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Title: Diverging roads

Author: Rose Wilder Lane

Release date: October 20, 2024 [eBook #74612]

Language: English

Original publication: United States: The Century Co

Credits: Mary Glenn Krause, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DIVERGING ROADS ***





                            DIVERGING ROADS

                          BY ROSE WILDER LANE

                     NEW YORK THE CENTURY CO. 1919

                  Copyright, 1919, by THE CENTURY CO.

                       _Published, March, 1919_




                               PROLOGUE


The tale of California's early days is an epic, an immortal song of
daring, of hope, of the urge of youth to unknown trails, of struggle,
and of heartbreak. Across the great American plains the adventurers
came, scrawling the story of their passing in lines of blood; they came
around the Horn in wind-jammers, beating their way northward in the
strange Pacific; they forced their way into the wilderness, awakening
California's hills from centuries-long sleep, and they pitched their
tents and built their cabins by thousands in Cherokee Valley.

Those were the great days of Cherokee, days of feverish activity,
of hard, fierce living, of marvelous event. The tales came down to
Masonville, where the stage stopped to change horses, and drivers,
express-messengers, and prospectors gathered in Mason's bar. The
Chinese laundryman had found beside his cabin a nugget worth sixteen
hundred dollars; the stage to Honey Creek had been held up just north
of Cherokee Hill; Jim Thane had struck it rich on North Branch.

Mason, prospering, ordered a billiard-table sent up from San
Francisco, built a dance-hall. Richardson came in with his family and
put up a general store. Cherokee was booming; Cherokee miners came down
with their sacks of gold-dust, and Masonville thrived.

But the great days passed. The time came when placer mining no longer
paid in Cherokee, and the camp moved on across the mountains. Cherokee
Valley was left behind, a desolate little hollow among the hills,
denuded of its trees, disfigured here and there by the scars of shallow
tunnels where hope still fought against defeat. A handful of dogged
miners remained, and a few Portuguese families living in little cabins,
harvesting a bare subsistence from the unwilling soil.

A few discouraged men came down to Masonville and took up homestead
claims, clearing the chaparral from their rolling acres, sowing grain
or setting out fruit-trees. They had wives and children; in time they
built a school-house. Later the railroad came through, and there was a
station and a small bank.

But the stirring times of enterprise and daring were gone forever. The
epic had ended in bad verse. Masonville slipped quietly to sleep, like
an old man sitting in the sun with his memories. And youth, taking
up its old immortal song of courage and of hope, went on to farther
unknown trails and different adventure.




                            DIVERGING ROADS




                               CHAPTER I


There is a peculiar quality in the somnolence of an old town in which
little has occurred for many years. It is the unease of relaxation
without repose, the unease of one who lies too late in bed, aware that
he should be getting up. The men who lounge aimlessly about the street
corners cannot be wholly idle. Their hands, at least, must be busy. The
scarred posts and notched edges of the board sidewalks show it; the
paint on the little stations is sanded shoulder-high to prevent their
whittling there. Energy struggles feebly under the weight of the slow,
uneventful days; but its pressure is always there, an urge that becomes
an irritation in young blood.

Helen Davies, pausing in the doorway of Richardson's store on a warm
spring afternoon, said to herself that she would be glad never to see
Masonville again. The familiar sight of its one drowsy street, the
rickety wooden awnings over the sidewalks, the boys pitching horseshoes
in the shade of the blacksmith-shop, was almost insupportable.

She did not want to stand there looking at it. She did not want to
follow the old stale road home to the old farm-house, which had not
changed since she could remember. She felt that she should be doing
something, she did not know what.

A long purple curl of smoke unrolling over the crest of Cherokee Hill
was the plume of Number Five coming in. Two short, quick puffs of white
above the bronze mist of bare apricot orchards mutely announced the
whistle for the grade.

Men sauntered past, going toward the station. The postmaster appeared
in his shirt-sleeves, pushing a wheelbarrow filled with mail sacks down
the middle of the street. The afternoon hack from Cherokee rattled by,
bringing a couple of tired, dust-grimed drummers. And the Masonville
girls, bare-headed, laughing, talking in high, gay voices, came
hurrying from the post-office, from the drug-store, from one of their
Embroidery Club meetings, to see Number Five come in. Helen shifted the
weight of the package on her arm, pulled her sunbonnet farther over her
face, and started home.

Depression and revolt struggled in her mind. She passed the wide,
empty doorway of Harner's livery-stable, the glowing forge of the
blacksmith-shop, without seeing them, absorbed in the turmoil of her
thoughts. But at the corner where the gravel walk began, and the
street frankly became a country road slipping down a little slope
between scattered white cottages, her self-absorption vanished.

A boy was walking slowly down the path. The elaborate unconcern of his
attitude, the stiffness of his self-conscious back, told her that he
had been waiting for her, and a rush of dizzying emotion swept away all
but the immediate moment. The sunshine was warm on her shoulders, the
grass of the lawns was green, every lace-curtained window behind the
rose-bushes seemed to conceal watching eyes, and the sound of her feet
on the gravel was loud in her ears. She overtook him at last, trying
not to walk too fast. They smiled at each other.

"Hello, Paul," she said shyly.

He was a stocky, dark-haired boy, with blue eyes. His father was dead,
killed in a mine over at Cherokee. He had come down to the Masonville
school, and they were in the same class, the class that would graduate
that spring. He was studying hard, trying to get as much education as
possible before he would have to go to work. He lived with his mother
in a little house near the edge of town, on the road to the farm.

"Hello," he replied. He cleared his throat. "I had to go to the
post-office to mail a letter," he said.

"Did you?" she answered. She tried to think of something else to say.
"Will you be glad when school's over?" she asked.

Paul and she stood at the head of the class. He was better in
arithmetic, but she beat him in spelling. For a long time they had
exchanged glances of mutual respect across the school-room. Some one
had told her that Paul said she was all right. He had beat her in
arithmetic that day. "She takes a licking as well as a boy," was what
he had said. But she had gone home and looked in the mirror.

The flutter at her heart had stopped then. No, she was not pretty. Her
features were too large, her forehead too high. She despised the face
that looked back at her. She longed for tiny, pretty features, large
brown eyes, a low forehead with curling hair. The eyes in the mirror
were gray and the hair was straight and brown. Not even a pretty, light
brown. It was almost black. For the first time she had desperately
wanted to be pretty. But now she did not care. He had waited for her,
anyway.

They walked slowly along the country road, under the arch of the trees,
through the branches of which the sun sent long, slanting rays of
light. There was a colored haze over the leafless orchards, and the
hills were freshly green from the rains.

"Well, I've got a job promised as soon as school is over," said Paul.

"What kind of job?" she asked.

"Working at the depot. It pays fifteen a month to start," he replied.
It was as if they were uttering poetry. The words did not matter. What
they said did not matter.

"That's fine," she said. "I wish I had a job."

"Gee, I hate to see a girl go to work," said Paul.

His lips were full and very firm. When he set them tightly, as he did
then, he looked determined. There was something obstinate about the
line of his chin and the slight frown between his heavy black brows.
Her whole nature seemed to melt and flow toward him.

"I don't see why!" she flashed. "A girl like me has to work if she's
going to get anywhere. I bet I could do as well as a boy if I had a
chance."

The words were like a defensive armor between her and her real desire.
She did not want to work. She wanted to be soft and pretty, tempting
and teasing and sweet. She wanted to win the things she desired by
tears and smiles and coaxing. But she did not know how.

Paul looked at her admiringly. He said, "I guess you could, all right.
You're pretty smart for a girl."

She glowed with pleasure.

They had often walked along this road as far as his house, when
accident brought them home from school at the same time. But their talk
had never had this indefinable quality, as vague and beautiful as the
misty color over the orchards.

Sometimes she had stopped at his house for a few minutes. His mother
was a little woman with brisk, bustling manner. She always stood at
the door to see that they wiped their feet before they went in. The
house was very neat. There was an ingrain carpet on the front-room
floor, swept till every thread showed. The center-table had a crocheted
tidy on it and a Bible and a polished sea-shell. This room rose like a
picture in her mind as they neared the gate. She did not want to leave
Paul, but she did not want to go into that room with him now.

"Look here--wait a minute--" he said, stopping in the gateway. "I
wanted to tell you--" He turned red and looked down at one toe, boring
into the soft ground. "About this being valedictorian--"

"Oh!" she said. There had been a fierce rivalry between them for the
honor of being valedictorian at the graduating exercises. There was
nothing to choose between them in scholarship, but Paul had won. She
knew the teachers had decided she did not dress well enough to take
such a prominent part.

"I hope you don't feel bad about it, Helen," he went on awkwardly. "I
told them I'd give it up, because you're a girl, and anyway you ought
to have it, I guess. I don't feel right about taking it, some way."

"That's all right," she answered. "I don't care."

"Well, it's awfully good of you." She could see that he was very much
relieved. She was glad she had lied about it. "Come in and look at
what I've got in the shed," he said, getting away from the subject as
quickly as possible.

She followed him around the house, under the old palm-tree that stood
there. He had cleared out the woodshed and put in a table and a chair.
On the table stood a telegraphic-sounder and key and a round, red, dry
battery.

"I'm going to learn to be an operator," he said. "I've got most of the
alphabet already. Listen." He made the instrument click. "I'm going to
practise receiving, listening to the wires in the depot. Morrison says
I can after I get through work. Telegraph-operators make as much as
seventy dollars a month, and some of them, on the fast wires, make a
hundred. I guess the train-dispatcher makes more than that."

"Oh, Paul, really?" She was all enthusiasm. He let her try the key. "I
could do it. I know I could," she said.

He was encouraging.

"Sure you could." But there was a faint condescension in his tone, and
she felt that he was entering a life into which she could not follow
him.

"That's the trouble with this rotten old world," she said resentfully.
"You can get out and do things like that. A girl hasn't any chance at
all."

"Oh, yes, she has," he answered. "There's lots of girl operators.
There's one down the line. Her father's station agent. And up at Rollo
there's a man and his wife that handle the station between them. He
works nights, and she works daytimes. They live over the depot, and if
anything goes wrong she can call him."

"That must be nice," she said.

"He's pretty lucky, all right," Paul agreed. "It isn't exactly like
having her working, of course--right together like that. I guess maybe
they couldn't--been married, unless she did. He didn't have much, I
guess. He isn't so awful much older than--But anyway, I'd hate to
see--anybody I cared about going to work," he finished desperately.
He opened and shut the telegraph-key, and the metallic clacks of the
sounder were loud in the stillness. Unsaid things hung between them.
Dazzled, tremulous, shaken by the beating of her heart, Helen could not
speak.

The palpitant moment was ended by the sound of his mother's voice.
"Paul! Paul, I want some wood." They laughed shakily.

"I--I guess I better be going," she said. He made no protest. But when
they stood in the woodshed doorway he said all in a rush:

"Look here, if I get a buggy next Sunday, what do you say we go driving
somewhere?"

She carried those words home with her, singing as she went.




                              CHAPTER II


He came early that Sunday afternoon, but she had been ready, waiting,
long before she saw the buggy coming down the road.

She had tried to do her hair in a new way, putting it up in rag curlers
the night before, working with it for hours that morning in the stuffy
attic bedroom before the wavy mirror, combing it, putting it up, taking
it down again, with a nervous fluttering in her wrists. In the end she
gave it up. She rolled the long braid into its usual mass at the nape
of her neck, and pinned on it a black ribbon bow.

She longed for a new white dress to wear that day. Her pink gingham,
whose blue-and-white-plaid pattern had faded to blurred lines of mauve
and pale pink, was hideous to her as she contemplated it stretched in
all its freshly ironed stiffness on the bed. But it was the best she
could do.

While she dressed, the sounds of the warm, lazy, spring morning
floated in to her through the half-open window. The whinnying of the
long-legged colt in the barnyard, the troubled, answering neigh of
his mother from the pasture, the cackling of the hens, blended like
the notes of a pastoral orchestra with the rising and falling whirr of
steel on the grindstone. Under the stunted live-oak in the side-yard
her father was sharpening an ax, while her little sister Mabel turned
the crank and poured water on the whirling stone. The murmur of their
talk came up to her, Mabel's shrill, continuous chatter, her father's
occasional monosyllables. She heard without listening, and the sounds
ran like an undercurrent of contentment in her thoughts.

When she had pinned her collar and put on her straw sailor she stood
for a long time gazing into the eyes that looked back at her from the
mirror, lost in a formless reverie.

"My land!" her mother said when she appeared in the kitchen. "What're
you all dressed up like that for, this time of day?"

"I'm going driving," she answered, constrained. She had dreaded the
moment. Her mother stopped, the oven door half open, a fork poised in
her hand.

"Who with?"

"Paul." She tried to say the name casually, making an effort to meet
her mother's eyes as usual. It was as if they looked at each other
across a wide empty space. Her mother seemed suddenly to see in her a
stranger.

"But--good gracious, Helen! You're only a little girl!" The words
were cut across by Tommy's derisive chant from the table, where he sat
licking a mixing-spoon.

"Helen's got a feller! Helen's got a feller!"

"Shut up!" she cried. "If you don't shut up--!"

But he got away from her and, slamming the screen door, yelled from the
safe distance of the woodpile:

"Helen's mad, and I'm glad, an' I know what will please her--!"

She went into the other room, shutting the door with a shaking hand.
She felt that she hated the whole world. Yes, even Paul. Her mother
called to her that even if she was going out with a beau, that was no
reason she shouldn't eat something. Dinner wouldn't be ready till two
o'clock, but she ought to drink some milk anyway. She answered that she
was not hungry.

Paul would come by one o'clock, she thought. His mother had only a cold
lunch on Sundays, because they went to church. He came ten minutes
late, and she had forgotten everything else in the strain of waiting.

She met him at the gate, and he got out to help her into the
buggy-seat. He was wearing his Sunday clothes, the blue suit, carefully
brushed and pressed, and a stiff white collar. He looked strange and
formal.

"It isn't much of a rig," he said apologetically, clearing his throat.
She recognized the bony sorrel and the rattling buggy, the cheapest in
Harner's livery-stable. But even that, she knew, was an extravagance
for Paul.

"It's hard to get a rig on Sunday," she said, "Everybody takes them all
out in the morning. I think you were awfully lucky to get such a good
one. Isn't it a lovely day?"

"It looks like the rains are about over," he replied in a polite voice.
After the first radiant glance they had not looked at each other. He
chirped to the sorrel, and they drove away together.

Enveloped in the hood of the buggy-top, they saw before them the yellow
road, winding on among the trees, disappearing, appearing again like
a ribbon looped about the curves of the hills. There was gold in the
green of the fields, gold in the poppies beside the road, gold in the
ruddiness of young apricot twigs. The clear air itself was filled with
vibrant, golden sunshine. They drove in a golden haze. What did they
say? It did not matter. They looked at each other.

His arm lay along the back of the buggy-seat. Its being there was
like a secret shared between them, a knowledge held in common, to be
cherished and to be kept unspoken. When the increasing consciousness of
it grew too poignant to be borne any longer in silence they escaped
from it in sudden mutual panic, breathless. They left the buggy, tying
the patient sorrel in the shade beneath a tree, and clambered up the
hillside.

They went, they said, to gather wild flowers. He took her hand to help
her up the trail, and she permitted it, stumbling, when unaided she
could have climbed more easily, glad to feel that he was the leader,
eager that he should think himself the stronger. At the top of the
hill they came to a low-spreading live-oak with a patch of young grass
beneath it, and here, forgetting the ungathered flowers, they sat down.

They sat there a long time, talking very seriously on grave subjects;
life and the meaning of it, the bigness of the universe, and how it
makes a fellow feel funny, somehow, when he looks at the stars at night
and thinks about things. She understood. She felt that way herself
sometimes. It was amazing to learn how many things they had felt in
common. Neither of them had ever expected to find any one else who felt
them, too.

Then there was the question of what to do with your life. It was a
pretty important thing to decide. You didn't want to make mistakes,
like so many men did. You had to start right. That was the point, the
start. When you get to be eighteen or so, almost twenty, you realize
that, and you look back over your life and see how you've wasted a lot
of time already. You realize you better begin to do something.

Now here was the idea of learning telegraphy. That looked pretty good.
If a fellow really went at that and worked hard, there was no telling
what it might lead to. You might get to be a train-dispatcher or even a
railroad superintendent. There were lots of big men who didn't have any
better start than he had. Look at Edison.

She agreed. She was sure there was nothing he could not do. Somehow,
then, they began to talk as if she would be with him. She might be a
telegrapher, too. Wouldn't it be fun if she was, so they could be in
the same town? He'd help her with the train orders, and if he worked
nights she could fix his lunch for him.

They made a sort of play of it, laughing about it. They were only
supposing, of course. They carefully refrained from voicing the thought
that clamored behind everything they said, that set her heart racing
and kept her eyes from meeting his, the thought of that young couple at
Rollo.

And at the last, when they could no longer ignore the incredible fact
that the afternoon was gone, that only a golden western sky behind the
flat, blue mass of the hills remained to tell of the vanished sunlight,
they rose reluctantly, hesitant. He had taken her two hands to help her
to her feet. In the grayness of the twilight they looked at each other,
and she felt the approach of a moment tremendous, irrevocable.

He was drawing her closer. She felt, with the pull of his hands, an
urging within herself, a compulsion like a strong current, sweeping her
away, merging her with something unknown, vast, beautifully terrible.
Suddenly, in a panic, pushing him blindly away, she heard herself
saying, "No--no! Please--" The tension of his arms relaxed.

"All right--if you don't want--I didn't mean--" he stammered. Their
hands clung for a moment, uncertainly, then dropped apart. They
stumbled down the dusky trail and drove home almost in silence.

       *       *       *       *       *

Spring came capriciously that next year. She smiled unexpectedly
upon the hills through long days of golden sunshine, coaxing wild
flowers from the damp earth and swelling buds with her warm promise.
She retreated again behind cold skies, abandoning eager petals and
sap-filled twigs to the chill desolation of rain and the bitterness of
frost.

Farmers trudging behind their plows felt her coming in the stir of the
scented air, in the responsiveness of the springy soil and, looking up
at the sparkling skies, felt a warmth in their own veins even while
they shook their heads doubtfully. And rising in the dawns they tramped
the orchard rows, bending tips of branches between anxious fingers,
pausing to cut open a few buds on their calloused palms.

But to Helen the days were like notes in a melody. Linnet's songs and
sunshine streaming through the attic windows or gray panes and rain
on the roof were one to her. She woke to either as to a holiday. She
slipped from beneath the patchwork quilt into a cold room and dressed
with shivering fingers, hardly hearing Mabel's drowsy protests at being
waked so early. Life was too good to be wasted in sleep. She seemed
made of energy as she ran down the steep stairs to the kitchen. It
swelled in her veins as a river frets against its banks in the spring
floods.

Every sight and sound struck upon her senses with a new freshness.
There was exhilaration in the bite of cold water on her skin when she
washed in the tin basin on the bench by the door, and the smell of
coffee and frying salt pork was good. She sang while she spread the red
table-cloth on the kitchen table and set out the cracked plates.

She sang:

    "You're as welcome as the flowers in Ma-a-ay,
    And I--love you in the same o-o-old way."

It seemed to her that she was caroling aloud poetry so exquisite that
all its meaning escaped the dull ears about her. She walked among them,
alone, wrapped in a glory they could not perceive.

Even her mother's tight-lipped anxiety did not quite break through her
happy absorption. Her mother worked silently, stepping heavily about
the kitchen, now and then glancing through the window toward the barn.
When her husband came clumping up the path and stopped at the back
steps to scrape the mud from his boots, she went to the door and opened
it, saying almost harshly, "Well?"

He said nothing, continuing for a moment to knock a boot heel against
the edge of the step. Then he came slowly in, and began to dip water
from the water pail into the wash-basin. The slump of his body in the
sweat-stained overalls expressed nothing but weariness.

"I guess last night settled it," he said. "We won't get enough of a
crop to pay to pick it. Outa twenty buds I cut on the south slope only
four of 'em wasn't black."

His wife went back to the stove and turned the salt pork, holding
her head back from the spatters. "What're we going to do about the
mortgage?" The question filled a long silence. Helen's song was hushed,
though the echoes of it still went on in some secret place within her,
safe there even from this calamity.

"Same as we've always done, I guess," her father answered at last,
lifting a dripping face and reaching for the roller towel. "See if I
can get young Mason to renew it."

"Well, he will. Surely he will," Helen said. Her tone of cheerfulness
was like a slender shaft splintering against a stone wall. "And there
must be _some_ fruit left. If there isn't much of a crop what we do get
ought to bring pretty good prices, too."

"You're right it ought to," her father replied bitterly. "A good crop
never brings 'em."

"Well, anyway, I'm through school now, and I'll be doing something,"
Helen said. She had no clear idea what it would be, but suddenly she
felt in her youth and happiness a strength that her discouraged father
and mother did not have. For the first time they seemed to her old and
worn, exhausted by an unequal struggle, and she felt that she could
take them up in her arms and carry them triumphantly to comfort and
peace.

"Eat your breakfast and don't talk nonsense," her father said.

But her victorious mood revived while she washed the dishes. She felt
older, stronger, and more confident than she had ever been. The news of
the killing frost, which depressed her mother and quieted even Mabel's
usual rebellion at having to help with the kitchen work, was to Helen
a call to action. She splashed the dishes through the soapy water so
swiftly that Mabel was aggrieved.

"You know I can't keep up," she complained. "It's bad enough to have
the frost and never be able to get anything decent, and stick here in
this old kitchen all the time, without having you act mean, too."

"Oh, don't start whining!" Helen began. They always quarreled about
the dishes. "I'd like to know who did every smitch of work yesterday,
while you went chasing off." But looking down at Mabel's sullen little
face, she felt a wave of compassion. Poor little Mabel, whose whole
heart had been set on a new dress this summer, who didn't have anything
else to make her happy! "I don't mean to be mean to you, Mabel," she
said. She put an arm around the thin, angular shoulders. "Never mind,
everything'll be all right, somehow."

