CHAPTER I.

GERTRUDE Warrener was twenty-five years old on the day she went into the back library and, seated in a rocking chair, a newspaper and a box of candy-kitchen chocolates in her lap—began to live.

Hitherto the boundaries of her lifeline had been limited by a wooden fence circling a few feet of coarse grass and two frame houses like her own. To the rear, in the yard, four poles formed a square with peculiar precision, and on washdays the level lines of a cord, stretching cat’s-cradle-wise, supported the household laundry.

She had taken for eight years the front rooms of the house for her point of vantage, and when she had mentally stated “Mrs. Felter’s just gone into the Perches’,” or “Pearl Exeter does her marketing in the afternoons instead of the mornings,” she had nothing further to say. One day she caught herself in the middle of some such banal reflection, and, going to the back of the house, took her place in the window of a microscopic library.

Gertrude Warrener did not remotely dream that she on this day passed the Rubicon lying between existence and life.

When the mind is sensible of inertia—the eyes catch sight of living forms, and the soul yearns toward something which it has not—it may be taken for granted that a life-breath has blown over the valley of dead bones.

In the case of Gertrude Warrener, it was indeed a tomb in which she awakened, and she did not know that she had been immured.

In her seventeenth year, George Warrener, just received into a subordinate position in a New York banking and broking firm, began to pay her his bashful attentions. With no spoken words on his part that she could remember—nor could he for the life of him have recalled the formula—there was an engagement. She married him before her eighteenth birthday.

As she sat in the library, all image of the youthful lover was completely effaced from her mind. He was now like hundreds and dozens of other middle-rank business men. Of medium height, stocky, his hair and short, stubby mustache nondescript, his eyes blue, wide apart and rather small, he was a successful type and entirely sacrificed as an individual. He often said:

“I look like a prosperous Wall Street man, and that is as near as I shall ever come to it—to look like it.”

But in spite of his dapper appearance, Warrener was an overworked drudge. He worked so hard and so long, his daily trips on unhealthy ferries and hot cars sapped his vitality to such an extent, that all his life had been spent and lived by the time he crossed at night the threshold of his home.

Gertrude in the little library opened the pages of the Slocum Daily slowly. She read the town gossip, a local weather prediction, an account of the hospital fair; and as she rocked and ate one after the other the chocolate marshmallows she had a feeling of freedom, whose cause was due simply to the fact that she had changed her point of view—due to the humble novelty of her transposition.

George’s library smelled of stale tobacco. She had sensitive nostrils, and was beginning to find the dead odor unpleasant, when at this point she fell upon an item in the Slocum Daily which held her attention:

We are glad to learn that the McAllister homestead has been opened. After the long absence in Europe of the family, Mr. and Mrs. Bellamy have returned, and Slocum welcomes them back with much pleasure.

“Slocum!” She spoke aloud, and there was scorn in her tone. “Well, I guess they’ll laugh at that. I don’t believe they care for the Daily!”

Old Mrs. McAllister at once took form for her. She had come to their wedding, and Gertrude remembered her as tall, and that her dress and hat became her. The young, light-minded bride had remarked the difference between this guest and other Slocumites.

Kept in state on the buffet downstairs was a silver pitcher, the sole real silver in the house. Mrs. McAllister had sent it to the Warreners as a wedding present.

Gertrude got up and went out in the hall. “Eliza!”

“Yes, ma’am.” The maid of all work appeared at the foot of the back stairs.

“Say—just go and get that silver pitcher off the dining-room buffet and clean it. I guess it hasn’t been cleaned for three years.”

The maid looked at her in astonishment. “Why, we haven’t got a mite of cleaning powder in the house, Mrs. Warrener!”

Mrs. Warrener came slowly down the stairs herself, and, going to the dining-room buffet, looked at her wedding gift—or what she could see of it through a thick layer of dirt and discoloration. Then she carried it to the bathroom, and, with nail brush and tooth powder, shone it up as well as she could. It was a tribute of welcome to the return of the Bellamys.

CHAPTER II.

After a week or so of the new atmosphere of the tiny library she summed up her life as follows, and was able to state that the routine of her days never varied: She rose at seven and dressed. George’s train went at eight, and she sat with him at table through a breakfast of hot bread, meat, potatoes and coffee. Then her husband put on his coat and hat and took his leave without even bidding her good-by. She felt lonely when the butcher and the grocer had gone. When she had given her directions to Eliza, it was never more than ten o’clock. In days past she had been used to walk out to the library and get a book, or wander into a neighbor’s “and sit a while,” but of late there commenced from the early morning a period of rocking and reading in the library. In the evening George returned from New York only in time to come to the table without the formality of washing his hands.

These were her interests. Too timid to go to Town Club meetings, too simple-minded to be of any great importance in the different Slocum circles, she kept to herself. Her sole interest would naturally be her husband; him she saw from seven P.M. to seven A.M.; or, rather, she slept beside him during these hours—for directly after dinner he would throw himself down on the lounge in his library and smoke and read till at nine o’clock she roused him and sent him to bed in their common bedroom, in their common bed.

George, tired and devitalized by his strenuous life, absorbed by his own and his employer’s affairs, fell asleep at once. But his companion, more alive than she knew, would lie awake until long past midnight, her body unfatigued, her mind restless, her wakeful eyes staring into the dark which had for her no emotion and no mystery.

One afternoon she found she had read through a whole book without stopping, and for the first time in her life had been absorbed. She got up and turned off the steam heat and opened the window.

“It must be ninety here with these radiators! You either freeze or stew.”

The air came in bluffly, its unfriendly edges met her cheeks; before they could be refreshed she was cold in her thin muslin shirt-waist.

She had risen in expression of a sudden need of air, a sudden sense of suffocation, but she thought only that she was “nervous,” and would go out and take a walk. A little later, a golf cape over a short coat of material known as “covert”—short-skirted, a gray felt hat on her head—Mrs. George Warrener was seen by her neighbors to be going “uptown.”

Not until she had left the village, keeping steady pace up the hill toward the Golf Club, did she feel that she had “let off steam.” The quick motion set free the tension of her nerves, and she almost forgot the acute sensation that drove her from the house. At the golf links she approached the course and stood by the fence, near to one of the last bunkers.

