said, and her stock went up with her tone. She left her name on the pad he pushed towards her and went out.

“Lucky there are three others,” she said. “I wouldn’t care for that gentleman—nor yet his Miss Eliot. But I suppose you can’t choose. The Buzz-saw next.”

The Buzz-saw was not subscribed to by the Grants. It was a murderous little political journal, full of gossip, and it exposed scandals rather than printed news. Its circulation was heavy and stray copies of it, brought home by Uncle George, had made Horatia wonder a good deal about it. She knew everyone read it, more or less under cover, and its unorthodoxy troubled her not at all. If it were rotten it would be fun to uncover its methods. So she toiled up another flight of stairs into a much smaller office where the editor, a typist and two lean, pipe-smoking reporters looked furtively amused at her appearance. She took the scrutiny well. Quite unembarrassed in her own glances, she had a way of putting herself in her own class immediately. It was impossible to look at her, at her dress and her unaffected hat, and not know that she meant to be quite impersonal. The reporters took their pipes to the other corner and the editor straightened up a little to offer her a chair and ask her business. When she told him he seemed to ruminate.

“What is your name?”

She told him and he seemed to connect it with Uncle George by a swift mental gesture.

“George Grant—dry-goods?”

“His niece. I live with him.”

“Well.” He thought again and then leaned forward with a confidential air that Horatia imagined him using habitually as he unearthed his scandals.

“We don’t take on girls. But I don’t say you couldn’t be useful to us. If you could run a column of good gossipy stuff about the swells—particularly the women, of course. Nothing that would let us in for libel—well, I’d edit it anyway, of course. But the preliminary stuff to these scandals—the first rumors of divorces and elopements—particularly concerning women more or less in the public eye. We don’t want stories about everyone. I could give you a list of people to watch. You know—the Town Topics sort of thing. Get us a lot more women readers.”

Horatia was enjoying herself.

“But how would I unearth these stories about people I don’t know?”

“You’d have to work around. A girl like you has got the——” (he fumbled and decided to be a plain American) “the entry everywhere. You’d feel around, listen to them talk, draw them out. There’s things a man can’t do.”

“Yes,” agreed Horatia, wisely, “there are.”

“Now of course a thing like that would be a trial column. Might not work out at all. Couldn’t be long-winded. And then, too, it isn’t worth an awful lot. But a girl like you, living at home, doing it for experience and pin-money, would realize that we couldn’t pay too much.”

His little eyes bored through her as he tried to feel her out. Horatia felt suddenly disgusted.

“I’ll think it over,” she said, getting to her feet. “I’m not sure I could do just what you want, but I’ll think it over. And come in in a day or so.”

The man seemed a little anxious to keep her and vaguely worried lest he had said too much.

“Our little journal tries to tell the truth,” was his parting comment and it followed Horatia sardonically down the stairs.

“You’re not an adventure,” thought Horatia, proceeding. “You’re a nasty, open debauch. My chances are narrowing.”

They narrowed further. The Evening Reporter was cleaner than the other two, more brusque, more businesslike. She could not see the editor. They needed no one. There remained the Evening Journal and that Horatia hardly knew by sight. She had bought a copy at the newsstand the other day when she was getting addresses and making her plans. It was a thinner sheet than the others and seemed to have a great deal of space for semi-philosophical editorials. A kind of labor journal she classified it and then felt that she had not been complete. It had hinted at Socialism but it was not Socialist frankly. Horatia knew the strong colors of Socialist publications, to a couple of which she subscribed, just as a matter of being open-minded.

There was no buzz or stir about the office of The Journal. It was high up in a kind of office building which fronted the lake, and its rooms seemed to be very few. In one a couple of typewriting machines with papers strewn about them were deserted. In the adjoining room, open in spite of a “private” sign on the door, a big desk was also deserted. At the back of the room a big window gave on the lake, ignoring the rush and noise of the brown streets below. Horatia looked around for someone and seeing nobody went to the window. She stood there, a little tired and reflective, thinking of the queerness of being in such a spot instead of in some big classroom or lecture hall or in the sedate comfort of West Park. The adventure spirit was wearying a little. What sort of places were these to see and feel life in? And how tawdry or how conventional one might become. She thought of Edna, speeding away with her husband on some luxurious train and wondered how she was feeling today. Suddenly she herself felt lonely and ignored. No one really cared where she was or what she was doing. It was glorious to be free but it would be—— She did not finish the thought, for someone came into the office and at the sound of his step she hurriedly turned to confront business or furtiveness or whatever might be there. She saw a tall man of about thirty-five with a lean face and slow, observing, cynical eyes.

“I am sorry you found the office deserted. I am Langley, the editor. What can I do for you? If it’s books, I don’t buy books. If it’s subscriptions, I can’t afford it.”

“It’s a job,” said Horatia.

“For me or you?” asked the man with a lazy smile. She liked his voice. It was well-bred. He was well-bred too and there was something vaguely familiar about his name.

“You’ve got one,” she countered.

He smiled neither in assent nor dissent.

“And you want one?”

“On a newspaper.”

“There are more substantial sheets than this one, you know.”

He spoke pleasantly and Horatia felt suddenly expansive and ready to talk.

“I’ve been to them all. One won’t have me, another wants me possibly to do society personals, and another wants me to run a spicy scandal column for them.”

“So they would. But as fourth fiddle I’ve nothing much better to offer, I’m afraid. I don’t need reporters, which I suppose is what you are hankering for, nearly as much as other ingredients for this paper.”

“I’m sorry,” said Horatia. “I’d like to work next to this view.”

“That’s why I took the office. I thought that too. But I can’t put the things that view tells me across with the public.”

“They would be pleasant things,” said Horatia. She was interested and meant to find out as much as she could about this man and his queer paper. And she felt in him a willingness to prolong the conversation. To test it, she turned to go.

“Good morning,” she said brightly. “Again I’m sorry.”

“It’s too bad. Will you give up the journalistic life now that the Big Four have offered you so infinitely less than nothing?”

“I suppose I’ll have to.”

“Have you done any of it yet? I beg your pardon for the question, which, not being a prospective employer, I haven’t any right to ask. Don’t answer if you don’t like.”

“I don’t mind. I’ve done no work—of any kind. Just raw—out of college.”

“University?”

She nodded and at the word the train of association became complete. Langley—of course—the 1905 Langley, who had been the big man in his day and left a train of college glory behind him that even yet was not obliterated by the hundreds of more recent graduates. He had begun the student government—but possibly it was not the same one. She was sure she hadn’t better ask him.

“Isn’t it odd,” he was saying, “how many college graduates think they can reform the world just by getting on a newspaper? They think such foolish things—that papers are forums of opinions—that they can write things they want to write. My dear young lady, a newspaper is only a medium for advertisers, that is, if it’s successful.”

“But I know that,” answered Horatia, “perfectly. I’m quite practical about it. And I don’t want to reform the world. I want to live right in it. I’m not the least bit of a reformer. I rather like the world.”

She looked so engagingly young and sweet and sensible that the man’s face brightened—almost involuntarily, as if he did not want it to brighten.

“You’re a romanticist, young lady.”

“I started out this morning from an ugly stone house on a lovely hill to seek my fortune. There was only one trouble. No one put any obstacles in my way and no one knew I was going to seek it really. The people I told didn’t understand. You’re the first person who has begun to talk to me, so I told you. And I’m getting too expansive. But I feel much better.”

“I wish I could give you a job, young adventurer,” answered the man, a little irrelevantly. “You might bring back some of the enthusiasm I had when I was as young as you are. But I was more solemn.”