That afternoon when the ironing was finished she dressed in her pink
gingham and best shoes. She was going to town for the mail, she
explained to her mother, and when her sister said, "Why, you went day
before yesterday!" she replied, "Well, I guess I'll just go to town,
anyway. I feel like walking somewhere."

Her mother apparently accepted the explanation without further thought.
The blindness of other people astonished Helen. It seemed to her that
every blade of grass in the fields, every scrap of white cloud in the
sky, knew that she was going to see Paul. The roadside cried it aloud
to her.

She let her hand rest a moment on the gate as she went through. It
was the gate on which they leaned when he brought her home from church
on Sunday nights. She could feel his presence there still; she could
almost see the dark mass of his shoulders against the starry sky, and
the white blur of his face.

The long lane by Peterson's meadow was crowded with memories of him.
Here they had stopped to gather poppies; there, just beside the gray
stone, he had knelt one day to tie her shoe. On the little bridge
shaded by the oak-trees they always stopped to lean on the rail and
watch their reflections shot across by ripples of light in the stream
below. She was dazzled by the beauty of the world as she went by all
these places. The sky was blue. It was a revelation to her. She had
never known that skies were blue with that heart-shaking blueness or
that hills held golden lights and violet shadows on their green slopes.
She had never seen that shadows in the late afternoon were purple as
grapes, and that the very air held a faint tinge of orange light. It
seemed to her that she had been blind all her life.

She stood some time on the little bridge, looking at all this
loveliness, and she said his name to herself, under her breath "Paul."
A quiver ran along her nerves at the sound of it.

He would be busy handling baggage at the station when Number Five came
in. She thought of his sturdy shoulders in the blue work-shirt, the
smooth forehead under his ragged cap, the straight-looking blue eyes
and firm lips. She would stand a little apart, by the window where the
telegraph-keys were clicking, and he would pass, pushing a hand-truck
through the crowd on the platform. Their eyes would meet, and the look
would be like a bond subtly uniting them in an intimacy unperceived by
the oblivious people who jostled them. Then she would go away, walking
slowly through the town, and he would overtake her on his way home to
supper. She could tell him, then, about the frost. Her thoughts went no
further than that. They stopped with Paul.

But before she reached his house she saw Sammy Harner frolicking in
the road, hilarious in the first spring freedom of going barefoot. He
skipped from side to side, his wide straw hat flapping; he shied a
stone at a bird; he whistled shrilly between his teeth. When he saw
her he sobered quickly and came trotting down the road, reaching her,
panting.

"I was coming out to your house just 's fast as I could," he said. "I
got a note for you." He sought anxiously in his pockets, found it in
the crown of his hat. "He gave me a nickel, and said to wait if they's
an answer."

She saw that his eyes were fixed curiously on her hands, which shook
so with excitement that she could hardly tear the railway company's
yellow envelope. She read:

    _Dear Friend Helen_:

    I have got a new job and I have to go to Ripley to-night where I
    am going to work. I would like to see you before I go, as I do not
    know when I can come back, but probably not for a long time. I did
    not know I was going till this afternoon and I have to go on the
    Cannonball. Can you meet me about eight o'clock by the bridge? I
    have to pack yet and I am afraid I cannot get time to come out to
    your house and I want to see you very much. Please answer by Sammy.

                                                     YOUR FRIEND, PAUL.

Sammy's interested gaze had shifted from her hands to her face. It
rested on her like an unbearable light. She could not think with those
calm observant eyes upon her. She must think. What must she think
about? Oh, yes, an answer. A pencil. She did not have a pencil.

"Tell him I didn't have a pencil," she said. "Tell him I said, 'Yes.'"
And as Sammy still lingered, watching her with unashamed curiosity, she
added sharply, "Hurry! Hurry up now!"

It was a relief to sit down, when at last Sammy had disappeared around
the bend in the road. The whirling world seemed to settle somewhat into
place then. She had never thought of Paul's going away. She wondered
dully if it were a good job, and if he were glad to go.




                              CHAPTER III


She came down the road again a little after seven o'clock. It was
another cold night, and the stars glittered frostily in a sky almost as
black as the hills. The road lost itself in darkness before her, and
the fields stretched out into a darkness that seemed illimitable, as
endless as the sky. She felt herself part of the night and the cold.

For an eternity she walked up and down the road, waiting. Once she
went as far as the top of the hill beyond the bridge, and saw shining
against the blackness the yellow lights of his house. She looked at
them for a long time. She thought that she would watch them until he
came out. But she was driven to walking up and down, up and down,
stumbling in the ruts of the road. At last she saw him coming, and
stood still in the pool of darkness under the oaks until he reached her.

"Helen?" he said uncertainly. "Is it you?"

"Yes," she answered. Her throat ached.

"I came as quick as I could," he said. Somehow she knew that his throat
ached, too. They moved to the little railing of the bridge and stood
trying to see each other's faces in the gloom. "Are you cold?" he asked.

"No," she said. She saw then that the shawl had slipped from her
shoulders and was dragging over one arm. The wind fluttered it, and her
hands were clumsy, trying to pull it back into place.

"Here," he was taking off his coat. "No," she said again. But she let
him wrap half the coat around her. They stood close together in the
folds of it. The chilly wind flowed around them like water, and the
warmth of their trembling bodies made a little island of cosiness in a
sea of cold.

"I got to go," he said. "It's a good job. Fifty dollars a month. I got
to support mother, you know. Her money's pretty nearly gone already,
and she spent a lot putting me through school. I just got to go. I
wish--I wish I didn't have to."

She tried to hold her lips steady.

"It's all right," she said. "I'm glad you got a good job."

"You mean you aren't going to miss me when I'm gone?"

"Yes, I'll miss you."

"I'm going to miss you an awful lot," he said huskily. "You going to
write to me?"

"Yes, I'll write if you will."

"You aren't going to forget me--you aren't going to get to going with
anybody else--are you?"

She could not answer. The trembling that shook them carried them beyond
speech. Wind and darkness melted together in a rushing flood around
them. The ache in her throat dissolved into tears, and they clung
together, cheek against hot cheek, in voiceless misery.

"Oh, Helen! Oh, Helen!" She was crushed against the beating of his
heart, his arms hurt her. She wanted them to hurt her. "You're
so--you're so--sweet!" he stammered, and gropingly they found each
other's lips.

Words came back to her after a time.

"I don't want you to go away," she sobbed.

His arms tightened around her, then slowly relaxed. His chin lifted,
and she knew that his mouth was setting into its firm lines again.

"I got to," he said. The finality of the words was like something solid
beneath their feet once more.

"Of course--I didn't mean--" She moved a little away from him,
smoothing her hair with a shaking hand. A new solemnity had descended
upon them both. They felt dimly that life had changed for them, that it
would never be the same again.

"I got to think about things," he said.

"Yes--I know."

"There's mother. Fifty dollars a month. We just can't--"

Tears were welling slowly from her eyes and running down her cheeks.
She was not able to stop them.

"No," she said. "I've got to do something to help at home, too." She
groped for the shawl at her feet. He picked it up and wrapped it
carefully around her.

They walked up and down in the starlight, trying to talk soberly,
feeling very old and sad, a weight on their hearts. Ripley was a
station in the San Joaquin valley, he told her. He was going to be
night operator there. He could not keep a shade of self-importance
from his voice, but he explained conscientiously that there would not
be much telegraphing. Very few train orders were sent there at night.
But it was a good job for a beginner and pretty soon maybe he would
be able to get a better one. Say, when he was twenty or twenty-one
seventy-five dollars a month perhaps. It wouldn't be long to wait. They
were clinging together again.

"You--we mustn't," she said.

"It's all right--just one--when you're engaged." She sobbed on his
shoulder, and their kisses were salty with tears.

He left her at her gate. The memory of all the times they had stood
there was the last unbearable pain. They held each other tight, without
speaking.

"You--haven't said--tell me you--love me," he stammered after a long
time.

"I love you," she said, as though it were a sacrament. He was silent
for another moment, and in the dim starlight she felt rather than saw
a strange, half-terrifying expression on his face.

"Will you go away with me--right now--and marry me--if I ask you to?"
His voice was hoarse.

She felt that she was taking all she was or could be in her cupped
hands and offering it to him.

"Yes," she said.

His whole body shook with a long sob. He tried to say something,
choking, tearing himself roughly away from her. She saw him going down
the road, almost running, and then the darkness hid him.

       *       *       *       *       *

In the days that followed it seemed to her that she could have borne
the separation better if she had not been left behind. He had gone down
the shining lines of track beyond Cherokee Hill into a vague big world
that baffled her thoughts. He wrote that he had been in San Francisco
and taken a ride on a sight-seeing car. It was a splendid place, he
said; he wished she could see the things he saw. He had seen Chinatown,
the Presidio, the beach, and Seal Rocks. Then he had gone on to Ripley,
which wasn't much like Masonville. He was well, and hoped she was, and
he thought of her every day and was hers lovingly. Paul. But she felt
that she was losing touch with him, and when she contemplated two or
three long years of waiting she felt that she would lose him entirely.
She thought again of that young couple at Rollo, and pangs of envy
were added to the misery in which she was living.

He had been gone two weeks when she announced to her mother that she
was going to be a telegraph-operator. She held to the determination
with a tenacity that surprised even herself. She argued, she pleaded,
she pointed out the wages she would earn, the money she could send
home. There was a notice in the Masonville weekly paper, advertising a
school of telegraphy in Sacramento, saying: "Operators in great demand.
Graduates earn $75 to $100 a month up." She wrote to that school, and
immediately a reply came, assuring her that she could learn in three
months, that railroad and telegraph companies were clamoring for
operators, that the school guaranteed all its graduates good positions.
The tuition was fifty dollars.

Her father said he guessed that settled it.

But in the end she won. When he renewed the mortgage he borrowed
another hundred dollars from the bank. Fifty dollars seemed a fortune
on which to live for three months. Her mother and she went over her
clothes together, and her mother gave her the telescope-bag in which to
pack them.

An awkward intimacy grew up between the two while they worked. Her
mother said it was just as well for her to have a good job for a while.
Maybe she wouldn't make a fool of herself, getting married before she
knew her own mind. Helen said nothing. She felt that it was not easy to
talk with one's mother about things like getting married.

Her mother said one other thing that stayed in her mind, perhaps
because of its indefiniteness, perhaps because of her mother's
embarrassment when she said it, an embarrassment that made them both
constrained.

"There's something I got to say to you, Helen," she said, keeping her
eyes on the waist she was ironing and flushing hotly. "Your father's
still against this idea of your going away. He says first thing we know
we'll have you back on our hands, in trouble. Now I want you should
promise me if anything comes up that looks like it wasn't just right,
you let me know right away, and I'll come straight down to Trenton and
get you. I'm going to be worried about you, off alone in a city like
that."

She promised quickly, uncertainly, and her mother began in a hurry to
talk of something else. Mrs. Updike, who lived on the next farm, was
going down to San Francisco to visit her sister. She would take Helen
as far as Sacramento and see her settled there. Helen must be sure to
eat her meals regularly and keep her clothes mended and write every
week and study hard. She promised all those things.

There was a flurry on the last morning. Between tears and excitement,
Mabel was half hysterical, Tommy kept getting in the way, her mother
unpacked the bag a dozen times to be sure that nothing was left out.
They all drove to town, crowded into the two-seated light wagon, and
there was another flurry at the station when the train came in. She
hugged them all awkwardly, smiling with tears in her eyes. She felt for
the first time how much she loved them.

Until the train rounded the curve south of town she gazed back at
Masonville and the little yellow station where Paul had worked. Then
she settled back against red velvet cushions to watch unfamiliar trees
and hills flashing backward past the windows. She had an excited sense
of adventure, wondering what the school would be like, promising
herself again to study hard. She and Mrs. Updike worried at intervals,
fearing lest by some mischance Mr. Weeks, the manager of the school,
would fail to meet them at the Sacramento station. They wore bits of
red yarn in their buttonholes so that he would recognize them.

He was waiting when the train stopped. He was a thin, well-dressed
man, with a young face that seemed oddly old, like a half-ripe apple
withered. He hurried them through noisy, bustling streets, on and off
street-cars, up a stairway at last to the school.

There were two rooms, a small one, which was the office, and a larger
one, bare and not very clean, lighted by two high windows looking out
on an alley. In the large room were half a dozen tables, each with
a telegraph-sounder and key upon it. There was no one there at the
moment, Mr. Weeks explained, because it was Saturday afternoon. The
school usually did no business on Saturday afternoons, but he would
make an exception for Helen. If she liked, he said briskly, she could
pay him the tuition now, and begin her studies early Monday morning.
He was sure she would be a good operator, and he guaranteed her a
good position when she graduated. He would even give her a written
guarantee, if she wished. But she did not ask for that. It would have
seemed to imply a doubt of Mr. Weeks' good faith.

Mrs. Updike, panting from climbing the stairs and nervous with anxiety
about catching her train, asked him about rooms. Providentially, he
knew a very good one and cheap, next door to the school. He was kind
enough to take them to see it.

There were a number of rooms in a row, all opening on a long hallway
reached by stairs from the street. They were kept by Mrs. Brown, who
managed the restaurant down-stairs. She was a sallow little woman, with
very bright brown eyes and yellow hair. She talked continuously in a
light, mechanically gay voice, making quick movements with her hands
and moving about the room with a whisking of silk petticoats, driven,
it seemed, by an intensity of energy almost feverish.

The room rented for six dollars a month. It had a large bow-window
overlooking the street, gaily flowered wall-paper, a red carpet, a big
wooden bed, a wash-stand with pitcher and bowl, and two rocking-chairs.
At the end of the long hall was a bathroom with a white tub in it, the
first Helen had seen. There was something metropolitan about that tub;
a bath in it would be an event far different from the Saturday night
scrubs in the tin wash-tub at home. And she could eat in the restaurant
below; very good meals for twenty cents, or even for less if she wanted
to buy a meal-ticket.

"I guess it's as good as you can do," said Mrs. Updike.

"I think it's lovely," Helen said.

So it was settled. Helen gave Mrs. Brown six dollars, and she whisked
away after saying: "I'm sure I hope you'll like it, dearie, and if
there's anything you want, you let me know. I sleep right in the next
room, so nothing's going to bother you, and if you get lonesome, just
come and knock on my door."

Then Mrs. Updike, with a hasty farewell peck at her cheek, hurried
away to catch her train, Mr. Weeks going with her to take her to the
station, and Helen was left alone.

She locked her door first, and counted her money, feeling very
businesslike. Then she unpacked her bag and put away her things,
pausing now and then to look around the room that was hers. It seemed
very large and luxurious. She felt a pleasant sense of responsibility
when everything was neatly in order and she stood at the window,
looking down the street to the corner where at intervals she saw
street-cars passing. She promised herself to work very hard, and to pay
back soon the money her father had lent her, with interest.

Then she thought, smiling, that in a little while she would go
down-stairs and eat supper in a restaurant, and then she would buy a
tablet and pencil and, coming back to this beautiful room, she would
sit down all alone and write a letter to Paul.




                              CHAPTER IV


The thought of Paul was the one clear reality in Helen's life while she
blundered through the bewilderments of the first months in Sacramento.
It was the only thing that warmed her in the midst of the strangeness
that surrounded her like a thin, cold fog.

There was the school. She did not know what she had expected, but she
felt vaguely that she had not found it. Faithfully every morning at
eight o'clock she was at her table in the dingy back room, struggling
to translate the dots and dashes of the Morse alphabet into crisp, even
clicks of the sounder. There were three other pupils, farm boys who
moved their necks uncomfortably in stiff collars and reddened when they
looked at her.

There was a wire from that room into the front office. Sometimes its
sounder opened, and they knew that Mr. Weeks was going to send them
something to copy. They moved to that table eagerly. There were days
when the sounder did not click again, and after a while one of the boys
would tiptoe to the office and report that Mr. Weeks was asleep. On
other days the sounder would tap for a long time meaninglessly, while
they looked at each other in bewilderment. Then it would make a few
shaky letters and stop and make a few more.

Then for several days Mr. Weeks would not come to the school at all.
They sank into a kind of stupor, sitting in the close, warm room, while
flies buzzed on the window-pane. Helen's moist finger-tips stuck to the
hard rubber of the key; it was an effort to remember the alphabet. But
she kept at work doggedly, knowing how much depended upon her success.
Always before her was the vision of the station where she would work
with Paul, a little yellow station with housekeeping rooms up-stairs.
She thought, too, of the debt she owed her father, and the help she
could give him later when she was earning money.

Bit by bit she learned a little about the other pupils. Two of them had
come down from Mendocino County together. They had worked two summers
to earn the money, and yet they had been able to save only seventy-five
dollars for the tuition. However, they had been sharp enough to
persuade Mr. Weeks to take them for that sum. They lived together in
one room, and cooked their meals over the gas-jet. It was one of them
who asked Helen if she knew that gas would kill a person.

"If you turned it on for a long time and set fire to it, I suppose it
would burn you up," she said doubtfully.

"I don't mean that way," he informed her, excited. "It kills you if
you just breathe it long enough. It's poison." After that she looked
with terrified respect at the gas-jet in her room, and was always very
careful to turn it off tightly.

The other boy had a more knowing air and smoked cigarettes. He
swaggered a little, giving them to understand that he was a man of
the world and knew all the wickedness of the city. He looked at Helen
with eyes she did not like, and once asked her to go to a show with
him. Although she was very lonely and had never seen a show in a real
theater, she refused. She felt that Paul would not like her to go. At
the end of three months in Sacramento these were the only people she
knew, except Mrs. Brown.

She felt that she would like Mrs. Brown if she knew her better. Her
shyness kept her from saying more than "Good evening," when she handed
her meal-ticket over the restaurant counter to be punched, and for some
inexplicable reason Mrs. Brown seemed shy with her. It was her own
fault, Helen thought; Mrs. Brown laughed and talked gaily with the men
customers, cajoling them into buying cigars and chewing-gum from her
little stock.

Helen speculated about Mr. Brown. She never saw him; she felt quite
definitely that he was not alive. Yet Mrs. Brown often looked at her
wide wedding-ring, turning it on her finger as if she were not quite
accustomed to wearing it. A widow, and so young! Helen's heart ached at
the thought of that brief romance. Mrs. Brown's thin figure and bright
yellow hair were those of a girl; only her eyes were old. It must be
grief that had given them that hard, weary look. Helen smiled at her
wistfully over the counter, longing to express her friendliness and
sympathy. But Mrs. Brown's manner always baffled her.

These meetings were not frequent. Helen tried to make her three-dollar
meal ticket last a month, and that meant that only five times a week
she could sit in state, eating warm food in an atmosphere thick with
smells of coffee and stew and hamburger steak. She had learned that
cinnamon rolls could be bought for half price on Saturday nights, and
she kept a bag of them in her room, and some fruit. This made her a
little uneasy when she saw Mrs. Brown's anxious eye on the vacant
tables; she felt that she was defrauding Mrs. Brown by eating in her
room.

Mrs. Brown worked very hard, Helen knew. It was she who swept the hall
and kept the rooms in order. She did not do it very well, but Helen
saw her sometimes in the evenings working at it. She swept with quick,
feverish strokes. Her yellow hair straggled over her face; her high
heels clicked on the floor; her petticoats made a whisking sound. There
was something piteous about her, as there is about a little trained
animal on the stage, set to do tasks for which it is not fitted. Helen
stole down the hallway at night, taking the broom from its corner as if
she was committing a theft, and surreptitiously swept and dusted her
own room, so that Mrs. Brown would not have to do it.

She wished that it took more time. When she had finished there was
nothing to do but sit at her window and look down at the street. People
went up and down, strolling leisurely in the warm summer evening. She
saw girls in dainty dresses, walking about in groups, and the sight
increased her loneliness. Buggies went by; a man with his wife and
children out driving, a girl and her sweetheart. At the corner there
was the clanging of street-cars, and she watched to see them passing,
brightly lighted, filled with people. Once in a while she saw an
automobile, and her breath quickened, she leaned from the window until
it was out of sight. She felt then the charm of the city, with its
crowds, its glitter, its strange, hurried life.

Two young men passed often down that street in an automobile. They
looked up at her window when they went by and slowed the machine. If
she were leaning on the sill, they waved to her and shouted gaily. She
always pretended that she had not seen them, and drew back, but she
watched for the machine to pass again. It seemed to be a link between
her and all that exciting life from which she was shut out. She would
have liked to know those young men.

She sat at the window one evening near the end of the three months
that she had planned to spend in the telegraph school. Paul's picture
was in her hand. He had had it taken for her in Ripley. It was a
beautiful, shiny picture, cabinet size, showing him against a tropical
background of palms and ferns. He had taken off a derby hat, which he
held self-consciously; his stocky figure wore an air of prosperity in
an unfamiliar suit.

She brooded upon the firm line of his chin, the clean-cut lips, the
smooth forehead from which the hair was brushed back slickly. His neck
was turned so that his eyes did not quite meet hers. It was baffling,
that aloof gaze; it hurt a little. She wished that he would look at
her. She felt that the picture would help her more if he would, and she
needed help.

Mr. Weeks had returned from one of his long absences that day, and
she had taken courage to ask him about a job. He had listened while
she stood beside his desk, stammering out her worry and her need. Her
money was almost gone; she thought she telegraphed pretty well, she
had studied hard. She watched his shaking hand fumbling with some
papers on his desk, and felt pityingly that she should not bother him
when he was sick. But desperation drove her on. She did not suspect
the truth until he looked up at her with reddened eyes and answered
incoherently. Then she saw that he was drunk.

