Peter was shaving for the evening. His sister was giving a dinner party for two of her husband’s fellow bankers and their wives. After that they were going to see the latest Belasco production, and from there to some one of the new dancing “clubs,”—the smart cabarets that were forced to organize in the guise of private enterprises to evade the two o’clock closing law. Peter enjoyed dancing, but he did not as a usual thing enjoy bankers’ wives. He was deliberating on the possibility of excusing himself gracefully after the theater, on the plea of having some work to do, and finally decided that his sister’s feelings would be hurt if she realized he was trying to escape the climax of the hospitality she had provided so carefully.

He gazed at himself intently over the drifts of lather and twisted his shaving mirror to the most propitious angle from time to time. In the room across the hall—Eleanor’s room, he always called 220 it to himself—his young niece was singing bits of the Mascagni intermezzo interspersed with bits of the latest musical comedy, in a rather uncertain contralto.

“My last girl came from Vassar, and I don’t know where to class her.”

Peter’s mind took up the refrain automatically. “My last girl—” and began at the beginning of the chorus again. “My last girl came from Vassar,” which brought him by natural stages to the consideration of the higher education and of Beulah, and a conversation concerning her that he had had with Jimmie and David the night before.

“She’s off her nut,” Jimmie said succinctly. “It’s not exactly that there’s nobody home,” he rapped his curly pate significantly, “but there’s too much of a crowd there. She’s not the same old girl at all. She used to be a good fellow, high-brow propaganda and all. Now she’s got nothing else in her head. What’s happened to her?”

“It’s what hasn’t happened to her that’s addled her,” David explained. “It’s these highly charged, hypersensitive young women that go to pieces under the modern pressure. They’re the ones that need licking into shape by all the natural processes.” 221

“By which you mean a drunken husband and a howling family?” Jimmie suggested.

“Yes, or its polite equivalent.”

“That is true, isn’t it?” Peter said. “Feminism isn’t the answer to Beulah’s problem.”

“It is the problem,” David said; “she’s poisoning herself with it. I know what I’m talking about. I’ve seen it happen. My cousin Jack married a girl with a sister a great deal like Beulah, looks, temperament, and everything else, though she wasn’t half so nice. She got going the militant pace and couldn’t stop herself. I never met her at a dinner party that she wasn’t tackling somebody on the subject of man’s inhumanity to woman. She ended in a sanitorium; in fact, they’re thinking now of taking her to the—”

“—bug house,” Jimmie finished cheerfully.

“And in the beginning she was a perfectly good girl that needed nothing in the world but a chance to develop along legitimate lines.”

“The frustrate matron, eh?” Peter said.

“The frustrate matron,” David agreed gravely. “I wonder you haven’t realized this yourself, Gram. You’re keener about such things than I am. Beulah is more your job than mine.” 222

“Is she?”

“You’re the only one she listens to or looks up to. Go up and tackle her some day and see what you can do. She’s sinking fast.”

“Give her the once over and throw out the lifeline,” Jimmie said.

“I thought all this stuff was a phase, a part of her taking herself seriously as she always has. I had no idea it was anything to worry about,” Peter persisted. “Are you sure she’s in bad shape—that she’s got anything more than a bad attack of Feminism of the Species in its most virulent form? They come out of that, you know.”

“She’s batty,” Jimmie nodded gravely. “Dave’s got the right dope.”

“Go up and look her over,” David persisted; “you’ll see what we mean, then. Beulah’s in a bad way.”

Peter reviewed this conversation while he shaved the right side of his face, and frowned prodigiously through the lather. He wished that he had an engagement that evening that he could break in order to get to see Beulah at once, and discover for himself the harm that had come to his friend. He was devoted to Beulah. He had always felt 223 that he saw a little more clearly than the others the virtue that was in the girl. He admired the pluck with which she made her attack on life and the energy with which she accomplished her ends. There was to him something alluring and quaint about her earnestness. The fact that her soundness could be questioned came to him with something like a shock. As soon as he was dressed he was called to the telephone to talk to David.

“Margaret has just told me that Doctor Penrose has been up to see Beulah and pronounces it a case of nervous breakdown. He wants her to try out psycho-analysis, and that sort of thing. He seems to feel that it’s serious. Margaret is fearfully upset, poor girl. So’m I, to tell the truth.”

“And so am I,” Peter acknowledged to himself as he hung up the receiver. He was so absorbed during the evening that one of the ladies—the wife of the fat banker—found him extremely dull and decided against asking him to dinner with his sister. The wife of the thin banker, who was in his charge at the theater, got the benefit of his effort to rouse himself and grace the occasion creditably, and found him delightful. By the time the evening was over he had decided that Beulah should be 224 pulled out of whatever dim world of dismay and delusion she might be wandering in, at whatever cost. It was unthinkable that she should be wasted, or that her youth and splendid vitality should go for naught.

