ERIS

BY
ROBERT W. CHAMBERS

AUTHOR OF “THE FLAMING JEWEL,” “THE LITTLE RED
FOOT,” “THE SLAYER OF SOULS,” “IN SECRET,”
“THE COMMON LAW,” ETC.

NEW

YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

ERIS. I

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

TO
MY FRIEND
HARRY PAYNE BURTON

ERIS

CHAPTER I

THE baby was born at Whitewater Farms about nine in the morning, April 19, 1900. Two pure-breed calves,—one a heifer, the other a bull,—were dropped the same day at nearly the same hour.

Odell came in toward noon, heard these farm items from his foreman, Ed Lister.

For twenty years Odell’s marriage had been childless. He had waited in vain for a son,—for several sons,—and now, after twenty sterile years of hardship, drudgery, and domestic discord, Fanny had given him a girl.

He stood in silence, chewing the bitter news.

“Awright,” he said, “that’s that! Is Queen doin’ good?”

Whitewater Queen was doing as well as could be expected and her fourth heifer-calf was a miracle of Guernsey beauty.

“Awright! Veal that danged bull-caaf. That’s White Chief’s second bull outa White Rose. I’m done. We’ll take her to Hilltop Acres next time. And that’s that!”

He dusted the fertiliser and land plaster from his patched canvas jacket:

“It blowed some,” he said. “I oughta waited. Cost me five dollars, mebbe. I thought it might rain; that’s why. It’s one dum thing after another. It allus comes like that.”

He scraped the bottom of his crusted boots against the concrete rim of the manure pit.

A bitter winter with practically no snow; dry swamps; an April drouth; a disastrous run of bull-calves with no market,—and now, after twenty years, a girl baby!

How was a man going to get ahead? How was he to break even? Twenty years Odell had waited for sons to help him. He should have had three or four at work by this time. Instead he was paying wages.

“I guess Fanny’s kinda bad,” remarked the foreman.

Odell looked up from his brooding study of the manure.

“I dunno,” continued the foreman; “another Doc is here, too. He come with a train nurse n’hour ago. Looks kinda bad to me, Elmer.”

Odell gazed stupidly at Lister.

“What other Doc?” he demanded.

“Old Doc Benson. Doc Wand sent Mazie for him.”

Odell said nothing. After a moment or two he walked slowly toward the house.

In the kitchen a neighbour, one Susan Hagan, a gross widow, was waddling around getting dinner, perspiring and garrulous. Two or three farm hands, in bantering conversation, stood washing or drying their faces at the sink.

Mazie, the big, buxom daughter of Ed Lister, moved leisurely about, setting the table. She was laughing, as usual, at the men’s repartee.

But when Odell appeared the clatter of the roller-towel ceased. So did Mazie’s laughter and the hired men’s banter.

Mrs. Hagan was the first to recover her tongue:

“Now, Elmer,” she began in unctuous tones, “you set right down here and eat a mite o’ ham——” She already had him by the sleeve of his canvas jacket. She grasped a smoking fry-pan in the other hand. The smoke from it blew into Odell’s face.

“Leggo,” he grunted, jerking his arm free.

Mrs. Hagan encountered Mazie’s slanting black eyes, narrow with derision:

“Elmer don’t want to eat; he wants to see Fanny,” said Mazie Lister. And added: “Your ham’s burning, Mrs. Hagan.”

“Where’s Doc Wand?” demanded Odell heavily.

Mrs. Hagan savagely snatched the answer from Mazie’s red lips:

“Oh, Elmer,” she burst out, “he’s went and called in old Doc Benson; and Benson he fetched a train nurse from Summit——” Smoke from the burning ham strangled her. Odell left her coughing, and strode toward the sitting room.

“Dang it!” he muttered, “what next!”

It was cool and dusky in the sitting room. He halted in the golden gloom, sullenly apprehensive, listening for any sound from the bed-room overhead.

After a little while Dr. Wand came downstairs. He was haggard and white, but when he caught sight of Odell he went to him with a smile. The village folk feared and trusted Dr. Wand. They feared his sarcasm and trusted his skill. But, with the self-assertion of inferiority, they all called him “Fred” or “Doc.”

“Well, Elmer,” he said, “the baby’s doing nicely.... I thought I’d like to have Dr. Benson look at Fanny.... A fine baby, Elmer.... Fanny asked me to think up some uncommon and pretty name for your little girl——”

“Name her anything,” said Odell thickly.... “Dang it, I waited twenty years for a boy. And now look what I get! It all comes to once. White Rose drops me a bull-caaf, too. But I can veal that!”

“Better luck next time——”

“No,” he interrupted fiercely, “I’m done!” He turned and stared at the sun-bars on the lowered shade, his tanned features working.

“It’s like the herd,” he said. “Either the cow or the herd-bull’s to blame for every dinged bull-caaf. And I can’t afford to breed ’em together more’n twice.... Twenty years I been lookin’ for a boy, Doc. No, I’m done. And that’s that!”

“You’d better go and eat,” suggested the doctor.

Odell nodded: “Fanny awright?”

“We’re watching her. Perhaps you’d better stay around this afternoon, Elmer——”

“I gotta spread manure——”

“I want you within calling distance,” repeated the doctor mildly.

Odell looked up. After a moment’s hesitation:

“Awright, Doc. I guess I can work around nearby. You must be dead-beat. Eat a snack with us?”

“Not now. I can’t leave your wife.”

“Do you mean that Fanny’s kinda bad?”

“Yes.... Your wife is very, very ill, Elmer. Dr. Benson is with her now.”

Breaking ground for a new kitchen garden that afternoon, Odell found the soil so infested with quack-root, horse-radish, and parsnip that he gave it up and told Lister that they’d fence the place as cheaply as possible and turn the hogs on it.

Lister hooked up a horse and drove away to hunt for locust posts and wire. Odell dragged his plow to the wagon shed, stabled the fat gray horse, walked slowly back toward the wood shed. There was a dead apple tree he could fell while waiting.

It was very still there in the April sunshine. All signs of rain were gone. The wind had died out. Save for the hum of bees in crocus and snow-drop, and except for the white cock’s clarion from the runs, no sound broke the blue silence of an April afternoon.

Odell looked up at the window of his wife’s bed-room. The white-capped nurse was seated there, her head turned as though intent upon something taking place within the room. She did not stir. After a while Odell picked up his spading fork and wiped the tines.

Yes, every kind of bad luck was coming at once; drouth, bull-calves, wind to waste fertiliser, doctors’ bills, expenses for a nurse, for Mrs. Hagan, for posts and wire,—and the land riddled with quack and horse-radish....

He’d about broken even, so far, during the last twenty years. All these years he’d marked time, doggedly, plugging away. Because, after all, there had been nothing else to do. He could not stop. To sell meant merely to begin again somewhere else, plug away, break about even year after year, die plugging. That was what general farming meant in White Hills when there were wages to pay. He could have made money with sons to help him.... Life was a tread-mill. What his cattle took from the land they gave back; nothing more. He was tired of the tread-mill. A squirrel in a cage travelled no further and got as far....

Odell drove his spading fork into the ground, sifted out fragments of horse-radish roots, kicked them under the fence into the dusty road beyond.

Dr. Wand’s roadster stood out there by the front gate. Behind it waited Dr. Benson’s driver in the new limousine car. Odell had not felt he could afford any kind of car,—not even a tractor. These danged doctors....

As he stood with one foot resting on his spading fork, gazing gloomily at the two cars, Dr. Benson, fat, ruddy and seventy, came out of the house with his satchel.

He nodded to Odell:

“Dr. Wand wants you,” he said. “She’s conscious.”

After the portly physician had driven away down the dusty road, Odell went into the house and ascended the stairs to the common bed-room from which now, in all probability, he was to be excluded for a while.

Dr. Wand, beside the bed, very tired, motioned Odell to draw nearer. It was the ghost of his wife he saw lying there.

“Well,” he grunted with an effort, “you don’t feel very spry, I guess. You look kinda peekid, Fan.”

All the stored resentment of twenty barren years glittered in his wife’s sunken eyes. She knew his desire for sons. She knew what he now thought of her.

She said in a distinct voice to Dr. Wand: “Tell him.”

The doctor said: “Your wife has asked me to think up some new and unusual name for the baby. I suggested ‘Eris,’” he added blandly. And, after a silence: “Your wife seems to like the name.”

Odell nodded: “Awright.”

His wife said to the doctor, in her painfully distinct voice: “I want she should have a name that no other baby’s got.... Because—that’s all I can give her.... Something no other baby’s got.... Write it, Doctor.”

Dr. Ward wrote “Eris” on the birth certificate. His expression became slightly ironical.

“Eris,” he repeated. “Do you both approve this name?”

Odell shrugged assent.

“Yes,” said the woman. “She’s mine. All I can give her is this name. I give it.”

“Eris was the name of a Greek goddess,” remarked the doctor. He did not explain that Eris was the goddess of Discord. “I’m very sure,” he added, “that no other baby is named Eris.... But plenty of ’em ought to be.... Was there anything you wanted to say to your wife, Elmer?”

“Hey?” demanded Odell, stupidly.

Suddenly something in the physician’s eyes sent a dull shock through Odell. He turned and stared at his wife as though he had never before laid eyes on her. After a while he found his voice:

“You—you’ll get better after a spell,” he stammered. “Feel like eatin’ a mite o’ sunthin’ tasty? You want I should get you a little jell ’rsunthin’—Fanny——”

Her bright, sunken gaze checked him.

“You ain’t asked to see the baby,” she said in her thin, measured voice; “I’m sorry I ever bore a child to you, Elmer.”

Odell reddened: “Where is it——?” He stumbled up from his chair, looking vaguely about him, confused by her brilliant eyes—by their measureless resentment.

For life was becoming too brief for pretence now. Fanny knew it; her husband began to realise it.

She said: “I’m glad I have no sons. I’m sorry I bore a child.... God forgive me.... Because I’ll never rest, never be quiet, now.... But I don’t mind so much ... if THEY will let me keep an eye on her somehow——” She tried to lift her head from the pillow: “I want to see her,” she said sharply.

“Yes,” said the doctor. “I want you to see her. Wait a moment——”

As he passed Odell he drew him outside. “Go downstairs,” he whispered. “I’ll call you if she asks to see you again.”

“She ain’t a-goin’ to get no better?” demanded Odell hoarsely.

“No.”

The physician passed on into the adjoining room, where the nurse sat watching a new-born baby in its brand new cradle.

Odell continued down the stairs, and seated himself in the dim sitting room....

Everything was coming at once—drouth, wind, bull-calves, girl babies—and Death.... All were coming at once.... But no sons had ever come. None would ever come now. So—wages must go on.... A woman to mind the baby.... And somebody to keep house for him.... Expense piling on expense. And no outlook—no longer any chance to break even.... Where was he to get more money? He could not carry the farm on his own shoulders all alone. The more work planned, the more men needed; and the more it all cost. Increased acreage, redoubled production, got him no further. Always it was, at best, merely an even break—every loss offsetting every gain....

One of the cats came in with a barn rat hanging from her mouth, looked furtively at Odell, then slunk out, tail twitching.

The man dropped his elbows on the centre table and took his unshaven face between both scarred fists....

The room had grown as still as death now. Which was fitting and proper.

After a long while Dr. Wand descended the stairs. Odell stood up in the semi-dusk of the sitting room.

“She didn’t ask for you again,” said the doctor.

“Is—is she—gone?”

“Yes.... Quite painlessly.”

They walked slowly to the porch. It was nearly milking time. The herd was coming up the long lane,—the sun dipping low behind,—and a delicate rosy light over everything.

“You got your milking to do,” said the doctor. “I’ll notify Wilbur Chase. I’ll see to everything, Elmer.”

Wilbur Chase was the local undertaker. The doctor went out to the road, cranked his car, got in wearily, and rolled away toward the village.

Odell stood motionless. In his ears sounded the cow-bells, tonk-a-tonk, tonk-a-tonk, as the Whitewater herd turned leisurely into the barn-yard. Ed Lister opened the sliding doors to the cow-barn. A frisky heifer or two balked; otherwise the herd went in soberly, filing away behind spotless, sweet-smelling rows of stalls, greeted thunderously by the great herd-bull from his steel bull-pen.

Odell, heavy-eyed, turned on his heel and went upstairs.

But at the door of the silent room above the nurse barred his way.

“I’ll let you know when you can see her,” she said. “She isn’t ready.”

Odell gazed at her in a bewildered way.

“The baby is in the other room,” added the nurse. “Don’t wake her. Better not touch her.”

He went, obediently, stood in the doorway, his scarred hands hanging.

Eris lay asleep in her brand new cradle, almost invisible under the white fabrics that swathed her.

The chamber of death was no stiller than this dim room where life was beginning. There was no sound, no light except a long, rosy ray from the setting sun falling athwart the cradle.

So slept Eris, daughter of discord, and so named,—an unwelcome baby born late in her parents’ lives, and opening her blind, bluish eyes like an April wind-flower in a world still numb from winter.

Odell stared at the mound of covers.

It would be a long while before this baby could be of any use at Whitewater Farms.

CHAPTER II

IT is a long lane that has no turning, either for cattle or for men.

When Fanny died Odell was forty. Two months later he married the strapping daughter of Ed Lister. And came to the turn in the long, long lane he had travelled for twenty years.

For, as Whitewater Queen was a breeder of heifer-calves, Mazie Lister proved to be a breeder of men.

Every year, for the first four years, she gave Odell a son.

There was no fuss made about these events. Mazie Lister was the kind of girl who could eat cabbage for breakfast, wad it down with pie, drive it deeper with a quart of buttermilk.

Once, to prove she could do it, she ate a whole roast sucking pig, five boiled potatoes, six ears of corn, a dish of cranberry sauce, and an entire apple pie; and washed it down with three quarts of new cider.

Her feed never fattened her; it seemed to make her skin pinker, teeth whiter, long, slanting black eyes more brilliant.