Her shock of loathing came upon her in a wave of nausea. She trembled
so that she could hardly get down the stairs, and she had walked a long
time in the clean sunshine before the full realization of what it meant
chilled her. She sat now confronting that realization.

She had only two dollars, a half-used meal-ticket, and a week's rent
paid in advance. She saw clearly that she could hope for nothing from
the telegraph school. It did not occur to her to blame anybody. Her
mind ran desperately from thought to thought, like a caged creature
seeking escape between iron bars.

She could not go home. She could not live there again, defeated,
knowing day by day that she had added a hundred dollars to the
mortgage. She had told Paul so confidently that she could do as well as
a boy if she had the chance, and she had had the chance. He could not
help her. The street below was full of happy people going by, absorbed
in their own concerns, careless of hers.

She had not seen the automobile with the two young men in it until it
stopped across the street. Even then she saw it dimly with dull eyes.
But the two young men were looking up at her window, talking together,
looking up again. They were getting out. They crossed the street. She
heard their voices below, and a moment later her heart began to thump.
They were coming up the stairs.

Something was going to happen. At last something was going to break the
terrible loneliness and deadness. She stood listening, one hand at her
throat, alert, breathless.

They were standing half-way up the stairs, talking. She felt indecision
in the sound of their voices. One of them ran down again. There was
an aching silence. Then she heard footsteps and the high, gay voice
of Mrs. Brown. They were laughing together. "Oh, you Kittie!" one of
the young men said. The three came up the stairs, and she heard their
clattering steps and caught a word or two as they went past her room.
Then the scratch of a match, and light gleamed through the crack of
Mrs. Brown's door.

They went on talking. It appeared that they were arguing, coaxing,
urging something. Mrs. Brown's voice put them off. There was a crash
and laughter. She gathered that they were scuffing playfully. Later she
heard Mrs. Brown's voice at the head of the back stairs, calling down
to some one to send up some beer.

Her tenseness relaxed. She felt herself falling into bottomless depths
of depression. The bantering argument was going on again. Meaningless
scraps of it came to her while she undressed in the dark and crept into
bed.

"Aw, come on, Kittie, be a sport! A stunning looker like that! What're
you after anyhow--money?"

"Cut that out. No, I tell you. What's it to you why I won't?"

She crushed her face into the pillow and wept silently. It seemed the
last unkindness of fate that Mrs. Brown should give a party and not ask
her.




                               CHAPTER V


The next day she dressed very carefully in a fresh white waist and her
Indianhead skirt and went down to the telegraph-office to ask for a
job. She knew where to find the office; she had often looked at its
plate-glass front lettered in blue during her lonely walks on the
crowded street. Her heart thumped loudly and her knees were weak when
she went through the open door.

The big room was cut across by a long counter, on which a young man
lounged in his shirt-sleeves, a green eye-shade pushed back on his
head. Behind him telegraph instruments clattered loudly, disturbing
the stifling quiet of the hot morning. The young man looked at her
curiously.

"Manager? Won't I do?" he asked.

She heard her voice quavering:

"I'd rather see him--if he's busy--I could--wait."

The manager rose from the desk where he had been sitting. He was a
tall, thin man, with thin hair combed carefully over the top of his
head. His lips were thin, too, and there were deep creases on either
side of his mouth, like parentheses. His eyes looked her over,
interested. He was sorry, he said. He didn't need another operator. She
had experience?

She was a graduate of Weeks' School of Telegraphy, she told him
breathlessly. She could send perfectly, she wasn't so sure of her
receiving, but she would be awfully careful not to make mistakes. She
had to have a job, she just had to have a job; it didn't matter how
much it paid, anything. She felt that she could not walk out of that
office. She clung to the edge of the counter as if she were drowning
and it were a life-line.

"Well--come in. I'll see what you can do," he said. He swung open a
door in the counter, and she followed him between the tables. There was
a dusty instrument on a battered desk, back by the big switchboard. The
manager took a message from a hook and gave it to her. "Let's hear you
send that."

She began painstakingly. The young man with the eye-shade had wandered
over. He stood leaning against a table, listening, and after she had
made a few letters she felt that a glance passed between him and the
manager, over her head. She finished the message, even adding a careful
period. She thought she had done very well. When she looked up the
manager said kindly:

"Not so bad! You'll be an operator some day."

"If you'll only give me a chance," she pleaded.

He said that he would take her address and let her know. She felt that
the young man was slightly amused. She gave the manager her name and
the street number. He repeated it in surprise.

"You're staying with Kittie Brown?" Again a glance passed over her
head. Both of them looked at her with intensified interest, for which
she saw no reason. "Yes," she replied. She felt keenly that it was an
awkward moment, and bewilderment added to her confusion. The young
man turned away and, sitting down, began to send a pile of messages,
working very busily, sending with his right hand and marking off the
messages with his left. But she felt that his attention was still upon
her and the manager.

"Well! And you want to work here?" The manager rubbed one hand over his
chin, smiling. "I don't know. I might."

"Oh, if you would!"

He hesitated for an agonizing moment.

"Well, I'll think about it. Come and see me again." He held her fingers
warmly when they shook hands, and she returned the pressure gratefully.
She felt that he was very kind. She felt, too, that she had conducted
the interview very well, and returning hope warmed her while she went
back to her room.

That afternoon she had a visitor. She had written her weekly letter
to her mother, saying that she had almost finished school and was
expecting to get a job, hesitating a long time, miserably, before she
added that she did not have much money left and would like to borrow
another five dollars. She had eaten a stale roll and an apple and was
considering how long she could make the meal-ticket last when she heard
the knock on her door.

She opened it in surprise, thinking there had been a mistake. A
stout, determined-looking woman stood there, a well-dressed woman who
wore black gloves and a veil. Immediately Helen felt herself young,
inexperienced, a child in firm hands.

"You're Helen Davies? I'm Mrs. Campbell." She stepped into the room,
Helen giving way before her assured advance. She swept the place with
one look. "What on earth was your mother thinking of, leaving you in a
place like this? Did you know what you were getting into?"

"I don't--what--w-won't you take a chair?" said Helen.

Mrs. Campbell sat down gingerly, very erect. They looked at each other.

"I might as well talk straight out to you," Mrs. Campbell said, as if
it were a customary phrase. "I met Mrs. Morris, Mrs. Updike's sister,
at the lodge convention in Oakland last week, and she told me about
you, and I promised to look you up. Well, when I found out! I told Mr.
Campbell I was coming straight down here to talk to you. If you want
to stay in a place like this, well and good, it's your affair. Though
I should feel it my duty to write to your mother. I wouldn't want my
own girl left in a strange town, at your age, and nobody taking any
interest in her."

"I'm sure it's very kind." Helen murmured in bewilderment.

"Well,"--Mrs. Campbell drew a long breath and plunged,--"I suppose you
know the sort of person this Kittie Brown, she calls herself, is? I
suppose you know she's a bad woman?"

A wave of blackness went through the girl's mind.

"Everybody in town knows what _she_ is," Mrs. Campbell continued.
"Everybody knows--" She went on, her voice growing more bitter. Helen,
half hearing the words, choked back a sick impulse to ask her to stop
talking. She felt that everything about her was poisoned; she wanted to
escape, to hide, to feel that she would never be seen again by any one.
When the hard voice had stopped it was an effort to speak.

"But--what will I do?"

"Do? I should think you'd want to get out of here just as quick as you
could."

"Oh, I do want to. But where can I go? I--my rent's paid. I haven't any
money."

Mrs. Campbell considered.

"Well, you will have money, won't you? Your folks don't expect you to
live here on nothing, do they? If it's only a day or two, I could
take you in myself rather than leave you in a place like this. There's
plenty of decent places in town." She became practical. "The first
thing to do's to pack your things right away. How long is your rent
paid? Can't you get some of it back?"

She waited while Helen packed. She did not stop talking, and Helen
tried to answer her coherently and gratefully. She felt that she should
be grateful. They went down the stairs, and Mrs. Campbell waited
outside the restaurant while Helen went in to ask Mrs. Brown to refund
the week's rent.

It was noon, but there were only one or two people in the restaurant.
Mrs. Brown's smile faded when Helen stammered that she was leaving.

"You are? What's wrong? Anybody been bothering you?" Her glance fell
upon the waiting Mrs. Campbell, and her sallow face whitened. "Oh,
that's it, is it?"

"No," Helen said hastily. "That is, it's been very nice here, and I
liked it, but a friend of mine--she wants me to stay with her. I'm
sorry to leave, but I haven't much money." She struggled against
feeling pity for Mrs. Brown. She choked over asking her to refund the
rent.

Mrs. Brown said she could not do it. She offered, however, to give
Helen something in trade, two dollars' worth. They both tried to make
the transaction commonplace and dignified.

Helen, at a loss, pointed out a heap of peanut candy in the glass
counter. She had often looked at it and wished she could afford to buy
some. Mrs. Brown's thin hands shook, but she was piling the candy on
the scale when Mrs. Campbell came in.

"What's she doing?" Mrs. Campbell asked Helen. "You buying candy?"

"I don't know what business it is of yours, coming interfering with
me!" Mrs. Brown broke out. "I never did her any harm. I never even
talked to her. You ask her if I ever bothered her. You ask her if
I didn't leave her alone. You ask her if I ain't keeping a decent,
respectable, quiet place and doing the best I can and minding my own
business and trying to make a square living. You ask her what I ever
did to her all the time she's been here." Her voice was high and
shrill. Tears were rolling down her face. Mechanically she went on
breaking up the candy and piling it on the scales. "I don't know what I
ever did to you that you don't leave me alone, coming poking around."

"I didn't come here to talk to you," said Mrs. Campbell. "Come on out
of here," she commanded Helen.

"I wish to God you'd mind your own business!" Mrs. Brown cried after
them. "If you'd only tend to your own affairs, you _good_ people!" She
hurled the words after them like a curse, her voice breaking with
sobs. The door slammed under Mrs. Campbell's angry hand.

Helen, shaking and quivering, tried not to be sorry for Mrs. Brown.
She was ashamed of the feeling. She knew that Mrs. Campbell did not
have it. Hurrying to keep pace with that furious lady's haste down the
street, she was overwhelmed with shame and confusion. The whole affair
was like a splash of mud upon her. Her cheeks were red, and she could
not make herself meet Mrs. Campbell's eyes.

Even when they were on the street-car, safely away from it all, her
awkwardness increased. Mrs. Campbell herself was a little disconcerted
then. She looked at Helen, at the bulging telescope-bag, the shabby
shoes, and the faded sailor hat, and Helen felt the gaze like a burn.
She knew that Mrs. Campbell was wondering what on earth to do with her.

Pride and helplessness and shame choked her. She tried to respond to
Mrs. Campbell's efforts at conversation, but she could not, though
she knew that her failure made Mrs. Campbell think her sullen. Her
rescuer's impatient tone was cutting her like the lash of a whip before
they got off the car.

Mrs. Campbell lived in splendor in a two-story white house on a
complacent street. The smoothness of the well-kept lawns, the
immaculate propriety of the swept cement walks, cried out against
Helen's shabbiness. She had never been so aware of it. When she was
seated in Mrs. Campbell's parlor, oppressed by the velvet carpet and
the piano and the bead portieres, she tried to hide her feet beneath
the chair and did not know what to do with her hands.

She answered Mrs. Campbell's questions because she must, but she felt
that her last coverings of reticence and self-respect were being torn
from her. Mrs. Campbell offered only one word of advice.

"The thing for you to do is to go home."

"No," Helen said. "I--I can't--do that."

Mrs. Campbell looked at her curiously, and again the red flamed in
Helen's cheeks. She said nothing about the mortgage. Mrs. Campbell had
not asked about that.

"Well, you can stay here a few days."

She lugged the telescope-bag up the stairs, the wooden steps of which
shone like glass. Mrs. Campbell showed her a room at the end of the
hall. A mass of things filled it; children's toys, old baskets, a
broken chair. It was like the closets at home, but larger. It was large
enough to hold a narrow white iron bed, a wash-stand, and a chair, and
still leave room to swing the door open. These things appeared when
Mrs. Campbell had dragged out the others.

Watching her swift, efficient motions in silence, Helen tried again to
feel gratitude. But the fact that Mrs. Campbell expected it made it
impossible. She could only stand awkwardly, longing for the moment
when she would be alone. When at last Mrs. Campbell went down-stairs
she shut the door quickly and softly. She wanted to fling herself on
the sagging bed and cry, but she did not. She stood with clenched
hands, looking into the small, blurred mirror over the wash-stand.
A white, tense face looked back at her with burning eyes. She said
to it, "You're going to do something, do you hear? You're going to
do something quick!" Although she did not know what she could do,
she could keep her self-control by telling herself that she would do
something.

Some time later she heard the shouts of children and the clatter of
pans in the kitchen below. It was almost supper-time. She took a
cinnamon roll from the paper sack in her bag, but she could not eat it.
She was looking at it when Mrs. Campbell called up the back stairs,
"Miss Davies! Come to supper."

She braced herself and went down. It was a good supper, but she
could not eat very much. Mr. Campbell sat at the head of the table,
a stern-looking man who said little except to speak sharply to the
children when they were too noisy. There were two children, a girl
of nine and a younger boy in a sailor suit. They looked curiously at
Helen and did not reply when she tried to talk to them. She perceived
that they had been told to leave her alone, and she felt that her
association with a woman like Mrs. Brown was still visible upon her
like a splash of mud.

When she timidly offered to help with the dishes after supper Mrs.
Campbell told her that she did not need any help. Her tone was not
unkind, but Helen felt the rebuff, and fearing she would cry, she went
quickly up-stairs.

She looked at Paul's picture for some time before she put it back
into her bag where she thought Mrs. Campbell would not see it. Then,
sitting on the edge of the bed under a flickering gas-jet, she wrote
him a long letter. She told him that she had moved, and in describing
the street, the beautiful house, the furniture in the parlor, she drew
such a picture of comfort and happiness that its reflection warmed
her somewhat. It was a beautiful letter, she thought, reading it over
several times before she carefully turned out the gas and went to bed.

Early in the morning she went to the telegraph-office and pleaded again
for a job. Mr. Roberts, the manager, was very friendly, talking to
her for some time and patting her hand in a manner which she thought
fatherly and found comforting. He told her to come back. He might do
something.

She went back every morning for a week, and often in the afternoons.
The rest of the time she wandered in the streets or sat on a bench in
the park. She felt under such obligations when she ate Mrs. Campbell's
food that several times she did not return to the house until after
dark, when supper would be finished. She had to ring the door-bell, for
the front door was kept locked, and each time Mrs. Campbell asked her
sharply where she had been. She always answered truthfully.

At the end of the week she received a letter from her mother, telling
her to come home at once and sending her five dollars for the fare.
Mrs. Campbell had written to her, and she was horrified and alarmed.

    Your father says we might have known it and saved our money, and I
    blame myself for ever letting you go. I don't say it will be easy
    for you here, short as we are this winter, but you ought to be glad
    you have a good home to come to even if it isn't very fine, and
    don't worry about the money, for your father won't say a word. Just
    you come home right away. Lovingly,

                                                            YOUR MOTHER

Helen hated Mrs. Campbell. What right had that woman to worry her
mother? Helen could get along all right by herself, and she wrote her
mother that she could. She had a job at last. Mr. Roberts had made a
place for her in the office, as a clerk at five dollars a week. She did
not mention the wages to her mother; she said only that she had a job,
and her mother was not to worry. She would be making more money soon
and could send some home.

The letter had been waiting for her, propped on the hall table,
when she hurried in, eager to tell Mrs. Campbell the glad news. Her
anger when she read it was obscurely a relief. The compulsion to feel
gratitude toward Mrs. Campbell was lifted from her. She wrote her
answer and hastened to drop it in the corner mail-box.

Running back to the house, she met Mrs. Campbell returning from a
sewing-circle meeting. Mrs. Campbell was neatly hatted and gloved, and
the expression in her pale blue eyes behind the dotted veil suddenly
made Helen realize how blow-away she looked, bare-headed, her loosened
hair ruffled by the breeze, her blouse sagging under the arms. She
stood awkwardly self-conscious while Mrs. Campbell unlocked the front
door.

"Did you get your mother's letter?"

"Yes. I got it."

"Well, what did she say?"

Helen did not answer that.

"I got a job," she said. Her breath came quickly.

"You have? What kind of job?"

Helen told her. They were in the hall now, standing by the golden-oak
hat-rack at the foot of the stairs. The children watched, wide-eyed, in
the parlor door.

Perplexity and disgust struggled on Mrs. Campbell's face.

"You think you're going to live in Sacramento on five dollars a week?"

"I'm going to. I got to. I'll manage somehow. I won't go home!" Helen
cried, confronting Mrs. Campbell like an antagonist.

"Oh, I don't doubt you'll _manage_!" Mrs. Campbell said cuttingly. She
went down the hall, and the slam of the dining-room door shouted that
she washed her hands of the whole affair.

She came up the back stairs half an hour later. Helen was sitting on
the bed, her bag packed, trying to plan what to do. She had only the
five dollars. It would be two weeks before she could get more money
from the office. Mrs. Campbell opened the door without knocking.

"I'm going to talk this over with you," she said, patient firmness in
her tone. "Don't you realize you can't get a decent room and anything
to eat for five dollars a week? Do you think it's right to expect your
folks to support you, poor as they are? It isn't--"

"I don't expect them to!" Helen cried.

"As though you didn't have a good home to go back to," Mrs. Campbell
conveyed subtly that a well-bred girl did not interrupt while an older
woman was speaking. "Now be reasonable about this, my--"

"I won't go back," Helen said. She lifted miserable eyes to Mrs.
Campbell's, and the expression she saw there reminded her of a horse
with his ears laid back.

"Then you've decided, I suppose, where you _are_ going?"

"No--I don't know. Where could I begin to look for a--nice room that I
can live in on my wages?"

Mrs. Campbell exclaimed impatiently. Her almost ruthless capability
in dealing with situations did not prepare her to meet gracefully one
that she could not handle. Her voice grew colder, and the smooth cheeks
beneath the smooth, fair hair reddened while she continued to talk. Her
arguments, her grudging attempts at persuasion, her final outburst of
unconcealed anger, were futile. Helen would not go home. She meant to
keep her job and to live on the wages.

"Well, then I guess you'll have to stay here. I can't turn you out on
the streets."

"How much would you charge for the room?" said Helen.

"Charge!" Helen flushed again at the scorn in the word.

"I couldn't stay unless I paid you something. I'd have to do that."

"Well, of all the ungrateful--!"

Tears came into Helen's eyes. She knew Mrs. Campbell meant well, and
though she did not like her, she wished to thank her. But she did not
know how to do it without yielding somewhat to the implacable force of
the older woman. She could only repeat doggedly that she must pay for
the room.

She was left shaken, but with a sense of victory emphasized by Mrs.
Campbell's inarticulate exclamation as she went out. It was arranged
that Helen should pay five dollars a month for the room.

But the bitterness of living in that house, on terms which she felt
were charity, increased daily. She tried to make as little trouble as
possible, stealing in at the back door so that no one would have to
answer her ring, making her bed neatly, and slipping out early so that
she would not meet any of the family. She spent her evenings at the
office or at the library, where she could forget herself in books and
in writing long letters. For some inexplicable reason this seemed to
exasperate Mrs. Campbell, who inquired where she had been and did not
hide a belief that her replies were lies. Helen felt like a suspected
criminal. She would have left the house if she could have found another
room that she could afford.

It was only at the office that she could breathe freely. She worked
from eight in the morning to six at night, and then until the office
closed at nine o'clock she could practise on the telegraph instrument
behind the tables where the real wires came in. She worked hard at it,
for at last she was on the road to the little station where she would
work with Paul. She felt that she could never be grateful enough to
Mr. Roberts for giving her the chance.

He was very kind. Often he came behind the screen where she was
studying and talked to her for a long time. He was surprised at first
by her working so hard. He seemed to think she had not meant to do
it. But his manner was so warmly friendly that one day when he took
her hand, saying, "What's the big idea, little girl--keeping me off
like this?" she told him about everything but Paul. She told him about
the farm and the mortgage and the failure of the fruit crop, even,
shamefaced, about Mr. Weeks' drinking, and that she did not know what
she would have done if she had not got the job. She was very grateful
to him and tried to tell him so.

He said drily not to bother about that, and she felt that she had
offended him. Perhaps her story had sounded as if she were begging
for more money, she thought with burning cheeks. For several days he
gave her a great deal of hard work to do and was cross when she made
mistakes. She did her best, trying hard to please him, and he was soon
very friendly again.

His was the only friendliness she found to warm her shivering spirit,
and she became daily more grateful to him for it. Though she was
puzzled by his displays of affectionate interest in her and his sudden
cold withdrawals when she eagerly thanked him, this was only part
of the bewildering atmosphere of the office, in which she felt many
undercurrents that she could not understand.

The young operator with the green eye-shade, for instance, always
regarded her with a cynical and slightly amused eye, which she resented
without knowing why. When she laid messages beside his key, he covered
her hand with his if he could, and sometimes when she sat working he
came and put his hand on her shoulder. She was always angry, for she
felt contempt in his attitude toward her, but she did not know how to
show her resentment without making too much of the incidents.

"Mr. McCormick, leave me alone!" she said impatiently. "I want to work."

"Just what _is_ the game?" he drawled.

"What do you mean?" she asked, reddening under that cool, satirical
gaze. He looked at her, grinning until she felt only that she hated
him. Or sometimes he said something like: "Oh, well, I'm not butting
in. It's up to you and the boss," and strolled away, whistling.

Much looking at life from the back-door keyhole of the
telegraph-operator's point of view had made him blasé and wearily
worldly-wise at twenty-two. He knew that every pretty face was moulded
on a skeleton, and was convinced that all lives contained one. Only
virtue could have surprised him, and he could not have been convinced
that it existed. When he was on duty in the long, slow evenings,
Helen, practising diligently behind her screen, heard him singing
thoughtfully:

    "Life's a funny proposition after all;
    Just why we're here and what it's all about,
    It's a problem that has driven many brainy men to drink,
    It's a problem that they've never figured out."