He found her eager to talk to him the next night when he went to see her.

“Peter,” she said, “I want you to go to my aunt and my mother, and tell them that I’ve got to go on with my work,—that I can’t be stopped and interrupted by this foolishness of doctors and nurses. I never felt better in my life, except for not being able to sleep, and I think that is due to the way they have worried me. I live in a world they don’t know anything about, that’s all. Even if they were right, if I am wearing myself out soul and body for the sake of the cause, what business is it of theirs to interfere? I’m working for the souls and bodies of women for ages to come. What difference does it make if my soul and body suffer? Why shouldn’t they?” Her eyes narrowed. Peter observed the unnatural light in them, the apparent dryness of her lips, the two bright spots burning below her cheek-bones.

“Because,” he answered her slowly, “I don’t 225 think it was the original intention of Him who put us here that we should sacrifice everything we are to the business of emphasizing the superiority of a sex.”

“That isn’t the point at all, Peter. No man understands, no man can understand. It’s woman’s equality we want emphasized, just literally that and nothing more. You’ve pauperized and degraded us long enough—”

“Thou canst not say I—” Peter began.

“Yes, you and every other man, every man in the world is a party to it.”

“I had to get her going,” Peter apologized to himself, “in order to get a point of departure. Not if I vote for women, Beulah, dear,” he added aloud.

“If you throw your influence with us instead of against us,” she conceded, “you’re helping to right the wrong that you have permitted for so long.”

“Well, granting your premise, granting all your premises, Beulah—and I admit that most of them have sound reasoning behind them—your battle now is all over but the shouting. There’s no reason that you personally should sacrifice your last drop of energy to a campaign that’s practically won already.” 226

“If you think the mere franchise is all I have been working for, Peter,—”

“I don’t. I know the thousand and one activities you women are concerned with. I know how much better church and state always have been and are bound to be, when the women get behind and push, if they throw their strength right.”

Beulah rose enthusiastically to this bait and talked rationally and well for some time. Just as Peter was beginning to feel that David and Jimmie had been guilty of the most unsympathetic exaggeration of her state of mind—unquestionably she was not as fit physically as usual—she startled him with an abrupt change into almost hysterical incoherence.

“I have a right to live my own life,” she concluded, “and nobody—nobody shall stop me.”

“We are all living our own lives, aren’t we?” Peter asked mildly.

“No woman lives her own life to-day,” Beulah cried, still excitedly. “Every woman is living the life of some man, who has the legal right to treat her as an imbecile.”

“Hold on, Beulah. How about the suffrage states, how about the women who are already in 227 the proud possession of their rights and privileges? They are not technical imbeciles any longer according to your theory. The vote’s coming. Every woman will be a super-woman in two shakes,—so what’s devouring you, as Jimmie says?”

“It’s after all the states have suffrage that the big fight will really begin,” Beulah answered wearily. “It’s the habit of wearing the yoke we’ll have to fight then.”

“The anti-feminists,” Peter said, “I see. Beulah, can’t you give yourself any rest, or is the nature of the cause actually suicidal?”

To his surprise her tense face quivered at this and she tried to steady a tremulous lower lip.

“I am tired,” she said, a little piteously, “dreadfully tired, but nobody cares.”

“Is that fair?”

“It’s true.”

“Your friends care.”

“They only want to stop me doing something they have no sympathy with. What do Gertrude and Margaret know of the real purpose of my life or my failure or success? They take a sentimental interest in my health, that’s all. Do you suppose it made any difference to Jeanne d’Arc how many 228 people took a sympathetic interest in her health if they didn’t believe in what she believed in?”

“There’s something in that.”

“I thought Eleanor would grow up to take an interest in the position of women, and to care about the things I cared about, but she’s not going to.”

“She’s very fond of you.”

“Not as fond as she is of Margaret.”

Peter longed to dispute this, but he could not in honesty.

“She’s a suffragist.”

“She’s so lukewarm she might just as well be an anti. She’s naturally reactionary. Women like that aren’t much use. They drag us back like so much dead weight.”

“I suppose Eleanor has been a disappointment to you,” Peter mused, “but she tries pretty hard to be all things to all parents, Beulah. You’ll find she won’t fail you if you need her.”

“I shan’t need her,” Beulah said, prophetically. “I hoped she’d stand beside me in the work, but she’s not that kind. She’ll marry early and have a family, and that will be the end of her.”