“Oh, I can be solemn on occasion,” said Horatia. She was having a tremendously good time, talking to this man who didn’t know her name and to whom it was so easy to talk. And he too was warming to the conversation.

“You see, I haven’t much of a newspaper. Three of us run it and we don’t do our own printing. There is one man who had hopes as I did. There is another who drinks too much—when he writes well—and writes badly when he drinks too little. We started out to make a newspaper which would not muck-rake, you know, but tell the truth about things. And we find, dear young lady, that nobody wants us. Even you wouldn’t want a job from us.”

“I truly think I would,” said Horatia. “Don’t you want a woman’s department? I really would enjoy doing society personals for a paper with a purpose.”

He laughed uproariously and she noticed how young he could look.

“Will you come to lunch and talk it over? I’ll tell you all about it—hopes and failures, young lady adventurer.”

“If I can pay for my own lunch.”

He bowed, then added with a twinkle:

“Of course we aren’t absolutely down to bedrock. I could pay for your lunch.”

“But it’s easier for me to beg for a job if I’m paying for my own. My name is Horatia Grant, Mr. Langley.”

“Miss Grant,” said Langley, holding the door open, “no matter who pays for it, I am going to enjoy my lunch.”

CHAPTER II

IT was an amazingly pleasant lunch. Horatia was not too sophisticated in this matter of eating with men in public restaurants and under the flattering charm of Jim Langley’s interest and attention she sparkled with excitement and response. She liked him. She liked his easy careless manners and his half-mocking, half-kind indulgence towards her remarks and the real amusement in his smile and the skill he showed in ordering food. And Langley across from her, along with his faint note of self-mockery, showed that he enjoyed himself too, for Horatia’s face was young and her mind was clear and above all she did not seem tired but fresh and vigorous. He asked her about herself, subtly keeping the conversation on her, and she told him of the house on the hill and her married sister and her aunt and uncle and the neighbors.

“They are kind, you know,” she finished, “but they are so simple that they all call me intellectual and set me apart as queer.”

“And you aren’t queer at all,” said Langley, “you’re a perfect product of what the nice cleanliness of West Park would produce with a college education superimposed on it. Why don’t you leave things alone, young lady? Your realities may be stupid but they are clean and straight. Why do you want to get tangled up and wrinkled up? Wouldn’t the West Park High School perhaps be a better solution than the newspaper? Or a good husband?”

She smiled at him.

“You smile now but later you’ll be sorry. You think you know about troubles because you’ve studied sociology and heard a lot of war lecturers. But you really are quite untouched. And life hurts. Even in West Park it must hurt, but in a city, in work—it probably will hurt much more. And besides the world isn’t the place it used to be, with clean-cut issues and a welcome for the young romanticist. It is worn with war, and very tired and a bit unscrupulous and there are no ideals left which haven’t been tampered with——”

“But we have to live in it just the same,” argued Horatia.

“You might enter a convent.” At which they both laughed, for it was so absurd to think of Horatia in a convent.

“Your people will probably object to your taking a job on my paper,” said Langley at length; “maybe you will when you hear more about me. I can’t pay you enough to make it worth your while financially. But perhaps if you want to come and will take the work I can give you and try to increase our circulation, I can find a desk for you anyway.” And having committed himself, the editor looked as if he were calling himself a fool in his thoughts.

“I’ll work for anything you’ll pay me,” said Horatia, “and I don’t think anyone can frighten me away from your paper, Mr. Langley. When can I come?”

“Good luck to begin on Monday.”

“I shall be at the office on Monday morning,” she promised, with a thrill, a young thrill in her voice.

She left the restaurant with all the spirit of the morning reinforced. Friday—Saturday—Sunday—then she would be at work. It wasn’t hard to find work. She would try very hard to make what she wrote interesting and possibly soon people would be buying the newspaper to read what she had written, and Langley would say—even so do fresh college graduates dream. But the college graduate of ten years back walked back to the office over the lake and told Bob Brotherton apropos of nothing that there was always a new way in which to make a damned fool of oneself.

What he was to do with her, why he had taken on an added responsibility just when The Journal seemed on its last legs were doubtless sufficiently irritating questions. But more irritating must have been the flare-up of impulsiveness, the response to youth and romance, which he had been deliberately trying to deaden in himself and which he had hoped were permanently deadened. He had waded through realism and discouragements to a kind of refusal to care about anything more and here he was lending a hand to someone who would go through the same weary mess. She would be far better off in her stupid suburbanism. Someone would marry her and use the youth and the freshness to decorate another suburban home somewhere. She shouldn’t be encouraged. The persistence of the devil that had made all that old stuff leap up in him again!

Horatia went on to Maud’s. Maud was her sister, who had married to the full approbation of West Park and her own satisfaction. It came upon Horatia in the midst of her excitement at the beautiful way things were turning out that she was sorry for people who couldn’t have all this interest in their lives and particularizing she discovered a localized regret that Maud’s life wasn’t more colorful. She hadn’t seen her sister often that summer. Maud’s two babies had come close together, and on the advent of the second they had moved from their first apartment to a house on one of the city boulevards, which pleased Aunt Caroline immensely. Horatia had been in the house only once or twice, for Maud brought the children to West Park on Sundays and that had been almost enough sisterly intercourse for Horatia. But now she wanted to spread out her inspiration and she turned her steps towards Elm Boulevard.

It was a newly-built section of the city which took great pride in its residential restrictions and its extremely up-to-date houses of brick or stucco, each of them representing a vague travesty on some architectural period or “style.” The sleek, small lawns were chopped off neatly, one from another, by little hedges which were not too high to hide any of the beauties or improvements of the place from the passing motorist. Well polished cars stood in front of some of the houses, children in smocked frocks and gaily colored half-socks played in the lawn-swings or walked up and down the sidewalks. It was mid-afternoon and the comfortable-prosperous were enjoying themselves. Horatia felt the still orderliness of the atmosphere and realized again why Aunt Caroline was given to occasional remarks about how “well Maud had done.”

She turned in at her sister’s house and Maud, who was sitting on the porch with her baby in her arms, jumped up to welcome her volubly and to introduce her to two other ladies as cool and plump and white-clad as Maud herself.

“Did you walk out this wretchedly hot day—all the way from town?”

Horatia had not felt the heat but she put a suddenly self-conscious hand up to her hair and hat under her sister’s solicitous inquiry. She found she was hot and moist beside these cool suburban ladies.

“I am hot,” she admitted. “May I go up and wash?”

The inside of the house was pleasanter than she had remembered. It was cool, its shades were drawn against the heat. Clean, pretty colors everywhere, and as she passed the children’s room the whiteness and pinkness of it charmed her.

She went down to the porch refreshed and admiring. Even if the Williams had chosen this location where there was no lake view and the houses were rather closely set, it had distinct advantages. She told Maud so and Maud was obviously greatly pleased.

“I knew I was right in insisting on this part of town,” she said. “A lake view is all right and so is the country. But unless you have oodles of money and three or four cars and a regular estate it is much better to settle in one of the good residence districts.”

“What makes a residence district good?” asked Horatia, quizzically, though she knew perfectly well.

The three suburban ladies looked a little shocked.

“Why the people, the people who live here. This district is restricted. You can’t build houses here that cost less than twelve thousand. That keeps out undesirables.”

“I see,” said Horatia, waiving her rights to controversy.

“Of course, with growing children,” began Maud in an instructive matronly tone.