Life seemed simple enough to Helen. She would be a telegraph-operator
soon, earning as much as fifty dollars a month. She could repay the
hundred dollars then, buy some new clothes, and have plenty to eat.
She would try to get a job at the Ripley station,--always in the back
of her mind was the thought of Paul,--and she planned the furnishing
of housekeeping rooms, and thought of making curtains and embroidering
centerpieces.

It was spring when he wrote that he was coming to spend a day in
Sacramento. He was going to Masonville to help his mother move to
Ripley. On the way he would stop and see Helen.

Helen, in happy excitement, thought of her clothes. She must have
something new to wear when they met. Paul must see in the first glance
how much she had changed, how much she had improved. She had not
been able to save anything, but she must, she must have new clothes.
Two days of worried planning brought her courage to the point of
approaching Mr. Roberts and asking him for her next month's salary
in advance. Next month's food was a problem she could meet later. Mr.
Roberts was very kind about it.

"Money? Of course!" he said. He took a bill from his own pocket-book.
"We'll have to see about your getting more pretty soon." Her heart
leaped. He put the bill in her palm, closing his hand around hers.
"Going to be good to me if I do?"

"Oh, I'd do anything in the world I could for you," she said, looking
at him gratefully. "You're so good! Thank you ever so much." His look
struck her as odd, but a customer came in at that moment, and in taking
the message she forgot about it.

She went out at noon and bought a white, pleated, voile skirt for five
dollars, a China-silk waist for three-ninety-five, and a white, straw
sailor. And that afternoon McCormick, with his cynical smile, handed
her a note that had come over the wire for her. "Arrive eight ten
Sunday morning. Meet me. PAUL."

She was so radiantly self-absorbed all the afternoon that she hardly
saw the thundercloud gathering in Mr. Roberts' eyes, and she went
back to her room that evening so confidently happy that she rang the
door-bell without her usual qualm. Mrs. Campbell's lips were drawn into
a tight, thin line.

"There's some packages for you," she said.

"Yes, I know. I bought some clothes. Thank you for taking them in,"
said Helen. She felt friendly even toward Mrs. Campbell. "A white,
voile skirt, and a silk waist, and a hat. Would--would you like to see
them?"

"No, _thank_ you!" said Mrs. Campbell, icily. Going up the stairs,
Helen heard her speaking to her husband. "'I bought some clothes,' she
says, bold as brass. Clothes!"

Helen wondered, hurt, how people could be so unkind. She knew that the
clothes were an extravagance, but she did want them so badly, for Paul,
and it seemed to her that she had worked hard enough to deserve them.
Besides, Mr. Roberts had said that she might get a raise.

She was dressed and creeping noiselessly out of the house at seven
o'clock the next morning. The spring dawn was coming rosily into the
city after a night of rain; the odor of the freshly washed lawns and
flower-beds was delicious, and birds sang in the trees. The flavor of
the cool, sweet air and the warmth of the sunshine mingled with her
joyful sense of youth and coming happiness. She looked very well, she
thought, watching her slim white reflection in the shop-windows.




                              CHAPTER VI


When the train pulled into the big, dingy station Helen had been
waiting for some time, her pulses fluttering with excitement. But her
self-confidence deserted her when she saw the crowds pouring from the
cars. She shrank back into the wailing-room doorway; and she saw Paul
before his eager eyes found her.

It was a shock to find that he had changed, too. Something boyish
was gone from his face, and his self-confident walk, his prosperous
appearance in a new suit, gave her the chill sensation that she was
about to meet a stranger. She braced herself for the effort, and when
they shook hands she felt that hers was cold.

"You're looking well," she said shyly.

"Well, so are you," he answered. They walked down the platform
together, and she saw that he carried a new suitcase, and that even his
shoes were new and shining. However, these details were somewhat offset
by her perception that he was feeling awkward, too.

"Where shall we go?" They hesitated, looking at each other, and in
their smile the strangeness vanished.

"I don't care. Anywhere, if you're along," he said. "Oh, Helen, it sure
is great to see you again! You look like a million dollars, too." His
approving eye was upon her new clothes.

"I'm glad you like them," she said, radiant. "That's an awfully nice
suit, Paul." Happiness came back to her in a flood and putting out her
hand, she picked a bit of thread from his dear sleeve. "Well, where
shall we go?"

"We'll get something to eat first," he said practically. "I'm about
starved, aren't you?" She had not thought of eating.

They breakfasted in a little restaurant on waffles and sausages and
coffee. The hot food was delicious, and the waiter in the soiled white
apron grinned understandingly while he served them. Paul gave him
fifteen cents, in an off-hand manner, and she thrilled at his careless
prodigality and his air of knowing his way about.

The whole long day lay before them, bright with limitless
possibilities. They left the suitcase with the cashier of the
restaurant and walked slowly down the street, embarrassed by the riches
of time that were theirs. Helen suggested that they walk awhile in the
capitol grounds; she had supposed they would do that, and perhaps in
the afternoon enjoy a car-ride to Oak Park. But Paul dismissed these
simple pleasures with a word.

"Nothing like that," he said. "I want a real celebration, a regular
blow-out. I've been saving up for it a long time." He struggled with
this conscience. "It won't do any harm to miss church one Sunday. Let's
take a boat down the river."

"Oh, Paul!" She was dazzled. "But--I don't know--won't it be awfully
expensive?"

"I don't care how much it costs," he replied recklessly. "Come on.
It'll be fun."

They went down the shabby streets toward the river, and even the dingy
tenements and broken sidewalks of the Japanese quarter seemed to them
to have a holiday air. They laughed about the queer little shops and
the restaurant windows, where electric lights still burned in the
clear daylight over pallid pies and strange-looking cakes. Helen must
stop to speak to the straight-haired, flat-faced Japanese babies who
sat stolidly on the curbs, looking at her with enigmatic, slant eyes,
and she saw romance in the groups of tall Hindoo laborers, with their
bearded, black faces and gaily colored turbans.

It was like going into a foreign land together, she said, and even Paul
was momentarily caught by the enchantment she saw in it all, though he
did not conceal his detestation of these foreigners. "We're going to
see to it we don't have them in our town," he said, already with the
air of a proprietor in Ripley.

"Now this is something like!" he exclaimed when he had helped Helen
across the gang-plank and deposited her safely on the deck of the
steamer. Helen, pressing his arm with her fingers, was too happy to
speak. The boat was filling with people in holiday clothes; everywhere
about her was the exciting stir of departure, calls, commands, the
thump of boxes being loaded on the deck below. A whistle sounded
hoarsely, the engines were starting, sending a thrill through the very
planks beneath her feet.

"We'd better get a good place up in front," said Paul. He took her
through the magnificence of a large room furnished with velvet chairs,
past a glimpse of shining white tables and white-clad waiters, to a
seat whence they could gaze down the yellow river. She was appalled by
his ease and assurance. She looked at him with an admiration which she
would not allow to lessen even when the boat edged out into the stream
and, turning, revealed that he had led her to the stern deck.

Her enthusiastic suggestion that they explore the boat aided Paul's
attempt to conceal his chagrin, and she listened enthralled to his
explanations of all they saw. He estimated the price of the crates
of vegetables and chickens piled on the lower deck, on their way to
the city from the upper river farms. It was his elaborate description
of the engines that caught the attention of a grimy engineer who had
emerged from the noisy depths for a breath of air, and the engineer,
turning on them a quizzically friendly gaze, was easily persuaded to
take them into the engine-room.

Helen could not understand his explanations, but she was interested
because Paul was, and found her own thrill in the discovery of a dim
tank half filled with flopping fish, scooped from the river and flung
there by the paddle wheel. "We take 'em home and eat 'em, miss," said
the engineer, and she pictured their cool lives in the green river, and
the city supper-tables at which they would be eaten. She was fascinated
by the multitudinous intricacies of life, even on that one small boat.

It was a disappointment to find, when they returned again to the upper
decks, that they could see nothing but green levee banks on each
side of the river. But this led to an even more exciting discovery,
for venturesomely climbing a slender iron ladder they saw beyond the
western levee an astounding and incredible stretch of water where land
should be. Their amazement emboldened Paul to tap on the glass wall
of a small room beside them, in which they saw an old man peacefully
smoking his pipe. He proved to be the pilot, who explained that it was
flood water they saw, and who let them squeeze into his tiny quarters
and stay while he told long tales of early days on the river, of
floods in which whole settlements were swept away at night, of women
and children rescued from floating roofs, of cows found drowned in
tree-tops, and droves of hogs that cut their own throats with their
hoofs while swimming. Listening to him while the boat slowly chugged
down the curves of the sunlit river, Helen felt the romance of living,
the color of all the millions of obscure lives in the world.

"Isn't everything interesting!" she cried, giving Paul's arm an excited
little squeeze as they walked along the main deck again. "Oh, I'd like
to live all the lives that ever were lived! Think of those women and
the miners and people in cities and everything!"

"I expect you'd find it pretty inconvenient before you got through,"
Paul said. "Gee, but you're awfully pretty, Helen," he added
irrelevantly, and they forgot everything except that they were together.

They had to get off at Lancaster in order to catch the afternoon boat
back to Sacramento. There was just time to eat on board, Paul said,
and overruling her flurried protests he led her into the white-painted
dining-room. The smooth linen, the shining silver, and the imposing
waiters confused her; she was able to see nothing but the prices on
the elaborate menu-cards, and they were terrifying. Paul himself
was startled by them, and she could see worried calculation in his
eyes. She felt that she should pay her share; she was working, too,
and earning money. The memory of the office, the advance she had
drawn on her wages, her uncomfortable existence in Mrs. Campbell's
house, passed through her mind like a shadow. But it was gone in an
instant, and she sat happily at the white table, eating small delicious
sandwiches and drinking milk, smiling across immaculate linen at Paul.
For a moment she played with the fancy that it was a honeymoon trip,
and a thrill ran along her nerves.

They were at Lancaster before they knew it. There was a moment of
flurried haste, and they stood on the levee, watching the boat push off
and disappear beyond a wall of willows. A few lounging Japanese looked
at them with expressionless, slant eyes, pretending not to understand
Paul's inquiries until his increasing impatience brought from them in
clear English the information that the afternoon boat was late. It
might be along about five o'clock, they thought.

"Well, that'll get us back in time for my train," Paul decided. "Let's
look around a little."

The levee road was a tunnel of willow-boughs, floored with soft sand in
which their feet made no sound. They walked in an enchanted stillness,
through pale light, green as sea-water, drowsy, warm, and scented with
the breath of unseen flowers. Through the thin wall of leaves they
caught glimpses of the broad river, the yellow waves of which gave
back the color of the sky in flashes of metallic blue. And suddenly,
stepping out of the perfumed shadow, they saw the orchards. A sea of
petals, fragile, translucent, unearthly as waves of pure rosy light,
rippled at their feet.

The loveliness of it filled Helen's eyes with tears. "Oh!" she said,
softly. "Oh--Paul!" Her hand went out blindly toward him. One more
breath of magic would make the moment perfect. She did not know what
she wanted, but her whole being was a longing for it. "Oh, Paul!"

"Pears, by Jove!" he cried. "Hundreds of acres, Helen! They're the tops
of trees! We're looking down at 'em! Look at the river. Why, the land's
fifteen feet below water-level. Did you ever see anything like it?"
Excitement shook his voice. "There must be a way to get down there. I
want to see it!" He almost ran along the edge of the levee, Helen had
to hurry to keep beside him. She did not know why she should be hurt
because Paul was interested in the orchards. She was the first to laugh
about going down-stairs to farm when they found the wooden steps on the
side of the levee.

But she felt rebuffed and almost resentful. She listened abstractedly
to Paul's talk about irrigation and the soil. He crumbled handfuls of
it between his fingers while they walked between the orchard rows,
and his opinion led to a monologue on the soil around Ripley and the
fight the farmers were making to get water on it. He was conservative
about the project; it might pay, and it might not. But if it did, a
man who bought some cheap land now would make a good thing out of it.
It occurred to her suddenly to wonder about the girls in Ripley. There
must be some; Paul had never written about them. She thought about it
for some time before she was able to bring the talk to the point where
she could ask about them.

"Girls?" Paul said. "Sure, there are. I don't pay much attention to
them, though. I see them in church, and they're at the Aid Society
suppers, of course. They seem pretty foolish to me. Why, I never
noticed whether they were pretty, or not." Enlightenment dawned upon
him. "I'll tell you; they don't seem to talk about anything much.
You're the only girl I ever struck that I could really talk to. I--I've
been awfully lonesome, thinking about you."

"Really truly?" she said, looking up at him. The sunlight fell across
her white dress, and stray pink petals fluttered slowly downward around
her. "Have you really been lonesome for me, too?" She swayed toward
him, ever so little, and he put his arms around her.

He did love her. A great contentment flowed through her. To be in his
arms again was to be safe and rested and warm after ages of racking
effort in the cold. He was thinking only of her now. His arms crushed
her against him; she felt the roughness of his coat under her cheek.
He was stammering love-words, kissing her hair, her cheeks, her lips.

"Oh, Paul, I love you, I love you, I love you!" she said, her arms
around his neck.

Much later they found a little nook under the willows on the levee bank
and sat there with the river rippling at their feet, his arm around
her, her head on his shoulder. They talked a little then. Paul told her
again all about Ripley, but she did not mind. "When we're married--"
said Paul, and the rest of the sentence did not matter.

"And I'm going to help you," she said. "Because I'm telegraphing now,
too. I'll be earning as much--almost as much, as you do. We can live
over the depot--"

"We will not!" said Paul. "We'll have a house. I don't know that I'm
crazy about my wife working."

"Oh, but I do want to help! A house would be nice. Oh, Paul, with
rose-bushes in the yard!"

"And a horse and buggy, so we can go riding Sunday afternoons."

"Besides, if I'm making money--"

"I know. We wouldn't have to wait so long."

She flushed. It was what she meant, but she did not want to think so.
"I didn't--I don't--"

"Of course there's mother. And I want to feel that I can support--"

She felt the magic departing.

"Never mind!" The tiniest of cuddling movements brought his arms tight
around her again.

"Oh, sweetheart, sweetheart, you're worth it!" he cried. "I'd wait for
you!"

They were startled when they noticed the shadows under the trees. They
had not dreamed it was so late. She smoothed her hair and pinned on her
hat with trembling fingers, and they raced for the landing. The river
was an empty stretch of dirty gray lapping dusky banks. There was no
one at the landing.

"It must be way after five o'clock. I wish I had a watch. The boat
couldn't have gone by without our seeing it?" The suggestion drained
the color from their cheeks. They looked at each other with wide eyes.
"It couldn't have possibly! Let's ask."

The little town was no more than half a dozen old wooden buildings
facing the levee. A store, unlighted and locked, a harness shop, also
locked, two dark warehouses, a saloon. She waited in the shadow of it
while he went in to inquire. He came out almost immediately.

"No, the boat hasn't gone. They don't know when it'll get here. No one
there but a few Japanese."

They walked uncertainly back to the landing and stood gazing at the
darkening river. "I suppose there's no knowing when it will get here?
There's no other way of getting back?"

"No, there's no railroad. I _have_ got you into a scrape!"

"It's all right. It wasn't your fault," she hastened to say.

They walked up and down, waiting. Darkness came slowly down upon them.
The river breeze grew colder. Stars appeared.

"Chilly?"

"A little," she said through chattering teeth.

He took off his coat and wrapped it around her, despite her protests.
They found a sheltered place on the bank and huddled together,
shivering. A delicious sleepiness stole over her, and the lap-lap of
the water, the whispering of the leaves, the warmth of Paul's shoulder
under her cheek, all became like a dream.

"Comfortable, dear?"

"Mmmmhuh," she murmured. "You?"

"You bet your life!" She roused a little to meet his kiss. The night
became dreamlike again.

"Helen?"

"What!"

"Seems to me we've been here a long time. What'll we do? We can't stay
here till morning."

"I don't--know--why not. All night--under the stars--"

"But listen. What if the boat comes by and doesn't stop? There isn't
any light."

She sat up then, rubbing the drowsiness from her eyes.

"Well, let's make a fire. Got any matches?"

He always carried them, to light the switch-lamps in Ripley. They
hunted dry branches and driftwood and coaxed a flickering blaze alive.
"It's like being stranded on a desert island!" she laughed. His eyes
adored her, crouching with disheveled hair in the leaping yellow light.
"You're certainly game," he said. "I--I think you're the pluckiest girl
in the world. And when I think what a fool I am to get you into this!"

There came like an echo down the river the hoarse whistle of the boat.
A moment later it was upon them, looming white and gigantic, its
lights cutting swaths in the darkness as it edged in to the landing.
Struggling to straighten her hat, to tuck up her hair, to brush the
sand from her skirt, Helen stumbled aboard with Paul's hand steadying
her.

The blaze of the salon lights hurt their eyes, but warmth and security
relaxed tired muscles. The room was empty, its carpet swept, the velvet
chairs neatly in place.

"Funny, I thought there'd be a lot of passengers," Paul wondered aloud.
He found a cushion, tucked it behind Helen's head, and sat down beside
her. "Well, we're all right now. We'll be in Sacramento pretty soon."

"Don't let's think about it," she said with quivering lips. "I hate to
have it all end, such a lovely day. It'll be such a long time--"

He held her hand tightly.

"Not so awfully long. I'm not going to stand for it." He spoke firmly,
but his eyes were troubled. She did not answer, and they sat looking at
the future while the boat jolted on toward the moment of their parting.

"Damn being poor!" The word startled her as a blow would have done.
Paul, so sincerely and humbly a church member--Paul swearing! He went
on without a pause. "If I had a little money, if I only had a little
money! What right has it got to make such a difference? Oh, Helen, you
don't know how I want you!"

"Paul, Paul dear, you mustn't!" Her hand was crushed against his face,
his shoulders shook. She drew his dear, tousled head against her
shoulder.

"Don't, dear, don't! Please."

He pushed away from her and got up. She let him go, shielding his
embarrassment even from her own eyes. "I seem to be making a fool of
myself generally," he said shakily. He walked about the room, looking
with an appearance of interest at the pictures on the walls. "It's
funny there aren't more people on board," he said conversationally
after a while. "Well, I guess I'll go see what time we get in." He came
back five minutes later, an odd expression on his face.

"Look here, Helen," he said gruffly. "We won't get in for hours.
Something wrong with the engines. They're only making half time.
I--ah--I don't know why I didn't think of it before. You've got to work
to-morrow and all. The man suggested--"

"Well, for goodness' sake, suggested what?"

"Everybody else has berths," he said. "You better let me get you one,
because there's no sense in your sitting up all night. There's no
knowing when we'll get in."

"But, Paul, I hate to have you spend so much. I could sleep a little
right here." A vision of the office went through her mind, and she
saw herself, sleepy-eyed, struggling to get messages into the right
envelopes and trying to manage the unmanageable messenger-boys. She was
tired. But it would be awfully expensive, no doubt. "And besides, I'd
rather stay here with you," she said.

"So would I. But we might as well be sensible. You've got to work,
and I'd probably go to sleep, too. Come on, let's see how much it is,
anyhow."

They found the right place after wandering twice around the boat. A
weary man sat behind the half-door, adding up a column of figures.
"Berths? Sure. Outside, of course. One left. Dollar and a half." His
expectation brought the money, as if automatically, from Paul's pocket.
He came out, yawning, a key with a dangling tag in his hand. "This way."

They followed him down the corridor. Matters seemed to be taken from
their hands. He stepped out on the dark deck.

"Careful there, better give your wife a hand over those ropes," he
cautioned over his shoulder, and they heard the sound of a key in a
lock. An oblong of light appeared; he stepped out again to let them
pass him. They went in. "There's towels. Everything all right, I
guess," he said cheerfully. "Good-night."

Their eyes met for one horrified second. Embarrassment covered
them both like a flame. "I--Helen! You don't think--?" They swayed
uncertainly in the narrow space between berths and wash-stand. Did the
boat jolt so or was it the beating of her heart?

"Paul, did you hear? How could--?"

"I guess I better go now," he said. He fumbled with the door.
"Good-night."

"Good-night." She felt suddenly forlorn. But he was not gone. "Helen?
It might be true. We might be married!"

She clung to him.

"We can't! We couldn't! Oh, Paul, I love you so!"

"We can be married--we will be--just as soon as we get to Sacramento."
His kisses smothered her. "The very first thing in the morning! We'll
manage somehow. I'll always love you just as much. Helen, what's the
matter? Look at me. Darling!"

"We can't," she gasped. "I'd be spoiling everything for you. Your
mother and me and everything on your hands, and you're just getting
started. You'd hate me after a while. No, no, no!"

They stumbled apart.

"What am I saying?" he said hoarsely, and she turned away from him,
hiding her face.

A rush of cold moist air blew in upon her from the open doorway. He was
gone. She got the door shut, and sat down on the edge of the berth. A
cool breeze flowed in like water through the shutters of the windows;
she felt the throbbing of the engines. Even through her closed lids
she could not bear the light, and after a while she turned it out,
trembling, and lay open-eyed in the darkness.

The stopping of the boat struck her aching nerves like a blow. She
sat up, neither asleep nor awake, pushing her hair back from a face
that seemed sodden and lifeless. A pale twilight filled the stateroom.
She smoothed her hair, straightened her crumpled dress as well as she
could, and went out on the deck. The boat lay at the Sacramento landing.

A few feet away Paul was leaning upon the railing, his face pale and
haggard in the cold light As she went toward him the events of the
night danced fantastically through her brain, as grotesque and feverish
as images in a dream.

"You don't hate me, do you, Helen?" he pleaded hopelessly.