“I wonder if she will,” Peter said, “I hope so. 229 She still seems such a child to me. I believe in marriage, Beulah, don’t you?”

Her answer surprised him.

“Under certain conditions, I do. I made a vow once that I would never marry and I’ve always believed that it would be hampering and limiting to a woman, but now I see that the fight has got to go on. If there are going to be women to carry on the fight they will have to be born of the women who are fighting to-day.”

“Thank God,” Peter said devoutly. “It doesn’t make any difference why you believe it, if you do believe it.”

“It makes all the difference,” Beulah said, but her voice softened. “What I believe is more to me than anything else in the world, Peter.”

“That’s all right, too. I understand your point of view, Beulah. You carry it a little bit too far, that’s all that’s wrong with it from my way of thinking.”

“Will you help me to go on, Peter?”

“How?”

“Talk to my aunt and my mother. Tell them that they’re all wrong in their treatment of me.” 230

“I think I could undertake to do that”—Peter was convinced that a less antagonistic attitude on the part of her relatives would be more successful—“and I will.”

Beulah’s eyes filled with tears.

“You’re the only one who comes anywhere near knowing,” she said, “or who ever will, I guess. I try so hard, Peter, and now when I don’t seem to be accomplishing as much as I want to, as much as it’s necessary for me to accomplish if I am to go on respecting myself, every one enters into a conspiracy to stop my doing anything at all. The only thing that makes me nervous is the way I am thwarted and opposed at every turn. I haven’t got nervous prostration.”

“Perhaps not, but you have something remarkably like ideÊ fixe,” Peter said to himself compassionately.

He found her actual condition less dangerous but much more difficult than he had anticipated. She was living wrong, that was the sum and substance of her malady. Her life was spent confronting theories and discounting conditions. She did not realize that it is only the interest of our investment in life that we can sanely contribute to 231 the cause of living. Our capital strength and energy must be used for the struggle for existence itself if we are to have a world of balanced individuals. There is an arrogance involved in assuming ourselves more humane than human that reacts insidiously on our health and morals. Peter, looking into the twitching hectic face before him with the telltale glint of mania in the eyes, felt himself becoming helpless with pity for a mind gone so far askew. He felt curiously responsible for Beulah’s condition.

“She wouldn’t have run herself so far aground,” he thought, “if I had been on the job a little more. I could have helped her to steer straighter. A word here and a lift there and she would have come through all right. Now something’s got to stop her or she can’t be stopped. She’ll preach once too often out of the tail of a cart on the subject of equal guardianship,—and—”

Beulah put her hands to her face suddenly, and, sinking back into the depths of the big cushioned chair on the edge of which she had been tensely poised during most of the conversation, burst into tears.

“You’re the only one that knows,” she sobbed 232 over and over again. “I’m so tired, Peter, but I’ve got to go on and on and on. If they stop me, I’ll kill myself.”

Peter crossed the room to her side and sat down on her chair-arm.

“Don’t cry, dear,” he said, with a hand on her head. “You’re too tired to think things out now,—but I’ll help you.”

She lifted a piteous face, for the moment so startlingly like that of the dead girl he had loved that his senses were confused by the resemblance.

“How, Peter?” she asked. “How can you help me?”

“I think I see the way,” he said slowly.

He slipped to his knees and gathered her close in his arms.

“I think this will be the way, dear,” he said very gently.

“Does this mean that you want me to marry you?” she whispered, when she was calmer.

“If you will, dear,” he said. “Will you?”

“I will,—if I can, if I can make it seem right to after I’ve thought it all out.—Oh! Peter, I love you. I love you.”

“I had no idea of that,” he said gravely, “but 233 it’s wonderful that you do. I’ll put everything I’ve got into trying to make you happy, Beulah.”

“I know you will, Peter.” Her arms closed around his neck and tightened there. “I love you.”

He made her comfortable and she relaxed like a tired child, almost asleep under his soothing hand, and the quiet spell of his tenderness.

“I didn’t know it could be like this,” she whispered.

“But it can,” he answered her.

In his heart he was saying, “This is best. I am sure this is best. It is the right and normal way for her—and for me.”

In her tri-cornered dormitory room at the new school which she was not sharing with any one this year Eleanor, enveloped in a big brown and yellow wadded bathrobe, was writing a letter to Peter. Her hair hung in two golden brown braids over her shoulders and her pure profile was bent intently over the paper. At the moment when Beulah made her confession of love and closed her eyes against the breast of the man who had just asked her to marry him, two big tears forced their way between Eleanor’s lids and splashed down upon her letter.