The field was sparsely dotted with the golfers. A red dash in the distance, a green dash, indicated the players who bent in bright sweaters over their sticks. Two men came across the ground close to her—strangers—she saw that instantly, and regarded them with the curiosity of a resident. The man who was playing, his club swung over his shoulder, his driver in his hand, was short and stout, with smooth, red cheeks and bright eyes under shaggy brows. His shoes were large and heavy, his golf stockings thick, and his fustian clothes rough and well made. His companion, a younger man in a loose-sleeved overcoat, had a soft felt hat on his head and a lighted cigar in his hand. The older man said to him, laughing:

“There you are, old man! If you’re really caddying for me, you’ll have to ferret the ball out of that ditch by the fence. I saw it roll down.”

The other lazily nodded, took a puff at his cigar and came over in the direction indicated. Mrs. Warrener leaned on the fence watching the gentleman, who poked about in the grass with his cane.

“Let me give you a fresh ball out of my pocket; I’ve got three left,” he called.

The older man laughed. “Oh, go on, look for it; it’s right under your nose. You’ve given me a ‘fresh ball out of your pocket’ every time one has rolled fifteen yards!”

Mrs. Warrener stooped down; she saw the golf ball on the other side of the fence. She put her hand under through the railing and picked it up; she handed it to the gentleman.

“I think this is your ball.”

He took it with a swift, quick look at her, lifted his hat with cane and cigar in the same hand and thanked her. Taking the ball, he returned to his friend.

Mrs. Warrener watched the older gentleman prepare to drive—then the two men follow the direction indicated by the sharp, momentary flight of the little white ball, the golfer tripping briskly along, the other dark figure following slowly. She had never seen either of them before; who were they? The distant rattle of an incoming train—the one before her husband’s—warned her of the time. She would barely reach home before George came in. “Although,” she reflected, “I may just as well be late, for all he will notice, he is so tired, anyway.”

She walked, nevertheless, mechanically toward home, so slowly that when she reached the village street George’s train had been in some time.

At this time of night a little crowd was gathered, as a rule, for the trolley, and Mrs. Warrener decided to take the car and anticipate her husband’s arrival by several minutes.

While she stood with the others who waited, the strangers of the Golf Club joined the crowd. As the car appeared the gentleman in the black coat helped her in and sat opposite her. When he threw back his coat to get out his fare from his pocket, she observed that he wore a gray waistcoat of soft material—it looked as though it were “knit,” she thought, or “worked”—a bright red tie and—unusual elegance among the men of Slocum—gloves—gray gloves, as soft in color as his waistcoat. Very much struck by his dress, she ventured, with a certain timidity, to look him in the face. The vivid color of his cravat made him seem very dark; all she could observe was a dark face, dark mustache and eyes, for he was looking at her, and she met his eyes directly. Their interested curiosity rendered her uncomfortable, and she removed her glance, which traveled down the line of colorless passengers, tired men in dusty, careless dress; unbrushed derbys, linen far from immaculate, gloveless hands. Each man had his bunch of evening papers, some carried parcels from the city for suburban use. A woman she knew, an inveterate shopper, nodded brightly to her.

“Been in New York all day. Just too tired. Never saw such a crowd in the stores; why, I thought I never would get waited on. Say——” There was a vacant seat by Mrs. Warrener, and the lady came over and took it, continuing a description of bargains, and a tirade against crowds. “Been up this week, Gert?”

“No, I hardly ever go in.”

“Well, it’s a change, but I always say when we get to Slocum I’m glad I don’t live in New York, it’s so wearing. Been up to the Golf Club?”

“Yes, but not to play.”

The conversationalist was conscious of a change in her well-known neighbor’s tone, an accent, just what it was she could not imagine, but it was sufficiently marked to give her food for thought.

As Mrs. Warrener left the car at her corner, Mrs. Turnbull puzzled over her. Perhaps she was offended with her? But she had no reason for such an idea! Perhaps George Warrener was losing money? As money to the unsentimental, commercial American mind is the source of all bliss and the cause of all unhappiness, the slide down which all spirits fall and the height to which they rise, she reached a sad conclusion in this, and dropped her wonderings.

Warrener and his wife arrived at the same moment on the steps of their two-story frame house.

“Well!” he said. He took out his latchkey and entered the door. The hall was hot and full of the smell of roasting meat and soup herbs. The dinner puffed out to meet the diners with damp, pungent warmth. George put his batch of papers down on the hall stand.

“Well,” he repeated, absently, took off his dusty derby, hung it up and got out of his overcoat.

He looked for no response to his greeting. Mrs. Warrener understood this, and made none.

Warrener went upstairs to his study.

“Gracious, Gert, some one’s left the window open in my den! It’s like ice here!”

“It’ll get hot enough. Turn on the steam.”

Mrs. Warrener followed her husband upstairs into the cold little room. The smell of stale smoke seemed to have frozen on the air, but over it the smell of the cigar the gentleman had smoked, a peculiar aroma, as new to her, as delicious, as would have been a priceless perfume, came to her nostrils. She went to her chair where she had sat for hours reading, and picked up her book, which she kept in her hand.

“What have you been doing all day, Gert?” he asked at dinner, after he had eaten his tepid soup and drunk an entire glass of ice water.

“Oh, I don’t know—nothing much.”

“Nothin’ doin’? Well, you are in luck! I feel as if something was doin’ in every inch of my body. I’m tired out. Harkweather kept the clerks down to-night—they won’t get out before nine o’clock; but I said ‘not tonight for me. I’m goin’ home.’ And I’m goin’ right to bed. I guess I’ll sleep twelve hours, all right!”

As they went upstairs, he first and she slowly following, she suggested:

“How would you like me to sleep in the spare room, if you’re so tired?”

“Why?” he asked, jocularly. “Do I snore so?”

“Yes, but that’s not it. It may feel good to have the whole bed to yourself.”

“Well, I believe it would.”

In the spare room, close to the springs, on a narrow, single bed, Mrs. Warrener crept alone. She drew the adjusting electric light close to her and took her book up again to re-read, her elbow in the pillow and her cheek on her hand. She followed the printed lines with dawning interest on her face, and a growing intelligence, until all of a sudden the dead stillness of the hour and time struck her. The fireless room—for there was no steam heat in it—gave her a chill. She put out the light and drew the coverlet about her and settled down to sleep.