"Of course not," she said. Through her weariness she felt a stirring of
pity. For the first time in her life she told herself to smile, and did
it. "We'd better be getting off, hadn't we?"

The grayness of dawn was in the air, paling the street-lights. A few
workmen passed them, plodding stolidly, carrying lunch-pails and tools;
a baker's wagon rattled by, awakening loud echoes. She tried to comfort
Paul, whose talk was one long self-reproach.

He hoped she would not get into a row with the folks where she stayed.
If she did, she must let him know; he wouldn't stand for anything like
that. She could reach him in Masonville till Saturday; then he would
come down again on his way home. He hadn't thought he could stop on
the way back, but he would. He'd be worried about her until he saw her
again and was sure everything was all right. He had been an awful boob
not to be sure about the boat; he'd never forgive himself if--

"What is it?" he broke off. She had turned to look after a young man
who passed them. The motion was almost automatic; she had hardly seen
the man and not until he was past did her tired mind register an
impression of a cynically smiling eye.

"Nothing," she said. She had been right; it was McCormick. But it would
require too much effort to talk about him.

The blinds of Mrs. Campbell's house were still down when they reached
it. The tight roll of the morning paper lay on the porch. She would
have to ring, of course, to get in. They faced each other on the damp
cement walk, the freshness of the dewy lawns about them.

"Well, good-by."

"Good-by." They felt constrained in the daylight, under the blank stare
of the windows. Their hands clung. "You really aren't mad at me, Helen,
about anything?"

"Of course I'm not. Nothing's happened that wasn't as much my fault as
it was yours."

"You'll let me know?"

She promised, though she had no intention of troubling him with her
problems. It was not his fault that the boat was late, and she had gone
as gladly as he. "Don't bother about it. I'll be all right. Good-by."

"Good-by." Still their fingers clung together. She felt a rush of
tenderness toward him.

"Don't look so worried, you dear!" Quickly, daringly, she leaned toward
him and brushed a butterfly's wing of a kiss upon his sleeve. Then,
embarrassed, she ran up the steps.

"See you Saturday," he called in a jubilant undertone. She watched his
stocky figure until it turned the corner. Then she rang the bell. There
was time for the momentary glow to depart, leaving her weak and chilly,
before Mrs. Campbell opened the door. She said nothing. Her eyes, her
tight lips, her manner of drawing her dressing-gown back from Helen's
approach, spoke her thoughts. Explanations would be met with scornful
unbelief.

Helen held her head high and countered silence with silence. But before
she reached her room she heard Mrs. Campbell's voice, high-pitched and
cutting, speaking to her husband.

"Brazen as you please! You're right. The only thing to do's to put her
out of this house before we have a scandal on our hands. That's what I
get for taking her in, out of charity!"

Helen shut her door softly. She would leave the house that very day.
The battered alarm clock pointed to half-past five. Three hours before
she could do anything. She undressed mechanically, half-formed plans
rushing through her mind. No money, next month's wages spent for these
crumpled clothes. She could telegraph her mother, but she must not
alarm her. Why hadn't she thought of borrowing something from Paul?
There was Mr. Roberts, but she could never make up more money. Perhaps
he would advance the raise he had promised. Her brain was working with
hectic rapidity. She saw in flashes rooming-houses, the office, Mr.
Roberts. She thought out every detail of long conversations, heard her
own voice explaining, arguing, promising, thanking.




                              CHAPTER VII


She woke with a start at the sound of the alarm. Her sleep had not
refreshed her. Her body felt wooden, and there was a gritty sensation
behind her eyeballs. Dressing and hurrying to the office was like a
nightmare in which a tremendous effort accomplishes nothing. The office
routine steadied her. She booked the night messages, laying wet tissue
paper over them, running them through the copying-machine, addressing
their envelopes, sending out messenger-boys, settling their disputes
over long routes. Everything was as usual; the sunshine streamed in
through the plate-glass front of the office; customers came and went;
the telephone rang; the instruments clicked. Her holiday was gone as
if she had dreamed it. There remained only the recurring sting of Mrs.
Campbell's words, and a determination to leave her house.

She tried several times to talk to Mr. Roberts. But he was in a black
mood. He walked past her without saying good-morning, and over the
question of a delayed message his voice snapped like a whip-lash. She
saw that some obscure fury was working in him and that he would grant
no favors until it had worn itself out. Perhaps he would be in a
better humor later. She must ask him for some money before night.

In the lull just before noon she sat at her table behind the screen,
her head on her arms. She did not feel like working at the instrument.
Mr. McCormick was lounging against the front counter, talking to Mr.
Roberts, who sat at his desk. They would take care of any customers;
for a moment she could rest and try to think.

"Miss Davies!"

"Yes, sir!" She leaped to her feet. Mr. Roberts' tone was dangerous.
Had she forgotten a message?

"I'd like to show you the batteries. Come with me."

"Oh, thank you! I'd like to see them." She tried by the cheerfulness of
her voice to make his frown relax.

She followed him gingerly down the stairway to the basement. The
batteries stood in great rows on racks of shelves, big glass jars
rimmed with poisonous-looking green and yellow stains, filled with
discolored water and pieces of rotting metal. A failing electric-light
bulb illuminated their dusty ranks, and dimly showed black beams and
cobwebs overhead.

"It's awfully good of you to take so much trouble," she began
gratefully.

"Cut that out! How long're you going to think you're making a damn fool
of me?" Mr. Roberts turned on her suddenly a face that terrified her.
Words choked in his throat. He caught her wrist, and she felt his whole
body shaking. "You--you--damned little--" The rows of glass jars spun
around her. She hardly understood the words he flung at her. "Coming
here with your big eyes, playing me for all you're worth, acting
innocence! D'you think you've fooled me a minute? D'you think I haven't
seen through your little game? How long d'you think I'm going to stand
for it--say?"

"Let me go," she said, panting.

She steadied herself against the end of a rack, where his furious
gesture flung her. They faced each other in the close space, breathing
hard. "I don't know--what you mean," she said. Her world was going to
pieces under her feet.

"You know damn well what I mean. Don't keep on lying to me. You can't
put it over. I know where you were last night." His face was contorted
again. "Yes, and all the other nights, all the time you've been kidding
yourself you were making a fool of me. I know all about it. Get that? I
know what you were before I ever gave you a job. What d'you suppose I
gave it to you for? So you could run around on the outside, laughing at
me?"

"Wait--oh, please--"

"I've done all the listening to you I'm going to do. You're going to do
something besides talk from now on. I'm not a boy you can twist around
your finger. I don't care how cute you are."

"I don't--want to. I only--want to get away," she said. She still faced
him, for she could not hide her face without taking her eyes from him,
and she was afraid to do that. When the silence continued she began
to drop into it small disjointed phrases. "I didn't know, I thought
you were so good to me. We couldn't help the boat being late. Please,
please, just let me go away. I was only trying to learn to telegraph. I
thought I was doing so well."

She felt, then, that he was no longer angry, and turning against the
cobwebbed boards, she covered her face with her arms and cried. She
hated herself for doing it; but she could not help it. Every instant
she tried to stop, and very soon she was able to do so. When she lifted
her head Mr. Roberts was gone.

She waited a while among the uncaring battery jars, steadying
herself, and wiping her face with her handkerchief. When she forced
herself to climb up into the daylight again there was no one in the
office but McCormick, who sat at the San Francisco wire, gazing into
space, whistling "Life's a funny proposition after all," while the
disregarded sounder clattered fretfully, calling him.

Of course she would leave the office. She put on her hat and did so at
once, but when she was out in the sunlight, with the eyes of passers-by
upon her, she could do nothing but writhe among her thoughts like a
flayed thing among nettles. The side streets were better than the
others, for there fewer people could see her. If it were only night, so
she could crawl unobserved into some corner and die.

It was a long time before she realized that her body was aching and
that she was limping on painful feet. She had reached a street in some
residence sub-division, where cement sidewalks ran through tangles
of last year's weeds, and little cottages stood forlornly at long
intervals. She stumbled over an expanse of dry stubble and green grass
and sat down. She could not suffer any more. It was good to sit in the
warm sunshine, to be alone. Life was vile. She shrank from it with sick
loathing. She had been so hurt that she no longer felt pain, but her
soul was nauseated.

There was no refuge into which she could crawl. There was no time to
heal her bruises, no one to help her bear them. The afternoon was
almost gone. At the house there was Mrs. Campbell, at the office--she
could get more money from her mother and go home to stay. She owed her
mother a hundred dollars--months of privation and heartbreaking work.
She could not shudder away from the hideousness of life at such a cost
to others. Somehow she must find strength in herself to stand up, to go
on, to do something.

Mr. Roberts' recommendation was necessary before she could get another
telegraph job. She did not know how to do anything else. She owed him
ten dollars, which must be paid. Paul--shamed blood rose in her cheeks
when her thoughts touched him. She must face this thing alone.

In the depths of her mind she felt a hardness growing. All her finer
sensibilities, hurt beyond bearing, were concealing themselves beneath
a coarser hardihood. Her chin went up, her lips set, her eyes narrowed
unconsciously.

After a long time she rose, brushing dead grass-stalks from her skirt,
and started back to town. A street-car carried her there quickly. On
the way she remembered that she should eat, and thought of Mrs. Brown.
The half-punched meal-ticket was still in her purse. She had shivered
at the thought of ever seeing Mrs. Brown again, and many times she had
intended to throw away the bit of paste-board, but she had not been
able to do so because it represented food.

She got off the car at the corner nearest the little restaurant, and
forced herself to its doors. It was closed and empty, and a "For Rent"
sign was glued to the dirty window. Under her quick relief there was a
sense of triumph. She had made herself go there, at least.

In a dairy-lunch she drank a cup of coffee and swallowed a sandwich.
Then she went back to the telegraph-office.

She held her head high and walked steadily, as she might have gone to
her own execution. She felt that something within her was being crushed
to death, something clean and fine and sensitive, which must die before
she could make herself face Mr. Roberts again. She opened the office
door and went in.

Mr. Roberts was at one of the wires. McCormick, frowning, was booking
messages at her high desk. She hung her hat in the cabinet and took the
pen from his hand.

"Well, Little Bright-eyes, welcome to our city!" he exclaimed in his
usual manner, but she saw that he was nervous, disturbed by the sense
of tension in the air.

"After this you're going to call me Miss Davies," she said, folding
a message into an envelope. She struck the bell for the next
messenger-boy. Well, she had been able to do that.

It was harder to approach Mr. Roberts. She did not know whether she
most shrank from him, despised him, or feared him, but her heart
fluttered and she felt ill when he came through the railing into the
office and sat down at his desk. She went over the day's bookings, and
checked up the messenger books without seeing them, until her hatred of
her cowardice grew into a kind of courage. Then she went over to his
desk.

"Mr. Roberts," she said clearly. "I'm not any of the things you called
me." Her cheeks, her forehead, even her neck, were burning painfully.
"I'm a perfectly decent girl."

"Well, there's no use making such a fuss about it," he mumbled,
searching among his papers for one which apparently was not there.

"I wouldn't stay, only I owe you ten dollars and I've got to have a
job. You know that. It was all the truth I told you, about having to
work. I got to stay here--"

"How do you know I'm going to let you?" he said, stung.

"I'm a good clerk. You can't get another as good any cheaper." She
found herself on the defensive and struck wildly. "You ought to anyway
let me keep the job, to make up--"

"That'll do," he said harshly. Turning away from her he caught
McCormick's eye, which dropped quickly to the message he was sending.
"Go take those messages off the hook and get them out, if you want a
job so bad."

She obeyed. It startled her to find she was meeting McCormick's grin
with a little twisted smile almost as cynical. What she wanted to do
was to scream.

Late that afternoon she was leaning on the front counter, watching
people go by outside the plate-glass windows and wondering what was the
truth about them, when she felt McCormick's gaze upon her. He came a
step closer, putting his elbow on the counter beside hers, and spoke
confidentially.

"Well, I guess you got the old man buffaloed, all right."

"I wish you'd leave me alone," she said in a hard, clear voice.

"Oh, what's the use of getting sore? You're a plucky little devil. I
like you." He spoke meditatively, as if considering impersonally his
sensations. "Made a killing at poker last night," he went on. When she
did not answer, "There's no string tied to a little loan."

But this, even with the flash of hope it offered, was too much to be
borne.

"Go away!" she cried. He strolled back to the wires, whistling.

She was checking up the last undelivered message at six o'clock and
telling herself that she must go back to Mrs. Campbell's for the night,
when Mr. Roberts laid a telegram on the desk beside her. "I'll try to
keep the office going without your assistance," he said with an attempt
at sarcasm. "Don't bother about me. Just get out."

The flowing operator's script danced before her eyes. She read it
twice. "See your service this afternoon. Can offer Miss Davies night
duty St. Francis hotel forty-five dollars a month report immediately.
BRYANT, MGR."

"San Francisco?" she stammered, incredulous, gazing at the SF
date-line. Across the yellow sheet she looked at Mr. Roberts, seeing
in his eyes a dislike that was almost hatred. "I'll go to-night," she
said. "I think everything's in order. That Ramsey message was out
twice."

When he had gone, she borrowed ten dollars from McCormick, promising to
return it at the end of the month. She hardly resented his elaborately
kissing the money good-by, and holding her hand when he gave it to
her. But she spent twenty-five cents of it to send a message from the
station to Paul, though McCormick would have sent it for her as a note,
costing nothing.




                             CHAPTER VIII


Cooped in a narrow space at the end of a long corridor, Helen sat
gazing at the life of a great San Francisco hotel. Every moment
the color and glitter shifted under the brilliant light of mammoth
chandeliers. Tall, gilded elevator-doors opened and closed; women
passed, wrapped in satins and velvets, airy feathers in their shining
hair; men in evening dress escorted them; bell-boys went by, carrying
silver trays and calling unintelligibly, their voices rising above the
continuous muffled stir and the faint sounds of music from the Blue
Room.

Helen had choked the telegraph-sounder with a pencil, so that she might
hear the music. But the tones of the violins came to her blurred by
a low hum of voices, by the rustle of silks, by the soft movement of
many feet on velvet carpets. Nothing was clear, simple, or distinct in
the medley. Her ears were baffled, as her eyes were dazzled and her
thoughts confused, by a multiplicity of sensations. San Francisco was a
whirlpool, an endless roaring circle, stupendous and dizzying.

This had been her sick impression of it on that first morning, when she
struggled through the eddying crowds at the ferry building, lugging
her telescope-bag with one hand and with the other trying to hold her
hat in place against gusts of wind. Beneath the uproar of street-car
gongs, of huge wagons rumbling over the cobbles, of innumerable
hurrying feet, whistles, bells, shouts, she had felt a great impersonal
current, terrifying in its heedlessness of all but its own mighty
swirl, and she had had the sensation of standing at the brink of a
maelstrom.

After ten months the impression still remained. But now she seemed to
have been drawn into the motionless vertex. The city roared around her,
still incomprehensible, still driven by its own breathless speed, but
in the heart of it she was alien and untouched. She had found nothing
in it but loneliness.

Her first terrors had vanished, leaving her with a frustrated sense
of having been ridiculous in having them. She had gathered her whole
strength for a great effort, and she had found nothing to do. Far
from lying in wait with nameless dangers and pitfalls for the unwary
stranger, the city apparently did not know she was there.

At the main telegraph-office Mr. Bryant had received her indifferently.
He was a busy man; she was one detail of his routine work. He directed
her to the St. Francis, asked her to report there at five o'clock,
and, looking at her again, inquired whether she knew any one in San
Francisco or had arranged for a place to live. Three minutes later he
handed her over to a brisk young woman, who gave her an address and
told her what car to take to reach it.

She had found a shabby two-story house on Gough Street, with a
discouraged palm in a tub on the front porch. A colorless woman showed
her the room. It was a small, neat place under the eaves, furnished
with an iron bed, a wash-stand, a chair, and a strip of rag carpet. The
bathroom was on the lower floor, and the rent was two dollars and a
half a week. Helen set down her bag with a sigh of relief.

Thus simply she found herself established in San Francisco. Her
first venture into the St. Francis had been no more exciting. After
a panic-stricken plunge into its magnificence she was accepted
noncommittally by the day-operator, a pale girl with eye-glasses, who
was already putting on her hat. She turned over a few unsent messages,
gave Helen the cash-box and rate-book, and departed.

Thereafter Helen met her daily, punctually at five o'clock, and saw her
leave. Helen rather looked forward to the moment. It was pleasant to
say, "Good evening," once a day to some one.

In the afternoon she walked about, looking at the city, and learned to
know many of the streets by name. She discovered the public library
and read a great deal. The library was also a pleasant place to spend
Sundays, being less lonely than the crowded parks, and if the librarian
were not too busy one might sometimes talk to her about a book.

The dragging of the days, as much as her need for more money, had
driven her to asking for extra work at the main office. But here,
too, she had been dropped into the machine and put down before her
telegraph-key, with barely a hurried human touch. A beginner, rated
at forty-five dollars, she replaced a seventy-five-dollar operator
on a heavy wire, and the days became a nerve-straining tension of
concentration on the clicking sounder at her ear, while the huge
room with its hundreds of instruments and operators faded from her
consciousness.

Released at four o'clock, she ate forlornly in a dairy lunch-room and
hurried to the St. Francis. Here, at least, she could watch other
people's lives. Gazing out at the changing crowd in the hotel corridor
she let her imagination picture the romances, the adventures, at her
finger-tips. A man spoke cheerfully to the cigar-boy while he lighted
his cigarette at the swinging light over the news-stand counter. He was
the center of a scandal that had filled the afternoon papers, and under
her hand was the message he had sent to his wife, denying, appealing,
swearing loyalty and love. A little, soft-eyed woman in clinging laces,
stepping from the elevator to meet a plump man in evening dress, was
there to put through a big mining deal with him. The ends of the
intrigue stretched out into vagueness, but her telegrams revealed its
magnitude.

Helen's cramped muscles stirred restlessly. There was barely room to
move in the tiny office, crowded with table and chair and wastebasket.
Spaciousness was on the other side of the counter.

She snatched the pencil from the counter and began a letter to Paul.
Her imagination, at least, was released when she wrote letters.

    _Dear Paul_:

    I wonder what you are doing now! It's eight o'clock and of course
    you've had your supper. Your mother's probably finishing up the
    kitchen work and putting the bread to rise, and you haven't
    anything to do but sit on the porch and look at the stars and the
    lighted windows here and there in the darkness, and listen to the
    breeze in the trees. And here I am, sitting in a place that looks
    just like a hothouse with all the flowers come to life. There's
    a ball up-stairs, and a million girls have gone through the
    corridors, with flowers and feathers and jewels in their hair, and
    dresses and evening cloaks as beautiful as petals. How I wish you
    could see them all, and the men, too, in evening dress. They're the
    funniest things when they're fat, but some of the slim ones look
    like princes or counts or something.

    What kind of new furniture was it your mother got? You've never
    told me a word about the place you're living since you moved, and
    I'm awfully interested. Do please tell me what color the wall-paper
    is and the carpets, and the woodwork, and what the kitchen is like,
    and if there are rose-bushes in the yard. Did your mother get new
    curtains, too? There is a lovely new material for curtains just
    out--sort of silky, and rough, in the loveliest colors. I see it in
    the store windows, and if your mother wants me to I'd love to price
    it, and get samples for her.

    A little boy's just come in with a toy balloon, and it got away
    from him and it's bumping up around on the gilded ceiling, and
    I wish you could hear him howl. It must be fun for the balloon,
    though, after being dragged around for hours, tugging all the time
    to get away, to escape at last and go up and up and up--

    I felt just like that this morning. Just think, Paul, I sent the
    last of the hundred dollars home, and another fifty besides! Isn't
    that gorgeous? I'm making over ninety dollars a month now, with my
    extra work at SF office, and my salary here--

She paused, biting her pencil. That would give him a start, she
thought. He had been so self-satisfied when he got his raise to being
day-operator and station-agent. She had not quite got over the hurt of
his taking it without letting her know that the night-operator's place
would be vacant. He had explained that a girl couldn't handle the job,
but she knew that he did not want her to be working with him.

In the spring, she thought, she would be able to get some beautiful new
clothes and go home for a visit. Paul would come, too, when he knew she
would be there. He would see then how well she could manage on a very
little money. In a few months more she would be able to save enough for
a trousseau, tablecloths, and embroidered towels--

"Blank, please!" A customer leaned on the counter. She gave him the pad
and watched him while he wrote. His profile was handsome; a lock of
fair hair beneath the pushed-back hat, a straight forehead, an aquiline
nose, a thin, humorous mouth. He wrote nervously, dashing the pencil
across the paper, tearing off the sheet and crumpling it impatiently,
beginning again. When he finished, shoving the message toward her with
a quick movement, he looked at her and smiled, and she felt a charm in
the warm flash of his eyes. His nervous vitality was magnetic.

She read the message. "'G. H. Kennedy, Central Trust Company, Los
Angeles. Drawing on you for five hundred. Must have it. Absolutely sure
thing this time. Full explanations follow by letter. GILBERT.'
Sixty-seven cents, please," she said. She wished that she could think
of something more to say; she would have liked to talk to him. There
was about him an impression of something happening every instant. When,
turning away, he paused momentarily, she looked at him quickly. But he
was speaking to the rival operator.

"Hello, kid!"

"On your way," the girl replied imperturbably. Her eyes laughed and
challenged. But with an answering smile he went past, and only his hat
remained visible in glimpses through the crowd. Then it turned a corner
and was gone.

"Fresh!" the girl murmured. "But gee, he can dance!"

Helen looked at her with interest. She was a new girl, on relief duty.
The regular operator for her company was a sober, conscientious woman
of thirty, who studied German grammar in her leisure moments. This one
was not at all like her.

"Do you know him?" said Helen, smiling shyly. This was an opening for
conversation, and she met it eagerly. The other girl had a friendly and
engaging manner, which obviously included all the world.