Growing children, it appeared, were all important to the three ladies. Horatia dropped out of the conversation but kept a look of bright intelligence focused on her informants. Growing children must be carefully watched and not allowed to make acquaintances among those whose residence districts were not restricted. They “picked up everything.” They were the subject of a long conversation which went from schools to carrots. The interest of the three ladies never flagged. Horatia held the baby in her lap and played with its wisps of hair, hardly attending to what was said. She vaguely heard the talk pass from undesirable children to undesirable mothers and the voices became more tense. The names were nothing to her and she was in no mood to combat the intolerances of the others. The baby was so small and pink and clean and desirable. Maud must have a lot of fun. It must be fun to share children with a man—— She heard a familiar name and broke off her thoughts abruptly. What was that they were saying?

“She was seen downtown having lunch with that Jim Langley—and you know what he is.”

“Oh, she doesn’t care what she does,” said Maud. “Whatever happened between her and her husband—do you know?”

“They say that after their baby died, she refused flatly to have any more—and you know how men are. If a woman can’t be tactful about those things and the way she feels—she said outrageous things about not being able to endure more such suffering. And yet when the child was alive she was hardly ever home.”

“That’s the way with those women,” said Maud sagely.

“And then running around with Jim Langley——”

The sick little feeling in Horatia grew acute. She had heard the name rightly.

“Who’s the pernicious gentleman?” she asked lightly enough.

“Jim Langley—no one you ought to know.” Maud was quick to adopt the tone of chaperonage.

“But I should know all about him,” persisted Horatia, easily, “because he’s just given me a job.”

There was a dangerous little pause. Then Maud spoke.

“You’re joking.”

“No—truly. He promised to give me a position on The Journal. Reporting, I suppose. I went to all the newspapers this morning.”

A flush had mounted to her sister’s cheeks.

“Horatia,” she said with a tense air of lightness, “where did you get this sudden notion of going to work at all?”

Horatia felt a little sorry. She realized that Maud was being humiliated by the turn the conversation had taken. But still she did want to know about Jim Langley.

“Of course I’ll want to do something. No one sits around any more with folded hands waiting to be married.”

This was a trifle better. It at least showed the callers that the work project was a freak and not a necessity. Maud decided to try to pass it off as a joke and reckon with Horatia later, but before she could speak one of her guests was inquiring:

“Really on Jim Langley’s paper, Miss Grant?”

“Why not?” asked Horatia. “He seems pleasant enough. What is the matter with him?”

“Horatia hasn’t been home except summers for four years,” said Maud shortly. “Why, he’s got a bad reputation, and was mixed up with a dreadful scandal here. He was named in the Hubbell divorce suit.”

“And he didn’t marry Mrs. Hubbell.”

“Should he?” Horatia sought instruction.

Maud rose with an air of exasperation.

“You shouldn’t go about alone to newspaper offices, Horatia,” she said. “It’s ridiculous. As for your working on The Journal, you just talk to Harvey and see what he says. Come, let’s see the garden.”

Horatia saw the garden obediently and the guests’ departure, followed close by the bedtime ceremonies at which Maud helped and presided, forced the matter out of the way. It was only as they sat at dinner that the topic rose again. Maud had composed herself and, considering that Horatia’s conversation had merely shown inexperience and ignorance, was no longer angry. She was rarely angry for any length of time. Now, looking at her husband over the neat central fern-dish, she said, half-jocularly, “You’ll really have to take Horatia in hand, Harvey. She is dreadful. Here she went and saw this Jim Langley person today and asked him for a position on his paper.”

“But the point is, Maud, that he gave me a job.”

Harvey looked at his sister-in-law and came at the question from a man angle.

“You don’t want to work on his paper, Horatia. If you want that kind of work, try either The Tribune or The Reporter. Langley’s paper is one of those enterprises that run themselves into the ground early. He’s always uncertain—no policy, no circulation to amount to anything. And then of course—Langley, himself.”

Horatia leaned towards him.

“But tell me about it, Harvey. There was a chorus of horror when I mentioned his name this afternoon. And he was the only gentleman I met this morning. I did try The Tribune and The Reporter. I even tried The Buzz-saw.”

Harvey threw back his head and roared.

“That’s a modern young woman. Why didn’t you take a job on that?”

“They offered me one—a scandal column, but I turned it down. Seriously, tell me about Mr. Langley.”

“Why, there’s not so much to tell,” said Harvey. “He’s in pretty bad odor, that’s all. The women are all interested in him because he was co-respondent in a divorce suit. Isn’t that it, Maud?”

“Don’t be silly, Harvey. You know what he is and you ought to tell Horatia.”

Harvey tried again with that disinclination to hurt the personal reputation of a man which most men show in such discussion.

“Jack Hubbell sued his wife for divorce and named Langley, who’d been philandering a lot. Langley always did that. He was a University man about my time and a tremendous fellow. Everybody worshipped his footsteps.”

“I’ve heard of him there,” said Horatia.

“He had a little money and started this newspaper, which would have been all right if he hadn’t refused to tie himself up with any political party and hadn’t also refused to make any concessions to advertisers. Seemed to have an idea that newspapers are run like books. Then he got a lot of booze-fighters working for him and sort of lost his grip. That’s all there’s to it. When his money gives out his paper will go to the wall.”

“But the divorce suit?”

“You’re as bad as the rest of them,” sighed poor Harvey. “Stick to the scandal. It never came to trial at all. Hubbell killed himself after the suit was filed.”

Maud finished.

“And he didn’t marry the woman or make any attempt to justify the situation. Just stopped going places and refused to explain anything. Naturally people assume the worst.”

Horatia felt a little pale. She could hear his kind voice, with the tinge of bitterness in it. And his remark, “Probably you won’t want to work for me after you hear what people say.” Well, she had heard. And she did want to work for him. They’d outlawed him from their silly society because he’d held his tongue. Probably none of it was true. And if it was true it didn’t matter. She brought her last reflection into words.

“But after all it doesn’t much matter, does it? He doesn’t want me to marry him or to take stock in his newspaper. All he offers is a job and even if all these things are as dreadful as they are reported to be, they don’t enter in. I’m old enough to be incorruptible surely. And I need newspaper experience.”

“I think, maybe I could get you on The Tribune if I talked to Weissner,” said Harvey.

“There,” said Maud, “why didn’t you come to us first? Of course it’s the thing just now to work, since the war. Dorothy Macdonald is studying stenography and you know how rich she is. And lots of others. But you might have asked us or Uncle George.”

“I wanted to find work for myself,” said Horatia, the memory of that morning’s somewhat torn glory still shining in her eyes. “And I’ve promised Mr. Langley, Maud. I couldn’t work on another paper. It would be too insulting.”

“You don’t want to ruin your reputation and the reputation of all the rest of us, do you?” asked Maud sharply.

“Oh, it’s not as bad as all that, you know, Maud,” interposed her husband. “Langley pays his bills and is in good standing at his clubs. Of course he isn’t getting anywhere, but it wouldn’t hurt Horatia’s reputation. Nothing hurts a girl’s reputation any more,” added Harvey, chuckling. “Debutantes appear in banks and come delivering laundry. You never know when you’ll come on them next. Let her do as she likes.”

“You’re a darling, Harvey. And I promise you, Maud, that I’ll tell you all the scandal from the inside and you can flourish it, copyrighted, around the boulevard.”

At which sally they all laughed; but the last thing Horatia heard that night as she climbed into Maud’s guest-room bed was Maud’s voice from her dressing-room, somewhat muffled but distinct, as she talked to her husband.

“I don’t like it, Harvey. He’s probably fascinated her, and they say he hasn’t any principles.”