CHAPTER III.

The business interest of which George Warrener formed a humble part had no picturesque traditions. Like everything else in New York, the corporation had even during Warrener’s time boasted several different addresses. When especial advantages presented themselves in the shape of higher buildings and higher rent, Harkweather & Fulsome moved. The unstableness, the constant transition, had an effect upon him which he did not appreciate. Warrener, with his firm, was restless; and restless with his eighty million fellow Americans.

Harkweather & Fulsome’s last move had been to a twenty-two-floored steel structure, from whose tenth story were visible the roofs of the buildings not yet razed to make room for other giant office honeycombs. Money, at Harkweather & Fulsome’s, superseded everything else in the world, extinguished the lights of pleasure, destroyed even the capacity to enjoy. Everything else was crowded out of the question. Harkweather & Fulsome were “strictly business,” strictly getters of wealth; and they squeezed dry every sponge that came to their hands.

Warrener, in the office, had drifted into the position of confidential clerk, very much used when wanted, and shifted off into a little, stuffy room, where he had a desk and typewriter, when his services were not in active demand. Here he copied, filed and noted; added, opened and docketed mail; and read the financial news in every available sheet in the city. To his own thinking, he was an authority on stocks and bonds. He heard innumerable tips thrown out; saw them acted upon, and prove either valuable or worthless; followed the rise and fall of fortunes near and far; assisted at failures and successes; and during the hours of his routine in the office had the sensation of being himself a millionaire! But when he left the ferry, the bondholders and “big men” hurried to their more important trains and more important stations, and Warrener hustled himself, with his evening papers, into the short train of the Slocum local, he then distinctly felt the difference between his bank balance and his chief’s! He lived in the atmosphere of money, but he had never been ambitious. Of average intelligence, common school education, steady-going and trustworthy, he had no intentions further than to pay his bills, earn his salary and keep at the business.

Were he asked what part of his life he recalled with most pleasure he would have unhesitatingly answered: “Getting engaged and going on our honeymoon.” The sentimental period—which had come into his unimaginative life with the imperiousness of that passion which at least once during a man’s life changes his existence for a time, short or long—had for Warrener left behind it a memory which the cares of the world, the moth and rust of vulgar routine, trains and ferries, quick lunches and elevators, common surroundings and abasing ideals, overlaid but never destroyed.

Eight years before he had asked the prettiest girl he knew to marry him, and she had said yes. His vacation falling at this time, they had spent two weeks in August at Far Rockaway, and from there went directly into the rented house on Grand Street, and the newly married man began his bi-daily pilgrimages on the train.

He would have been ashamed to have anyone, above all his wife, know that as he crossed the ferry, one of a thick-packed crowd on the front part of the boat, standing there close to the running waters, near the bow, he often gave himself a mental holiday; then the image of Gertrude in a pinkish dress and picture hat came to his mind as he had seen her on the boardwalk at Rockaway eight years ago. It was a species of revel for him to recall those days. He was not unhappy or even discontented; he was too commonplace to be capable of either sensation. He was numbed, pinched hard by life.

“I am indispensable to Mr. Harkweather,” he repeated, with pride, and passed the time with his hand on other people’s grindstones, all the gold dust flying into other people’s bags.

CHAPTER IV.

One especial Sunday he awakened after a refreshing sleep, stretched his arms and yawned aloud, then lay pleasantly conscious of the well-being of his condition—half asleep still, and it was far into the morning! Belowstairs he could hear the heavy footsteps of Eliza, and fancied the early presage of dinner. Warrener listened, knowing he should soon hear another footstep lighter than that of the maid-of-all-work.

“Gert!”

Mrs. Warrener came in.

“It’s twelve o’clock,” she said, “and you’ll just about have time to get up, take your bath and dress for dinner.”

“All right,” he responded, cheerfully, but did not move. Instead, putting his hands up behind his head, he watched his wife as she fetched out his clean clothes and laid them with his Sunday suit over a chair. As she moved quietly about the room, the man’s feeling of content grew, added to by the feminine presence and the evidence of care and wifely attention. The little room was bright with the sunshine of a mild November day. The chromos, the glaring wall paper, the cheap oak bedroom set, the thin lace curtains touched with the light, appeared lovely in their master’s eyes. Before him was the prospect of a long day of repose, spent in perfect, tranquil laziness, a day in the fresh country air. There would be no office or telegraph calls, no duties, no sounds to disturb the hard-earned hours. His relaxed nerves and body rejoiced in the holiday. He was as happy as he could ever be—did he know it, would ever be. Years afterward Warrener looked back at that especial Sunday with something of the same affection he bestowed upon his marriage memories, and with keener regret.

As Mrs. Warrener went out of the room, he called her:

“Say, Gert!”

She paused at the door, clean towels in her hand. She was going to get his bath ready.

“Well, what?”

He wanted to call: “Give me a kiss.” But her manner rather distanced him. So he said: “What’ll you give me if I guess what we’re going to have for dinner?”

“Nothing,” she laughed. “I should think anybody with a nose would know. Eliza leaves the kitchen door open all the time.”

“It smells good,” he sniffed. “And it’s away ahead of sandwiches and a glass of beer; that’s my noon meal, as a rule.”

She warned him he wouldn’t get any dinner at all if he didn’t hurry up, and in a few moments he heard the running of his bath; the sound, to his good humor and contented frame of mind, was one more pleasant, luxurious, agreeable part of the day.

Later, shaved and washed, dressed with great precision and care, he sat in the parlor, the multitudinous sheets of the New York daily papers around him.

Gertrude rocked idly in the window, her eyes on the deserted street. Eliza washed the dinner dishes and put them rattling away, then tramped up the front stairs, and in gorgeous magnificence went out the back way, emerging into Grand Street. At the sight of her Mrs. Warrener said: “I’m going to give you a cold supper, George, some salad and tea—she’s made biscuits, I guess.”

“Oh, that’s all right. It seems as if we only just got up from dinner.” He threw his paper down. “Want to take a walk, Gert? It’s nice out, and I don’t think it’s cold.”

“Well,” she said, indifferently, “I’ll get my hat and coat.”

When she came down Warrener had been walking about his tiny parlor and dining room, and was still under the spell of householder and in love with his possessions.