No cares worried her. She laughed a great deal. She was busy from dawn to dark. Unfatigued but sleepy, she yawned frightfully toward nine o’clock. It was her time to roost.

Mazie’s instincts concerning progeny were simple. She nursed each arrival as long as necessary, then weaned it. Then the youngster had to learn to shift for himself—wash and dress, turn up at meal hours, turn in with the chickens, rise with the crows.

It was a little different, however, with Eris, whom Mazie had inherited. Eris, of course, was bottle-fed. Whitewater Queen’s heifer-calf, White Princess, had no better care. Whatever was advisable was completely and thoroughly done in both cases.

White Princess grew to beautiful Guernsey symmetry, with every promise of conformation to classic type; and was duly registered. Little Eris, small boned, with delicately fashioned limbs, looked out on the world from a pair of crystal-blue, baby eyes, which ultimately became a deep, limpid grey.

Unlike White Princess, Eris did not promise to conform to the Odell type. There seemed to be little of that breed about her. Fanny had been bony and shiny-skinned, with a high-bridged, pinkish nose, watery eyes—a wisp of a woman with a rodent’s teeth and every articulation apparent as a ridge under a dry, tightly stretched epidermis.

Odell, with his even, white teeth, coarse, highly-coloured skin and brown eyes, was a compact, stocky, heavy-handed, broad-footed product of Scotch-Irish pioneer stock. But Fanny’s grandmother, a Louisiana Creole, had run away from school to go on the stage, and had married a handsome but dissolute Southern planter who died of drink.

Sundays Fanny used to wear her grandmother’s portrait painted in miniature on ivory, as a breast-pin.

“Hand-painted,” she used to explain. And always added: “Creoles are all white.” Which was true. But, when quarrelling with his wife, Odell pretended to believe otherwise.

Rummaging through Fanny’s effects a day or two after her marriage, Mazie discovered a painted fan, a mother-of-pearl card-case, and this breast-pin. She carried the miniature to Odell.

“Looks like baby,” she explained, with her care-free laugh.

“She’ll be lucky if she favours that pitcher,” said Odell. “But like as not she’ll take after Fanny.” He was wrong in his guess.

When Eris was five her resemblance to the miniature had become marked. And Mazie’s boys looked like their mother and father.

On Saturday nights, after immersing her own unwilling brunette brats in the weekly bath, Mazie found the slim white body of little Eris an ever-increasing amusement and a pique to her curiosity. The child’s frail yet healthy symmetry, the fine skin, delicate, perfect limbs, lovely little hands and feet, remained perennial sources of mirth and surprise to this robust young woman who was equally healthy, but built on a big, colourful, vigorous plan.

Solid and large of limb and haunch, deep-bosomed, ruddy-skinned, the young stepmother always bred true to type. Her sons were sons of the soil from birth. There could be no doubt about her offspring. What wasn’t Lister was Odell. They belonged to the land.

But when Mazie looked at her husband and looked at the child, Eris—and when she remembered Fanny—then she wondered and was inclined to smile. And she was content that her sons’ thick, sturdy bodies and slanting, black eyes so plainly advertised the stock they came from. Utility. Health. Strength.

Fanny had had a pink nose. Even a Guernsey ought to have one. But the nose of Eris was snow white. To what stock did this child throw back?

When Eris was seven she was sent to the village school, leading her eldest stepbrother thither by the hand. Both were scared and tearful. Nobody went with little Eris to mitigate the ordeal; and she was a most sensitive child.

Hers had been a deathless curiosity since she was old enough to ask her first question. An unquenchable desire for information seemed to possess her. Her eternal, “Will you tell me why?” became a nuisance.

“Dang it, send her to school!” shouted Odell at last. And that was how.

At her small desk, rigid, bewildered, terribly intent on the first teacher in human form she had ever gazed upon, she found herself on the verge of tears. But, before she could dissolve, her brother forestalled her, bursting into vigorous yells, bawling like a calf; and would not be comforted. Which allowed Eris no time for private grief while wiping his eyes with her pinafore.

Noonday recess and lunch baskets and the wildly gyrating horde of children let loose on a sandy playground ended the first encounter between Eris Odell and the great god Education in His Local Temple at White Hills Village.

Eris learned little in school. There is little to learn in American schools. No nation is more illiterate. And in the sort of school she went to the ignorant are taught by the half educated.

None of her teachers could speak English as it should be spoken. In their limited vocabulary there was no room for choice of words. Perhaps that was why negatives were doubled now and then.

As for the rest, she was stuffed with falsified history and unessential geographical items; she was taught to read after a fashion, and to spell, and to juggle figures. There was a nature class, too, full of misinformation. And once an owlish, elderly man lectured on physiology; and told them in a low and solemn voice that “there is two sects in the phenonemy of natur, and little boys are made diffrunt to little girls.”

That ended the lecture, leaving every little boy and little girl mad with unsatisfied curiosity, and some of the older children slightly uncomfortable.

But The Great American Ass dominates this splendid land of ours. He knows. He’ll tell the world. And that’s that—as Odell was accustomed to say. And early in her career little Eris caught the cant phrase of finality from her father, and incorporated it with her increasing lingual equipment.

When one of the boys tried to kiss her, she kicked his shins. “And that’s that!” she added breathlessly, smoothing out her rumpled pinafore.

In Mazie she had a stepmother who made no difference between Eris and her own progeny. She kissed them all alike at bedtime; dosed them when necessary, comforted their sorrows with stock reassurances from a limited vocabulary, darned, sewed, mended, washed for all alike.

Mazie gave her children and her husband all she had time to give—all she had the capacity to give—the kindly, cheerful offices and understanding of a healthy female.

Whitewater Queen was as good a mother. Both lacked imagination. But Whitewater Queen didn’t need any.

For a time, however, the knowledge imbibed at school nourished Eris, although there were few vitamines in the feed.

When she was thirteen her brothers—twelve, eleven, ten and nine—alternately bullied her, deferred to her, or ran bawling to her with their troubles.

When she was fourteen the world met its own weird at Armageddon. The old order of things began to change. A new earth and a newly interpreted Heaven replaced the “former things” which had “passed away.”

At eighteen Eris looked out over the smoking débris of “former things”—gazed out of limpid grey eyes upon “a new Heaven and a new Earth”; and saw the cloudy, gigantic spectre of all-that-had-once-been receding, dissolving, vanishing from the world where it had reigned so tyrannically and so long.

About that time she dreamed, for the first time, that dream which so often re-occurred in after years—that she stood at her open window, naked, winged, restless for flight to some tremendous height where dwelt the aged god of Wisdom all alone, cutting open a human heart that was still faintly pulsating.

At eighteen—the year the world war was ended—Eris “graduated.”

She wrote a little act for herself, designed her own costume, made it, acted, sang, and danced the part. It was the story of a poor girl who prays for two things—a pair of wings so that she may fly to the moon, and a new hat for the journey. Suddenly she discovers a new hat in her hands. The next instant two beautiful little wings sprout on her shoulders. Instantly she takes scissors and snips off the wings and trims her new hat with them. Ready for her journey, suddenly she realises that now she cannot fly. She tears the wings from the hat. Too late. She can’t fasten them to her shoulders again. They flutter to her feet. She falls on her knees in a passion of tears. The moon rises, grinning.

It was a vast success—this little act of Eris Odell—and while its subtler intent was quite lost on the honest folk of White Hills Village, the story itself was so obvious and Eris did it so prettily that even her father grunted approval.

That evening he promised her the next heifer-calf for her own. If it proved a good one the sale of it should provide a nice nest-egg for Eris when she married.

The next heifer-calf promised well. Eris named her White Iris and she was so registered.

In the yearling pure-breeds she was first at the Comity Fair. But Eris refused to sell. At the State Fair White Iris beat every Guernsey and every other heifer, pure-breed and grade.

Brookvale Manor offered her three thousand dollars. Odell made her take it, and put the money into the local bank. So, with tears blinding her grey eyes, Eris sold White Iris out of the county. And would not be comforted even by the brand new cheque-book sent to her by the cashier of the White Hills Bank.

The account, however, was in her father’s name.

Now, the horizon of Eris Odell had narrowed as her sphere of activity dwindled after graduation.

Whitewater Farms became her world. Within its confines lay her duties and diversions, both clearly defined.

They were her heritage. No loop-holes offered escape—excepting marriage. And that way out was merely the way in to another and similar prison the boundary of which was a barbed wire fence, and its mathematical centre a manure pit.

She continued to dream of wings. An immense, indefinable longing possessed her in waking hours. But she was only one of the youthful, excited millions, waking after æons to the first instincts that had ruled the human race.

It was the restlessness of the world’s youth that stirred her—Modern Youth opening millions of clear young eyes to gaze upon the wonders of a new Heaven and a new earth, and mad to explore it all from zenith to depths—sky, sea, land, and the waters under the earth. Youth, suddenly crazed by an overwhelming desire for Truth, after æons and æons of lies.

Explore, venture, achieve, live—demand Truth, exact it, face it, and know!—the mighty, voiceless cry of the World’s Youth—claiming freedom to seek, liberty to live, fearless, untrammelled, triumphant. A terrible indictment of Age, and of those age-governed æons which forever have passed away.

Already the older, duller generation caught the vast vibration of young hearts beating to arms, young voices swelling the tremulous, universal cry of insurgence, a clear, ceaseless, sea-like sound of laughter proclaiming the death of Sham—ringing an endless, silvery requiem.

Odell shoved up his spectacles and lowered the newspaper to glance at Eris.

“What say?” he repeated fretfully.

“I’d like to study dancing.”

“Can’t you dance? You go to enough socials and showers ’n’one thing ’n’other.”

“I mean—stage dancing.”

“Stage!” he thundered. “Be you crazy?”

“Why, Eris, how you talk!” said her stepmother, too astounded to laugh.

“I could go to New York and work in a store by day; and take stage-dancing lessons evenings,” murmured the girl. “I want to be somebody.”

“You stay here and do your chores and try to act as if you ain’t a little loonatic!” shouted Odell. “I’m sicka hearing about the capers and kickups of young folks nowaday. Them gallivantins don’t go in my house. I’m sicka reading about ’em, too. And that’s that!”

“After all,” said Eris, “why do I have to do what I don’t care to do?”

“Dang it,” retorted her father, “didn’t you never hear of dooty? What d’they teach you in school?”

“Nothing much,” she replied listlessly. “Did you always want to be a farmer, daddy?”

“Hey?”

“Are you a farmer because you wanted to be? Or did you want to be something else?”

“What dinged trash you talk,” he said, disgusted. “I didn’t wanta be a blacksmith or I’da been one.”

“Why can’t I be what I’d like to be? Will you tell me why?”

Odell, speechless, resumed his newspaper. It was nearly nine o’clock and he hadn’t read half the local news and none of the column devoted to the Grange.

Eris looked wistfully at him, loitering still in the doorway, slim, grey-eyed, undeveloped.

Her stepmother laughed at her: “Notions,” she said. “Don’t you know you’d go to rack and rooin that way? You go to bed, Eris.... There’s fresh ginger snaps in the pantry.”

CHAPTER III

UNTIL the Great War turned the world upside down, Whitewater Farms made money after Odell married Ed Lister’s daughter.

Shortage of labour during the war cut into profits; taxes wiped them out; the ugly, Bolshevik attitude of labour after the war caused a deficit.

It was the sullen inertia of the mob, conscious of power. Men did not care whether they worked at all. If they chose to work, mills and factories would pay them enough in three days to permit them to remain idle the remainder of the week. No farmer could pay the swollen wages demanded for field labour, and survive financially.

Every village was full of idle louts who sneered at offered employment.

Fruit rotted in orchards, grain remained uncut, cattle stood neglected. The great American loafer leered at the situation. The very name of Labour stank. It stinks still. The Great American Ass has made the term a stench in the nostrils of civilisation.

The next year mills and factories began to lay off labour. Odell and Lister scraped together a few sulky field hands, mainly incompetents, men who had spent all their wages. Fields were sullenly tilled, crops gathered, cattle cared for.

Except for profiteers, reaction had set in. War profligacy, asinine finance, crushing taxes already were doing their work.

Rather than pay for feed, farmers sold their stock. The demand for pork started everybody hog-raising. Prices fell; loss followed. Then stagnation. It was the bitter aftermath of war—the deluge. Dead water.

Only one star of hope glimmered over the waste,—the New Administration.

Spring was a month early that year. Odell, at sixty, unimpaired by pie and the great American frying pan, his gaitered legs planted sturdily in the new grass, looked out over his domain and chewed a clover stem.

“I ain’t afraid,” he said to Lister. “I’m going the hull hog. Every acre.”

“Where’s your help?” remonstrated Lister.

“I got ’em.”

“Some on ’em is quitters. They’ll lay down on yeh, Elmer.”

Odell spat out the clover stem: “Every acre, Ed!” he repeated. “And six cows on test.”

“We ain’t got the help——”

“Six cows,” growled Odell; “White Lady, Snow Queen, Silver Maid, Thistledown, Milkweed Lass, and Whitewater Lily.... I gotta make money. I’m aimin’ to and I’m a-going to. I got four sons. And that’s that!”

“Elmer——”

“Awright. I know all what you gonna say, Ed. But where does it get you to go around with a face a foot long? How’s things to start unless somebody starts ’em? Awright, prices is bad. You can’t sell a pure-breed caaf in this dinged country. There isn’t no market for a fancy heifer. Everybody’s breedin’ Holsteins ’n’sloshin’ around after grades. Awright; nobody wants Guernsey quality; everybody wants Holstein bulk ’n’watery milk ’n’everything. I know. And my answer is, every acre, Ed; and six cows on test; and higher prices on every danged caaf that’s dropped.

“If I sell a heifer it’s a favour to be paid for through the nose. And I feed every bull-caaf and no vealin’ this year. Enough hogs to turn out till October; not another danged snout! If the Bank don’t see me through I’ll blow it up. Now, g’wan and make your plans.”