“Oh, come dear, let it wear itself out. Horatia’s not a child and she can look out for herself. Come here, sweetheart, and take a look at these white flannels. Are they fit for tennis?”

CHAPTER III

LIKE Harvey, Horatia had no doubts as to her ability to look out for herself. To a certain extent she had been already doing it and she had begun doing it early so that it was natural for her to be independent and vigorous. Her father had died when she was five and after that her mother had not seemed to care enough about living to keep it up. She had been a pretty, intense woman who had taken her wifehood and maternity very seriously, so seriously that she had quickly faded and at the time of her death had not looked at all like the lovely young girl in leg-o’-mutton sleeves, who smiled out of the photograph in the West Park parlor.

She had two children, both girls to her secret relief and her husband’s secret disappointment, and she fussed over their clothes and their childish illnesses interminably. In spite of or perhaps because of her fussing, they were, when she left them, two sturdy little girls with pleasant tempers and good digestions. They accepted the change in their fortunes quietly, taking all the kissing and patting and uncomprehended signs of sympathy which came their way, and, climbing into the big walnut bed at the Grant house on the first night of their transference there, they cuddled closely together and fell asleep.

George Grant, their uncle, came in to see if they were asleep a little later and stood looking down at them in a kind of puzzled wonder and with a rusty throb of pity at the fact that they looked very small indeed in the big bed. It was as near to a definite emotion towards them as he ever got. He was their father’s brother and had officially “taken them” because it was the natural and proper thing to do. He was the head of a dry-goods establishment and by dint of steady application and learning one thing, the wholesale dry-goods business, well, he had made money in a slow accumulating way. And he had built his house, which perfectly expressed him. Like it he was good and substantial and like it also, provincial, unimaginative and unconscious of his limitations and lacks. His wife was enough like him to have been his sister and whether this was the result of slow absorption of his characteristics or had been the original bond between them, no one knew. Mrs. Grant knew as much about clean housekeeping as he knew about dry-goods. She had a subsidiary passion for church work and was an authority on church suppers and foreign missions.

She also had taken her brother-in-law’s children because it was the obvious thing for a childless, well-to-do couple to do. But perhaps because the Grants had been married for twelve years without having any children, the desire for them had either died or never been cultivated and they took Maud and Horatia without warmth. From the very beginning the house on the hill meant repression to them. There was never cruelty or even unkindness but it was all cold. Even in the kitchen there was no freedom or expansion. The food was measured and counted and it was not a place where an enterprising or hungry girl might take a pot of jam or a dozen cookies and abscond with them for an after-school lunch. To be sure if they were hungry they were allowed to have bread and butter and brown sugar—or a doughnut perhaps. But their aunt or the raw-boned Swedish girl who helped her gave it out always with an air of rationing and several admonitions not to drop the crumbs.

At intervals, all along their path through grammar school, High School and Sabbath school, came the supposedly high spots of recreation, parties which they themselves gave or which they went to as guests. Even at a very early age they had no question as to which kind they enjoyed most. They liked to go to parties and they hated them at home. Parties in other houses usually involved some stiffness at the beginning but they warmed up to gaiety and a joyous kind of disorderliness which sent all the children home flushed, tired and happy. At the Grant house they were functions all the way through. Mrs. George Grant modeled them on the parties she gave to the ladies of the Missionary Guild.

“I hate parties at home,” Maud would grumble to her sister when some morning Mrs. Grant would gravely announce that she thought one was due, and Horatia, always braver, would say, “But Aunt Caroline, what shall we do at the party?” Aunt Caroline, her mind already on the refreshments and the exact dozen of napkins which she would dedicate to the use of the children, had always the same answer, “Why, play games, Horatia—just as you always do.”

The children all came. Parties were never events to be ignored, and the young public of West Park was not discriminating if refreshments were involved. They came, all clean and scrubbed, and were sent down to the big bare hall which a freshly-lit fire tried in vain to heat, and they seconded the embarrassed efforts of Maud and Horatia to get up some games. But Mrs. Grant sat by the wall and watched with a mother or two flanking her, and there was no abandon. The refreshments, served in the big dining-room, were all that saved the situation, and even those were spoiled for the two hostesses by a feeling of their aunt’s eyes lurking for crumbs. Yet, afterwards, when the children had gone home again and all traces of them were carefully removed, Mrs. Grant would smile and say to her nieces, “Did you have a nice time?” And faithfully, true to a convention which they did not in the least understand, they answered, “Oh, yes, Aunt Caroline.”

Of course even all Mrs. Grant’s passion for routine could not prevent some crises arising. One came when Maud refused to do any more studying after she graduated from the High School. In spite of her lamentable monthly report card, Maud had been destined for a teacher and her sudden rebellion at the end of her seventeenth year shocked her aunt terribly. But Maud had a way of being silent and sullen and she had secret reinforcement from Harvey Williams, who was one of the reasons why she did not intend to go to the University. She rather concealed the fact of Harvey at the time of her rebellion, but after she had gained her point, Harvey became a steady caller at the Grant house. Maud had insisted that she was going to earn her own living but she postponed beginning to do it and it shortly became very obvious that she might better spend her few unmarried days preparing a trousseau. Harvey was quite an eligible person, beginning a law practice in the city and living with his mother in West Park. The Grants, once adjusted, smiled in their cheerless way upon the match. Maud’s love-making had gone on during Horatia’s last year at High School and first year at the University. She was at first tremendously impressed by the fact that Maud’s brown curls and pink skin were desirable to the point of matrimony. She recognized the fact that Maud was pretty but rooming with the prettiness and eternally removing jars of cold cream and boxes of pink powder from her side of the bureau had lessened its effectiveness for her. It was, none the less, a great thing to have Maud being made love to and to think of her in secret as the recipient of passionate kisses and delightful murmured phrases of love. Maud jarred on the romance by being Maud throughout, inclined to giggle and enjoy even Uncle George’s crude jokes about Harvey, and Harvey had done his share of the jarring by being a blushful, diffident young man who shot side glances at his fiancée and giggled heavily himself. Horatia did her best to forget them actually and to remember the delightful fact that they were lovers, hoping against hope that they spent their evenings in moonlight walks instead of holding hands at the movies.

By the time Maud was married, her sister was more sophisticated. She had finished her first year at the University and begun to read a great deal. Many subjects, more or less taboo in West Park, she had heard discussed freely by both students and professors. She had decided that there was something wrong with the social and economic systems of the world, that West Park was a small and narrow place, that flirting was silly, that she must devote a great deal of time to reading essays and books on psychology, and that she would like to meet some “real men” and get away from West Park. In spite of all this accumulated philosophy, she was oddly glad to get on a street-car labeled “West Park” when she came home on her first vacation, and to see all the familiar landmarks on the way to the stone house on the hill. She never forgot that homecoming. It was home, and not even the facts that Aunt Caroline was at a missionary meeting and that Maud had a cold in her head and wanted to talk about the initialing of her linen could keep Horatia from romancing somewhat over it.

But by evening she felt indefinably let down. It was a warm June night and the windows were open in the dining-room so that as they sat at dinner Horatia could see the city below, its lights just beginning to sparkle through the first dusk, and the slow freighters on the great lake beyond passing and repassing with grave dignity. It was all beautiful and quiet and familiar outside and yet no one at the table seemed to feel it except herself. Uncle George at the head of the table in his black house-jacket, ate silently, his broad, unemotional face fallen into heavy lines of contentment. The day was over, his day’s business had been good and after dinner he would water the lawn.