“You’ve got the McAllister wedding present cleaned up fine.”

“It’s the only real silver we’ve got; it makes the other things look common.”

Mrs. Warrener regarded the display on her buffet with some discontent.

“Oh, I don’t know,” returned the husband. “It’s as good as you can get anywhere for the money.”

“The McAllisters have come back to Slocum,” his wife mentioned.

“Yes,” he nodded. “Mrs. McAllister used to go to Uncle Samson’s church. I don’t see why you shouldn’t go up there to call some day.”

Mrs. Warrener had opened the front door and gone out on the stoop; George, getting into his overcoat, followed her. Side by side they went slowly down the front steps of the little wooden stoop.

“I shouldn’t know what to say.”

“Oh, she’ll say it all; besides, perhaps she’ll be out—leave a card—got one of mine?”

“Yes, I guess so.”

“Well.”

As they turned into Grand Street and hesitated a moment as to their direction, Warrener suggested:

“Might as well walk along up toward the McAllister place; it’s as good a walk as any.”

As they started off in the fresh, crisp air, refreshing and sweet to the man’s nostrils, stimulating and revivifying after his close confined days, a sudden impulse to have the woman by his side nearer him overcame him; he drew her arm through his.

“Let’s walk arm in arm, like old married couples.”

But Mrs. Warrener held back and took her arm away.

“No,” she demurred; “I think it’s common.”

In the following days Mrs. Warrener took up her life, or, more accurately, began it, standing on the threshold of an abyss—the flight of steps before her that led to the new. As she had never been particularly interested in anything, she did not know that she was an invalid with a fatal malady, a malady whose term is too commonly employed by people whose reason for the state is less apparent than this woman’s in a country town. She had never heard the word “boredom” used.

There were half a dozen village friends of Mrs. Warrener’s whose status was on a higher plane than hers, whose houses had more square feet of land around them, whose “help” was more efficient. In their parlors now and then she took an inadequate hand at euchre, and of late she had been trying to learn bridge. These ladies made the town library and the little hospital, the Children’s Home and the church interests, run more or less smoothly; they had a hundred busy, useful interests. They were good wives and good mothers and good citizens. She had never heard any of them use the verb “to be bored,” and if she had, she would not have known what it meant! She suffered under a complaint which, like many maladies, is less fatal so long as it has no name; but the disease was too acute to be ignored. It had engendered too many complications.

At the town library the librarian from among the rows of school books one day handed down to Mrs. Warrener a French dictionary. From the novel she had read a few days before she had copied out this phrase:

Ennui is like the unseen worm in the wood, that slowly gnaws the good, clean substance until his parasite presence is declared by innumerable interstices that finally destroy the wood and proclaim it rotten to the fiber—ennui had eaten into her, devoured her. There was not one inch of her that did not ache from desuetude, from moral inertia.

Gertrude found the word “ennui” in the dictionary, and the following definition: “Listlessness, languor, tedium, lassitude, tiresomeness,” compared it with her scrap of paper, puzzled her pretty brows until their lines looked like pain. As she put up the book and left the library, she said to herself: “Well, I guess that’s what’s the matter with me.”

CHAPTER V.

When Slocum was scarcely a village Edward McAllister, after his retirement from the Supreme Court, purchased sufficient land in the State to establish a model farm. Here his children, Paul and Agnes, were born, and before they had time to know they were Americans McAllister accepted a foreign embassy and lived with his family abroad until his death. His daughter, Agnes, had married in Rome, and after a few years of wandering and continental life, with her husband, Mr. John Bellamy, and her brother, Mr. Paul McAllister, she returned to Slocum.

They had come back in order that Mrs. Bellamy should see just how much she could stand of American life and manners; in order that their children might have enough of their native soil on their hands as they played, and enough of its education in their heads, to entitle them to the self-sufficiency of American citizens.

Little Bellamy was immured in Groton, hard at the American part of it, and Mrs. Bellamy sat this morning in a charming room furnished in Colonial style: continental taste and the accessories that make living a luxury and pleasure combined to make her a charming environment. Mrs. Bellamy was teaching her little daughter the gentle art of making a long rope of useless wool by means of a spool and a row of pins.

The mother’s head bent close to the little girl’s was as golden as the child’s. Her hands, with their flashing rings, played in and out among the pins with a skill nothing short of miraculous in the eyes of the little girl, who took up the spool between her own tiny fingers, the worsted twisted hard around her thumb.

By the table, in a luxurious leather chair, the other occupant of the room was almost lost to sight. His presence was, however, indicated by the film of cigarette smoke that rose curlingly around his head. The yellow cover of a French novel was just visible above the table.

“Paul,” his sister asked him, “how do you like America?”

“America?” he repeated, and, although he said no more, she knew by his quizzical drawl what he meant.

“Well, Slocum, then, and the old place?”

“Immensely!”

“Absurd,” she laughed. “You have only been here a week, and except for ridiculously caddying a couple of times for John at the Golf Club, you have not been out of the house.”

“In which case, how could I fail to like it?” he said, with mock politeness. “You’ve kept me company! You don’t seem to be tempted to explore the old scenes any more than I do! Perhaps, like me, you’re afraid of the shock. You know how luxurious I am. If it were not for the extremely swell gentleman and lady servants, I should feel very much at ease.” He had not put down his book; he still smoked and appeared to be reading what he said from it. “I was most amused the other day as I stood on the piazza; did John tell you? I saw going around the road two very attractive-looking girls—they recalled the Gibson pictures as much as anything else. They wore, of course, short skirts and those bodices that you see everywhere. They had a bicycle, each of them, and they were walking along, their arms around each other’s waists. I said to John: ‘By Jove, what a stunning pair of girls! I should like to know them.’ And he said: ‘They are living in the same house with you, my dear fellow—they are my cook and my laundress.’”

Mrs. Bellamy laughed appreciatively. “Tell me, Paul, how does America strike you?”

McAllister reluctantly laid his book down, crossed his legs and prepared to answer.

“I’ve been out more often than you think. I took a turtle view of the town; I mean I sauntered up and down it and out of it, and it gave me as complete a sensation as I have had in twenty-four years. A better sensation, ma chÈre, and I am not likely to have another.”