He went into the creamery where his wife stood beside the separator, watching a cat lap up some spilled cream.

“Your pa’s timid, Mazie,” he said. “I tell him I cal’late t’start under full steam. What do you say?”

She laughed: “Pa’s got notions. He allus was a mite slow. I guess you know best, Elmer.”

“We all gotta work,” he said. “That means Eris, too.”

“She allus helps me,” remarked Mazie, simply.

“I dunno what she does,” grunted Odell; “—sets a hen or two, fools around the incubators, digs up a spoonful of scratch-feed—what does she do, anyhow?”

“The child mends and irons——”

“When she ain’t readin’ or tendin’ her flowers or moonin’ ’round the woods ’n’fields,” retorted Odell. “Eris reckons she’s too fine a lady for farm folk, I guess. I want her to keep busy. And that’s that.”

“Somebody’s got to tend the flowers,” remonstrated Mazie. “You don’t want we should have no posy bed, Elmer—like poor folks down to the Holler, do you?”

“I can git along ’n’eat dinner without posies. Why don’t Erie read the Grange Journal? Oh, no; it’s fancy novels and highfalutin’ books she studies onto. And she’s allus cuttin’ out these here fashions into these here magazines with coloured pitchers outside. Did you ever see Eris studyin’ into a cook-book? Or a seed catalogue? Or the Guernsey Cattle Magazine? Or the Breeder’s Guide——”

“You let her be,” said Mazie, good-naturedly. “The housework’s done and that’s all you need to know. She can cook and make a bed if she’s a mind to.”

“Mind,” growled Odell, “—what’s a girl want of a mind? All she uses it for is to plan how to play-act on the stage or gallivant into moving pitchers. All she thinks about is how to git to New York to hunt up some fancy job so she can paint her face and dance in bare legs——”

“Now, Elmer, Eris is too smart to act foolish; and she’s educated real well. You liked to see her act in school, and you thought she danced nicely. She’s only a child yet——”

“She’s twenty!”

“She’s no more’n sixteen in her way of thinking, Elmer. She’s a good girl.”

“I didn’t say she’s bad. But she’s twenty, and she ought to be more help to us. And she ought to quit readin’ and moonin’ and dreamin’ and lazin’——”

“You quit your lazin’, too,” laughed Mazie, setting a pan of cream in the ice chest. “Why don’t you go down to the barn and ring that new herd-bull? You can’t get him into the paddock without a staff any more. And if you don’t watch out Whitewater Chieftain will hurt somebody.... ’N’I’ll be a widow.”

As Odell went out the dairy door, preoccupied with the ticklish job before him, he met Eris with her arms full of new kittens.

“Mitzi’s,” she explained, “aren’t they too cunning, daddy? I hope they’re not to be drowned.”

“I ain’t runnin’ a cat-farm,” remarked Odell. “Did you mend my canvas jacket?”

“Yes; it’s on your bed.”

“Did you coop them broody hens? I bet you didn’t.”

“Yes. There are seventeen in three coops.”

“Housework done?”

“Yes.”

“Awright. Why don’t you get the cook-book and set in the hammock a spell?”

The girl laughed: “Don’t you like mother’s cooking?”

“S’all right for me. But I don’t cal’late your mother’s going to cook for the fella you hitch up with.”

Eris turned up her nose: “Don’t worry. I shan’t ever marry. Not any boy in this town, anyway. Probably I’ll never marry.... I’ll not have time,” she added, half to herself.

Odell, who was going, stopped.

“Why not?” he demanded.

“An actress ought not to marry. She ought to give every moment to her art,” explained the girl naïvely.

“Is—that—so? Well, you can chase that idea outa your head, my girl, because you ain’t never going to be no actress. And that’s that!”

“Some day,” said Eris, with a flushed smile, “I shall follow my own judgment and give myself to art.... And that’s that!”

As they stood there, father and daughter, confronting each other in the pale April sunshine, the great herd-bull bellowed from the cattle-barn, shaking the still air with his thunderous reverberations. He was to be shot that evening.

Eris sighed: “He misses his companions,” she said, “and he tells us so.... Poor White Lightning.... And I, also, miss the companionship of all I have never known.... Some day I shall tell you so.... I hope you’ll understand.”

“You talk like a piece in a magazine,” said Odell; “you better quit reading them danged love stories and movin’ pitcher magazines and study into the Farm Journal.”

“You’d be very proud of me if I became a great actress,” she said seriously.

“I’d be a danged sight prouder if you was a great cook,” he grunted. And he went toward the cattle-barn, spinning the patent self-piercing nose ring on his horny forefinger.

Eris called after him: “Have you got to shoot Lightning?”

“Yes, I gotta beef him. He’s no good any more.”

So the great herd-bull, like all “Former Things,” was doomed to “pass away.”

As the Dionysia became the Mithraic Rites, so was taurian glory doomed to pass.... A bullet where Aldebaran shows the way. The way of all bulls.

Neither Odell nor Eris had ever heard of Aldebaran. And the tombs of the Magi were no more tightly sealed than the mind of the father. But the child’s mind hid a little lamp unlighted. A whisper might reveal to her Aldebaran shining in the midnight heavens. Or the Keys of Life and Death hanging on the Rosy Cross....

The bull died at the appointed hour. Eris stood in her bed-room closing both ears with trembling palms.

She did not hear the shot. Mazie found her there; laughed at her good-naturedly.

Eris’ lips formed the words: “Is he dead?”

“My dear, he’s Polack beef by now.”

Gloria tauri—gloria mundi. But whatever ends always begins again.

What was the Dionysia is now Rosicrucian ... and shall again be something else ... and always the same.

As for the Bull of Mithra—and Mithra, too—bull-calves are born every day. And there are a million million suns in the making.

It’s only the Old Order that changes, not what orders it.

CHAPTER IV

BULLS die; men die; the old order dies,—slowly sometimes, sometimes in the twinkling of an eye.

The change came swiftly upon Eris; passed more swiftly still, leaving no outward trace visible. But when it had passed, the heart and mind of Eris were altered. All doubt, all hesitation fled. She understood that now the road to the stars was open, and that, one day, she would do what she had been born to do.

The World War was partly responsible for the affair. The dye situation in the United States resulted. In Whitewater Mills, both dyes and mordants remained unsatisfactory. The mill chemist could do nothing and they let him go.

Where cotton was used in shoddy combination with wool, permanency of colour scarcely mattered—the poor always getting the dirty end of everything in a nation that has always laughed at a swindle.

But before the war, Whitewater Mills had built a separate plant for fine hosiery, lisle and silk, and had specialised in mauves and blues—fast, unfading, beautiful colours, the secret of which remained in Germany.

Now, desiring to resume, and unable to import, the directors of the mill sent a delegation to New York to find out what could be done.

There the delegates discovered, dug out, and engaged a chemist named E. Stuart Graydon.

It appeared that the secrets of German dyes and mordants were known to Mr. Graydon. How they became known to him he explained very frankly and eloquently. Candour, an engaging smile, pale smooth features full of pale bluish shadows,—these and a trim figure neatly clothed made up the ensemble of Mr. Graydon.

Permanent colour was his specialty. Anyway, his long, steady fingers were permanently stained with acid and nicotine. He was employed by a photographer when they discovered him. Or, to be accurate, he discovered them at their third-class hotel on Broadway.... And never left them until he had signed a contract.

It was after church that somebody introduced E. Stuart Graydon to Eris.

He walked home with the family; and his talent for general conversation earned him an invitation to remain to midday dinner.

Quiet, convincing eloquence was his asset. There appeared to be no subject with which he was not reasonably familiar. His, also, was that terrible gift for familiarity of every description; he became a friend over night, a member of the family in a week. He was what Broadway calls “quick study,” never risking “going stale” by “letter perfect” preparation for an opening.

He took a deep interest in Guernsey breeding. But Odell did the talking. That was how Graydon acquired a reputation for an astonishing versatility;—he started the subject and kept it kindled while others did the talking. And in ten minutes he was able to converse upon the theme with a skilful and convincing fluency entirely irresistible.

After dinner Mazie showed him Fanny’s miniature on ivory.

He smilingly sketched for the family a brief history of miniature painting. It happened that he was minutely familiar with all methods and all branches of Art. Indeed, that was how the entire affair started. And Art accounted for the acid stains, also.

To Eris, Art included the drama, and all that her ardent mind desired. It took Mr. Graydon about five minutes to discover this. And of course it transpired that he knew everything connected with the drama, spoken and silent.

The next evening he came to supper. He talked cattle, ensilage, rotation of crops, sub-soils, inoculation, fertilisers, with Odell until the hypnotised farmer was loth to let him go.

He talked to Mazie about household economy, labour-saving devices, sanitary disposal plants, water systems, bleaches—with which he was dreadfully familiar—furniture polish, incubators.

With the boys he discussed guns and ammunition, traps and trapping, commercial education, the relation of labour to capital, baseball in the State League, ready-made clothing, the respective merits of pointers, setters, bull terriers and Airedales.

Hypnotised yawns protested against the bed hour in the household of Odell. Nobody desired to retire. The spell held like a trap.

As for Eris, she decided to stay in the sitting room with Mr. Graydon when the family’s yawns at last started them blinking bedward.

Odell, yawning frightfully, got into his night-shirt and then into bed; and lay opening and shutting his eyes like an owl on the pillow while Mazie, for the first time in months, did her hair in curl papers.

“A nice, polite, steady young man,” she said, nodding at Odell’s reflection in the looking glass. “My sakes alive, Elmer, what an education he’s got!”

“Stew Graydon knows a thing or two, I guess,” yawned Odell. “You gotta be mighty spry to get a holt onto that young fella.”

“I’ve a notion they pay him a lot down to the mill,” suggested Mazie.

“You can’t expec’ to hire a Noo York man like that fer nothin’,” agreed Odell. “He’s smart, he is. And there’s allus a market fer real smartness. Like as not that young fella will find himself a rich man in ten years. I guesso.”

A silence; Mazie busy with her lustrous hair,—the plump, rosy, vigorous incarnation of matronly health.

In the mirror she caught Elmer’s sleepy eye and laughed, displaying her white teeth.

“You think he kinda favours Eris?” she asked.

“Hey?”

“I don’t know why else he come to supper.”

“He come to supper to talk farmin’ with me,” said Odell gruffly.

“Maybe. Only I guess not,” laughed Mazie.

“Well, why did he come, then? He wanted I should show him the new separator and them samples of cork-brick. He’s a chemist, ain’t he? He’s int-rested in cork-brick and separators ’n’ all like that.”

Mazie twisted a curl paper around a thick brown tress.

“When he talked about the theatre and acting,” she remarked, “did you notice how Eris acted?”

“She gawked at him,” grunted Odell. “She’d better get that pitcher idee outa her fool head,—lazin’ around readin’ them pitcher magazines ’n’ novels, ’n’ moonin all over the place instid of findin’ chores to occupy her ’n’ doin’ them——”

“Oh, hush,” interrupted Mazie; “you talk and take on awful foolish, Elmer. When Eris marries some bright, steady boy, all that trash in her head will go into the slop-pail.”

Odell scowled:

“Well, why don’t she marry, then? She ain’t no help to you——”

“She is! Hush up your head. You’ll miss her, too, when she marries, and some strange man takes her away. I guess I know who aims to do it, too.”

“Well, who aims to do it? Hey? She don’t have nothin’ to say to our Whitewater boys. She allus acts proud and highmighty and uppish. Dan Burns he come sparkin’ her ’n’ she stayed in her room and wouldn’t even come down to supper. ’N’ there was Clay Wallace, ’n’ Buddy Morgan——”

“It looks like she’s willing to be sparked to-night, don’t it?” said Mazie, with an odd little laugh.

Elmer rose on one elbow: “Say, you don’t think he wants our Eris, do yeh?”

“Why not? Isn’t Eris good enough for any man?”

“Well, well, dang it all, Stew Graydon seems diff-runt.... He’s too educated ’n’ stylish for plain folks—’n’ he’s got a big position in the mill. He don’t want our Eris——”

“Why not?” repeated Mazie.

Odell shook his frowsy head: “He’ll want a rich girl. Eris hain’t got only that heifer-money. I can’t give her more’n a mite——”

“That don’t count with me, Elmer.” She flushed, “—it didn’t count with you.”

“Well, you was worth consid’ble more’n cash,” he grunted.

“So’s any girl—if a boy likes her.”

“You think a smart man like Stew Graydon——”

“How do I know?” drawled Mazie. “She’s downstairs yet with him, ain’t she? I never knew her to act that way before. Nor you, either.”

She never had “acted that way before.”

The drowning swimmer and his straw—Eris and the first man she ever had met who had been actually in touch with the mystery of the moving pictures—that was the situation.

For Graydon’s personality she had only the virginal interest which is reassured by a pleasant manner, a pleasing voice, and the trim, neat inconspicuousness of face, figure, and apparel which invites neither criticism nor particular admiration,—nor alarm.

But for his education, his knowledge, his wisdom, his fluency,—above all for his evident sympathy and ability to understand her desire,—she had an excited and passionate need.

As he talked, he looked her over, carefully, cautiously—preoccupied with odd and curious ideas even while conversing about other things.

That evening, when taking leave, he pressed her slender fingers together, gently, not alarming her—scarcely even awaking self-consciousness. He was always the artist, first of all.

After a month, even Elmer understood that Graydon was “sparking” Eris.

And, from the time that Eris first was made to understand that fact she lived in a continuous, confused dream, through the unreality of which sometimes she was aware of her own heart beating with excitement.

He had said to her, one evening, after the family had gone to bed, that the stage was her vocation and that God himself must have ordained that she should, one day, triumph there.

She listened as in a blessed trance. All around her the night air grew heavy with the scent of honeysuckle. A moon was shining. The whippoorwill’s breathless cry came from the snake-fence hedge.