"Sure I do," she answered, though there was uncertainty under the
round tones. She ran a slim forefinger through the blond curl that lay
against her neck, smiling at Helen with a display of even, white teeth.
Helen thought of pictures on magazine covers. It must be wonderful to
be as pretty as that, she thought wistfully. "Who's he wiring to?"

Helen passed the message across the low railing that separated the
offices. She noticed the shining of the girl's fingernail as she ran it
along the lines.

"Well, what do you know about that? He _was_ giving me a song and dance
about being Judge Kennedy's son. You never can tell about men," she
commented sagely, returning the telegram. "Sometimes they tell you the
absolute truth."

A childlike quality made her sophistication merely piquant. Her
comments on the passing guests fascinated Helen, and an occasional
phrase revealed glimpses of a world of gaiety in which she seemed to
flutter continually, like a butterfly in the sunshine. She worked, it
appeared, only at irregular intervals.

"Momma supports me, of course on her alimony. Papa certainly treated
her rotten, but his money's perfectly good," she said artlessly. Her
frankness also was childlike, and her calm acceptance of the situation
made it necessary to regard it as commonplace. Helen, in self-defense,
could not be shocked.

"She's lot of fun, momma is. Just loves a good time. She's out dancing
now. Gee! I wish I was! I'm just crazy about dancing, aren't you?
Listen to that music! All I want is just to dance all night long.
That's what I really love."

"Do you ever--often, I mean--do it? Dance all night long?" Helen asked,
wide-eyed.

"Only once a night." She laughed. "About five nights a week."

Helen thought her entertaining, and warmed to her beauty and charm.
In an hour she was asking Helen to call her Louise, and although she
made no attempt to conceal her astonishment at the barrenness of
Helen's life, her generous desire to share her own good times took
the sting from her pity. Why, Helen didn't know the city at all, she
cried, and Helen could only assent. They must go out to some of the
cafés together; they must have tea at Techau's; Helen must come to
dinner and meet momma. Louise jumbled a dozen plans together in a rush
of friendliness. It was plain that she was genuinely touched in her
butterfly heart by Helen's loneliness.

"And you're a brunette!" she cried. "We'll be stunning together. I'm so
blonde." The small circle of her thought returned always to herself.
Helen, dimly seeing this, felt an amused tolerance, which saved her
pride while she confessed to herself her inferiority in cleverness
to this sparkling small person. Louise would never have drifted into
dull stagnation; she would have found some way to fill her life with
realities instead of dreams.

Midnight came before Helen realized it. Tidying her desk for the night,
she found the unfinished letter to Paul and tucked it into her purse.
She had not been forced to feed upon her imagination that evening.

Louise walked to the car-line with her, and it was settled that the
next night Helen should come to dinner and meet momma. It meant cutting
short her extra work and paying the day-operator to stay late at the
St. Francis, but Helen did not regret the cost. This was the first
friend the city had offered her.

       *       *       *       *       *

Three weeks later she was sharing the apartment on Leavenworth Street
with Louise and her momma.

The change had come with startling suddenness. There had been the
dinner first. Helen approached it diffidently, doubtful of her
self-possession in a strange place, with strange people. She fortified
herself with a new hat and a veil with large velvet spots, yet at
the very door she had a moment of panic and thought of flight and
a telephone message of regrets. Only the thought of her desperate
loneliness gave her courage to ring the bell.

The strain disappeared as soon as she met momma. Momma, slim in a silk
petticoat and a frilly dressing-sack, had taken her in affectionately.
Momma was much like Louise. Helen thought again of pictures on magazine
covers, though Louise suggested a new magazine, and her mother did
not. Even Helen could see that Momma's pearly complexion was liberally
helped by powder, and her hair was almost unnaturally golden. But the
eyes were the same, large and blue, fringed with black lashes, and both
profiles had the same clear, delicate outlines.

"Yes, dear, most people do think we're sisters," Mrs. Latimer said
complacently, when Helen spoke of the resemblance.

"We have awful good times together, don't we, Momma?" Louise added, her
arm around her mother's waist, and Helen felt a pang at the fondness of
the reply. "We certainly do, kiddie."

It was a careless, happy-go-lucky household. Dinner was scrambled
together somehow, with much opening of cans, in a neglected, dingy
kitchen. Helen and Louise washed the dishes while momma stirred the
creamed chicken. It was fun to wash dishes again and to set the table,
and Helen could imagine herself one of the family while she listened
to their intimate chatter. They had had tea down town; there was
mention of some one's new car, somebody's diamonds; Louise had seen a
lavallière in a jeweler's shop; she teased her mother to buy it for
her, and her mother said fondly, "Well, honey-baby, we'll see."

They had hardly begun to eat when the telephone-bell rang, and momma,
answering it, was gone for some time. They caught scraps of bantering
talk and Louise wondered, "Who's that she's jollying now?" She sprang
up with a cry of delight when momma came back to announce that the
crowd was going to the beach.

There was a scramble to dress. Helen, hooking their gowns in the
cluttered bedroom, saw dresser drawers overflowing with sheer
underwear, silk stockings, bits of ribbon, crushed hat-trimmings, and
plumes. Louise brushed her eyebrows with a tiny brush, rubbed her nails
with a buffer, dabbed carefully at her lips with a lip-stick Helen
hoped that she did not show her surprise at these novel details of the
toilet. They had taken it for granted she was going to the beach with
them. Their surprise and regret were genuine when she said she must go
to work.

"Oh, what do you want to do that for?" Louise pouted. "You look all
right." She said it doubtfully, then brightened. "I'll lend you some
of my things. You'd be perfectly stunning dressed up. Wouldn't she be
stunning, Momma? You've got lovely hair and that baby stare of yours.
All you need's a dress and a little--Isn't it, Momma?"

Her mother agreed warmly. Helen glowed under their praise and was
deeply grateful for their interest in her. She wanted very much to go
with them, and when she stood on the sidewalk watching them depart in a
big red automobile, amidst a chorus of gay voices, she felt chilled and
lonely.

They were lovely to be so friendly to her, she thought, while she
went soberly to work. She felt that she must in some way return their
kindness, and after discarding a number of plans she decided to take
them both to a matinée.

It was Louise, at their third meeting, who suggested that she come to
live with them. "What do you know, Momma, Helen's living in some awful
hole all alone. Why couldn't she come in with us? There's loads of
room. She could sleep with me. Momma, why not?"

Her mother, smiling lazily, said:

"Well, if you kids want to, I don't care." Helen was delighted by
the prospect. It was arranged that she should pay one third of the
expenses, and Louise cried joyfully: "Now, Momma, you've got to get my
lavallière!"

The next afternoon Helen packed her bag and left the room on Gough
Street. Her feet wanted to dance when she went down the narrow stairs
for the last time and let herself out into the windy sunshine.

       *       *       *       *       *

It was maddening to find herself so tied down by her work. In the early
mornings, dragging herself from bed, she left Louise drowsy among the
pillows and saw while she dressed the tantalizing signs of last night's
gaiety in the dress flung over a chair, the scattered slippers and
silk stockings. She came home at midnight to a dark, silent apartment,
letting herself in with a latch-key to find the dinner dishes still
unwashed and spatterings of powder on the bedroom carpet, where street
shoes and a discarded petticoat were tangled together. She enjoyed
putting things in order, pretending the place was her own while she
did it, but she was lonely. Later she awoke to blink at Louise,
sitting half undressed on the edge of the bed, rubbing her face with
cold-cream, and to listen sleepily to her chatter.

"You'll be a long time dead, kiddie," momma said affectionately.
"What's the use of being a dead one till you have to?" Helen's youth
cried that momma was right. But she knew too well the miseries of
being penniless; she dared not give up a job. A chance remark, flung
out on the endless flow of Louise's gossip, offered the solution. "What
do you know about that boob girl at MX office? She's picked a chauffeur
in a garden of millionaires, and she's going to quit work and _marry_
him!"

Helen's heart leaped. It was her chance. When she confronted Mr. Bryant
across the main-office counter the next morning her hands trembled, but
her whole nature had hardened into a cold determination. She would get
that job. It paid sixty dollars a month; the hours were from eight to
four. Whether she could handle market reports or not did not matter;
she would handle them.

She scored her first business triumph when she got this job, although
she did not realize until many years later what a triumph it had been.
She settled into her work at the Merchants' Exchange wires with only
one thought. Now she was free to live normally, to have a good time,
like other girls.

The first day's work strained her nerves to the breaking point The
shouts of buyers and sellers on the floor, the impatient pounding on
the counter of customers with rush messages, the whole breathless haste
and excitement of the exchange, blurred into an indistinct clamor
through which she heard only the slow, heavy working of the Chicago
wire, tapping out a meaningless jumble of letters and fractions. She
concentrated upon it, with an effort which made her a blind machine.
The scrawled quotations she flung on the counter were wrought from an
agony of nerves and brain.

But it was over at last, and she hurried home. The dim stillness of the
apartment was an invitation to rest, but she disregarded it, slipping
out of her shirt-waist and splashing her face and bare arms with cold
water. A new chiffon blouse was waiting in its box, and a thrill
of anticipation ran through her when she lifted it from its tissue
wrappings.

She fastened the soft folds, pleased by the lines of her round arms
seen through the transparency, and her slender neck rising from white
frills. In the hand-glass she gazed at the oval of her face reflected
in the dressing-table mirror, and suddenly lifting her lids caught the
surprising effect of the sea-gray eyes beneath black lashes, an effect
she had never known until Louise spoke of it.

She was pretty. She was almost--she caught her breath--beautiful. The
knowledge was more than beauty itself, for it brought self-assurance.
She felt equal to any situation the evening might offer, and she was
smiling at herself in the mirror when Louise burst in, a picture in
a dashing little serge suit and a hat whose black line was like the
stroke of an artist's pencil.

"The alimony's come!" she cried. "We're going to have a regular time!
Momma'll meet us down town. Look, isn't it stunning?" She displayed
the longed-for lavallière twinkling against her smooth young neck. "I
knew I'd get it somehow Momma--the stingy thing!--she went and got her
new furs. But we met Bob, and he bought it for me." She sat down before
the mirror, throwing off her hat and letting down her hair. "I don't
know--it's only a chip diamond." Her moods veered as swiftly as light
summer breezes. "I wish momma'd get me a real one. It's nonsense, her
treating me like a baby. I'm seventeen."

Helen felt her delight in the new waist evaporate. Louise's chatter
always made her feel at a disadvantage. There was a distance between
them that they seemed unable to bridge, and Helen realized that it was
her fault. Perhaps it was because she had been so long alone that she
often felt even more lonely when she was with Louise.

The sensation returned, overpowering, when they joined the crowd in the
restaurant. She could only follow Louise's insouciant progress through
a bewildering medley of voices, music, brilliant lights, and stumble
into a chair at a table ringed with strange faces. Momma was there,
her hat dripping with plumes, white furs flung negligently over her
shoulders, her fingers a blaze of rings. There was another resplendent
woman, named Nell Allan; a bald-headed fat man called Bob; a younger
man, with a lean face and restless blue eyes, hailed by Louise as
Duddy. They were having a very gay time, but Helen, shrinking unnoticed
in her chair, was unaccountably isolated and lonely. She could think of
nothing to say. There was no thread in the rapid chatter at which she
could clutch. They were all talking, and every phrase seemed a flash of
wit, since they all laughed so much.

"I love the cows and chickens, but this is the life!" Duddy cried at
intervals. "Oh, you chickens!" and "This is the life!" the others
responded in a chorus of merriment. Helen did not doubt that it all
meant something, but her wits were too slow to grasp it, and the talk
raced on unintelligibly. She could only sit silent eating delicate food
from plates that waiters whisked into place and whisked away again, and
laughing uncertainly when the others did.

Color and light and music beat upon her brain. About her was a
confusion of movement, laughter, clinking glasses, glimpses of white
shoulders and red lips, perfumes, hurrying waiters, steaming dishes,
and over and through it all the quick, accented rhythm of the music,
swaying, dominating, blending all sensations into one quickening
vibration.

Suddenly, from all sides, hidden in the artificial foliage that covered
the walls, silvery bells took up the melody. Helen, inarticulate and
motionless, felt her nerves tingle, alive, joyful, eager.

There was a pushing back of chairs, and she started. But they were only
going to dance. Duddy and momma, Bob and Mrs. Allan, swept out into a
whirl of white arms and dark coats, tilted faces and swaying bodies.
"Isn't it lovely!" Helen murmured.

But Louise was not listening. She sat mutinous, her fingers tapping
time to the music, her eyes beneath the long lashes searching the room.
"I can't help it. I just got to dance!" she muttered, and suddenly she
was gone. Some one met her among the tables, put his arms around her,
and whirled her away. Helen, watching for her black hat and happy face
to reappear, saw that she was dancing with the man whose telegram had
introduced them. Memory finally gave her his name. Gilbert Kennedy.

Louise brought him to the table when the music ceased. There were gay
introductions, and Helen wished that she could say something. But momma
monopolized him, squeezing in an extra chair for him beside her, and
saying how glad she was to meet a friend of her little girl's.

Helen could only be silent, listening to their incomprehensible
gaiety, and feeling an attraction for him as irresistible as an
electric current. She did not know what it was, but she thought him the
handsomest man she had ever seen, and she felt that he did whatever he
wanted to do with invariable success. He was not like the others. He
talked their jargon, but he did not seem of them, and she noticed that
his hazel eyes, set in a network of tiny wrinkles, were at once avid
and weary. Yet he could not be older than twenty-eight or so. He danced
with momma, when again the orchestra began a rag, but coming back to
the table with the others, he said restlessly:

"Let's go somewhere else. My car's outside. How about the beach?"

"Grand little idea!" Duddy declared amid an approving chorus. Helen,
following the others among the tables and through the swinging doors
to the curb where the big gray car stood waiting, told herself that
she must make an effort, must pay for this wonderful evening with some
contribution to the fun. But when they had all crowded into the machine
and she felt the rush of cool air against her face and saw the street
lights speeding past, she forgot everything but joy. She was having
a good time at last, and a picture of the Masonville girls flashed
briefly through her mind. How meager their picnics and hay rides
appeared beside this!

She half formed the phrases in which she would describe to Paul their
racing down the long boulevard beside the beach, the salty air, and the
darkness, and the long white lines of foam upon the breakers. This,
she realized with exultation, was a joy-ride. She had read the word in
newspapers, but its aptness had never before struck her.

It was astounding to find, after a rush through the darkness of the
park, that the car was stopping. Every one was getting out. Amazed and
trying to conceal her amazement, she went with them through a blaze of
light into another restaurant where another orchestra played the same
gay music and dancers whirled beyond a film of cigarette smoke. They
sat down at a round bare table, and Helen perceived that one must order
something to drink.

She listened to the rapid orders, hesitating. "Blue moons" were
intriguing, and "slow gin fizz" was fascinating, with its suggestion
of fireworks. But beside her Mr. Kennedy said, "Scotch high-ball,"
and the waiter took her hesitation for repetition. The glass appeared
before her, there was a cry of "Happy days!" and she swallowed a
queer-tasting, stinging mouthful. She set the glass down hastily.

"What's the matter with the high-ball?" Mr. Kennedy inquired. He had
paid the waiter, and she felt the obligation of a guest.

"It's very good really. But I don't care much for drinks that are
fizzy," she said. She saw a faint amusement in his eyes, but he did not
smile, and his order to the waiter was peremptory. "Plain high-ball
here, no seltzer." The waiter hastened to bring it.

Mr. Kennedy's attention was still upon her, and she saw no escape. She
smiled at him over the glass. "Happy days!" she said, and drank. She
set down the empty glass and the muscles of her throat choked back
a cough. "Thank you," she said, and was surprised to find that the
weariness was no longer in his eyes.

"You're all right!" he said. His tone was that of the vanquished
greeting the victor, and his next words were equally enigmatic. "I hate
a bluffer that doesn't make good when he's called!" The orchestra had
swung into a new tune, and he half rose. "Dance?"

It was hard to admit her deficiency and let him go.

"I can't. I don't know how."

He sat down.

"You don't know how to dance?" His inflection said that this was
carrying a pretense too far, that in overshooting a mark she had missed
it. His keen look at her suddenly made clear a fact for which she had
been unconsciously groping while she watched these men and women, the
clue to their relations. Beneath their gaiety a ceaseless game was
being played, man against woman, and every word and glance was a move
in that game, the basis of which was enmity. He thought that she, too,
was playing it, and against him.

"Why do you think I'm lying to you, Mr. Kennedy? I would like to dance
if I could--of course."

"I don't get you," he replied with equal directness. "What do you come
out here for if you don't drink and don't dance?"

It would be too humiliating to confess the extent of her inexperience,
her ignorance of the city in which she had lived for almost a year. "I
come because I like it," she said. "I've worked hard for a long time
and never had any fun. And I'm going to learn to dance. I don't know
about drinking. I don't like the taste of it much. Do people really
like to drink high-balls and things like that?"

It startled a laugh from him.

"Keep on drinking 'em, and you'll find out why people do it," he
answered. Over his shoulder he said to the waiter, "Couple of rye
high-balls, Ben."

The others were dancing. They were alone at the table, and when,
resting an elbow on the edge of it, he concentrated his attention upon
her, the crowded room became a swirl of color and light about their
isolation. Her breath came faster, the toe of her slipper kept time
to the music, exhilaration mounted in her veins, and her success in
holding his interest was like wine to her. But a cold, keen inner self
took charge of her brain.

The high-balls arrived. She felt that she must be rude, and did not
drink hers. When he urged she refused as politely as she could. He
insisted.

"Drink it!" She felt the clash of an imperious, reckless will against
her impassive resistance. There was a second in which neither moved,
and their whole relation subtly changed. Then she laughed.

"I'd really rather not," she said lightly.

"Come on--be game," he said.

"The season's closed," Louise's flippancies had not been without their
effect on her. It was easier to drop back into her own language. "No,
really--tell me, why do people drink things that taste like that?"

He met her on her own ground. "You've got to drink, to let go, to have
a good time. It breaks down inhibitions." She noted the word. The
use of such words was one of the things that marked his difference
from the others. "God knows why," he added wearily. "But what's the
use of living if you don't hit the high spots? And there's a streak
of--perversity--depravity in me that's got to have this kind of thing."

Their group swooped down about the table, and the general ordering of
more drinks ended their talk. There was a clamor when Helen said she
did not want anything. Duddy swept away her protests and ordered for
her, but momma came to the rescue.

"Let the kid alone; she's not used to it. You stick to lemon sours,
baby. Don't let them kid you," she said. The chatter swept on, leaving
her once more unnoticed, but when the music called again Mr. Kennedy
took her out among the dancers.

"You're all right," he said. "Just let yourself go and follow me. It's
only a walk to music." And unaccountably she found herself dancing,
felt the rhythm beat through blood and nerves, and stiffness and
awkwardness drop away from her. She felt like a butterfly bursting from
a chrysalis, like a bird singing in the dawn. She was so happy that Mr.
Kennedy laughed at the ecstacy in her face.

"You look like a kid in a candy-shop," he said, swinging her past a jam
with a long, breathless swooping glide and picking up the step again.

"I'm--per-fect-ly-happy!" she cried, in time to the tune. "It's
awfully good--of you-ou!"

He laughed again.

"Stick to me, and I'll teach you a lot of things," he said.

She found, when she went reluctantly back to the table with him,
that the others were talking of leaving. It hurt to hear him
enthusiastically greeting the suggestion. But after they were in
the machine it appeared that they were not going home. There was
an interval of rushing through the cool darkness, and then another
restaurant just like the others, and more dancing.

The hours blurred into a succession of those swift dashes through the
clean night air, and recurring plunges into light and heat and smoke
and music. Helen, faithfully sticking to lemon sours as momma had
advised, discovered that she could dance something called a rag, and
something else known as a Grizzly Bear; heard Duddy crying that she was
some chicken; felt herself a great success. Bob was growing strangely
sentimental and talked sorrowfully about his poor old mother; momma's
cheeks were flushed under the rouge, and she sang part of a song,
forgetting the rest of the words. The crowd shifted and separated;
somewhere they lost part of it, and a stranger appeared with Louise.

Helen, forced at last to think of her work next morning, was horrified
to find that it was two o'clock. Momma agreed that the best of friends
must part. They sang while they sped through the sleeping city, the
stars overhead and the street-lights flashing by. Drowsily happy, Helen
thought it no harm to rest her head on Mr. Kennedy's shoulder, since
his other arm was around momma, and she wondered what it would be like
if a man so fascinating were in love with her. It would be frightfully
thrilling and exciting, she thought, playing daringly with the idea.

"See you, again!" they all cried, when she alighted with momma and
Louise before the dark apartment-house. The others were going on
to more fun somewhere. She shook hands with Mr. Kennedy, feeling a
contraction of her heart. "Thank you for a very pleasant time." She
felt that he was amused by the stilted words.

"Don't forget it isn't the last one!" he said.

She did not forget. The words repeated themselves in her mind; she
heard his voice, and felt his arm around her waist and the music
throbbing in her blood for a long time. The sensations came back to
her in the pauses of her work next day, while she dragged through the
hours as if she were drugged, hearing the noise of the exchange and the
market quotations clicking off the Chicago wire, now very far and thin,
now close and sickeningly loud.

She was white and faint when she got home, and Momma suggested a
bromo-seltzer and offered to lend her some rouge. But Mr. Kennedy had
not telephoned, and she went to bed instead of going out with them that
evening. It was eleven days before he did telephone.




                              CHAPTER IX


In the mornings Helen went to work. The first confusion of the
Merchants' Exchange had cleared a little. She began to see a pattern
in the fluctuations of the market quotations. January wheat, February
wheat, May corn, became a drama to her, and while she snatched the
figures from the wire and tossed them to the waiting boy, saw them
chalked up on the huge board, and heard the shouts of the brokers, she
caught glimpses of the world-wide gamble in lives and fortunes.