Mrs. Bellamy listened, as she always did when her brother gave himself the trouble to speak more than one sentence at a time to any woman with whom he was not in love.

“It is all new-born, honorable, progressive and decent. Everybody seems to have a certain disdain for me. I believe it is because, if you will permit me to say so, I dress so well.”

His sister laughed.

“Not that they do not dress well! They do—astoundingly well; but they all dress alike, and you cannot tell, as in the case of your own servant, a lady from her cook, or a butcher boy on a holiday from the millionaire’s son, if he happens to come through town on foot or in a motor. Let’s agree, then, that I do look different. ‘The drug-store man’—that’s what you call him, isn’t it?—looked at me as if he hated me and my clothes when he gave me some calisaya. He thought I was a foreigner; they don’t like foreigners. If anything could put me on the same footing with my country people, this town street did, as far as it was able. By the time I got to the grocery I had forgotten that I had not seen America for thirty years, and that I was so different. Nothing remained but that country school feeling, that boy feeling. If you ask what I mean: There was a barrel of apples outside of the grocer’s door. I wanted to sneak one! I would have given fifty dollars for a glass of cider—for anything, in short, to keep up the game. I went in and asked him if he had such a thing as ‘sarsaparilla.’ He had it, and, in spite of my ‘difference,’ he pulled his cork and I drank the whole glass of that stuff. Pah! don’t ask me about it! It was all right, I don’t doubt; but when I left the corner and started up the hill, that wonderful sentimental feeling had entirely left me! There was only a wretched nausea—a complete sense of how far away I had gone from the simplicity of the whole thing, and I don’t say that I congratulated myself. Now, will you let me read, Agnes?”

But Mrs. Bellamy had turned to a servant who entered with a card—with two cards. “‘Mr. and Mrs. Warrener,’” she read aloud. “Oh, dear me, have you let them in?”

It appeared there was only a lady: “Mrs. George Warrener.”

“Heavens! I suppose that a lot of these people will call, and I must be more or less civil. Show Mrs. Warrener in—there is time to escape for you, Paul, by way of the dining room.”

CHAPTER VI.

The brightness of the room, the effect produced by the brilliant color of the decorations, and the atmosphere of livableness and charm did not dazzle the guest who entered—because she simply could not see! Her excitement was such that it caused a sort of blindness to fall on her, although she had never thought herself bashful or shy.

A lady, younger than herself, rose and welcomed her in a soft, quick voice, with a difference so marked in speech to any Mrs. Warrener had ever heard that she thought it was a foreign accent.

“How do you do? This is very good of you; won’t you sit here? We feel very much like strangers, coming back to Slocum after so many years. Fanny, darling, take your spools and wool and go to nurse. There—first say: ‘How do you do?’ to Mrs. Warrener.”

Gertrude had a vision of a small creature with a head like a chrysanthemum flower and the wide, round eyes of a child. The little hand that met her glove with frank politeness gave her a pretty greeting. Mrs. Warrener was obliged to break the hard tension of nervous fright that clutched her throat, and to speak to her hostess, who, in a chair near her, represented a world of civilization and education so unlike her own that a bird of paradise and a barnyard hen might have had more points in common.

She breathed out: “I used to know Mrs. McAllister; she used to go to my husband’s uncle’s church.” There was no elder lady present, and Mrs. Warrener looked for one.

“Oh, yes,” her hostess answered. “I am very sorry my mother is not here. She is at Cannes; she never comes north before spring. It is nearly twelve years since she’s been in America.”

“Yes,” Mrs. Warrener was forced to speak. “I guess it was just at the time of my wedding. That was eight years ago. I remember they said she was going to Europe then. She came to my wedding; she was at the church.”

Mrs. Bellamy, who keenly, although with perfect politeness, was studying the village lady before her, wondered very much for what reason her mother had attended the Warrener wedding.

“Slocum must seem small after Rome,” Mrs. Warrener ventured into the conversation with more ease.

Her hostess laughed. “Slocum! Why, I haven’t seen it yet, do you know! I came at night—we drove up from the train in a storm. But”—she raised her eyes to the other part of the room—“my brother can tell you how it seems; he has lots of ideas about it! My brother, Mr. McAllister—Mrs. Warrener.”

Paul McAllister had returned, to his sister’s great surprise.

“Mrs. Warrener thinks Slocum must seem ‘small’ after Rome.” She did not italicize the repetition which she carefully made, sure that it would appeal to her brother’s humor as it was.

Mrs. Warrener gracefully, if unnecessarily, rose to the presentation, and found her hand in that of the gentleman of the long black overcoat, who bowed, meeting her eyes with a smile very like one of recognition and friendliness.

“Slocum is not small to me. I was born and brought up here. The place one comes from always seems the most important in the world. Of course it may strike me as small before I get through with it, but I have not found it so yet.”

Entirely unable to cope with the conversation, ordinary as it was, carried on by the quick, soft voices in enunciation so new to her that the language seemed scarcely English—Mrs. Warrener looked at the speaker with less embarrassment because he put her at her ease. Dark, brilliant and distinguished, he did not, nevertheless, awe her as did Mrs. Bellamy’s beauty and pose. McAllister took a chair and sat down directly in front of the guest.

“I have seen Mrs. Warrener already—at golf. You were there yesterday? Didn’t you give me my ball?”

“Yes, I just walked up for a little exercise. It’s nice playing there in the afternoon now, since the snow has gone.”

“I don’t play, myself,” McAllister said, “but, as you say, it’s a nice walk.”

Mrs. Bellamy, after a word or two, leaned back in her chair with relief, and left to her brother the amenities, watching him and the guest.

After Mrs. Warrener had gone—and McAllister had seen her to the door and returned with his indolent step—as he stopped to light a fresh cigarette, his sister said:

“Well, had you any recollection about a village beauty such as your boyhood and sarsaparilla memories? And did Mrs. Warrener recall it—and is the result the same?”

McAllister turned his handsome, careless face to his sister.

“You think her a stupid little provincial, don’t you, Agnes?”

“I? Why, I asked you your opinion.”

“You don’t deny that you think that.”

“Her boots are frightful, and her hat was appalling.”

“Oh, come,” laughed her brother; “be fair!”

Mrs. McAllister gathered up her work—a piece of tapestry.