When he had had his mental will of her—excited her almost to blissful tears, soothed her, led her on, deftly, eloquently—he took her smooth hand of a child. All set for the last act, he drew the girl against his shoulder, taking plenty of time.

Her head was still swimming with his eloquence. Hope intoxicated her. His lips meant nothing on her cheek—but her mind was all a-quiver—and it was her mind alone that he had stimulated and excited to an ecstasy uncontrollable; and which now responded and acquiesced.

“And after we marry I am to study for the stage?” she repeated, tremulously, oblivious of his arm tightening around her body.

It transpired, gently and eloquently, that it was for this very reason he desired to marry her and give her what was nearest her girl’s heart—what her girl’s mind most ardently desired in all the world—her liberty to choose.

But he warned her to keep the secret from her family. Trembling, enchanted, almost frightened by the approaching splendour of consummation, she promised in tears.

Then the barrier burst under an overwhelming rush of gratitude. She was his. She would surrender, now, to this man who had suddenly appeared from nowhere;—an emissary of God sent to understand, sympathise, guide her to that destiny which, even he admitted, God had ordained as hers.

Eris was married to E. Stuart Graydon in her twentieth year at the parsonage of the Whitewater Church, at ten o’clock in the morning. All Whitewater attended and gorged. No rural precedent was neglected—neither jest nor rice nor old shoes,—everything happened, from the organ music and the unctuous patronage of “Rev. Styles,” to the thick aroma of the “bounteous repast” at Whitewater Farms, where neighbours came, stuffed themselves, and went away boisterously all that rainy afternoon.

Bride and groom were to depart on the six o’clock train for Niagara.

About five o’clock, the groom, chancing to glance out of the window, saw two men,—strangers in Whitewater but perfectly well known to him,—walking up the path that led to the front door.

For a second he sat motionless; the next, he turned and looked into the grey eyes of his bride.

“Eris,” he said calmly, “if anybody asks for me say I’ve run down to the mill and I’ll be back in fifteen minutes.”

She smiled vaguely as he rose and went out the back way where the automobiles were parked.

A few minutes later Odell was called from the room by one of his sons:

“Say, pop, there’s a party out here inquiring for someone they call Eddie Graydon.”

Odell went out to the porch: “What name?” he demanded, eyeing the two strangers and their dripping umbrellas.

“You Elmer Odell?” demanded the taller man.

“That’s what my ma christened me,” replied Odell, jocosely.

“Your daughter marrying a man who calls himself E. Stuart Graydon?”

“She ain’t marryin’ him. She’s done it.”

“Where is he?”

“He jest stepped out. Gone to the mill to fix up sunthin’ before leavin’.”

The taller man said to his companion: “Run down to the mill, will you?” And, as the other turned and walked rapidly away in the rain:

“I’ve got a warrant for Eddie Graydon when he comes back. That’s one of his names. Eddie Carter is the right one. Sorry for you, Mr. Odell; sorrier for your daughter.”

Odell stared at him, the purple veins beginning to swell on his temples.

“D-dang it!” he stammered,—“what’s all this dinged junk about? Who be you?”

And, when the tall, quiet man had terribly convinced him, Odell staggered, slightly, and wiped the sweat from his temples.

“That lad has a record,” said the detective, in his low, agreeable voice. “He’s a fine artist and a crackerjack chemist. Maybe he don’t know anything about the new tens and twenties. Maybe. Nor anything about the location of the plates.... My God, Mr. Odell, we’ve got to get those plates. Only Brockway could have equalled that engraving. Yes, sir—only the old man.”

Odell scarcely heard him for the thunderous confusion in his brain.

He sat down, heavily, staring at space under knitted brows. Minute after minute passed. The distant laughter and clamour of guests came fitfully from the great kitchen beyond. It rained and rained on the veranda roof.

After a quarter of an hour the detective came in from the porch.

“You got a telephone, Mr. Odell?”

The farmer nodded.

“I want to call up my mate at the mill——” looking around the sitting room and finally locating the instrument. “What’s the mill number?”

“Seven.”

He gave the crank a turn; the metal bell jingled.

After a few moments he got his mate. He talked rapidly in a low, clear voice. Odell heard without listening or understanding. The detective hung up.

“Say,” he said, “that fellow’s gone. He won’t come back here. He’s gone!”

“What say?” mumbled Odell, wiping away the sweat.

“I’m telling you that Eddie Carter has beat us to it. He didn’t go to the mill. He won’t come back here.... Who’s got a big yellow touring car—a Comet Six—in this town?”

Odell put his scarred hands to his forehead: “Doc Benson, I guess,” he said vaguely.

“He here?”

“I guess he’s in there eatin’.”

“Well, tell him his car went out of town twenty minutes ago at sixty per,” said the detective briskly.... “So long. I’m sorry.... Is there a garage in the village where they have cars for hire?”

“At the hotel,” said the farmer.... “By God!...” He got up as though dazed.

“Mazie,” he called hoarsely. Nobody heard him in the gay tumult. He stared after the detective, who was walking swiftly down the path in the rain.

“Jesus,” he whispered.... “He done us all.... ’N’ that’s that! Oh, God!—’n’ that’s that!”

A nine days’ scandal in the village—a year’s food for gossip—and that was that, also.

Neither blame nor disgrace attached to anybody. Nobody thought less of the Odells, nor did they of themselves.

The crash of her dream-house stunned Eris. She took it very silently, with no outward emotion.

After a month the whole thing seemed, in fact, a dream—too unreal to believe or to grieve over.

After three months Odell talked vaguely of getting a di-vorce, “so’s she kin hook up to somebody respectable when she’s a mind to.”

Then Eris flashed fire for the first time:

“I’ll never marry again! Never! I never wanted to anyway. This is enough! I’ll live and die as I am. And there’ll be no more men in my life and no bother about divorce, either. He’ll never come back. What do I care whether I’m married or not! It doesn’t mean anything and it never will. I’m through with marriage and with marrying men! And that’s that!”

CHAPTER V

IT was Sunday; and it was in May. To Whitewater Farms floated the sound of bells from three village churches, pealing alternately. With a final three strokes from each bell, Odell and Lister drove out of the horse-barn in the family carry-all. In God’s honour, Odell wore a celluloid collar. Lister’s reverence was expressed in a new scarlet bandanna.

Mazie, big, symmetrical, handsome in her trim summer clothes, appeared from the house, herding her loitering, loutish offspring—Gene, 18; Si, 17; Willis, 16; Buddy, 15; all habited in the dark, ready-made clothing and dark felt hats of rural ceremony, the gloomy similarity relieved only by ready-made satin neck-scarfs of different but primitive hues.

“Where’s Eris?” inquired Odell.

Mazie laughed: “She ain’t ready, what with her curling and her manicure set—busy ’s’a bee from fingers to toes—”

“Eris!” shouted her father, looking up at the open window, where dotted muslin curtains were blowing.

Eris peeped out, her chestnut hair dishevelled.

“Don’t wait,” she said. “I’ll walk.”

Odell gathered the reins: “G’lang!” he grunted.

For twenty minutes or more there was no sound in the House of Odell except the flutter of muslin curtains.

Under the window a lilac bush was vibrant with bumble-bees; robins ran through the grass; blue-birds drifted along the fence from post to post in soft, moth-like flight.

It was quite a while after the kitchen clock struck that light, hurried steps sounded on the stairs.

Eris stepped out on the porch, radiant and in her best.

At twenty she had the slender immaturity of a girl of sixteen. Her slim figure made her seem taller than she was.

Her hat was one of those sagging straw affairs. It tied under the chin with lilac ribbon. Her thin white gown had lilac ribbons on it, too. So did her sun-shade.

She was very late. She walked to the gate, keeping to the brick path on account of her white shoes and stockings.

Here she consulted her wrist-watch. There was no use hurrying now. She glanced up and down the road—possibility of a belated neighbour giving her a lift to the village.

No, it was too late to hurry. Almost too late to go at all.

She looked up at the gate lilacs, broke off a heavy, mauve cluster, inhaled the fragrance.

For a little while, still, she lingered on the chance of a passing vehicle. Finally she returned to her room, took a book from her pillow, took “the key to the fields,” and sauntered off through the hillside orchard, now a wilderness of pink and white bloom.

Everywhere the azure wings of blue-birds; the peach-red of a robin’s breast; the broad golden glint of a flicker flashing through high white bloom.

The breeze which had fluttered her muslin curtains was busy up here, too, blowing white butterflies out of their courses and spreading silvery streaks across tall grasses.

On the hill-top she paused, looking out over the world of May.

Below her lay Whitewater Farms, neat as a group of newly-painted toys, house, barns with their hip-gables, silos, poultry-runs, sheds, out-buildings, whitewashed fences.

A mile south, buried among elms and maples, lay White Hills Village, the spires of its three churches piercing the foliage.

All around, east, west, south, rose low hills, patched with woods, a barn or two in silhouette on some grassy ridge. Ploughed fields, pastures, squares of vivid winter wheat checkered the panorama, the tender green of hard-wood groves alternating with the dark beauty of hemlock and white pine.

Overhead a blue sky, quite cloudless; over all, May sunshine; the young world melodious with the songs of birds. And Eris, twenty, with the heart and experience of sixteen.

Sweet, thrilling came the meadow lark’s calling from the crests of tall elms. It seemed to pierce her heart.

To the breezy stillness of the hill came faintly out of the valley the distant barking of a dog, a cock-crow, answered, answered again from some remoter farm.

Eris turned and looked into the north, where bluish hills spread away into the unknown.

Below her were the Home Woods, where Whitewater Brook ran over silver gravel, under mossy logs, pouring into deep, spreading pools, gliding swiftly amid a camouflage of ferns, gushing out over limestone beds to clatter and sparkle and fling rainbow spray across every sunny glade.

Eris looked down at the woods. To venture down there was not very good for her low-heeled, white sport shoes.... Of course she could clean them after noon dinner and they’d be dry in time for—anything.... But for what?

She paused at the wood’s edge, her mind on her shoes.

“In time for what?” she repeated aloud.

She stood, abstracted, grey eyes brooding the question.

What was there to dress for—to clean her white shoes for? Evening service. A slow stroll with some neighbour’s daughter along the village street. Gossip with other young people encountered in the lamp-lit dark. Banter with boys—passing the usual group clustered on fence or wall—jests born of rural wit, empty laughter, emptier retort—the slow stroll homeward.... This was what she dressed for.... Or for a party ... where the deadly familiarity of every face and voice had long since dulled her interest.... Where there was never any mental outlook; no aspiration, no stimulation—no response to her restless curiosity—where nobody could tell her “why.”

Standing there on the wood’s edge, she wondered why she was at pains to dress becomingly for the sake of such things as these.

She wondered why she cared for her person so scrupulously in a family where a bath a week was the rule—in a community where the drug-store carried neither orange-stick nor depilatory.

It is true, however, that with the advent of short skirts and prohibition it was now possible to purchase lipstick and powder-puff in White Hills. And State Troopers had been there twice looking for hootch.

There was a rumour in local ecclesiastical circles that the youth of White Hills was headed hellward.

As yet the sweet-fern was only in tassel; Eris could pick her way, without danger to her stockings, through the strip of rough clearing. She entered the woods, pensively, amid the dappled shadows of new leaves.

Everywhere her eyes discovered young ferns and wild blossoms. Trillium and bunch-berry were still in bloom; viburnum, too; violets, blue, yellow and white; and a few pink moccasin flowers and late anemones.

Birds, too, sang everywhere; crows were noisy in the taller pines; glimpses of wood-thrush and Veery in moist thickets; clear little ecstasies of bird-song from high branches, the strident chirring of red squirrels, the mysterious, muffled drumming of a cock-grouse far in woodland depths.

Where a mossy limestone ledge hung low over Whitewater Brook, Eris spread her handkerchief and sat down on it carefully, laying her book beside her.

Here the stillness was melodious with golden harmonies from a little waterfall.

There were no black flies or midges yet,—no exasperating deer-flies either. Only gilded ephemera dancing over the water, where, at intervals, some burly trout broke with a splash.

Green-clouded swallow-tail butterflies in floppy, erratic flight, sped through sunny glades. Overhead sailed the great yellow swallow-tail,—in aërial battle, sometimes with the Beauty of Camberwell, the latter rather ragged and faded from last summer’s gaiety, but with plenty of spirit left in her shabby wings.

Sun-spots glowed and waned; shadows flickered; water poured and glided between green banks, aglint with bubbles. The beauty of all things filled the young heart of Eris, reddened her lips, tormented her, almost hurt her with the desire for utterance.

If inexperience really has anything to express, it has no notion how to go about it.

Like vast, tinted, unreal clouds, her formless thoughts crowded her mind—guileless desire, innocent aspiration toward ineffable heights, ambition as chaste as immature.

And when in dreaming preoccupation the clouds took vague form, her unformed mind merely mirrored an unreal shape resembling herself—a magic dancing shape, ethereal, triumphant amid Olympian thunders of applause—a glittering shape, like hers, lovelier, facing the world from the jewelled splendour of the stage—a shadow-shape, gliding across the screen, worshipped in silence by a breathless multitude.

She opened her book. It was entitled: “How to Break into the Movies.” She read for a few moments, gave it up.

It was May in the world; and, in the heart of Eris, April. And a strange, ardent, restlessness in the heart of all youth the whole world over—the renaissance, perhaps, of a primitive, lawless irresponsibility curbed into discipline æons ago. And, after ages, let loose again since the Twilight of the World fell over Armageddon.

Sooner or later she felt she must free mind, heart, body of whatever hampered, and go—go on about her business in life—whatever it might be—seek it throughout the world—ask the way—ask all things unknown to her—learn all things, understand, choose, achieve.

Twenty, in the April just ended! Her time was short. The time to be about her business in life was very near.... The time was here.... It was already here ... if she only knew the way.... The way out.... The door that opened outward....

Lifting her grey eyes she saw a man across the brook. He saw her at the same moment.

He was fat. He wore short rubber boots and no coat. Creel, bait-box, and fishing rod explained his presence on Whitewater. But as to his having any business there, he himself seemed in doubt.