At the other end of the table his wife was talking to the girls about Maud’s coming wedding. And as usual her mind was focused on the food, the napkins and silver and especially the cleaning necessary, and Horatia once more suffered the feeling of reluctant chill of the old days when her aunt proposed a children’s party. Thank God this one would be the last.

Her aunt broke into her thought.

“And then I suppose Horatia will be the next one,” she said with a heavy facetiousness.

“Didn’t you meet any fellows at the ‘U’?” asked Maud. “Most of the girls come back simply laden with pictures. Esther Dinsmore has a man who motors up to see her every week or so—clear across the state.”

“I didn’t go in for that sort of thing.” There was a trace of self-righteousness mingled with the humor in Horatia’s tone. “And I am afraid I won’t be the next one, Aunt Caroline, because I don’t want to get married for ages. I’ve lots of things to do first.”

“Teaching?” asked Maud in disgust.

“No—I don’t think so. Social work, maybe.”

“Slum work?” It was Aunt Caroline this time.

“We don’t call it that any longer.” Horatia was patient. “No—— Lots of the social work is scientific work in an office. Collecting statistics.”

Aunt Caroline preened herself just a little.

“I may be very old-fashioned but this statistic collecting seems very foolish to me. Just a fad. Now when we send out a missionary to a heathen country we don’t ask for statistics. We want to know how many souls he has saved.”

“That might in itself be a modest statistic,” laughed Horatia.

“And,” concluded Aunt Caroline with the air of one who quotes the irrefutable and has a right to quote it, “I’m sure ‘the poor ye have always with you.’”

There was a moment’s silence. Then Maud giggled.

“Let’s stop the deep stuff, for pity’s sake. There he comes, Horatia.”

Harvey could be seen passing the dining-room windows. Maud giggled again and jumped up to look at herself in the mirror of the sideboard. Then she went through the hall to meet her fiancé.

“Horatia’s home,” they could hear her saying, “she’s an awful highbrow. Not much like poor chicken-brained me.” She made her apologies for her lack of mind with enormous pride and Harvey said something in a low voice at which there was another giggle. Horatia felt reluctant to meet him again but she folded her napkin and went out on the porch where the two lovers had settled themselves. Harvey shook hands with her a little awkwardly but not as awkwardly as she had expected. Working in the city had put a keener edge on him. He held his head better and talked better English—not entirely the slangy boy and girl stuff which she had always had from him. On the whole, as she looked him over, Horatia thought her sister was doing rather well. Nothing exceptional in Harvey, of course, but after all he would make a good husband. They talked for a little and Harvey was intelligent on all the subjects which she, a little priggishly, introduced. He was a graduate of her University and full of reminiscence. But for all his pleasant conversation Horatia found herself feeling in the way. Harvey’s arm stealing over the back of Maud’s chair—Maud’s affected, immensely assured little laugh as if she had a world at her feet and need make no effort—it puzzled Horatia. It seemed inconceivable that this well-ordered young man should want her to go so that he could make silly love to a giggling Maud and yet—— She stood up and prepared to go into the house. Neither protested.

From that vacation on, Horatia began to be the “intellectual one” in her circle of friends. At first she resented it, then liked it and grew ultimately into complete indifference to what West Park did or didn’t think. But that was later. At first she found herself set apart and left out of the jokes. Before she went back to the University Maud was “settled,” not in West Park, but in an apartment in the city itself, more accessible for Harvey and better suited to his wife’s budding passion for storming the society of the city. With her going Horatia had dropped out of the circle of friends who used to come to the children’s parties. The girls had married or gone East or to Normal schools. The boys were marrying or flirting with city girls. Yet, though the reality of her relations with the suburb had all changed, faded, she never lost the feeling that she belonged to it and was in a measure bound to go back to it. She knew that her aunt and uncle wanted her to live with them—and that dull as their affection was, they were used to her and wanted her. But stronger than their call was her feeling of West Park’s physical beauty, of the vigor of its cool, brisk winds and of the greatness of the great lakes spread out at the foot of the city and all its suburbs. It was always a relief to come back from the flat little university town.

She had done rather well at the University, though, as she told Maud, she had not “gone in” for the social side of the undergraduate life, the life which was so important to many of the girl students. A great deal of that side of the University bothered her and repelled her. There were girls who seemed to care about nothing except prolonged tumultuous flirtations which included an immense amount of kissing and physical demonstration. Horatia allied herself with the group which considered such things a disgrace to the college. It was a strong group, not too large, and they substituted for the flirtations of the other girls an intense interest in and elaborate discussion of the modern woman and her relations to men. They were constantly exchanging cold-blooded little ideas for perfecting the sex. And underneath their scorn for the hand-holding undoubtedly persisted an interest in the very thing they scorned, judging by the time they put on the subject.

Once in a while they tried to put some of their theories into practice. Horatia would find some young man attracted to her and meet him honestly and simply as she would have met any girl. She would talk in her best manner and tell him about the things she was thinking. And inevitably she drove him away, for the young men were not at the age when they looked for straight comradeship from girls. There was another code among them. They liked Horatia well enough, rather admired her, but they left her alone. It worried her a little. She did not want to go through life without love. She had heard and read too much about it. And, transcending her talk about the new spirit of friendship between men and women, of a partnership marriage, came flashes of feeling as she read her Keats or stumbled on a boy and a girl saying a clinging good-night in some dark corner of the campus. She felt left out.

After all it did not matter much, because in the spring of her Sophomore year everything changed. The United States had declared war and all the most interesting young men had melted away, leaving only indistinguishable stars in the University service flag. And it was by the war that Horatia’s last two years at the University were colored. She had not had much of a point of view about the European trouble as she vaguely characterized it when it had been purely European. She had talked once of becoming a nurse and going abroad but it was one of her wildest dreams and not an especially cherished one. But now for a year and a half the University had mobilized itself. Appeals for help, lectures from returned soldiers, classrooms and halls filled with flaring war posters, constant campaigns for funds, a sudden hierarchy springing up among Red Cross workers, blue veils, red veils and white veils shrouding the heads of the earnest bandage makers, and constant efforts on the part of every instructor to relate his or her branch of study to the great war, realizing that only by so doing could he hold any number of his pupils—such things did the war mean to the college. The interest in athletics died down like an untended fire—seriousness came into vogue—and there was even more to it. All these young students, still mentally adolescent, suffered. They suffered because they had been taught that they should understand life, because the supernatural had been left out of their philosophies and blind faith had been discarded. Yet they were face to face with horrors, with facts, philosophies which they could not comprehend and they strained their minds trying to understand. Those who had been mildly Socialist turned with repugnance from Bolshevism. Those who had always had a smug trust in their financial solidity saw fortunes vanish or become useless in the face of misfortune. Individualists realized that their social duty was unescapable. For two years these students who had gone to college to learn facts, as they supposed, found themselves in a chaos of changing ideas, guided only unsurely by instructors as bewildered as they were themselves. No one wanted to stay in college. They stayed only because of parental pressure and because the University authorities introduced as much practical war work as was possible. And the cold-blooded philosophy and psychology Horatia had been absorbing was melted in the heat of the great world emotionality.

Then at the height of all this enthusiasm came the armistice revealing to the world suddenly and fearfully the confusion the world was in—confusion of politics, of sociology, and ethics.