“You are unable,” she said, with some asperity, “to see any landscape without a woman in it, even for five days.”

“It’s a great compliment that you pay your sex. Let my weakness pass. Won’t you confess that this little village nobody has more good looks than we have seen in Rome for two winters?”

“Beauty—Paul!”

McAllister shrugged: “Decidedly. A face like a Greuze, perfect eyebrows—so perfect as to be almost suspicious; that inimitable droop of the eyes and the corners of the mouth—at once childlike and mature; and her coloring!”

“You are always finding the most impossible women, and telling me how paintable they are. Do you want to paint this little bore?”

“Somebody has painted her, and to perfection,” he said, with authority. “I will show you her likeness in the Louvre when we get back.”

He had thrust his hands in his pockets and begun to stroll up and down the room. As she watched him a shade crossed his sister’s face. The worsted ball Fanny had let fall her mother picked up and turned over in her hands.

“As you sat and talked to the poor little woman I watched you; she was fascinated by you—no, really! Her entire expression altered! She has never seen anyone like you before.” (“That’s what the drug-store man thought,” murmured McAllister.) “And I hope she won’t take to frequenting the Golf Club and other local festive places where she can see you.”

“Thanks, Agnes.”

McAllister laughed, and, taking from her hands the red worsted ball, idly unwound it.

“Don’t be foolish! If we are here for any purpose under heaven, let’s amuse ourselves and some of these people, too! I don’t intend to shut myself up like Noah in the ark, with only the passengers I took on board at Rome. Let’s have Mrs. Warrener to lunch; she’s a nice little creature; she’s immured in this hole, and she’s probably bored to death.”

“If she is immured,” murmured Mrs. Bellamy, “don’t let’s bring her out.”

McAllister had almost unwound the ball as he talked, and what was left of it rolled down under the table.

Here Bellamy came in, and McAllister took his indolent self away. “What have you been doing?” Mr. Bellamy asked his wife. She gathered up the worsted and said, impatiently: “I’ve been talking to my idle and destructive brother.”

CHAPTER VII.

It was six by the time Mrs. Warrener reached her own door. The aspect of Grand Street had changed. In the early twilight of the November afternoon the wooden houses bordering her street stood out clear-cut and fearlessly ugly. All the Felter children were playing in the yard, their piercing screams over their games of pleasure welcomed her ears. The little things, with red tam-o’-shanters on their heads, tore about hither and thither, calling in loud, penetrating voices.

Fanny Bellamy had said, “How do you do, Mrs. Wawenner,” in a voice like an angel bird’s. As Gertrude went up her steps she saw the Slocum Daily on the mat. Usually she seized upon the paper eagerly, but to-night she did not even lift it from the stoop.

In answer to the bell, the maid-of-all-work, Eliza, ran to the door. It was washday, and she exuded soapsuds. In her uncombed and dusty hair, little flakes of soapsuds still clung; she wore a gingham apron, with which she wiped her steaming face as she let her mistress in. For the first time Mrs. Warrener saw Eliza with eyes from which the scales of custom had fallen, and the cordial smile extended by one maid’s mistress who is conscious that she is just so little better because she has as much to spend a week as the maid has a month, did not this evening light the lady’s face.

“Eliza, never go to the door again without a white apron.”

The woman stared blankly, and her silent astonishment further aggravated the mistress.

“And fix your hair,” she said, severely, “and keep the kitchen door shut.”

Dinner smells which for years unremarked had greeted Mrs. Warrener’s nostrils, odors of kitchen and soapsuds, sickened her to-night; but before she could turn to go upstairs her attention was forcibly called to account by Eliza, who, with arms akimbo, cried to her:

“If you ain’t satisfied with me, Mrs. Warrener, you can get another girl. I ain’t no common, ordinary servant to be spoke to like that.”

Mrs. Warrener turned about at the lower stair. “What are you, then?” she asked, sharply.

The woman drew a breath of rage. “What am I?” she shrieked. “Why, I’m help, that’s what I am! And I’ve got better clothes than you have upstairs.”

“You can go and put them on,” her mistress said, “and get another place.”

Too excited to realize what the predicament of being without a servant meant in a suburban town, Gertrude did nothing to propitiate, and Eliza left.

From the opposite windows the neighbors watched the departure with astonishment and much interest, for Eliza had been with the Warreners eight years. Her red face shone under her feathered hat at the hack window, and her eyes, when flaming passion was subdued, were full of tears.

As Gertrude, indifferently, and without a word of good-by, paid her her money, Eliza sniffled: “I’d of liked to say good-by to Mr. Warrener—he’s a gentleman.”

When he came in finally to a dinner kept hot on the stove for him, and served by his wife, she informed him:

“I’ve sent Eliza away.” He was stupefied, and could not believe his ears.

“Good gracious! What for?”

“She was impertinent.”

Too amazed to speak, he ate his soup in silence; saying at length, sympathetically: “You’ll have to go up to town to-morrow and get somebody.”

“I guess I will.”

“I’m sorry for you, Gerty. It will be work for you, and it’s no easy job to get servants for the country, especially general houseworkers.”

“That’s just it,” she agreed, meditatively. But the idea of going to town was an excitement to her for the first time, and she had a scheme already in her mind. If she could find them she would get a cook and laundress and an upstairs girl. She would economize somehow or other, and she guessed George wouldn’t mind.

CHAPTER VIII.

The stagnant pool of Slocum was very considerably stirred by New York during the days when Mrs. Warrener was obliged to go in and out to look for her servants. For she had decided that Eliza should be replaced by two maids, one of whom should be dressed in apron and caps such as those worn by the trim person of whom she had caught a glimpse as she waited in Mrs. Bellamy’s drawing room.

When her husband came home one night, Gertrude was waiting for him in the window. She had had a hard day. Timid and abashed before the new and autocratic ladies for whom she felt no room in the house was good enough, she had vacillated on the verge of temper and tears. One of her characteristics was the complete control of her features and a passive exterior which hitherto no excitements had disturbed.

“George”—she drew her husband into the parlor—“I’ve got two girls.” She put her hand on the lapel of the overcoat he had as yet not taken off.

“Two girls!” he echoed.

She was flushed and pretty—very pretty. He vaguely thought she was dressed up more than usual.