“Hello, sister!” he said jauntily.

“Hello,” said Eris, politely.

“Is it all right for me to fish here?” he inquired. “I’m not trespassing, am I?”

“People fish through our woods,” replied Eris.

“Oh, are they your woods?” He looked around him at the trees as though to see what kind of sylvan property this girl possessed.

“A pretty spot,” he said with condescension, preparing to bait his hook. “I like pretty spots. It’s my business to hunt for them, too. Yes, and sometimes I hunt for dreary spots. Not that I like them, but it’s in my line——” He shoved a squirming worm onto the hook and wiped his hands on his trousers. “Yes, that’s my line—I’m in all kinds of lines—even fish-lines——” He dropped his hook into the pool and stood intent, evidently indifferent to any potential applause as tribute to his wit.

He was sunburnt, fat, smooth-shaven. Thin hair partly covered his head in damp ringlets.

Presently he glanced across at Eris out of little bluish, puffy eyes which sagged at the corners. He winked at her, not offensively:

“Yes, that’s my best line, sister.... Spots! All kinds. Pretty, gloomy, lovely, dreary—oasis or desert, it doesn’t matter; I’m always in the market for spots.”

“Are you looking for a farm?” inquired Eris.

“Farm? Well, that’s in my line, too,—farms, mills, nice old stone bridges,—all that stuff is in my line,—in fact, everything is in my line,—and nothing on my line——” He lifted a dripping bait, lowered it again, winked at Eris.

“I suppose,” he said, “there isn’t a single thing in all the world that isn’t in my line. Why, even you are!” he added, laughing fatly. “What do you think of that, now?”

“What is your line?” she inquired, inclined to smile.

“Can’t you guess, girlie?”

“No, I can’t.”

“Well, I come out this way on location. The bunch is over at Summit. I’m just scouting out the lay over here. To-day’s Sunday, so I’m fishing. I can’t hunt spots every minute.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” said Eris.

“Why, we’re shooting the sanitarium over at Summit,” he explained, gently testing his line. As there was nothing on it he looked over at Eris.

“You don’t get me, sister,” he said. “It’s pictures. See?”

“Moving pictures?”

“Yeh, the Crystal Film outfit. We’re shooting the ‘Wild Girl.’ It’s all outside stuff now. We’re going to shoot ‘The Piker’ next. Nature stuff. That’s why.”

Once more he drew out and examined his bait. “Say,” he demanded, “are there any fish in this stream?”

“Trout.”

“Well, they seem to be darned scarce——”

“I want to ask you something,” interrupted the girl, breathlessly.

“Shoot, sister.”

“I want to know how people—how a girl——”

“Sure. I get you. I’m glad you asked me. They all ask that. You want to know how to get into pictures.”

“Yes——”

“Of course. So does every living female in the United States. That’s what sixty million women, young and old, want to know——”

He looked up, prepared to wink, but something in her flushed expression modified his jocose intention:

“Say, sister,” he drawled, “you don’t want to go into pictures.”

“Yes, I do.”

“What for?”

“Why are you in pictures?” she asked.

“God knows——”

“Will you please tell me why?”

“I like the job, I guess.”

“So do I.”

“Oh, very well,” he said, laughing, “go to it, girlie.”

“How?”

“Why, I can’t tell you——”

“You can!”

He lifted his bait and flopped it into another place.

“Now, listen,” he said, “some men would take notice of your pretty face and kid you along. That ain’t me. If you break loose and go into pictures it’s a one to a million shot you make carfare.”

“I want to try.”

“I can’t give you a job, sister——”

“Would the Crystal Film management let me try?”

“Nobody would let you try unless they needed an extra.”

“What is an extra?”

“A day’s jobber. Maybe several days. Then it’s hoofing it after the next job.”

“Couldn’t they let me try a small part?”

“We’re cast. You got to begin as an extra, anyhow. There’s nothing else to it, girlie——”

Something jerked his line; gingerly he lifted the rod, not “striking”; a plump trout fell from the hook into the water.

“Lost him, by jinx!” he exclaimed. “What the devil did I do that I hadn’t oughto I dunno?”

“You should jerk when a trout bites. You just lifted him out. You can’t hook a trout that way.... I hope you will be kind enough to give me your name and address, and help me to get into pictures.”

For a while he stood silent, re-baiting his hook. When he was ready he cast the line into the water, laid the rod on the bank, drew out and lighted a large, pallid cigar.

“Of course,” he remarked, “your parents are against your going into pictures.”

“My mother is dead. My stepmother only laughs at me.”

“How about papa?”

“He wouldn’t like it.”

“Same old scenario,” he said. “And I’ll give you the same old advice: if you got a good home, stay put. Have you?”

“Yes.”

“But you don’t want to stay put?”

“No.”

“You want to run away and-be-a-great-actress?”

“I’m going to try.”

“Try to do what?”

“Find out what I can do and do it!” she replied hotly, almost on the verge of tears.

He looked up at the delicate, flushed beauty of her face.

It wasn’t a question of talent. Most women have the actress in them. With or lacking intelligence it can be developed enough for Broadway use.

“You young girls,” he said, “expect to travel everywhere on your looks. And some of you do. And they last as long as their looks last. But men get nowhere without brains.”

“I have brains,” she retorted unsteadily.

“Let it go at that. But where’s your experience?”

“How can I have it unless I—I try?”

“You think acting is your vocation, sister?”

“I intend to find out.”

“You better listen to me and stick to a good home while the sticking’s good!”

“I’m going into pictures,” she said slowly. “And that’s that!”

Wearying of bad luck the fat man started to move down stream toward another pool.

The girl rose straight up on her mossy rock, joining both hands in classic appeal, quite unconscious of her dramatic attitude.

“Please—please tell me who you are and where you live!” she beseeched him.

He was inclined to laugh; then her naïveté touched him.

“Well, sister,” he said, “if you put it that way—my name is Quiss—Harry B. Quiss. I live in New York—Hotel Huron. You can find me there when I’m not on location or at the studio.... The Crystal Films Corporation. We’re in the telephone book.”

Mr. Quiss might have added that the Crystal Films Corporation was also on its beam-ends. But he couldn’t quite do that. All he could say was: “Better stick to papa while the sticking’s good, girlie. There’s no money in pictures. They all bust sooner or later. Take it from one who’s been blown sky-high more’n twice. And expects to go up more’n twice more.”

He went slowly toward the pool below, gesticulating with his rod for emphasis:

“There’s no money in pictures—not even for stars. I don’t know where it all goes to. Don’t ask me who gets it. I don’t, anyway.”

CHAPTER VI

ON Monday evening at five o’clock the Whitewater herd was ready for milking.

Odell, Ed Lister, and the foreman, Gene Lyford, scrubbed their hands and faces and put on clean white canvas clothes. Clyde Storm, helper, went along the lime-freshened concrete alleys, shaking out bran and tossing in clover-hay. Everywhere in the steel stanchions beautiful Guernsey heads were turned to watch his progress. In the bull-pen the herd-bull pried and butted at the bars. The barn vibrated with his contented lowing.

Calves in their pens came crowding to the bars like herded deer, or went bucketing about, excited to playful combat by the social gathering after an all-day separation.

In the stalls sleek flanks were being wiped down until they glistened like the coats of thoroughbred horses; udders were washed with tepid water; the whole place smelled fresh and clean as a hayfield.

No mechanical apparatus was employed at Whitewater Farms.

Odell, finished with the first cow, carried the foaming pail to the steelyards, weighed it, noted the result on the bulletin with a pencil that dangled there, and stepped aside to make room for Ed Lister, who came up with a brimming pail.

There was little conversation at milking hour, scarcely a word spoken except in admonition or reassurance to some restless cow—no sounds in the barn save the herd-bull’s deep rumble of well-being, a gusty twitter of swallows from the eaves, the mellow noises of feeding cattle, clank and creak of stanchion, gush and splash of water as some thirsty cow buried her pink nose in the patent fonts.

The still air grew fragrant with the scent of milk and clover-hay.

One or two grey cats came in, hopefully, and sat on the ladder-stairs, purring, observant, receptive.

The cows on test were in the western extension, all becoming a trifle restless now that their hour was again approaching. And presently two of Odell’s sons, Si and Willis, came in, scrubbed and clothed in white, prepared to continue the exhaustive record already well initiated.

“Eris home yet?” asked Odell over his shoulder.

Si shook his head and picked up a pail.

“Well, where’n the dang-dinged town is she?” growled Odell. “If she’s staying som’mers to supper, why can’t she send word?”

Willis said: “Buddy went down street to look for her. Mommy sent him.”

The boys passed on into the extension where the comely cattle on test stood impatient.

Odell remarked to Lister: “Ever since Eris drove over to Summit to see them pitcher people makin’ movies she’s acted sulky and contrary like. Now look at her stayin’ away all day—’n’ out to supper, too, som’mers.”

“She acts like she’s sot on sunthin’,” suggested Lister, adjusting his milking stool and clasping the pail between his knees.

“She’s sot on j’ining some danged moving pitcher comp’ny,” grunted Odell. “That’s what’s in her head all the time these days.”

Lister’s pail hummed with alternate streams of milk drumming on the tin. For a while he milked in silence save for a low-voiced remonstrance to the young and temperamental Guernsey whose near hind leg threatened trouble.

As he rose with the brimming pail he said: “I guess Eris is a good girl. I guess she wouldn’t go so far as to do nothin’ rash, Elmer.”

“I dunno. You couldn’t never tell what Fanny had in her head. Fanny allus had her secret thoughts. I never knowed what she was figurin’ out. Eris acts that way; she does what she’s told but she thinks as she’s a mind to. Too much brain ain’t healthy for no woman.”

Lister weighed his pail, scratched down the record opposite the cow’s name, turned and looked back at Odell.

“Women oughta think the way their men-folks tell ’em,” he said. “That’s my idee. But the way they vote and carry on these days is a-sp’ilin’ on ’em, accordin’ to my way of figurin’.”

Odell said nothing. As he stood weighing his pail of milk, Buddy came into the barn, eating a stick of shop candy.

“Say, pa,” he called out, “mommy wants you up to the house!”

“When? Now?” demanded his father in dull surprise.

“I guess so. She said you was to come right up.”

Odell placed the empty milk pail on the floor: “Eris home yet?”

“I dunno. I guess not. Will you let me milk Snow-bird, pa?”

“No. Look at your hands! You go up and shake down some hay.... Where’s your ma?”

“She’s up in Eris’ room. She says for you to come. Can’t I wash my hands and——”

“No. G’wan up to the loft. And don’t step on the pitchfork, neither.”

He turned uncertainly toward Lister and found his father-in-law looking at him.

“Kinda queer,” he muttered, “Mazie sending for me when she knows I’m milking....”

Lister made no comment. Odell went out heavily, crossed the farm yard in the pleasant sunset glow, walked on toward the house with lagging stride.

As he set foot on the porch he became conscious of his irritation, felt the heat of it in his cheeks—the same old familiar resentment which had smouldered through the dingy, discordant years of his first marriage.

Here it was again, creeping through him after all these placid years with Mazie—the same sullen apprehension, dull unease verging on anger, invading his peace of mind, stirred this time by Fanny’s child—Eris, daughter of Discord.

“Dang Fanny’s breed,” he muttered, entering the house, “—we allus was enemies deep down, ... deep down in the flesh....”

All at once he understood his real mind. Eris had always been Fanny’s child. Never his. He remembered what Fanny had said to him at the approach of death—how, in that last desperate moment the battered mask of years had slipped from her bony visage and he had gazed into the stark face of immemorial antipathy, ... the measureless resentment of a sex.

Fanny was dead. May God find out what she wants and give it to her. But Fanny’s race persisted. She lived again in Eris. He was face to face with it again.... After twenty years of peace!...

He went to the foot of the stairs and called to his wife. Her voice answered from the floor above. He plodded on upstairs.

Mazie was standing in Eris’ room, a pile of clothing on the bed, a suitcase and a small, flat trunk open on the floor.

She turned to Odell, her handsome features flushed, and the sparkle of tears in her slanting, black eyes.

“What’s the trouble now?” he demanded, already divining it.

“She’s gone, Elmer. She called me up on the telephone from Albany to tell me. The Crystal Fillum Company offers her a contract. She wants her clothes and her money.”

A heavy colour surged through the man’s face.

“That’s the danged secret blood in her,” he said. “I knowed it. There’s allus sunthin’ hatchin’ deep down in women of her blood.... She’s allus had it in her mind to quit us.... She never was one of us.... All right, let her go. I’m done with her.”

Mazie began unsteadily: “So many children of—of our day seem to feel like our Eris——”

“Mine don’t! My boys ain’t got nothin’ secret into them! They ain’t crazy in the head ’n’ they ain’t full o’ fool notions.”

Mazie remained silent. Her sons were fuller of “notions” than their father knew. It had required all the magnetism of her affection and authority to keep them headed toward a future on Whitewater Farms. For the nearest town was already calling them; they sniffed the soft-coal smoke from afar and were restless for the iron dissonance and human bustle of paved and narrow ways.

Theirs was the gregarious excitement instinct in human animals. Beyond the dingy monochrome of life they caught a glimmer of distant brightness. The vague summons of unknown but suspected pleasures stirred them as they travelled the sodden furrow.

Youth’s physical instinct is to gather at the water-hole of this vast veldt we call the world, and wallow in the inviting mire of a thousand hoofs, and feel and hear and see the perpetual milling of the human herds that gather there.

Only in quality did Eris differ from her brothers. It was her mind—and the untasted pleasures of the mind—that drove her to the common fount.

There is a picture by Fragonard called “The Fountain of Love.” And, as eagerly as the blond and glowing girl speeds to the brimming basin where mischievous little winged Loves pour out for her the magic waters, so impetuously had Eris sped toward the fount of knowledge, hot, parched with desire to set her lips to immortal springs.