But it was only another great spectacle in which she had no part. She
was merely a living mechanical attachment to the network of wires. She
wanted to tear herself away, to have a life of her own, a life that
went forward, instead of swinging like a pendulum between home and the
office.

She did not want to work. She had never wanted to work. Working had
been only a means of reaching sooner her own life with Paul. The road
had run straight before her to that end. But now Paul would not let her
follow it; he did not want her to work with him at Ripley; she would
have to wait until he made money enough to support her. And she hated
work.

Resting her chin on one palm, listening half consciously for her call
to interrupt the ceaseless clicking of the sounder, she gazed across
the marble counter and the vaulted room; the gesticulating brokers,
the scurrying messengers, faded into a background against which she
saw again the light and color and movement of the night when she had
met Mr. Kennedy. She heard his voice. "What's the use of living if you
don't hit the high spots?"

She hurried home at night, expecting she knew not what. But it had not
happened. Restlessness took possession of her, and she turned for hours
on her pillow, dozing only to hear the clicking of telegraph-sounders,
and music, and to find herself dancing on the floor of the Merchants'
Exchange with a strange man who had Mr. Kennedy's eyes. On the eleventh
day she received a letter from Paul, which quieted the turmoil of her
thoughts like a dash of cold water. In his even neat handwriting he
wrote:

    I suppose the folks you write about are all right. They sound
    pretty queer to me. I don't pretend to know anything about San
    Francisco, though. But I don't see how you are going to hold down a
    job and keep up with the way they seem to spend their time, though
    I will not say anything about dancing. You know I could not do it
    and stay in the church, but I do not mean to bring that up again in
    a letter. You were mighty fine and straight and sincere about that,
    and if you do not feel the call to join I would not urge you. But I
    do not think I would like your new friends. I would rather a girl
    was not so pretty, but used less slang when she talks.

The words gained force by echoing a stifled opinion of her own. With
no other standard than her own instinct, she had had moments of
criticising Louise and momma. But she had quickly hidden the criticism
in the depths of her mind, because they were companions and she had not
been able to find any others. Now they stood revealed through Paul's
eyes as glaringly cheap and vulgar.

Her longing for a good time, if she must have it with such people,
appeared weak and foolish to her. She felt older and steadier when she
went home that night. Then, just as she entered the door, the telephone
rang and Louise called that Gilbert Kennedy wanted to speak to her.

It was impossible to analyze his fascination. Uncounted times she had
gone over all he had said, all she could conjecture about him, vainly
seeking an explanation of it. The mere sound of his voice revived the
spell like an incantation, and her half-hearted resistance succumbed to
it.

Before the dressing-table, hurrying to make herself beautiful for an
evening with him, she leaned closer to the glass and tried to find the
answer in the gray eyes looking back at her. But they only grew eager,
and her reflection faded, to leave her brooding on the memory of his
face, half mocking and half serious, and the tired hunger of his eyes.

"Have a heart, for the lovea Mike!" cried Louise. "Give me a chance.
You aren't using the mirror yourself, even!" She slipped into the chair
Helen left and, pushing back her mass of golden hair, gazed searchingly
at her face. "Got to get my lashes dyed again; they're growing out.
Say, you certainly did make a hit with Kennedy!"

"Where's the nail polish?" Helen asked, searching in the hopeless
disorder of the bureau drawers. "Oh, here it is. What do you know about
him?"

"Well, he's one of those Los Angeles Kennedys. You know, old man was
indicted for something awhile ago. Loads of money." Louise, dabbing on
cold-cream, spoke in jerks. "His brother was the one that ran off with
Cissy Leroy, and his wife shot her up. Don't you remember? It was in
all the papers. I used to know Cissy, too. She was an awful good sport,
really. Don't you love that big car of his?"

Helen did not answer. In her revulsion she felt that she was not at all
interested in Gilbert Kennedy, and she had the sensation of being freed
from a weight.

Momma, slipping a rustling gown over her head, spoke through the folds.
"He's a live wire," she praised. She settled the straps over her
shoulders, tossing a fond smile at Helen. "Hook me up, dearie? Yes,
he's a live wire all right, and you've certainly got him coming."

A sudden thought chilled Helen to the finger-tips. She fumbled with the
hooks.

"He isn't married, is he?"

"Married! Well, I should say not! What do you think I am?" momma
demanded. "Do you think I'd steer you or Louise up against anything
like that?" Her voice softened. "I know too well what unhappiness comes
from some one taking another lady's husband away from his home and
family, though he does pay the alimony regular as the day comes around,
I will say that for him. I hope never to live to see the day my girl,
or you either, does a thing like that." There was genuine emotion in
her voice. Helen felt a rush of affectionate pity for her, and Louise,
springing up, threw her bare arms around her mother.

"Don't you worry, angel momma! I see myself doing it!" she cried.

At such moments of warm-hearted sincerity Helen was fond of them both.
She felt ashamed while she finished dressing. They were lovely to her,
she thought, and they accepted people as they were, without sneaking
little criticisms and feelings of superiority. She did not know what
she thought about anything.

Her indecisions were cut short by the squawk of an automobile-horn
beneath the windows. With last hasty slaps of powder-puffs and a
snatching of gloves, they hurried down to meet Mr. Kennedy at the door,
and again Helen felt his charm like a tangible current between them.
Words choked in her throat, and she stood silent in a little whirlpool
of greetings.

There were three indistinct figures already in the tonneau; a glowing
cigar-end lighted a fat, jolly face, and two feminine voices greeted
momma and Louise. Hesitating on the curb, Helen felt a warm, possessive
hand close on her arm.

"Get out, Dick. Climb in back. This little girl's going in front with
me." The dominating voice made the words like an irresistible force.
Not until she was sitting beside him and a docile young man had wedged
himself into the crowded space behind, did it occur to her to question
it.

"Do you always boss people like that?"

They were racing smoothly down a slope, and his answer came through the
rushing of the wind past her ears. "Always." The gleam of a headlight
passed across his face and she saw it keen, alert, intensely alive.
"Ask, and you'll have to argue. Command, and people jump. It's the
man that orders what he wants that gets it. Philosophy taught in ten
lessons," he added in a contemptuous undertone. "Well, little girl, you
haven't been forgetting me, have you?"

She disregarded the change of tone. His idea had struck her as
extraordinarily true. It had never occurred to her. She turned it over
in her mind.

"A girl ought to be able to work it, too," she said.

He laughed.

"Maybe. She finds it easier to work a man."

"I'm too polite to agree that all of you are soft things."

"You're too clever to find any of us hard to handle."

"Yes? Isn't it too bad putty is so uninteresting?"

She was astounded at her own words. They came from her lips with no
volition of her own, leaping automatically in response to his. She felt
only the stimulation of his interest, of his electrical presence beside
her, of their swift rush through the darkness pierced by flashing
lights.

"You don't, of course, compare me to putty?"

"Well, of course, it does set and stay put, in the end. You can depend
on it."

"You can count on me, all right. I'm crazy about you."

"Crazy people are unaccountable."

Her heart was racing. The speed of the car, the rush of the air, were
in her veins. She had never dreamed that she could talk like this. This
man aroused in her qualities she had never known she possessed, and
their discovery intoxicated her.

He was silent a moment, turning the car into a quieter street. There
was laughter behind them, one of the others called: "We should worry
about the cops! Go to it, Bert!" He did not reply, and the leap of the
car swept their chatter backward again.

"Going too fast for you?" She read a double meaning and a challenge in
the words.

"I've never gone too fast!" she answered. "I love to ride like this.
Where are we going?"

"Anywhere you want to go, as long as it's with me."

"Then let's just keep going and never get there. Do you know what I
thought you meant the other night when you said we'd go to the beach?"

"No, what?" He was interested.

She told him. This was safer ground, and she enlarged her mental
picture of the still, moonlit beach, the white breakers foaming along
the shore, the salt wind, and the darkness, and the car plunging down a
long white boulevard.

"Do you mean to tell me you'd never been to the beach resorts before?"

"Isn't it funny?" she laughed.

"You're a damn game little kid."

She found that the words pleased her more than anything he had yet said.

They sped on in silence. Helen found occupation enough in the sheer
delight of going so swiftly through a blur of light and darkness
toward an unknown end. She did not resist the fascination of the man
beside her; there was exhilaration in his being there, security in his
necessary attention to handling the big machine. They passed the park
gates, and the car leaped like a live thing at the touch of a whip,
plunging faster down the smooth road between dark masses of shrubbery.
A clean, moist odor of the forest mixed with a salt tang in the air,
and the headlights were like funnels of light cutting into the solid
night a space for them to pass.

"Isn't it wonderful!" Helen sighed, and despised the inadequacy of the
word.

"I like the bright lights better myself." After a pause, he added,
"Country bred, aren't you?" His inflection was not a question.

She replied in the same tone.

"College man, I suppose."

"How did you dope that?"

"'Inhibitions,'" she answered.

"What? O-o-oh! So you haven't been forgetting me?"

"I didn't forget the word," she said. "I looked it up."

"Well, make up your mind to get rid of 'em?"

"I'd get rid of anything I didn't want."

"Going to get rid of me?"

"No," she said coolly. "I'll just let you go."

It struck her that she was utterly mad. She had never dreamed of
talking like that to any one. What was she doing and why?

"Don't you believe it one minute!" His voice had the dominating ring
again, and suddenly she felt that she had started a force she was
powerless to control. The situation was out of her hands, running away
with her. Her only safety was silence, and she shrank into it.

When the car stopped she jumped out of it quickly and attached herself
to momma. In the hot, smoky room they found a table at the edge of
the dancing floor, and she slipped into the chair farthest from him,
ordering lemonade. Exhilaration left her; again she could think of
nothing that seemed worth saying, and she felt his amused eyes upon her
while she sat looking at the red crepe-paper decorations overhead and
the maze of dancing couples. It was some time before the rhythm of the
music began to beat in her blood and the scene lost its tawdriness and
became gay.

"Everybody's doing it now!" Louise hummed, looking at him under her
long lashes. The others were dancing, and the three sat alone at the
table. "Everybody's doing it, doing it, doing it. Everybody's doing it,
but you--and me."

"Go and grab off somebody else," he answered good-humoredly. "I'm
dancing with Helen--when she gets over being afraid of me." He lighted
a cigarette casually.

"Oh, really? I'd love to dance. Only I don't do it very well."

His arms were around her and they were dancing before she perceived how
neatly she had risen to the bait. She stumbled and lost a step in her
fury.

"No? Not afraid of me?" he laughed. "Well, don't be. What's the use?"

"It isn't that," she said. "Only I don't know how to play your game.
And I don't want to play it. And I'm not going to. You're too clever."

"Don't be afraid," he said, and his arm tightened. They missed step
again, and she lost the swing of the music. "Let yourself go, relax,"
he ordered. "Let the music--that's better."

They circled the floor again, but her feet were heavy, and the
knowledge that she was dancing badly added to her effort. Phrases
half formed themselves in her mind and escaped. She wanted to be able
to carry off the situation well, to make her meaning clear in some
graceful, indirect way, but she could not.

"It's this way," she said. "I'm not your kind. Maybe I talked that way
for a while, but I'm not really. I--well--I'm not. I wish you'd leave
me alone. I really do."

The music ended with a crash, and two thumps of many feet echoed the
last two notes. He still held her close, and she felt that inexplicable
charm like the attraction of a magnet for steel.

"You really do?" His tone thrilled her with an intoxicating warmth. The
smile in his eyes was both caressing and confident. Consciously she
kept back the answering smile it commanded, looking at him gravely.

"I really do."

"All right." His quick acquiescence was exactly what she had wanted,
and it made her unhappy. They walked back to the table, and for hours
she was very gay, watching him dance with momma and Louise. She crowded
into the tonneau during their quick, restless dashes from one dancing
place to the next. She laughed a great deal, and when they met Duddy
and Bob somewhere a little after midnight she danced with each of them.
But she felt that having a good time was almost as hard work as earning
a living.

It was nearly two weeks before she went out again with momma and
Louise, and this time she did not see him at all. Louise was astonished
by his failure to telephone.

"What in the world did you do with that Kennedy man?" she wanted to
know. "You must have been an awful boob. Why, he was simply dippy about
you. Believe me, I'd have strung him along if I'd had your chance. And
a machine like a palace car, too!" she mourned.

"Oh, well, baby, Helen doesn't know much about handling men," momma
comforted her. "She did the best she could. You never can tell about
'em, anyway. And maybe he's out of town."

But this was not true, for Louise had seen him only that afternoon with
a stunning girl in a million dollars' worth of sables.

Helen was swept by cross-currents of feeling. She told herself that
she did not care what he did. She repeated this until she saw that the
repetition proved its untruth. Then she let her imagination follow
him. But it could do this only blindly. She could picture his home
only by combining the magnificence of the St. Francis with scraps from
novels she had read, and while she could see him running up imposing
steps, passing through a great door and handing his coat to a dignified
man servant, either a butler or a footman, she could not follow him
further. She could see him with a beautiful girl at a table in a
private room of a café; there were no longer any veils between her and
that side of a man's life, and she no longer shrank from facing the
world as it exists. But she knew that this was only one of his many
interests and occupations. She would have liked to know the others.

She turned to thoughts of Paul as one comes from a dark room into
clear light. At times she felt an affection for him that made her
present life seem like a feverish dream. She imagined herself living
in a pretty little house with him. There would be white curtains at
the windows and roses over the porch. When the housework was all
beautifully done she would sit on the porch, embroidering a centerpiece
or a dainty waist. The gate would click, and he would come up the
walk, his feet making a crunching sound on the gravel. She would run
to meet him. It had been so long since she had seen him that his
face was vague. When with an effort she brought from her memory the
straight-looking blue eyes, the full, firm lips, the cleft in his chin,
she saw how boyish he looked. He was a dear boy.

The days went by, each like the day before. The rains had begun. Every
morning, in a ceaseless drizzle from gray skies, she rushed down a
sidewalk filmed with running water and crowded into a street-car jammed
with irritated people and dripping umbrellas. When she reached the
office her feet were wet and cold and the hems of her skirts flapped
damply at her ankles.

She had a series of colds, and her head ached while she copied endless
quotations from relentlessly clicking sounders. At night she rode
wearily home, clinging to a strap, and crawled into bed. Her muscles
ached and her throat was sore. Momma, even in the scurry of dressing
for the evening, stopped to bring her a glass of hot whiskey-and-water,
and she drank it gratefully. When at last she was alone she read awhile
before going to sleep. One forgot the dreariness of living, swept away
into an artificial world of adventure and romance.

Christmas came, and she recklessly spent all her money for gifts to
send home; socks and ties and a shaving cup for her father, a length
of black silk and a ten-dollar gold piece for her mother, hair ribbons
and a Carmen bracelet for Mabel, a knife and a pocket-book with a
two-dollar bill in it for Tommy. They made a large, exciting bundle,
and when she stood in line at the post-office she pictured happily the
delight there would be when it was opened. She hated work with a hatred
that increased daily, but there was a deep satisfaction in feeling that
she could do such things as this with money she herself had earned.

The brokers at the Merchants' Exchange gave her twenty dollars at
Christmas, and with this she bought a gilt vanity-case for Louise,
gloves for momma, and Paul's present. She thought a long time about
that and at last chose a monogrammed stick-pin, with an old English "P"
deeply cut in the gold.

He sent her a celluloid box lined with puffed pink sateen, holding a
comb and brush set. It made a poor showing among the flood of presents
that poured in for momma and Louise, but she would have been ashamed
of being ashamed of it. However, she let them think it came from her
mother. She had not told them about Paul, feeling a dim necessity of
shielding that part of her life from Louise's comments.

There were parties every night Christmas week, but she did not go to
any of them. She was in the throes of grippe and though the work at the
office was light it took all her sick energy. Even on New Year's night
she stayed at home, resisting all the urgings of Louise and momma, who
told her she was missing the time of her life. She went resolutely
to bed, to lie in the darkness and realize that it was New Year's
night, that her life was going by and she was getting nothing she
wanted. "It's the man that orders what he wants that gets it." Gilbert
Kennedy's voice came back to her.

Rain was beating on the window-panes, and through the sound of it she
heard the distant uproar of many voices and a constant staccato of
fireworks crackling through the dripping night in triumphant expression
of the inextinguishable gaiety of the city. She thought of Paul. So
much had happened since she saw him, so much had come between them. He
had been living and growing older, too. It was impossible to see what
his real life had been through his matter-of-fact letters, chronicle
of where he had been, how much money he was saving, on which Sundays
the minister had had dinner at his house. Only occasional phrases were
clear in her memory. "When we are married--" She could still thrill
over that. And he always signed his letters, "lovingly, Paul." And
once, speaking of a Sunday-school picnic, he had written, "I wish you
had been there. There was no girl that could touch you."

There was comfort and warmth in the thought that he loved her. When
she saw him again everything would be all right. She went to sleep
resolving that she would work hard, save her money, go home for a visit
in March or April, and ask him to come. The hills would be green, the
orchards would be iridescent with the colors of spring, and she would
wear a thin white dress--

In February her mother wrote and asked for more money.

    Old Nell died last week. Tommy found her dead in the pasture when
    he went to get the cows. We will have to have a new horse for the
    spring plowing, and your father has found a good six-year-old,
    blind in one eye, that we can get cheap. We will have to have sixty
    dollars, and if you can spare it, it will come in very handy. We
    would pay you back later. I would not ask you for it only you are
    making a good salary, and I would rather get it from you than from
    the bank. It would be only a loan, for I would not ask you to give
    it to us. If you can let us have it, please let me know right away.

She had saved thirty dollars and had just drawn her half-month's pay.
Momma would gladly wait for her share of the month's expenses. As
soon as she was through work she went to the post-office and got a
money-order for sixty dollars. She felt a fierce pride in being able to
do it, and she was glad to know that she was helping at home, but there
was rage in her heart.

It seemed to her that fate was against her, that she would go on
working forever, and never get anything she wanted. She saw weeks and
months and years of work stretching ahead of her like the interminable
series of ties in a railroad track, vanishing in as barren a
perspective.

For nearly three years her whole life had been work. Those few evenings
at the cafés had been her only gaiety. She had copied innumerable
market quotations, sent uncounted messages, been a mere machine, and
for what? She did not want to work, she wanted to live.

That night she went to the beach with the crowd. Bob was there and
Duddy and a score of others she had met in cafés. There again was the
stir of shifting colors under brilliant lights, the eddy and swirl of
dancers, sparkling eyes, white hands, a glimmer of rings, perfume,
laughter, and through it all the music, throbbing, swaying, blending
all sensations into one quickening rhythm, one exhilarating vibration
of nerves and spirit. Helen felt weariness slip from her shoulders; she
felt that she was soaring like a lark; she could have burst into song.

She danced. She danced eagerly, joyously, carried by the music as by
the crest of a wave. Repartee slipped from her lips as readily as from
Louise's; she found that it did not matter what one said, only that
one said it quickly; her sallies were met by applauding laughter. In
the automobile, dashing from place to place, she took off her hat and,
facing the rushing wind, sang aloud for pure joy.

They encountered Gilbert Kennedy just after midnight. She turned a
flushed, radiant face to him when he came over to their table. She felt
sure of herself, ready for anything. He leaned past her to shake hands
with momma, who greeted him in chorus with Louise.

"Back in our midst once more!" he said to Helen over his shoulder. He
brought up a chair beside hers, and she saw in his first glance that he
was tired and moody. She felt the lessening of his magnetic vitality;
it seemed to have drained away through some inner lesion. He ordered
straight Scotch and snapped his fingers impatiently until the waiter
brought it.

"Who you with, Bert? Didn't see your car outside," said Duddy.

"Oh, I was with some crowd. Don't know where they are. Haven't got the
car," he answered.

"Stick around with us then." "I bet you've been hitting the high spots,
and smashed it!" Bob and Duddy said simultaneously. But the orchestra
was beginning another tune, and only Helen noticed that in the general
pushing back of chairs he did not reply.

She shook her head at the question in his eyes, and he asked no one
else to dance. Of course, after that, she had to refuse the others,
too, and they were left sitting at the bare table ringed with the
imprints of wet glasses. An unaccountable depression was settling
on her; she felt sorry and full of pity, she did not know why, and
an impulse to put her hand on his smooth, fair hair surprised and
horrified her.

"Rotten life, isn't it?" he said. It was a tone so new in him that she
did not know how to reply.

"I'm sorry," she answered.

"Sorry? Good Lord, what for?"

"I don't know. I just am. I'm sorry for--whatever it is that's
happened." She saw that she had made a mistake, and the remnant of her
exhilaration fluttered out like a spent candle. She sat looking at the
dancers in silence, and they appeared to her peculiar and curious,
going round and round with terrific energy, getting nowhere. The music
had become an external thing, too, and she observed the perspiring
musicians working wearily, with glances at the clock.

"Funny," she said at length.

"What?"

"All these people--and me, too--doing this kind of thing. We don't get
anything out of it. What do we do it for?"

"Oh, safety-valve. Watts discovered the steam-engine on the principle."
His voice was very tired.

The more she considered the idea, the more her admiration for him grew.
She was not in the least afraid of him now; she was eager to talk to
him. Her hand went out detainingly when he rose, but he disregarded
it. "So long," he said carelessly, and she saw that, absorbed in some
preoccupation, he hardly knew that she was there. She let him go and
sat turning an empty glass between her fingers, lost in speculations
concerning him. Though she spent many of her evenings at the beach
during several weeks, she did not see him again, and she heard one
night that he had gone broke and left town.

She could not believe that disaster had conquered him. That last
meeting and his disappearance had increased the charm he had for her.
Her mind recurred to him, drawn by an irresistible fascination. She
had only to brood on the memory of him for a moment and a thrill ran
through her body. It could not be that she loved him. Why, she did not
even know him.