“I’m tired out!” she exclaimed. “Those intelligence offices are enough to wear you to death. I got two because—the work here is too much for any one girl.”

George looked around the microscopic room, and mentally saw, as well, the microscopic second floor.

“Eliza got through all right.”

Mrs. Warrener exclaimed: “Don’t talk to me of Eliza. She wasn’t fit to be seen.”

With the hope that the two servants together might not cost as much as one, he asked:

“What’s their wages?”

She hesitated.

“Why, I’d rather make it up some way—on a dress or a hat. They’re high. One twenty and the other twenty-five a month.”

“Gee whizz!” Warrener staggered back. “Why,” he gasped, “you’re crazy, Gert!”

Her hand fell back from the lapel of his coat. Tears of vexation and fatigue sprang to her eyes.

“Hush! She’s there, in the dining room—she’ll hear you. I’m not crazy, I’m sick of living like a tenement house.”

The master was prevented from saying anything further by the entrance of a pert-faced girl in cap and apron, who said briskly:

“Dinner’s served.”

Standing there in Eliza’s place between the cheap portiÈres, she represented a convulsion in the clerk’s household. He had never been thus invited to a meal in his own house before. He got off his coat and followed his wife in to dinner.

The little, cozy room possessed for the first time an element of unrest. In eight years it had not altered so much as this. At first Gertrude, with a washerwoman, did her own work; then Eliza came blithely and good-humoredly on the scene. She had grown to be like a friend. Warrener liked her. In her oven, which she had at length triumphantly overcome, she baked him certain favorite little breads much to his taste. She ironed his collars and shirts “just right.” He could say to her:

“Look here, Eliza, just run down to Pearce’s and get me a couple of cigars.” He could never order this bustling individual in cap and gown in this manner. “A tenement!” The word touched his contented pride in his little household; already the golden sunlight was beginning to slip from the wall. Change and progression were following the tired man close on his heels to his very door.

A fortnight went by after her call at the house on the hill before the event reverently hoped for by George Warrener’s wife transpired.

Mrs. Bellamy in her French automobile drove up Grand Street and called on Mrs. Warrener.

Gertrude was out, and when she came home and found the bit of pasteboard lying on the hatstand and realized that Mrs. Bellamy had been—and had gone!—a feeling of desolation swept over her such as might attack a lonely occupant of a desert island on rushing to his island’s edge to see a ship slip over the horizon.

The disappointed woman could think of nothing to follow this occurrence, no future after it. She felt deserted and very miserable.

The waitress who answered the bell her mistress rang appeared now to be superfluous—the extravagance this splurge represented occurred to Gertrude for the first time. What was the good of the servants after Mrs. Bellamy had been and gone! Since Mrs. Bellamy would never come again, Eliza might just as well be there with her blowzy hair, her blue apron and her kind, smiling face. Gertrude felt a homesickness for her as excitement died out of her limited sky.

Katy’s manner was less flaunting and insolent than usual. Mrs. Bellamy in her handsome clothes and the automobile had impressed her.

“When did the lady come?”

“About half an hour ago.”

“Was there anyone else?”

Mrs. Warrener would not let herself think just who there might have been.

“There was only a little girl in the motor car.”

“She didn’t leave any message?”

“No, ma’am.”

Well, it was all over, and she might as well make the best of it. She had got on all right enough before the Bellamys came; she guessed she could live without them, anyhow. She would keep the girls till George’s summer vacation, and then they could get another place. That this provision would leave them stranded in a bad season did not disturb her.

She “just couldn’t” go upstairs to indolently sit down and contemplate at once the stupid days to be! There were George’s socks to mend, but she turned about where she stood, gratefully remembering that there was also the meeting of a card club of which she was a member. It would at least keep her doing something, and she went out again and started toward Mrs. Turnbull’s.

Her feet were clad in shoes then in vogue, with thick, projecting soles and stubby ends. As her foot was ridiculously small, it looked less like a man’s—which masculinity it seems this heavy gear is intended to simulate—than like a sturdy little boy’s. Her short-length skirt showed a slender ankle in coarse black stockings, the skirt itself falling smoothly on her rounded hips; her coat lay smoothly across a flat back and shoulders, the small, supple waist was held in by a leather belt. Her collar, neither stiff enough nor high enough to be “smart,” was low enough to leave visible the back of her neck and the close growth of her hair. Men have been known more than once to follow a woman for the charm of the nape of her neck; that soft, pretty turn, the lovely part of the form where the head with more or less beauty—according to type—joins the shoulder and body.

Before Mrs. Warrener was within two blocks of her destination, she heard some one walking fast behind her, and not unnaturally turned to see who followed her with a step so decided in the lonely street.

It was Mr. McAllister.

The unexpectedness of this appearance on the afternoon when she had given up the idea of coming in contact with his like and circle again—the fact of meeting him in the open street, where there was no one but himself to critically observe her manner—gave her a shock of pleasure. She stammered: “How do you do?” and held out her hand to him with the gaucherie of a child.

“What a dreadfully fast walker you are!” McAllister was out of breath. “And it’s not the first time I’ve noticed it. You don’t know how I ran down the hill behind you that night at the Golf Club.”

He had never spoken to such a painful blush before, as surprise and flattered pleasure deepened in the woman’s cheeks.

“It’s a splendid speed,” he approved, “and it’s given you a most glorious color.”

As he walked along by her side she managed to say:

“Your sister called to day, and I was out.”

“That’s too bad!” he exclaimed heartily. “She will be so sorry. She wanted to take you out in the automobile—I lent it for the purpose. Where are you going, and at such a pace—may I know?”

“I’m going to a card party at Mrs. Turnbull’s—it’s right here.”

Her companion showed plainly his disappointment. “I thought you were out for a good walk, and that perhaps I might join you.”

More sorry than he, and thoroughly regretting having told her stupid errand, she slowed her pace.

“Can’t I come in with you—and play as well?”

She smiled nervously. “Oh, no, there are only ladies in the club.”

“Only!” he repeated. “What better could one want? But I should prefer it in the singular. Can’t you seriously take me in under your protection and introduce me? What do you play? Bridge? I can play bridge. It would amuse me hugely.” He saw that she did not understand his use of the word and changed it. “Entertain me—do, please.”