Odell’s heavy eyes, brooding anger, followed Mazie’s movements as she smoothed out the clothing and laid each garment in the trunk.

“You don’t have to do that,” he growled. “Let her come and get ’em if she wants ’em.”

“But she needs——”

“Dang it, let ’em lay. Like’s not she’ll sicken o’ them pitcher people before the week’s out. She’ll get her belly full o’ notions. Let her caper till she runs into barbed wire. That’ll sting some sense into her hide.”

“She only took her little leather bag, Elmer——”

“She’ll sicken sooner. I ain’t worryin’ none. She ain’t a loose girl; she’s just a fool heifer that goes bucketin’ over a snake-fence where it’s half down. Let her kick up and skylark. You bet she’ll hear the farm bell when it comes supper time——”

He turned away exasperated, but Mazie took him by the sleeve of his milking jacket:

“She’s got to have money, Elmer——”

“No, she hain’t! She’ll sicken the quicker——”

“Elmer, it’s her money.”

“’Tain’t. It’s mine.”

“It’s her heifer-money——”

“She shan’t have it! Not till she’s twenty-one. And that’s that!”

Mazie looked at her husband in a distressed way, her black eyes full of tears:

“Elmer, you can’t use a girl like a boy. A girl’s a tender thing. And I was afraid of this—something like this.... Because Eris is a mite different. She likes to read and study. She likes to figure out what she reads about. She likes music and statues and art-things like the hand-painted pictures we saw in Utica. There’s no harm in art, I guess.... And you know how she always did love to dress up for church plays—and how nicely she sang and danced and acted in school——”

“Dang it all!” shouted Odell, beating one tanned fist within the other palm, “let her come home and cut her capers! She can do them things when there’s a entertainment down to the church, can’t she?

“That’s enough for any girl, ain’t it? And she can go to Utica and look at them hand-painted pitchers in the store windows. And she can dance to socials and showers like sensible girls and she can sing her head off Sundays in church when she’s a mind to!

“All she’s gotta do is come home and git the best of everything. But as long as she acts crazy and stays away, I’m done with her. And that’s that!”

CHAPTER VII

SPRING had begun more than a month early. The young year promised agricultural miracles. All omens were favourable. Ed Lister predicted it would be a “hog-killin’.”

June’s magic turned Whitewater to a paradise. Crystal mornings gradually warming until sundown; gentle showers at night to freshen herbage and start a million planted seeds; blossoms, bees, buds, blue skies—all exquisitely balanced designs in June’s enchanted tapestry—and nothing so far to mar the fabric—no late and malignant frost, no early drouth, broken violently by thunderbolt and deluge; no hail; no heavy winds to dry and sear; nothing untoward in the herd,—no milk-fever, no abortion, no terrifying emergency at night.

The only things to irritate Odell were the letters from Eris. They aroused in him the dumb, familiar anger of Fanny’s time.

But after the first week in July there were no longer any letters from Eris. The girl had written two or three times during June, striving to explain herself, to make him understand her need of doing as she was doing, the necessity that some of her own money be sent her.

Her last letter arrived about the beginning of that dreadful era of unprecedented heat and drouth which ushered in July and which caused that summer to be long remembered in the Old World as well as in the New.

Odell’s refusal to send her a single penny, and his repeated summons for her return had finally silenced Eris. No more letters came. Odell’s attitude silenced Mazie, too, whose primitive sense of duty was to her man first of all.

Sometimes she ventured to hope that Eris might, somehow, be successful. Oftener a comforting belief reassured her that the girl would soon return to material comforts and female duties, which were all Mazie comprehended of earthly happiness.

Odell’s refusal to send Eris her money and her clothes worried Mazie when she had time to think. But what could she do? Man ruled Mazie’s universe. It was proper that he should. All her life she had had to submit to him,—she had to cook for him, wash, sew, mend, care for his habitation, bear his children, fed them, wean them, and, in the endless sequence again, cook, wash, iron, sew, mend for these men-children which she had borne her man. And it was proper. It was the way of the world. Of heaven, too, perhaps. God himself was masculine.... She sometimes wondered whether there really was any rest there for female angels....

Of what other women desired and did,—of aspiration, spiritual and intellectual discontent, Mazie knew nothing. For her nothing desirable existed beyond the barbed wire. And yet, without at all understanding Eris, always she had felt an odd sympathy for the girl’s irregularities—had recognized that Fanny’s child was different from herself, from her offspring—from other women’s children. But the underlying motive that had sent Eris forth was quite beyond Mazie’s ken. The resurrection of her sex came too early for her who had not yet died.

The farm year had begun prosperously. Until July there had been no cloud on the horizon. In imagination Odell gazed across acres and acres of golden harvest; saw a beneficent and paternal Government coming to the relief of all farmers; saw every silo packed, every barn bursting; saw the steady increase of the herd balanced by profitable sales; saw ribbons and prizes awaiting his exhibits at County and State Fairs.

Yet, very often after supper, when standing on the porch chewing his quid as stolidly as his cows chewed their cuds, he was aware of a vague unease—as in Fanny’s day.

He could not comprehend the transmission of resentment from Fanny to Fanny’s child. He could much less understand the inherited resentment of a sex, now for the first time since creation making its defiance subtly felt the whole world through. Sub jugum ad astra! And now the Yoke had fallen; stars blazed beyond. Restless-winged, a Sex stood poised for flight, turning deaf ears to earthbound voices calling them back to hoods and bells and jesses.

One stifling hot night in July, after two weeks’ enervating drouth, Odell’s impotent wrath burst from the depths of bitterness long pent:

“That ding-danged slut will shame us yet if she don’t come back! I’m done with her if she ain’t in her own bed by Monday night. You write and tell her, Mazie. Tell her I’m through. Tell her I say so. And that’s that!”

The “ding-danged slut” at that moment lay asleep on the grass in a New York public park. And all around her, on the hot and trampled grass, lay half-naked, beastly, breathing human heaps—the heat-tortured hordes of the unwashed.

CHAPTER VIII

JULY began badly in New York. Ambulances became busy, hospitals overcrowded, seaside resorts thronged. Day after day a heavy atmosphere hung like a saturated and steaming blanket over the city. The daily papers recorded deaths from heat. Fountains were full of naked urchins unmolested by police. Firemen drenched the little children of the poor with heavy showers from hose and stand-pipe.

Toward midnight, on the tenth day of the heat, a slight freshness tempered the infernal atmosphere of the streets. It was almost a breeze. In the Park dry leaves rustled slightly. Sleepers on bench and withered sward stirred, sighed, relaxed again into semi-stupor.

Two men in light clothes and straw hats, crossing the Park from West to East, paused on the asphalt path to gaze upon the thousands of prostrate figures.

“Yonder’s a sob-stuff story for you, Barry,” remarked the shorter man.

“There’s more than one story there,” said the other.

“No, only one. I’ll tell you that story: these people had rather work and die in their putrid tenements than work and live in the wholesome countryside. You can’t kick these town rats out of their rat-ridden city. They like to fester and swarm. And when any species swarms, Barry, Nature presently decimates it.”

They moved along slowly, looking out over the dim meadows heaped with unstirring forms.

“Perhaps,” admitted Annan, who had been addressed as Barry, “the mass story is about what you outlined, Mike; but there are other stories there——” He made a slight gesture toward the meadow, “The whole gamut from farce to tragedy....”

“The only drama in that mess is rooted in stupidity.”

“That’s where all tragedy is rooted.... I could step in among those people and in ten minutes I could bring back material for a Hugo, a Balzac, a Maupassant, a Dumas——”

“Why don’t you? It’s your job to look for literary loot in human scrap heaps. Here’s life’s dumping ground. You’re the chiffonier. Why not start business?”

“I’m considering it.”

“Go to it,” laughed the other, lighting a cigarette and leaning gracefully on his walking stick. “Yonder’s the sewer; dig out your diamond. Uproot your lily!”

Annan said: “Do you want to bet I can’t go in there, wake up one of those unwashed, and, in ten minutes, get the roots of a story as good as any ever written?”

“If you weren’t in a class by yourself,” said the other, “I’d bet with you. Any ordinary newspaper man could go in there and dig up a dozen obvious news items. But you’ll dig up a commonplace item and turn it into an epic. Or you’ll dig up none at all, and come back with a corker——”

“I’ll play square——”

“I know you! The biggest story in the world, Barry, was born a punk little news item; and it would have died an item except for the genius who covered it. You’re one of those damned geniuses——”

“Don’t try to hedge!——”

“Don’t tell me! Nothing ever really happens except in clever brains. I can condense Hamlet’s story into a paragraph. But I’m glad Shakespeare didn’t. I’m glad the Apostles were——”

“You’re a crazy Irishman, Coltfoot,” remarked Annan, looking about him at the thousands of spectral sleepers. “Shut up. I need a story and I’m going to get one.... You don’t want to take my bet, do you?”

“All right. Ten dollars that you don’t get the honest makings of a real story in ten minutes. No faking! No creative genius stuff. Just bald facts.” He looked at his wrist-watch, then at his companion. “Ready?”

Annan nodded, glanced out over the waste of withered grass. As he stepped from the asphalt to the meadow a tepid breeze began to blow, cooling his perspiring cheeks.

A few sleepers stirred feverishly. Under a wilted shrub a girl lifted her heavy head from the satchel that had pillowed it. Then, slowly, she sat upright to face the faint stir of air.

Her hat fell off. She passed slim fingers through her bobbed hair, ruffling it to the cool wind blowing.

Annan walked directly toward her, picking his way across the grass among the sleeping heaps of people.

As he stopped beside her, Eris looked up at him out of tired eyes which seemed like wells of shadow, giving her pinched face an appearance almost skull-like.

Annan mistook her age, as did everybody; and he calmly squatted down on his haunches as though condescending to a child.

“Don’t be afraid to talk to me,” he said in his easy, persuasive way. “I write stories for newspapers. I’m looking for a story now. If you’ll tell me your story I’ll give you ten dollars.”

Eris stared at him without comprehension. The increasing breeze blew her mop of chestnut curls upward from a brow as white as milk.

“Come,” he said in his pleasant voice, “there are ten perfectly good dollars in it for you. All I want of you is your story—not your real name, of course,—just a few plain facts explaining how you happen to be sleeping here in Central Park with your little satchel for your pillow and the sky for your bed-clothes.”

Eris remained motionless, one slender hand buried in the grass, the other resting against her temples. The blessed breeze began to winnow her hair again.

“Won’t you talk to me?” urged Annan. “You’re not afraid, are you?”

“I don’t know what to say to you?”

“Just tell me how you happen to be sleeping here in the Park to-night.”

“I have to save my money—” She yawned and concealed her lips with one hand.

“Please excuse me,” she murmured, “I haven’t slept very well.”

“Then you have some money?” he inquired.

“I have twenty dollars.... Money doesn’t last long in New York.”

“No, it doesn’t,” agreed Annan gravely. “Did you work in a shop?”

“In pictures.”

“Moving pictures?”

“Yes. I have a contract with the Crystal Films.”

“Oh, yes. I heard about that outfit. It blew up. Did they ever pay you any salary?”

“No.”

“How did you happen to hook up with that bunch of crooks?” he asked.

“I don’t think they are crooks. Mr. Quiss isn’t.”

“Who’s he?”

“Well—I think he looks up places to photograph—and he supplies extras——”

“A scout. Where did you run into him?”

“Near my home.”

“Did your parents permit you to join that flossy outfit?”

“No.”

“I see. You ran away.”

“I—went away.”

“Could you go home now if you wished to?”

“I don’t wish to.”

“Then you must believe that you really possess dramatic talent.”

Eris passed her fingers wearily through her hair: “I am trying to learn something,” she said, as though to herself. “I think I have talents.”

“What is it you most desire to be?”

“I like to act ... and dance.... I’d like to write a play ... or a book ... or something....”

“Like other people, you’re after fame and fortune. I’m chasing them, too. Everybody is. But the world’s goal remains the same, no matter what you are hunting. That goal is Happiness.”

She looked at him, heavy-eyed, silent. She yawned slightly, murmured an excuse, rubbed her eyes with her forefinger.

“Which is your principal object in life, fame or fortune?” he inquired, smiling.

“Are those the principal objects in life?” she asked, so naïvely that he suspected her.

“Some believe that love is more important,” he said. “Do you?”

She rested her pale cheek on her hand: “No,” she said.

“Then what is your principal object in life?” he asked, watching her intently.

“I think, more than anything, I desire education.”

His surprise was followed by further suspicion. Her reply sounded too naïve, too moral. He became wary of the latent actress in her.

She sat there huddled up, brooding, gazing into the darkness out of haunted eyes.

“Do you think an education is really worth this sort of hardship?” he asked.

That seemed to interest her. She replied:

“I think so.... I don’t know.”

“What are you trying to learn?”

“The truth ... about things.”

“Why don’t you go to school?”

“I’ve been through high-school.”

“Didn’t you learn the truth about things in high-school?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Where are you going to learn it then?”

She was plainly interested now:

“I think the only way is to find out for myself.... I don’t know anybody who can tell me reasons. I like to be told why. If I don’t know the facts about life how can I write plays and act them? I must find out. I’m twenty, and I know scarcely anything worth knowing. It is awful. It frightens me. I’m crazy to be somebody. I can’t be unless I learn the truth about things.

“There is nobody at home to tell me.... I couldn’t stand it any longer.... I had to find out for myself. Books don’t help. They excite.” She looked at him feverishly: “It is a terrible thing to want only facts,” she said. “Because nothing else satisfies.”

He thought, incredulously, “Where did she get that line?” He said: “A taste for Truth spoils one’s appetite for anything else.... So that’s what you’re after, is it? You’re after the truth about things.”

She did not reply.

He said, always watching her: “When you know the truth what are you going to do with it?”

“Act it. Write it.”

“Live it, too?” he inquired gravely.

She turned to look at him, not comprehending.

“Where are you going to get the money to do all this?” he asked lightly.