For the first few months after the signing of the armistice the word “reconstruction” flew about the campus. War funds became “reconstruction funds.” And then doubt began to creep about. What did reconstruction mean and what would it lead to? Discontents penetrated the campus grounds. The instructors, their own opinions in a state of flux and bound to wait for further developments before crystallizing, were poor leaders, dealing out generalities and ambiguousness. A certain fixed curriculum dragged its way through the months. They were all conscious that they were holding to outworn forms. Who knew what the University of the future would be? Perhaps those diplomas given out in June, 1919, were the least valuable of any ever given. Students went out into a life which the instructors could not forecast. In wartime it was possible to preach courage and sacrifice. In these strange new peace times who knew whether courage and sacrifice were cardinal virtues?

This of course was all under the surface, hardly felt perhaps by many of both teachers and students. But the unrest, the doubts were there, revealed to the least probing. To some of them, among them Horatia, a strange thing happened. She had been trained at first to believe in a pragmatic philosophy which the war had swept away in its wind of romantic sacrifice and heroism. In her first two years she had felt rather scornful of the silliness of college men. And then they were drawn out of her life into the great struggle and became heroes. Horatia had come to believe in heroism. She had heard of so many young lives offered nobly, read many young loose-hung fighting autobiographies. And she had come out of college as thorough a young romanticist as ever lived in the Middle Ages, but a puzzled young romanticist with neither Church nor king to give her guidance. She brought her strong faith in young men, her growing desire for all the romance life could give, home. Home to West Park and after a taste of the dull routine of Aunt Caroline’s days and the gossiping wedding of Edna, had decided that she could not bear the let-down, the drop from romantic idealism and noble ideas into the actuality of a corner of life. There was more in life which she must have and go after posthaste. And so it was that the morning after the wedding, she had set off adventuring and found the road open and pleasant.

CHAPTER IV

FROM The Journal office the lake looked blue and calm, disdaining the stray gusts of wind that tossed newspapers and rubbish about in the alleys below Main Street. Horatia had moved her typewriter over to the window so typewriting might be accompanied by some compensations. Langley said it increased her mistakes one hundred per cent, but Horatia insisted that it doubled her inspirations.

“Which is necessary,” she added, “when one is trying to be both brilliant and informational. The two things don’t track.”

She hated typewriting. Her fingers, untrained to accuracy, stumbled and missed their aim and wrote absurdities. But typewriting was one of the things which must be done if she was to do journalistic work, they told her, and Horatia had decided that working on a newspaper was worth a good many sacrifices. She had gone through some of them already in the shape of family protests and disapprovals and if another one was to take the shape of a 1913 Oliver typewriter, that too was to be borne. Gladly borne for the sake of the thrilling contact with unprinted, raw news, with information on a hundred subjects that had never interested her before, for the sake of the kaleidoscopic picture of the city’s life and means of life, for the caustic brilliant comments of Jim Langley and Bob Brotherton, sitting with their pipes smoking furiously as they uncoiled the truth about some happening, or wrote editorials of things as they ought to be. Out of the terrific tangle of the philosophies and political economies of the world she saw these men draw threads and wind them neatly on a spool of thought. The tangle remained a tangle but a fascinating instead of a discouraging one. It was more what was said than what was written, though enough out of tune with the current hysteric dread of American Bolshevism was published to account for Harvey’s characterization that Langley had “no policy” which meant the fatal lack of the right one. Horatia knew now why Jim Langley’s paper had never appeared in the Grant household. She had seen the president of the Dry-Goods Association of which Uncle George was a pillar denounced in its pages for crooked political dealing. She knew why the advertisements that The Journal ran were those of obscure stores or coöperative establishments or small firms employing union labor. In two months she had learned more about politics, psychology, philosophy and labor problems than she had known there was to learn. Most of it had come direct from Langley. He had looked a little surprised when she had turned up that Monday morning, whimsically surprised.

“So you came?” he said simply with a thousand implications in his tone.

And she had answered, “I came,” giving therewith the answer to all his implied questionings in her tone. He gave her a desk and told her briefly, almost abruptly, what he thought she could do. She could “cover” certain meetings for them, mostly big lectures and concerts that must be reported, with such theater notices as would be necessary and for the rest, it would be mostly writing up the notes of Bob Brotherton, or Charley Jones, the other reporter, when their work crowded them too much.

“You see,” he explained, “you take no one’s place but you can relieve the pressure on all of us.”

That was the outline of her work but compressed in the outline she found ten and sometimes twelve hours a day of fascination. The two other men had taken her advent rather smilingly but they soon found her useful. She learned to read their handwriting, to decipher their notes, to write a story from their verbal outline. And “in spite of her typewriting,” said Langley, “it is good copy.”

Little by little she had come into the confidences of the office. The men talked freely in front of her, tried to show her how to typewrite, explained their standards, told of their own histories and ambitions. Bob Brotherton had meant to write and was particularly expansive about his wasted ambition when he had been drinking a little. Horatia came to recognize the effect of liquor in his conversation and to discount it. She liked him too because Langley had told her something of Bob’s miseries, his domestic tragedy of an insane wife and a feeble-minded child, both now in institutions somewhere. And it was impossible to keep from liking Charley Jones, out of college three years and hoping, praying and urging that Labor would come into its own soon. All the problems of the city and of the country, even of the world, were met in the little office by Bob’s literary pessimism, Charley’s cure-all and the philosophical endurance of Langley. Langley never got angry or excited. When the others were tangled as to policy or inner meanings, he hit the truth on the head with some single sentence. Horatia, sitting at her typewriter or at her table with her back to them all, would catch herself listening for his comment and when it came would seize upon it as truth and final.

She had no idea of how much she had changed the office, of how much more work and less idling had come with her. Perhaps because her dogged determined industry made them ashamed, perhaps because her uplifted profile at the window or her apologetic frowning smile at some mistake she had made charmed them, they all worked with a new energy. And they were all amazed at her lack of self-consciousness. They were experienced, each in his own way, and they watched her for those traces of self-consciousness which break down the barriers between business and personal relations. But there was none of it. She never blushed, she never seemed afraid. It was all interest—pure interest.

“I can’t get it,” said Bob one day after she had left the office. “She likes it here. What does she see in this decrepit sheet to interest her? She ought to be listening to troubadours under her window, instead of pounding a typewriter.”

“Precisely,” said Langley, a little over-dryly. “She ought, but she wouldn’t. She’s gone on a hunt for her own romance—that’s what the modern young girl does instead of having it brought to her.”

“And she’s found it here?” grinned Bob.

Langley shrugged his shoulders and tilted his pipe.

“Temporarily. The view helps.”

He sent Bob out on an assignment shortly after and then stood before the window watching the darkness close down on the water.

There was no doubt that The Journal’s affairs were looking up. A new movement had come into the city—a non-partisan political element who in default of a paper of their own were using his. They were backing a strong man and a comparatively decent one for mayor in the November elections and political advertising had swelled the funds of The Journal as much as its advocacy of a strong candidate had increased its circulation. And Langley found his old nerve coming back into his writing. He admitted occasionally to some of his companions that it was worth while writing if someone was reading what he wrote. But there seemed to be other things that stimulated his thought. He had a way of watching Horatia’s profile, clear and pure against the window, of drinking in the frank admiration in her tone and her face as she talked to him, the sweetness of her impersonality—those things were getting into his writing too. But he never admitted that. So on this October day when Horatia sat struggling with her typewriter, he acted quite as if he was oblivious to her presence.

She rose at last and brought her copy to him and he groaned as usual at the misplaced letters and figures.

“But read it,” said Horatia gaily. “It’s a description of the mass meeting the women got up for our candidate which mentions the name of every lady present who can afford to subscribe to the paper. I’m getting on to the game. And please don’t give me any more to do this afternoon because I want to go.”