Mrs. Warrener had not much imagination, but she could imagine the faces of Mrs. Turnbull and her fellow club members at the sight of Mr. McAllister and herself together under any circumstances. He looked so tall—so laughing and at ease—his attitude as if he had known her all his life bewildered her; her embarrassment was not yet relieved, although her pleasure was growing.

“Oh, no, I couldn’t, Mr. McAllister.”

“Do you like cards?” he demanded, with abrupt change of topic.

“Not much; I don’t play well.”

“I hate them, personally,” he admitted. “Why, then, do you go?”

As she made him wait for an answer he urged: “It’s a crime to sacrifice this afternoon in a hot, stuffy room before a lot of painted pasteboards. I don’t believe they expect you—do they?”

“Well, I don’t believe they do. I don’t often go. I just pay fines all the time.”

“Pay one this once, won’t you? Is this the house? Why, it’s a box, nothing more. Don’t go and be shut up in it!”

Gertrude thought with a pang that Mrs. Turnbull’s was twice as large as her own house—she had envied her.

“Don’t you want to show me one of the walks around here? There must be lots of nice tramps. It will do you good.”

She had never been spoken to in her life like this before. Strange as it may seem, it is, nevertheless, true that she had never exchanged half a dozen words with any man but her husband in her life—that is, any man save the tradespeople, whom she always talked to as long as she could. She had once acknowledged to herself: “I guess I like men better than women—I’d rather talk to the grocer than to any of the stupid Slocum women. It’s common of me, but it’s true.”

McAllister’s voice was like a cradle—she seemed to rock in it.

“He’s perfectly elegant,” she said to herself; “so handsome and polite.”

She would have suffocated at the Turnbulls’; the same atmosphere that had latterly pervaded all of her own surroundings began to surround the unoffending little house whose porch and front gate were reached.

She nerved herself to look up at Mr. McAllister, and with some assurance met his smiling eyes.

“I’ll go along a little further; there’s a pretty walk over along the old Lackawanna Station.”

CHAPTER IX.

When she turned into Grand Street at nearly six o’clock she scarcely knew whether it was her own gate through which she passed or whether the house was in its right place or had vanished with the old associations; whether she walked up the wooden steps to a familiar door or floated on air to the portal of a castle in Spain.

Warrener had telephoned that he would not be home before midnight; she received the message with relief, although the name sounded with as much indifference to her as though she heard it for the first time that night.

She sat musing over her dinner, ate a little of it, left the table as soon as she could, and restlessly wandered through the rooms from one to the other, then upstairs to the “den,” where in the dark she threw herself full length on George’s hard leather lounge.

The walk of several miles must have caused these excited feelings, this glow; but she was conscious as well of a kind of suffering agitation. She had walked many miles in her life with no such exhilaration as this.

To natures such as hers, by temperament sluggish, an awakening is dangerous, and means revolution. She never had thought of love—that is, in connection with herself or anyone she knew. The idea that a married woman, a nice one—of course there were bad ones—could care for another man had never occurred to her. The word “love” she had never heard mentioned that she could recall. Men like Warrener do not talk of love; they avoid the word and its chaotic consequences. She had never said “I love you” in her life. Her wooing had consisted of a timid kiss or two, a decorous marriage into whose ceremony the word “love” had slipped unobserved, close to “honor” and “obey.” “Love,” in that sentence, meant that she submitted always with a sort of shame and humiliation to be a wife; “honor,” that neither of them would do anything criminal, of course—how should they? “Obey,” that she would keep house for George. These, had she been capable of pigeonholing her ideas, were the grooves into which she would have slipped her conceptions of wedded life.

It is not strange that a woman with a hostility to the laws of whose mysterious passion she knows nothing should refuse to linger in her thoughts on love when it is so mentally surrounded. Love stories she rarely read; she thought them silly and little less than sane. She couldn’t understand them—once or twice they had given her unhappy, lonely feelings, and she had not sought their pages again.

On the sofa, in the dark, after the first dazzling force of the feeling which suffused her and which she did not understand, she thought of her clothes! She wished she had worn another dress, her new beige and a pair of new boots. As she had nothing but Mrs. Bellamy’s afternoon dress with which to compare her wardrobe, she could not construct in her mind any new costume fitting to such an occasion. Her coquetry had not before been aroused. George did not care what she wore. “You’re all right in anything,” she could hear him say.

No, she didn’t believe she was all right. Mr. McAllister was, though. How elegantly he was dressed! His suit, his cravat, his hat and cane and gloves! She was astonished at the vividness with which his image came to her. He seemed to stand there smiling at her. It made her uneasy to think of him so clearly. George dressed nicer than most men, she had thought, but beside Mr. McAllister—why, he looked—he looked common! The word was growing to be very useful to her.

After a little the effect of the open air and the excitement overcame her reflections. She grew drowsy and fell into a light sleep. Her subjective self, more keen and sensitive than her objective, was released, and she dreamed, for a rare thing, dream after dream. Strange, unrestful visions. Mr. McAllister was wound in and out of them, tangled in their maze. She was trying to run away from him. He was beside her, and she was trying to push him away. Out of the indistinct and broken figures of sleep he became clearly defined—he put his arm about her and kissed her. As Gertrude felt the unwonted and confusing touch on her lips—the confusion of her senses—she sprang up with a cry. There was some one in the room.

“Don’t be scared, Gerty; it’s only me.”

“Oh!” she shuddered. “How you frightened me, George! What did you do it for?”

He turned up the light.

“Why, I couldn’t find you in our room or the spare room, so I came in here. Fell asleep waiting for me, did you?”

He stood there, tired and grimy, his hair mussed, his collar lacking its freshness.

“Well, you frightened me like anything,” she said, petulantly. “What did you do? Did you shake me?”

“No, I didn’t—I kissed you.”

She got up without reply and went past him into the spare room.

Warrener said nothing until his preparations for the night were made, then calling out: “Aren’t you coming to bed, Gertrude?” he went to the spare-room door. It was locked.

Used to little petulant exhibitions of temper whose pricks he had felt with no serious wound, tired out and rendered indifferent by the unremitting brain and nerve tension of his life, Warrener yielded passively, and, going into the other room with a sigh of fatigue, sought his deserted bed.

TO BE CONTINUED.