“It is going to be difficult—without money,” she admitted.

Something in the situation stirred a perverse sort of humour in him. He didn’t quite believe in her, as she revealed her complexities and her simplicities out of her own mouth.

“The love of money is the root of all good,” he remarked.

After a silence: “I wonder,” she said thoughtfully. “One needs it to do good ... perhaps to be good.... Nobody can tell, I suppose, what starvation might do to them.... Money is good.”

“All things are difficult without money,” he said, pursuing his perverse thesis. “The love of it is not the root of all evil. Money is often salvation. Lack of it fetters effort. Want of it retards fulfilment. Without it ambition is crippled. Aspiration remains a dream. Lacking a penny-worth of bread, Hamlet had never been written.... I think I’ll say as much in my next story.”

His was an easy and humorous tongue, facile and creative, too—it being his business to juggle nimbly with ideas and amuse an audience at so much a column.

Eris listened, unaware that he was poking fun at himself. Her shadowy eyes were intent on his in the starlight. The white, sharp contours of her face interested him. He was alert for any word or tone or gesture done for dramatic effect.

“So that’s your story, then,” he said in his gay, agreeable voice. “You are a little pilgrim of Minerva in quest of Wisdom, travelling afoot through the world with an empty wallet and no staff to comfort you.”

“I understand what you mean,” she said. “Minerva was goddess of Wisdom. We had mythology in high-school.”

He thought: “She’s a clever comedienne or an utter baby.” He said: “Is that really all there is to your story?”

“I have no story.”

“No ill-treatment at home to warrant your running away?”

“Oh, no.”

“Not even an unhappy love affair?”

She shook her head slightly as though embarrassed.

“How old are you?”

“Twenty in April.”

Annan was silent. He had not supposed her to be over seventeen. She had seemed little more than a child in the starlight when she sat up ruffling her bobbed hair in the first tepid breeze.

She said seriously: “I am growing old. And if I have talent I have no time to waste. That is why I went away at the first opportunity.”

“What are your talents?”

“I dance. I have acted in school plays. Once I wrote a one-act piece for myself. They liked it.”

“Go ahead and tell me about it.”

She told him how she had written the act and how she had sung and danced. Stimulated by the memory of her little success, she ventured to speak of her connection with the Crystal Films. Then, suddenly, the long-pent flood of trouble poured out of her lonely heart.

“I drove over to Summit,” she said, “where they had been shooting an exterior. Mr. Quiss introduced me to Mr. Donnell, the director. Mr. Donnell said that they were just leaving for Albany on location, and he couldn’t give me a test. So I went to Albany the next morning—I just packed my night-clothes and walked all the way to Gayfield to catch the six o’clock morning train. It was my first chance. I seemed to realise that. I took fifty dollars I had saved. I have spent thirty of it already.

“At Albany Mr. Donnell had a test made of me. It turned out well. He offered me a contract. I telephoned to my stepmother and told her what I had done. I explained that I needed money.... I have some money of my own. But my father wouldn’t let me have it. I wrote several times, but they only told me to come home. They wouldn’t let me have any money.

“Then, when the company arrived at the New York studio, Mr. Donnell seemed to be in trouble. We were not paid. I heard Mr. Quiss say that the principals had received no salary for a month. He said that Mr. Donnell had not been paid, either. The carpenters who were building sets refused to go on until they had their wages. Somebody cut off the electric current. Our dynamo stopped. We stood around all day. Somebody said that the bankers who owned the Crystal Films were in financial difficulties.

“Then, the next morning, when we reported for work at the studio, we found it locked. I was sorry for our company. Even the principals seemed to be in need of money. Mr. Quiss was very kind to me. He offered to pay my fare back home. But I wouldn’t go. Mr. Donnell offered to lend me ten dollars, but I told him I had twenty. He gave me a nice letter to the Elite Agency. Mr. Quiss promised to keep me in mind. But the agencies tell me that all the film companies are letting their people go this summer. I can’t seem to find any work. They tell me there won’t be any work until October.... I’m saving my twenty dollars. And I’m wondering what I shall find to do to keep busy until October.... Even if I could afford a room, I don’t need it. It is too hot in New York to sleep indoors.... I can wash my face and hands in the ladies’ room of any hotel. I give the maid five cents.... But I don’t know what to do for a bath. I must do something.... I shall hire a room for a day and wash myself and my clothes.... You see, twenty dollars doesn’t go very far in New York.... I wonder how far I can go on it.... Do you know what would be the very cheapest way to live on twenty dollars until October?”

After a silence Annan said: “I owe you ten for your story. That makes thirty dollars.”

“Oh. But I can’t take money from you!”

“Why?”

“I haven’t earned it. I had no story to tell you. I’ve only talked to you.”

Annan, sitting cross-legged on the grass, clasped his knees with both arms. He said, coolly:

“I offered you ten dollars for your story. That was too little to offer for such a story. It’s worth more.”

“Why, it isn’t worth anything,” she retorted. “I hadn’t any story to tell you. I shan’t let you give me money just because I’ve talked to you.”

“Can you guess how much I shall be paid by my newspaper for writing out this story you have told me?” he asked, smiling at her in the starlight.

She shook her head.

“Well, I won’t bother you with details; but your commission in this transaction will be considerable. Your commission will amount to a hundred dollars.”

She sat so rigid and unstirring that he leaned a little toward her to see her expression. It was flushed and hostile.

“Do you think I am joking?” he asked.

“I don’t know what you are doing.”

He said: “I’m not mean enough to make a joke of your predicament. I’m telling you very honestly that I can construct a first-rate short story out of the story you have just told me. I’m workman enough to do it. That’s my job.

“Every week I write a short story for the Sunday edition of the New York Planet. My stories have become popular. My name is becoming rather well known. I am now paid so well for my stories that I can afford to pay well for the idea you have given me. Your story is full of ideas, and it’s worth about a hundred dollars to me.”

“It isn’t worth a cent,” she said. “I don’t want you to offer me money.... Or anything....” She laid both hands against her forehead as though her head ached, and sat huddled up, elbows resting on her knees. Presently she yawned.

“Please excuse me,” she murmured, “I seem to be tired.”

There was a long silence. Annan turned his head to see if his friend Coltfoot still waited. Not discovering him, he inspected his watch. Surprised, he lit a match to make certain of the time; and discovered that he had been talking with this girl for more than an hour and a half.

He said to her in his pleasant, persuasive voice: “You’re not afraid of me, are you?”

She looked up, white and tired: “I’m not afraid of anybody.”

“Well, you’re not entirely right. However, if you’re not afraid of me, suppose I help you find a room to-night. You can afford a room now.”

She shook her head.

“You intend to stay here?”

“Yes, to-night.”

“You’d better not stay here with a hundred and twenty dollars in your pocket.”

“I shan’t take money from you.”

“Do you want me to lose five hundred dollars?”

“How?” she asked, bewildered by the sudden impatience in his voice.

“If I write the story I get six hundred. I won’t write it unless you take your commission.”

She said nothing.

“Come,” he said, almost sharply. “I’m not going to leave you here. You need a bath, anyway. You can’t get a good rest unless you have a bath.”

He sprang up from the grass, took her hand before she could withdraw it, and drew her forcibly to her feet.

“Maybe you’re twenty,” he said, “but some cop is likely to take you to the Arsenal as a lost child.”

She seemed so startled that he reassured her with a smile,—stooped to pick up her hat and satchel, still smiling.

“Come on, little pilgrim,” he said, “it’s two o’clock in the morning, and the Temple of Wisdom is closed. Bath and bed is your best bet.”

She pinned on her hat mechanically, smoothed her wrinkled dress. Then she looked up at him in a dazed way.

“Ready?” he asked gently.

“Yes. What do you want me to do?”

“Let’s go,” he said lightly, and took her by the hand again.

Slowly through starry darkness he guided her between prone shapes on the grass, and so along the asphalt, east, until the silvery lamps of Fifth Avenue stretched away before them in endless, level constellations.

He was beginning to wonder where to take her at such an hour. But to the sort of mind that was Annan’s, direct method and simple solution always appealed. He came to a swift conclusion,—came to it the more easily because it was an amusing one.

“You’re not afraid of me, you say?” he repeated.

She shook her head. “You seem kind.... Should I be?”

“Well, not in my case,” he said, laughing.... “We’ll take that taxi—” He hailed it, gave directions, and seated himself beside her, now keenly amused.

“Little pilgrim,” he said, “you’re going to have a good scrub, a good sleep in a good bed, and a jolly good breakfast when you wake up. What do you think of that!”

“I don’t know what to think.... I have found much kindness among strangers.”

He laughed and lighted a cigarette. The avenue was nearly deserted. At Forty-second Street the taxi swung west to Seventh Avenue, south, passing Twenty-third Street, west again through a maze of crooked old-time streets. It stopped, finally, before a two-story and basement house of red brick—one of many similar houses that lined both sides of a dark and very silent block.

Annan got out, paid his fare, took the little satchel, and handed Eris out.

“Is it a boarding house?” she asked.

“One lodges well here,” he replied carelessly.

They ascended the stoop; Annan used his latch-key, let her in, switched on the light.

“Come up,” he said briefly.

On the landing at the top of the stairs he switched on another light, opened a door, lighted a third bracket.

“Come in!”

Eris entered the bed-room. It was large. So was the bed, a four-poster. So was the furniture.

“Here’s your bath-room,” he remarked, opening a door into a white-tiled room. He stepped inside to be certain. There were plenty of towels, soap still in its wrapper, a row of bottles with flowers painted on them—evidently for masculine use—cologne, bay rum, witch hazel, hair-tonic.

“Now,” he said, “your worries are over until to-morrow. There’s your tub, there’s your bed, there’s a key in the door. Lock it when you turn in. And don’t you stir until they bring your breakfast in the morning.”

Eris nodded.

“All right. Good-night.”

She turned toward him as though still a little bewildered.

“Are you going?” she asked timidly.

“Yes. Is there anything you need?”

“No.... I would like to thank you—if you are going....”

“Little pilgrim,” he said, “I want to thank you for an interesting evening.”

He held out his hand; Eris laid hers in it.

“You needn’t tell me your name,” he said smilingly,—“unless you choose to.”

“Eris Odell.”

“Eris! Well, that’s rather classic, isn’t it? That’s an—unusual—name.... Eris. Suggests Mount Ida and golden apples, doesn’t it?—Or is it your stage name?”

Puzzled, smiling, he stood looking at her, still retaining her hand.

“No, it’s my name.”

“Well, then, my name is Barry Annan.... And I think it’s time we both got a little sleep....” He shook her slender hand formally, released it.

“Good-night, Eris,” he said. “Lock your door and go to sleep.”

“Good-night,” she replied in a tired, unsteady voice.

Annan walked through the corridor into the front bed-room and turned on his light.

He seemed to be much amused with the situation,—a little worried, too.

“She’ll get in Dutch if she doesn’t look out,” he thought as he went about his preparations for the night.... “A funny type.... Rather convincing.... Or a consummate actress.... But she’s most amusing anyway. Let’s see how she turns out.... She looks hungry.... What a little fool!... Now, you couldn’t put this over on the stage or in a story.... Your public is too wise. They don’t grow that kind of girl these days.... That’s romantic stuff and it won’t go with the wise guy.... You can’t pull a character like this girl on any New York audience. And yet, there she is—in there, scrubbing herself, if I can judge by the sound of running water.... No, she doesn’t exist.... And yet, there she is!... Only I’m too clever to believe in her.... There is no fool like a smart one.... That is why the Great American Ass is the greatest ass on earth....”

CHAPTER IX

MRS. SNIFFEN, who had looked after Annan for thirty years, found him bathed, shaved, and dressed, and busy writing when she brought him his breakfast tray.

“The gentleman in the other room, Mr. Barry—when is he to ’ave ’is breakfast?”

“It’s a lady, old dear.”

Mrs. Sniffen’s pointed nose went up with a jerk. He had been counting on that. He liked to see Mrs. Sniffen’s nose jerk upward.

“A pretty lady,” he added, “with bobbed hair. I met her accidentally about two o’clock this morning in Central Park.”

When the effect upon Mrs. Sniffen had sufficiently diverted him, he told her very briefly the story of Eris.

“I’m writing it now,” he added, grinning. “Sob-stuff, Xantippe. I’m going to make a little gem of it. It’ll be a heart-yanking tragedy—predestined woe from the beginning. That’s what they want to-day,—weeps. So I’m going to make ’em snivel.... Moral stuff, old dear. You’ll like it. Now, be nice to that girl in there when she wakes up——”

He put his arm around Mrs. Sniffen’s starched and angular shoulders as she indignantly placed his tray on the desk before him.

“Leave me be, Mr. Barry,” she said sharply.

Some of the parties given by Annan had been attended by what Mrs. Sniffen considered “hussies.” Annan gave various sorts of parties. Some were approved by Mrs. Sniffen, some she disapproved. Her sentiments made a chilling difference in her demeanour, not in her efficiency. She was a trained servant first of all. She had been in Annan’s family for forty years.

“Be kind to her,” repeated Annan, giving Mrs. Sniffen a pat and a hug. “She’s a good little girl.... Too good, perhaps, to survive long. She’s the sort of girl you read about in romance forty years ago. She’s a Drury Lane victim. They were all fools, you know. I couldn’t leave the suffering heroine of a Victorian novel out in the Park all night, could I, old dear?”

“It’s your ’ouse, Mr. Barry,” said Mrs. Sniffen grimly. “Don’t be trying to get around me with your imperent, easy ways——”

“I’m not trying to. When you see her and talk to her you’ll agree with me that she is as virtuous as she is beautiful. Of course,” he added, “virtue without beauty is unknown in polite fiction, and is to be severely discouraged.”