“Nice businesslike attitude,” said the editor.

“Everything’s done,” said Horatia, defensively.

“All right.”

“I’ll tell you what I want to do,” volunteered Horatia.

Langley had permitted himself no inquisitiveness but he seemed glad and composed himself to listen.

“My revered uncle and aunt feel so nieceless since I work all day and sleep all the time that I’m home that they have decided to do a very wonderful thing. They are going to Florida for the rest of the winter to look at beauties which they are getting too old to appreciate. And as it seemed useless to keep the stone house open for me, I am told to go to live with Maud. I don’t want to live with Maud, however, and, truth to tell, I don’t think Maud, though she won’t admit it, wants me to very much. I’m not much help to her and I rile her pool of life. She has admitted that if I could get a ‘cunning little apartment and some girl to live with me,’ I might be more content. And so I have found a cunning little apartment and the friend dropped from heaven to live with me. She is the new woman in the government labor office, Grace Walsh. I heard about her—she was five or six years ahead of me at the University—and I went to see her and she’s very keen about it, living with me, I mean.”

“Where is the cunning place?”

“On Sixth Street. New apartment building. I’m going to meet Grace there now and when we get the pictures hung, you can drop your editorial mantle and come to call.”

Langley flushed a little. It was a long time since he had had such light-hearted invitations flung at him—or so it must have seemed to him. And, vaguely understanding the flush, Horatia was suddenly enraged at the ostracism which had been forced upon him.

“Won’t you walk over and see the place now with me?” she said, impulsively. “It isn’t half a mile.”

She expected him to refuse her. He had not repeated his invitation to lunch since she had been in the office and, courteous as he always was, Horatia fancied that he avoided personal contact with her when he could. But now, to her surprise, he rose.

“I’d like to. I’ve been wanting a walk all day.”

They swung along briskly and this time the sardonic Langley seemed left behind in the office. The new one laughed like a boy and walked as if all the rigidity had melted out of his body. On the street, as they passed people whom he or Horatia knew, his hat was off almost with a flourish as if he greeted the world afresh.

“You act as if you’d dropped all the cares of the world,” laughed Horatia.

“No—I’m still carrying them. But it isn’t the cares of the world that weigh you down. It’s your own little cares. If you have none of those and no ugly scars left by them you can carry the troubles of the world easily enough. What an easy problem to solve Bolshevism is, if you aren’t trying to solve it with a mind diseased by personal aches and worries.”

Horatia did not answer. She hoped he would go on into fuller, more specific confidence. She hated herself for the question that so often cropped up in her mind as to what were the real facts of the Hubbell trouble. She understood so much of him now that she wanted to know about that. It would be the last link in the chain—no, the last step in the ladder that mounted—whither she did not know. Somewhere in her vaguest thoughts she and Jim Langley understood each other perfectly, scoffed at the rest of the world that did not understand.

But he did not go on. They reached the apartment building, and Horatia, pulling out her latch-key long before it was necessary, rang for the elevator.

“Your friend is there?” asked Langley, suddenly, sharply.

This time it was Horatia’s turn to flush. She dropped from the clouds.

“Of course,” she said, impatiently. “But I like to use my latch-key.”

She rapped on the door where a card already announced the names of Miss Walsh and Miss Grant. There was no answer and she unlocked the door and pushed it open. A note lay on the little table in the hall. Horatia picked it up and read it. Then she turned to Langley with her head a little higher than usual.

“Grace had to go downtown for some things. She’ll be back later. You can come in anyway, can’t you, and let me show you the place?”

His eyes met hers squarely.

“It’s better not,” he said, quietly.

They stood confronting the silly, awkward little situation with varying emotions. His rage at the fact that he couldn’t be natural for fear of compromising her—that he had to protect her not from himself but from his reputation, was natural enough. And Horatia raged because she did not know that she dared urge him, and she wanted to.

“It’s absurd,” she cried impatiently. “It’s stupid. It’s beastly. You’ve been abominably treated. Do you think I care what people say?”

His eyes seemed to melt at the championing kindness of her tone—then froze again.

“The oppressed always appeal to the romantic. But you want to make sure of the merits of the oppressed. Some other time, Miss Grant. I enjoyed my walk.”

He was gone immediately and Horatia flung furniture and rugs into place until her anger was cooled. Grace came in half an hour later to find things in amazing order.

“You’ve done everything.”

“I wanted to work,” answered Horatia, briefly.

And then——

“Look here, do I have to have a chaperon every time I want a man to come up here? Do you?”

Grace pulled off her gloves, sat down on the sofa and surveyed the room and the question calmly. She was a calm person, who balanced an unshocked acceptance of any laxity or scandal in the world of literature against an equally uncomplaining acceptance of the restraints of the world of action. And she seemed fond of Horatia, though Horatia had a feeling of getting acquainted only up to a certain point.

“I suppose not,” Grace said slowly. “People may be a little vicious in their talk if you’re not somewhat circumspect. I wouldn’t advise sessions with married men—or ones with highly colored reputations——”

“What does it matter what people say?” urged Horatia.

“Oh, it doesn’t—and it does. I think it would to you. But the question of having men here alone isn’t likely to arise. For the kind of men you’d want wouldn’t come if they thought your reputation would be endangered. There are a few survivals of romance, and the knightly spirit, and one of the last to go, if it ever goes, will be the care that men take of women’s names. It’s my experience that names rank more highly than bodies in male psychology.”

There was no sign of any remembrance of the episode in Langley’s manner the next day and Horatia found no difference in his attitude towards her. She never saw him outside the office. The curtains were hung in the little apartment. Grace sat up an informal tea-table at which Horatia assisted. Even Maud came occasionally with some of her friends to savor this bachelor life, and they pretended to envy for half an hour. It was a very pleasant apartment and Horatia found that being an intellectual in the city was far different from being an intellectual in the confines of West Park or a highbrow at the University. Not all men were afraid of brains. Charley Jones came and brought young men with him, several friends of Harvey’s came and there were others justifying themselves by this claim or that to a seat near that tea-table where Grace Walsh, looking like a Dutch picture, poured out tea and calm cynical judgments and Horatia, in a yellow silk dress on Sundays and blue serge on weekdays, pressed lemon, cream, tea cakes and joy of living on them.

It was wonderful to see how the excitement of the new life brought a richer color into Horatia’s cheeks and a glow into her eyes which made every gown the most becoming one. It was amazing to see how her power over men grew. She seemed to toss a mental challenge to every man she met, a challenge not to a combat of words or phrases but to a struggle over the interesting and vital things in the world. She was enjoying herself so much that she tempted them all to discover her secret of enjoyment.

But she allowed nothing to interfere with her work and more and more of her time was spent at the office as the fall days grew shorter and the lake more steadily grey and the work heavier. The November election promised to be a most important one in the history of the city. The Journal’s candidate, Nels Johnson, came and went in the office. He was a heavy little man with a kind shrewd face and a tolerant smile. Horatia liked him and she liked to hear him talk and give opinions for publication. Langley liked him too, she knew. She could hear them often through the door of his office discussing things which had nothing to do with the election.

“The Reds are rotten, physically and morally, and they run on a single track mentally, most of them,” Langley would say, “but I’ll be damned if they aren’t much more attractive than the slinking crowd that want to put out all the pipes in the country. I’d sooner have an old-style Tammany man than one of these ministerial sneaks.”

And Bob Brotherton, his nose a little red still and his utterance a trifle thick from indulgence in some private store of liquor to which he seemed to have eternal access, would agree. And the candidate for office would agree. And Charley Jones, with some comment on the attempt of the churches to dominate labor, would agree. And Horatia, vigorously nodding at her typewriter, would agree too that she wanted the world run by freedom and not by imprisonments.