“You’re the master,” snapped Mrs. Sniffen. “I know my place. I ’ope others will know theirs—particularly minxes——”

“Now, Xantippe, don’t freeze the child stiff. I’m very sure she isn’t a minx——”

Mrs. Sniffen coldly laid down the law of suspects:

“I’ll know what she is when I see her.... There’s minxes and there’s ’ussies; and there’s sluts and scuts. And there’s them that walk in silk and them that wear h’aprons. And there’s them that would rather die where they lie than take bed and bread of a strange young gentleman who follows ’is fancy for a lark on a ’ot night in the Park. ’Ussies are ’ussies. And I’m not to be deceived at my time o’ life.”

Annan chipped an egg, undisturbed. “I know you, Xantippe,” he remarked. “You may not like some of the people who come here, but you’ll be nice to this girl.... Take her breakfast to her at ten-thirty; look her over; come in and report to me.”

“Very well, sir.”

Annan went on with his breakfast, leisurely. As he ate he read over his pencilled manuscript and corrected it between bites of muffin and bacon.

It was laid out on the lines of those modern short stories which had proven so popular and which had lifted Barry Annan out of the uniform ranks of the unidentified and given him an individual and approving audience for whatever he chose to offer them.

Already there had been lively competition among periodical publishers for the work of this new-comer.

His first volume of short stories was now in preparation. Repetition had stencilled his name and his photograph upon the public cerebrum. Success had not yet enraged the less successful in the literary puddle. The frogs chanted politely in praise of their own comrade.

The maiden, too, who sips the literary soup that seeps through the pages of periodical publications, was already requesting his autograph. Clipping agencies began to pursue him; film companies wasted his time with glittering offers that never materialised. Annan was on the way to premature fame and fortune. And to the aftermath that follows for all who win too easily and too soon.

There is a King Stork for all puddles. His law is the law of compensations. Dame Nature executes it—alike on species that swarm and on individuals that ripen too quickly.

Annan wrote very fast. There were about thirty-five hundred words in the story of Eris. He finished it by half-past ten.

Rereading it, he realised it had all the concentrated brilliancy of an epigram. Whether or not it would hold water did not bother him. The story of Eris was Barry Annan at his easiest and most persuasive. There was the characteristic and ungodly skill in it, the subtle partnership with a mindless public that seduces to mental speculation; the reassuring caress as reward for intellectual penetration; that inborn cleverness that makes the reader see, applaud, or pity him or herself in the sympathetic rôle of a plaything of Chance and Fate.

And always Barry Annan left the victim of his tact and technique agreeably trapped, suffering gratefully, excited by self-approval to the verge of sentimental tears.

“That’ll make ’em ruffle their plumage and gulp down a sob or two,” he reflected, his tongue in his cheek, a little intoxicated, as usual, by his own infernal facility.

He lit a cigarette, shuffled his manuscript, numbered the pages, and stuffed them into his pocket. The damned thing was done.

Walking to the window he looked out into Governor’s Place—one of those ancient and forgotten Greenwich streets, and now very still and deserted in the intense July sunshine.

Already the hazy morning threatened to be hotter than its humid predecessors. Nothing stirred in the street, not a cat, not an iceman, not even a sparrow.

Tall old trees, catalpa, maple, ailanthus,—remnants of those old-time double ranks that once lined both sidewalks,—spread solitary pools of shade over flagstone and asphalt. All else lay naked in the glare.

Mrs. Sniffen appeared, starched to the throat, crisp, unperspiring in her calico.

“She’s ’ad her breakfast, sir.”

“Oh! How is she feeling?”

“Could you lend her a bath-robe and slippers, sir?”

He smiled: “Has she concluded to stay here indefinitely?”

“Her clothes are in the tub, Mr. Barry.”

“In the bath-tub?”

“In the laundry tub.”

“Oh. So you’re going to do her laundry for her!”

“It’s no trouble, sir. I can ’ave them for her by early afternoon.”

“You’re a duck, Xantippe. You look after her. I’m going down-town to the office. Give her some lunch.”

“Very good, sir.”

He followed Mrs. Sniffen to the corridor, where his straw hat and malacca stick hung on a peg.

“Am I right, or is she a hussie?” he inquired, mischievously.

“She’s an idjit,” snapped Mrs. Sniffen. “Spanking is what she needs.”

“You give her one,” he suggested in guarded tones, glancing instinctively at the closed door beyond.

“Shall you be back to lunch, sir?”

He was descending the stairs, his story bulging in his coat pocket.

“No; but don’t let her go till I come back. I’m going to try to persuade her to go home to the pigs and cows.... And, Xantippe, there’ll be four to dinner. Eight o’clock will be all right.... I’d like a few flowers.”

“Very well, sir.”

Annan went out. The house had cooled during the night and the heat in the street struck him in the face.

“Hell,” he muttered, “isn’t there any end to this!”

There is no shabbier, dingier city in the world than New York in midsummer.

The metropolis seems to be inhabited by a race constitutionally untidy, indifferent to dirt, ignorant of beauty, of the elements of civic pride and duty.

For health and comfort alone, tree-shaded streets are a necessity; but in New York there is a strange hostility to trees. The few that survive mutilation by vandals,—animal and human,—are species that ought not to be planted in such a city.

A few miserable elms, distorted poplars, crippled maples, accentuate barren vistas. Lamp posts and fire boxes fill up the iron void, stark as the blasted woods of no-man’s land.

Annan found Coltfoot, the Sunday editor, in his undershirt, drops of sweat spangling the copy he was pencilling.

“You didn’t wait last night,” began Annan.

“What do you think I am!” growled Coltfoot “I need sleep if you don’t.” He picked up a cold cigar, relighted it.

“Do I get your ten or do you get mine?”

“There’s her story,” said Annan, tossing the manuscript onto the desk.

“Is it straight?”

“No, of course not. You yourself said that nothing really ever happens except in the human brain.”

“Then you hand me ten?”

“I found a news item and made a story of it. As the girl is still alive, I had to end my story by deduction.”

“What do you do, kill her off?”

“I do.”

“You and your morgue,” grunted Coltfoot. “—it’s a wonder your public stands for all the stiffs you bring in.... But they do.... They want more, too. It’s a murderous era. Fashion and taste have become necrological. But mortuary pleasures pass. Happy endings and bridal bells will come again. Then you tailors of Grubb Street will have to cut your shrouds according.”

He glanced at the first pencilled page, skimmed it, read the next sheet more slowly, lingered over the third—suddenly slapped the manuscript with open palm:

“All right. All right! You get away with murder, as usual.... Your stuff is dope. Anybody is an ass to try it. It’s habit-forming stuff. I don’t know now whether I owe you ten. I guess I do, don’t I?”

“We’ll have to wait and see what happens to her. If her story works out like my version of her story, you’ll owe me ten,” said Annan, laughing.

“What really happened last night after I left?” demanded Coltfoot.

Annan told him, briefly.

“What,” exclaimed the other, “is that tramp girl still in your house?”

“Yes, poor little devil. I’m going to ship her back to her native dairy this afternoon.... By the way, you’re dining with me, you know.”

Coltfoot nodded, pushed a button and dragged a bunch of copy toward him.

“Get out of here,” he said.

Annan lunched at the Pewter Mug, a club for clever professionals, where there were neither officers nor elections to membership, nor initiation fees, nor vouchers to sign.

Nobody seemed to know how it originated, how it was run, how members became members.

One paid cash for luncheon or dinner. The dues were fifty dollars yearly, dumped into a locked box in cash.

Of course, some one man managed the Pewter Mug. Several were suspected. But nobody in the large membership was certain of his identity.

Thither strolled Barry Annan after a scorching trip uptown. Wilted members drifted in to dawdle over cold dishes,—clever youngsters who had made individual splashes in their several puddles; professionals all,—players, writers, painters, composers, architects, engineers, physicians, sailors, soldiers,—the roll call represented all the creative and interpretive professions that America is heir to.

Annan’s left-hand neighbour at the long table was a boy officer whose aëroplane had landed successfully on Pike’s Peak, to the glory of the service and the star-spangled banner.

On his right a young man named Bruce ate cold lobster languidly. He was going to Newport to paint a great and formidable lady—“gild the tiger-lily,” as Annan suggested, to the horror of Mr. Bruce.

She had been a very great lady. Traditionally she was still a social power. But she had seen everything, done everything, and now, grown old and bad-tempered, she passed her declining days in making endless lists of people she did not want to know.

She was Annan’s great-aunt. She had never forgiven him for becoming a common public entertainer.

Once Annan wrote her: “I’ve a list of people you have overlooked and whom you certainly would not wish to know.”

Swallowing her dislike she wrote briefly requesting him to send her the list.

He sent her the New York Directory. The breach was complete.

“What can you offer me that I cannot offer myself?” Annan had inquired impudently, at their final interview.

“If you come out of that Greenwich gutter and behave as though you were not insane I can make you the most eligible young man in New York,” she had replied.

He preferred his “gutter,” and she washed her gem-laden hands of him.

But the curse clung to Barry Annan. “He’s a nephew of Mrs. Magnelius Grandcourt,” was still remembered against him when his name and his stories irritated the less successful among his confrères. The conclusion of the envious was that he had a “pull.”

Bruce rose to go—a dark, sleek young man, trimmed in Van Dyck fashion, with long, acquisitive fingers and something in his suave manner that suggested perpetual effort to please. But his eyes were opaque.

“Tell my aunt,” said Annan, “that if she’ll behave herself she can come and live a sporting life with me in Governor’s Place, and bring her cat, parrot, and geranium.”

Bruce’s shocked features were Annan’s reward. He grinned through the rest of luncheon; was still grinning when he left the Pewter Mug.

Outside he met Coltfoot, hot and without appetite.

“It’s ten degrees hotter down-town,” grunted the latter. “I’m empty, but the idea of food is repugnant. Where are you going, Barry?”

Annan had forgotten Eris. “I’m going to get out of town,” he said. “I think I’ll go out to Esperence and get some golf. We can be back by 7:30. Does it appeal to you, Mike?”

“It does, but I’m a business man, not a genius,” said Coltfoot, sarcastically. “Did you ship your tramp girl home?”

“Oh, Lord, I clean forgot her,” exclaimed Annan. “I’ve got to go back to Governor’s Place. I must get rid of her before dinner——”

He was already moving toward Sixth Avenue. He turned and called back, “Eight o’clock, Mike!”

“All set,” grunted Coltfoot.

An elevated train was Annan’s choice. Preoccupied with the problem of Eris, he arrived at No. 3 Governor’s Place before he had solved it. He didn’t want to hustle her out. He couldn’t have her there at eight o’clock.

Letting himself into the little brick house with a latch-key, he glanced along the corridor that led into the dining-room, and saw Mrs. Sniffen in the butler’s pantry beyond.

“Hello, Xantippe,” he said; “how’s the minx?”

Mrs. Sniffen placed a cup of hot clam broth upon a tray.

“Mr. Barry,” she said in an oddly altered voice, “that child is sick. She couldn’t keep her breakfast down.”

“For heaven’s sake——”

“I made her some broth for luncheon. No use at all. She couldn’t keep it.”

“What do you suppose is the matter with her?” he demanded nervously.

“Starvation. That’s my idea, sir. She’s that bony, Mr. Barry—no flesh on ’er except ’er ’ands and face,—and every rib to be seen plain as my nose!”

“You think she hasn’t had enough to eat?”

“That, and the stuff she did eat—and what with walking the streets in this ’eat and sleeping out in the Park——”

Mrs. Sniffen hauled up the dumb-waiter and lifted off a covered dish.

“Toasted biscuit,” she explained. “She can’t a-bear anything ’earty, Mr. Barry.”

“Well,” he said, troubled, “what are we going to do with her?”

“That’s for you to say, sir. You brought ’er ’ere.”

He looked at Mrs. Sniffen and thought he detected a glimmer of satisfaction at his predicament.

“Where is she?” he asked.

“In bed, sir. She wants to dress and go away but I wouldn’t ’ave it, Mr. Barry. Ambulance and ’ospital—that’s what would ’appen next. And I ’ad a time with her, Mr. Barry. She said she was in the way and didn’t want to give trouble. Hup she must get and h’off to the streets—But I ’ad ’er clothes I did, soaking in my tubs.... I let ’er cry. I don’t say it ’urt ’er, either. It ’elped, according to my way of thinking.”

“She can’t go if she’s ill,” he said; and looked at Mrs. Sniffen rather helplessly: “Do you think I’d better call in a doctor?”

“No, sir. I don’t mind looking out for her. A little care is all she needs.”

After a moment’s frowning reflection: “It will be awkward to-night,” he suggested.

Mrs. Sniffen’s nose went up: “The ladies will ’ave to powder their faces in your room, Mr. Barry, and keep their ’ands off the piano.”

He scowled at the prospect, then: “Here, give me that tray. I’ll feed her myself.”

He went upstairs with the tray, knocked at the closed door.

“Tuck yourself in,” he called to her. “I’ve come to nourish you. All set?”

After a few moments: “Yes,” she said calmly.

He went in. She sat huddled up in bed, swathed to the throat in a blue crash bath-robe.

“Well”, he exclaimed gaily, “I hear unruly reports about you. What do you mean by demanding to get up and beat it?”

“I can’t expect you to keep me here, Mr. Annan. I’ve been so much trouble already——”

“This is clam broth. I think you can keep it down. Sip it slowly. There are toasted crackers, too——”

He placed the tray on her knees.

“Now,” he said, encouragingly, “be a sport!”

“I’ll try.”

The process of absorption was a slow one. She was very pale, and there were dark smears under her eyes. Her bobbed chestnut hair accented the slender purity of face and neck. Her hands seemed plump, but the bath-robe sleeve revealed a wrist and fore-arm much too thin.

“How does it feel?” he inquired, when the cup was empty.

Eris flushed. He saw that it embarrassed her to discuss bodily ills with him. Memory of her morning sickness deepened the painful tint in her cheeks:

“I don’t know—know what to say to you,—I am so ashamed,” she faltered.

“Eris!” he interrupted sharply.

She looked up, startled, her grey eyes brilliant with unshed tears, and saw the boyish grin on his face.