But perhaps the nicest moments and hours for Horatia were the evenings in the office when they all worked late and tobacco and accomplishment were thick in the air. Sometimes the reporters would all be out on some errands and Langley would talk to her—always impersonally, never emotionally, but expansively, going back into the history of the city to explain some political anomaly to her and telling her, in spite of himself, about his ideas and plans. She came to respect him more and more and to believe in the fineness of his instincts. But still she never heard him say a word of his personal affairs. She wondered how and where he lived. Somewhere on the other side of the city, she knew, and that was all. He never told her about the old scandal and she never could find out more about it. At a certain point in his career Langley had simply shut his mouth and there was no one else who knew more than Harvey Williams.

Horatia gloried in the growing prestige of The Journal. Even Harvey bought it now and Maud’s early opposition had changed into a feeling that Horatia with all her eccentricity was bringing distinction upon them. She never said that to Horatia. But she talked of her “intellectual sister” without embarrassment now on the Boulevard.

CHAPTER V

MAUD had her own plans for Horatia. She herself was finding life very pleasantly successful and she followed her leaders carefully, trusting no habits of life which they did not trust and indeed regarding all other types of living as either impossible to attain or impossible to endure. She was developing the best possible setting for herself and her family. Her house broke none of the rules laid down in “House and Garden,” with its striped cretonnes and plain linens and comfortable furniture. It was not too ostentatious because the young people around her were not ostentatious, but it was a beginning. And she saw her future before her with delightful clearness through a succession of increasingly expensive automobiles, through a succession of increasingly elaborate gowns up to the day when she would own a great brick house in the city and a winter home in California. She did not take great credit to herself for this ambition. It was due to her own astuteness and Harvey’s cleverness.

So she gave dinner parties to people whom she knew and liked and other dinner parties to people who were useful to her husband, and enjoyed her progress along the reasonable way of luxury and importance. The things Horatia talked about, odd things picked up in her newspaper office, of a new spirit in the world, of the relentless advance of the hordes of workers, bothered her not at all. She knew that servants were increasingly hard to get and to keep “in their place” and that there were “labor troubles” in some of the manufactories managed by people whom she knew and that “everybody was striking.” But she knew too that Harvey placed the responsibility on the war for much of the trouble, and she had no doubt that, the war being over, those little matters would adjust and allow the right people to run things as they should be run. Horatia talked a great deal but Maud had no doubts about her sister’s ultimate destiny. Somewhere along the line, and not too far along, she meant to marry Horatia to some desirable man. She had discovered that Horatia was an asset at a dinner party just as she was a blight at a bridge. She was one person when she was making inexcusable and enraging blunders at a bridge-table and another when she appeared at a tea, able and willing to talk of the newest local interest or problem to important and serious-minded ladies or when, in some queer effective dinner-dress, she sat with her bright, grave face turned in constant interest to the man beside her.

“Horatia plays up to men awfully well,” Maud told her husband. And was wholly wrong. Horatia was too interested to play up to anyone, man or woman. She had come from her University into a world vastly more stimulating than she had imagined. It was, as Langley had told her, a world tired and worn by war, a world in vast upheaval over the division of material things, but through the weariness and worn places relentless new life, undiscouraged energies were already pushing their way. Since the war young people had come to feel their power and their indispensability; young plans for life and ways of life, less greedy than the old ones, pushed themselves forward, sure that they could not fail as deplorably as the old systems had done. Women were no longer tremulous about their possibilities; an under-supply of men had forced them out of their dependencies and they faced life more sturdily. Men, shocked into the realization that death comes devastatingly to whole generations of the young, faced life more sturdily too, though temporarily with less responsibility, with more desire for immediate pleasures, for immediate achievements, and with an undertone of mental insecurity. The whole world seemed to feel unstable and ready for experiments, any experiments. That was the world which Horatia had found and it mated badly with Maud’s. Maud’s world, Maud’s friends, lived by the rules laid down by old-fashioned success and decency. They held to the old order but not to the spirit of the old order. The spirit of the old order had been far-reaching, far-seeking, anxious to perpetuate its own ideas and to raise generation after generation like itself. But Maud and Harvey had no thought of grandchildren or of the future of their own ideas. Their ideas reached not much farther than the brick mansion and the house in California.

Through their circles and through her own Horatia came and went and everywhere she touched life and tingled with the contact, unconscious that it was she herself who was electric. Langley watched her as she dashed in and out of his office and tried not to do so and on his failure cursed himself under his breath for a doddering fool and worked harder than ever.

He sent Horatia home at five o’clock on the afternoon of the election, for they had put out a special edition the day before and he noticed the unnatural flush of her cheeks.

“Come back tonight if you like,” he said. “You can answer the telephones after the returns begin to come in. But there’ll be nothing before ten.”

Horatia went obediently. At the apartment she found an urgent message from Maud. Someone had failed her and would Horatia come to dinner? Horatia called her to beg off and yielded. Maud was very serious about her dinner parties and this one, it appeared, was especially important.

“You can go at ten, if you have to. But don’t leave me with an unbalanced table. There’d be two men sitting next each other. Please.”

Horatia promised and hung up the receiver, smiling a little at the enormity of two men sitting next each other. But after all it gave her something to do and she was not sorry.

Harvey greeted her admiringly in the living-room.

“How are politics?”

“I’d give a lot to know.”

“Well,” he admitted, “your candidate really does stand a show. It’s amazing the way he has come on, without more backing. The chances are that he’ll run second or third.”

“I think he’ll be first,” said Horatia, and was going on when Maud came in, resplendent in black satin and with her blond hair drawn back from her forehead in perfect waves. She looked Horatia over critically. Horatia’s dress was the color of burnt orange and obviously she had done her hair herself and quickly. But even Maud could not cavil.

“I’ve given you young Wentworth,” she said, with the air of one who confers great benefits, “and don’t talk his arm off about politics. He’s rather sporty—was an aviator—is awfully rich, they’re the grain exporters, you know. And do be nice to him, won’t you?”

“It’s easier to be nice to the poor than the sporty rich. But I’ll try.”

She found it surprisingly easy to be nice after all. Anthony Wentworth had the charm of a young man and the finesse of an older one. He talked on all sorts of subjects—about soldiers and soldiering, not from the point of view Horatia heard most often in The Journal office, the economic standpoint, but from the romantic one. And Horatia, who had given up the hope that there was anything romantic in war, listened to him as he talked of chances and perils and adventures, never for a minute in self-exploitation but for sheer joy in having found a listener who knew what he was trying to say.

“But you got out of it,” she protested. “Why didn’t you keep on flying?”

He smiled a little apologetically.

“I don’t enjoy flying for mere sport—or commercially. There’s no pleasure in it as there can be in driving a car or riding a horse. But to run the risks and take the chances and know there’s a reason why you should is different.”

He relapsed into an attack on his salad and Horatia broke up a cracker and thought of the difference between his ideas of war and the war as it was seen by ex-soldiers who drifted into The Journal office with gossip and complaints. But she did not pursue the idea, for when the salad was finished Anthony Wentworth had more to say to her, so much that she forgot about the election and thought of how wonderful it would be to travel through all the queer countries of the world with a man who could ride and shoot and drive an airplane and whose hair grew back from his forehead naturally. Maud, from the head of the table, looked at them and even found time to dream a very hasty dream in which she figured largely as the sister-in-law of Mr. Anthony Wentworth.