                               CHAPTER X


In March Paul came to see her.

It had been a hard day at the office. A mistake had been made in
a message, and a furious broker, asserting that it had cost him
thousands of dollars, that she was at fault, that he was going to
sue the telegraph company, had pounded the counter and refused to be
quieted. All day she was overwhelmed with a sense of disaster. It would
be months before the error was traced, and alternately she recalled
distinctly that she had sent the right word and remembered with equal
distinctness that she had sent the wrong one.

Dots and dashes jumbled together in her mind. She was exhausted at four
o'clock, and thought eagerly of a hot bath and the soothing softness of
a pillow. Slumped in the corner of a street-car, she doggedly endured
its jerks and jolts, keeping a grip on herself with a kind of inner
tenseness until the moment when she could relax.

Louise was hanging over the banister on the upper landing when she
entered the hall of the apartment-house. Her excited stage-whisper met
Helen on the stairs.

"Sh-sh-sh! Somebody's here to see you."

"Who?" The event was unusual, but Louise's manner was even more so.
Vague pictures of her family and accident and death flashed through
Helen's startled mind.

He said his name was Masters. He was an awful stick. Momma'd sent
Louise out to give her the high sign. Louise's American Beauty man was
in town, and there was going to be a party at the Cliff House. They
could sneak in and dress and beat it out the back way. Momma had the
guy in the living-room. He'd simply spoil the party.

"Aw, have a heart, Helen. Momma'll get rid of him somehow. You can fix
it up afterward."

Helen's first thought was that Paul must not see her looking like
this, disheveled, her hair untidy, and her fingers ink-stained. Her
heart was beating fast, and there was a fluttering in her wrists. It
was incredible that he was really near, separated from her only by a
partition. The picture of him sitting there a victim of momma's efforts
to entertain him was ghastly and at the same time hysterically comic.
She tip-toed in breathless haste past the closed door and gained the
safety of the bedroom, Louise's kimono rustling behind her. The first
glance into the mirror was sickening. She tore off her hat and coat and
let down her hair with trembling fingers.

"He's--an awful good friend. I must see him. Heavens! what a fright!
Be an angel and find me a clean waist," she whispered. The comb shook
in her hand; hairpins slipped through her fingers; the waist she found
lacked a button, and every pin in the room had disappeared. It was an
eternity before she was ready, and then, leaning for one last look in
the glass, she was dissatisfied. There was no color in her face; even
her lips were only palely pink. She bit them; she rubbed them with
stinging perfume till they reddened; then with a hurried resolve she
scrubbed her cheeks with Louise's rouge pad. That was better. Another
touch of powder!

"Do I look all right?"

"Stunning! Aw, Helen, come through. Who is he? You've never told me a
word." Louise was wild with curiosity.

"Sh-sh!" Helen cautioned. She drew a deep breath at the living-room
door. Her little-girl shyness had come back upon her. Then she opened
the door and walked in.

Momma, in her kimono, was sitting in the darkest corner of the room,
with her back toward the window. Only a beaded slipper toe and some
inches of silk stocking caught the light. She was obviously making
conversation with painful effort. Paul sat facing her, erect in a stiff
chair, his eyes fixed politely on a point over her shoulder. He rose
with evident relief to meet Helen.

"Good afternoon, Mr. Masters," she said, embarrassed.

"Good afternoon." They shook hands.

"I'm very glad to see you. Won't you sit down?" she heard herself
saying inanely.

Momma rose, clutching her kimono around her.

"Well, I'll be going, as I have a very important engagement, and you'll
excuse me, Mr. Masters, I'm sure," she said archly. "So charmed to have
met you," she added with artificial sweetness.

The closing of the door behind her left them facing each other with
nothing but awkwardness between them. He had changed indefinably,
though the square lines of his face, the honest blue eyes, the firm
lips were as she remembered them. Under the smooth-shaven skin of his
cheeks there was the blue shadow of a stubborn beard. He appeared
prosperous, but not quite sure of himself, in a well-made broadcloth
suit, and he held a new black derby hat in his left hand.

"I'm awfully glad to see you," she managed to say. "I'm--so surprised.
I didn't know you were coming."

"I sent you a note on the wires," he replied. "I wasn't sure till last
night I could get off."

"I didn't get it," she said. Silence hung over them like a threat. "I'm
sorry I didn't know. I hope you didn't have to wait long. I'm glad
you're looking so well. How is your mother?"

"She's all right. How is yours?"

"She's very well, thank you." She caught her laugh on a hysterical
note. "Well--how do you like San Francisco weather?"

His bewilderment faded slowly into a grin.

"It is rather hard to get started," he admitted. "You look different
than I thought you would, somehow. But I guess we haven't changed much
really. Can't we go somewhere else?"

She read his dislike of momma in the look he cast at her living-room.
It was natural, no doubt. But a quick impulse of loyalty to these
people who had been so kind to her illogically resisted it. This room,
with its close air, its film of dust over the table-tops, its general
air of neglect emphasized by the open candy box on the piano-stool and
the sooty papers in the gas grate, was nevertheless much pleasanter
than the place where she had been living when she met Louise.

"I don't know just where," she replied. "Of course, I don't know the
city very well because I work all day. But we might take a walk."

There was a scurry in the hallway when she opened the door; she caught
a glimpse of Louise in petticoat and corset-cover dashing from the
bathroom to the bedroom. She hoped that Paul had not seen it, but his
cheeks were red. It was really absurd; what was there so terrible about
a petticoat? He should have known better than to come to the house
without telephoning, anyway. She cast about quickly for something to
say.

No, he answered, he could not stay in town long, only twenty-four
hours. He wanted to see the superintendent personally about the
proposition of putting in a spur-track at Ripley for the loading of
melons. There were--her thoughts did not follow his figures. She heard
vaguely something about irrigation districts and water-feet and sandy
loam soil. So he had not come to see her!

Then she saw that he, too, was talking only to cover a sense of
strangeness and embarrassment as sickening as her own. She wished that
they were comfortably sitting down somewhere where they could talk.
It was hard to say anything interesting while they walked down bleak
streets with the wind snatching at them.

"Whew! You certainly have some wind in this town!" he exclaimed. At the
top of Nob Hill its full force struck them, whipping her skirts and
tugging at her hat while she stood gazing down at the gray honeycomb of
the city and across it at masses of sea fog rolling over Twin Peaks.
"It gives me an appetite, I tell you! Where'll we go for supper?"

She hesitated. She could not imagine his being comfortable in any of
the places she knew. Music and brilliant lights and cabaret singers
would be another barrier between them added to those she longed to
break down. She said that she did not know the restaurants very well,
and his surprise reminded her that she had written him pages about
them. She stammered over an explanation she could not make.

There were so many small, unimportant things that were important
because they could not be explained, and that could not be explained
without making them more important than they were. It seemed to her
that the months since they had last met were full of them.

She took refuge in talking about her work. But she saw that he did not
like that subject. He said briefly that it was a rotten shame she had
to do it, and obviously hoped to close the theme with that remark.

They found a small restaurant down town, and after he had hung up his
hat and they had discussed the menu, she sat turning a fork over and
over and wondering what they could talk about. She managed to find
something to say, but it seemed to her that their conversation had no
more flavor than sawdust, and she was very unhappy.

"Look here, Helen, why didn't you tell those folks where you live that
we're engaged?" There was nothing but inquiry in his tone, but the
words were a bombshell. She straightened in her chair.

"Why--" How could she explain that vague feeling about keeping it from
Louise and momma? "Why--I don't know. What was the use?"

"What was the use? Well, for one thing, it might have cleared things up
a little for some of these other fellows that know you."

What had momma told him? "I don't know any men that would be
interested," she said.

"Well, you never can tell about that," he answered reasonably. "I was
sort of surprised, that's all. I had an idea girls talked over such
things."

She was tired, and in the dull little restaurant there was nothing
to stimulate her. The commonplace atmosphere, the warmth, and the
placidity of his voice lulled her to stupidity.

"I suppose they do," she said. "They usually talk over their rings."
She was alert instantly, filled with rage at herself and horror. His
cheeks grew dully red. "I didn't mean--" she cried, and the words
clashed with his. "If that's it I'll get you a ring."

"Oh, no! No! I don't want you to. I wouldn't think of taking it."

"Of course you know I haven't had money enough to get you a good one. I
thought about it pretty often, but I didn't know you thought it was so
important. Seems to me you've changed an awful lot since I knew you."

The protest, the explanation, was stopped on her lips. It was true.
She felt that they had both changed so much that they might be
strangers.

"Do you really think so?" she asked miserably.

"I don't know what to think," he answered honestly, pain in his voice.
"I've been--about crazy sometimes, thinking about--things, wanting to
see you again. And now--I don't know--you seem so different, sitting
there with paint on your face--" Her hand went to her cheek as if it
stung her--"and talking about rings. You didn't use to be like this
a bit, Helen," he went on earnestly. "It seems to me as if you'd
completely lost track of your better self somehow. I wish you'd--"

This struck from her a spark of anger.

"Please don't begin preaching at me! I'm perfectly able to take care
of myself. Really, Paul, you just don't understand. It isn't anything,
really, a little bit of rouge. I only put it on because I was tired
and didn't have any color. And I didn't mean it about the ring. I just
didn't think what I was saying. But I guess you're right. I guess
neither of us knows the other any more."

She felt desolate, abandoned to dreariness. Everything seemed all
wrong with the world. She listened to Paul's assurances that he knew
she was all right, whatever she did, that he didn't care anyhow, that
she suited him. But they sounded hollow in her ears, for she knew that
beneath them was the same uncertainty she felt. When, flushing, he
said again that he would get her a ring, she answered that she did not
want one, and they said no more about it. The abyss between them was
left bridged only by the things they had not said, fearing to make it
forever impassable by saying them.

He left her at her door promptly at the proper hour of ten. There was
a moment in which a blind feeling in her reached out to him; she felt
that they had taken hold of the situation by the wrong end somehow,
that everything would be all right if they had had a chance.

He supposed she couldn't take the morning off. He had to see the
superintendent, but maybe they could manage an hour or two. No, she had
to work. With the threat of that missent message hanging over her she
dared not further spoil her record by taking a day off without notice.
And she knew that one or two hours more could not possibly make up the
months of estrangement between them.

"Well, good-night."

"Good-night." Their hands clung a moment and dropped apart. If only
he would say something, do something, she did not know what. But
awkwardness held him as it did her.

"Good-night." The broad door swung slowly shut behind her. Even then
she waited a moment, with a wild impulse to run after him. But she
climbed the stairs instead and went wearily to bed, her heart aching
with a sense of irreparable loss.

In the morning she was still very tired, and while she drove herself
through the day's work she told herself that probably she had never
really loved him. "Unless you can love as the angels may, with the
breadth of heaven betwixt you," she murmured, remembering the volume of
poetry she had found on a library shelf. She had thrilled over it when
she read it, dreaming of him; now it seemed to her a grim and almost
cynical test. Well, she might as well face a lifetime of work. Lots of
women did.

She managed to do this, seeing years upon years of lonely effort,
during which she would accumulate money enough to buy a little home of
her own. There would be no one in it to criticise her choice of friends
or say that she painted. That remark clung like a bur in her mind. Yes,
she could face a lifetime in which no one would have the right to say
things like that!

But when she went home she found that she could not endure an evening
of loneliness. Louise and momma were going out, and she was very gay
while she dressed to go with them. They said they had never seen her in
better spirits.

Unaccountably, the lights, the music, the atmosphere of gaiety, did not
get into her blood as usual. At intervals she had moments of depression
that they did not touch. She sat isolated in the crowd, sipping her
lemonade, feeling that nothing in the world was worth while.

However, she went again the next night. She began to go almost as
frequently as momma and Louise, and to understand the unsatisfied
restlessness which drove Mrs. Latimer and her friends. She was tired in
the morning, and there were more complaints of her work at the office,
but she did not care. She felt recklessly that nothing mattered, and
she went back to the beach resorts as a thirsty person will tip an
emptied glass in which perhaps a drop remains.

"What's the matter, little one? Got a grouch?" said Louise's American
Beauty man one night He was jovial and bald; his neck bulged over the
back of his collar, and he wore a huge diamond on his little finger.
Helen did not like him, but it was his party. He owned the big red car
in which they had come to the beach, and she felt that his impatient
reproach was justified. She was not paying her way.

"Not a bit!" she laughed. "Only for some reason I feel like a cold
plum-pudding."

"What you need's brandy sauce," Duddy said, appreciating his own wit.

"You mean you want me to get lit up!"

"That's the idea! Bring on the booze, let joy be unrefined! Waiter, rye
high-balls all around!"

She did not object; that did not seem worth while, either. When the
glasses came she emptied hers with the rest, and her spirits did
seem to lighten a little. "It removes inhibitions," Gilbert Kennedy
had said. And he was gone, too. If he were only there the sparkle of
life would come back; she would be exhilarated, witty, alive to her
finger-tips once more--

The crowd was moving on again. She went with them into the cool night,
and it seemed to her that life was nothing but a moving on from
dissatisfaction to dissatisfaction. Squeezed into a corner of the
tonneau, she relapsed into silence, and it was some time before she
noticed the altered note in the excitement of the others.

"Give 'er the gas! Let 'er out! Damn it, if you let 'em pass--!" the
car's owner was shouting, and the machine fled like a runaway thing.
Against a blur of racing sand dunes Helen saw a long gray car creeping
up beside them. "You're going to kill us!" momma screamed, disregarded.
Helen, on her feet, clinging to the back of the front seat, yelled with
the others. "Beat 'im! Beat 'im! Y-a-a-ah!"

Her hat, torn from her head, disappeared in the roaring blur behind
them. Her hair whipped her face. She was wildly, gloriously alive.
"Faster--faster, oh!" The gray car was gaining. Inch by inch it crawled
up beside them. "Can't you go _faster_?" she cried in a bedlam of
shouts. Oh, if only her hands were on the wheel! It was unbearable that
they should lose. "Give 'er more gas--she'll make eighty-five!" the
owner yelled.

Everything in Helen narrowed to the challenge of that plunging gray
car. Its passing was like an intolerable pulling of something vital
from her grip. Pounding her hand against the car-door she shrieked
frantic protests. "Don't let him do it! Go on! Go on!" The gray car was
forging inexorably past them. It swerved. Momma's scream was torn to
ribbons by the wind. It was ahead now, and one derisive yell from its
driver came back to them. Their speed slowed.

"He's turning in at The Tides. Stop there?" the chauffeur asked over
his shoulder.

"Yes, damn you! Wha'd yuh think you're driving, a baby-carriage? You're
fired!" his employer raged, and he was still swearing when Helen,
gasping and furious, stumbled from the running-board against Gilbert
Kennedy.

"Good Lord, was it you?" he cried. "Some race!" he exulted and swinging
her off her feet, he kissed her gayly. Something wild and elemental in
her rushed to meet its mate in him. He released her instantly, and in a
chorus of greetings, "Drinks on me, old man!" "Some little car you've
got!" "Come on in!" she found herself under a glare of light in the
swirl and glitter of The Tides. He was beside her at the round table,
and her heart was pounding.

"No--no--this is on me!" he declared. "Only my money's good to-night.
I'm going to Argentine to-morrow on the water-wagon. What'll you have?"

They ordered, helter-skelter, in a clamor of surprise and inquiry.
"Argentine, what're you giving us!" "What's the big idea?" "You're
kidding!"

"On the level. Argentine. To-morrow. Say, listen to me. I've got
hold of the biggest proposition that ever came down the pike. Six
million acres of land--good land, that'll raise anything from hell to
breakfast. Do you know what people are paying for land in California
right now? I'll tell you. Five hundred, six hundred, a thousand dollars
an acre. And I've got six million acres of land sewed up in Argentine
that I can sell for fifty cents an acre and make--listen to what I'm
telling you--and make a hundred per cent. profit. The Government's
backing me--they'd give me the whole of Argentine. I tell you there's
millions in it!"

He was full of radiant energy and power. Her imagination leaped
to grasp the bigness of this project. Thousands of lives altered,
thousands of families migrating, cities, villages, railroads built.
She felt his kiss on her lips, and that old, inexplicable, magnetic
attraction. The throbbing music beat in her veins like the voice of it.
He smiled at her, holding out his arms, and she went into them with
recklessness and longing.

They were carried together on waves of rhythm, his arms around her, her
loosened hair tumbling backward on her neck.

"I'm mad about you!"

"And you're going away?"

"Sorry?"

"Sorry? Bored. You always do!"

He laughed.

"Not on your life! This time I'm taking you with me."

"Oh, but I wouldn't take you--seriously!"

"I mean it. You're coming."

"I'm dreaming."

"I mean it." His voice was almost savage. "I want you."

Fear ran like a challenge through her exultation. She felt herself a
small fluttering thing against his breast, while the intoxicating music
swept them on through a whirling crowd. His face so close to her was
keen and hard, his eyes were reckless as her own leaping blood. "All
I've ever needed is a girl like you. You're not going to get away this
time."

"Oh, but I'm perfectly respectable!"

"All right! Marry me."

Behind the chaos of her mind there was the tense, suffocating
hesitation of the instant before a diver leaves the
spring-board--security behind him, ecstasy ahead. His nearness, his
voice, the light in his eyes, were all that she had been wanting,
without knowing it, all these months. The music stopped with a crash.

He stood, as he had stood once before, his arm still tight around her,
and in a flash she saw that other time and the dreary months that had
followed.

"All right. It's settled?" There was the faintest question in his
confident voice.

"You really do--love me?"

"I really do." His eyes were on hers, and she saw his confidence change
to certainty. "You're game!" he said, and kissed her triumphantly,
in the crowded room, beneath the glaring lights and crepe-paper
decorations. She did not care; she cared for nothing in the world now
but him.

"Let's--go away--a little while by ourselves, out where it's dark and
cool," she said hurriedly as they crossed the floor.

"Not on your life! We're going to have the biggest party this town
ever saw!" he answered exultantly over his shoulder, and she saw his
enjoyment of the bomb he was about to drop upon the unsuspecting
group at the table. "The roof is off the sky to-night. This is a
wedding-party!"

Louise and momma were upon her with excited cries and kisses, and
Helen, flushed, laughing, trying not to be hysterical, heard his voice
ordering drinks, disposing of questions of license, minister, ring,
rooms at the St. Francis, champagne, supper, flowers. She was the
beggar maid listening to King Cophetua.




                              CHAPTER XI


At ten o'clock on a bright June morning Helen Kennedy tip-toed across a
darkened bedroom and closed its door softly behind her. Her tenseness
relaxed with a sigh of relief when the door shut with the tiniest of
muffled clicks and the stillness behind its panels remained unbroken.

Sunlight streamed through the windows of the sitting-room, throwing
a quivering pattern of the lace curtains on the velvet carpet and
kindling a glow of ruddy color where it touched mahogany chairs and a
corner of the big library table. She moved quickly to one of the broad
windows and carefully raised a lower sash. The low roar of the stirring
city rushed in like the noise of breakers on a far-away beach, and
clean, tingling air poured upon her. She breathed it in deeply, drawing
the blue silk negligée closer about her throat.

The two years that had whirled past since she became Bert Kennedy's
wife had taught her many things. She had drawn from her experience
generalities on men, women, life, which made her feel immeasurably
older and wiser. But there were problems that she had not solved,
points at which she felt herself at fault, and they troubled her
vaguely while she stood twisting the cord of the window-shade in her
hand and gazing out at the many-windowed buildings of San Francisco.

She had learned that men loved women for being beautiful, gay,
unexacting, sweet-tempered always, docile without being bores. She had
learned that men were infuriated by three things; questions, babies,
and a woman who was ill. She had learned that success in business
depended upon "putting up a front" and that a woman's part was to help
in that without asking why or for what end. She had learned that the
deepest need of her own nature was to be able to look up to the man she
loved, even though she must go down on her own knees in order to do it.
She knew that she adored her husband blindly, passionately, and that
she dared not open her eyes for fear she would cease to do so.

But she had not quite been able to fit herself into a life with him.
She had not learned what to do with these morning hours while he was
asleep; she had not learned to occupy all her energies in useless
activities while he was away; in a word, she did not know what to do
with the part of her life he did not want, and she could not compel
herself to be satisfied in doing nothing with it.

Gathering up the trailing silks of her nightgown and negligée she went
back to the pile of magazines and books on the table. She did not
exactly want to read; reading seemed to her as out of place in the
morning as soup for breakfast. But she could not go out, for at any
moment Bert might wake and call to her, and she could not dress, for
he saw a reproach in that, and was annoyed. She turned over the books
uncertainly, selecting at last a curious one called "Pragmatism," which
had fascinated her when she dipped into its pages in the library. She
had it in her hand when the door-bell rang loudly.

She stood startled, clutching the book against her breast. Her heart
beat thickly, and the color faded from her face and then poured back in
a burning flush. The bell rang again more imperatively. The very sound
of it proclaimed that it was rung by a collector. Was it the taxi-cab
man, the tailor, the collection agency? She could not make herself go
to the door, and the third long, insistent peal of the bell wrung her
like the tightening of a rack. It would waken Bert, but what further
excuse could she make to the grimly insulting man she visualized on the
other side of the door? The bell continued to ring.

After a long time it was silent, and she heard the slam of the
automatic elevator's door. A second later she heard Bert's voice.

"Helen! Helen! What the devil?"

She opened the bedroom door and stood smiling brightly on the
threshold. "'Morning, Bert dear! Behold, the early bird's gone with his
bill still open!"

"Well, why the hell didn't you open the door and tell him to stop that
confounded noise? Were you afraid of disturbing him?"

He knew how it hurt her, but she was trained not to show it. It
appeared to her now that she had been criminally selfish in not
guarding Bert's sleep. She saw herself a useless incumbrance to her
husband's career, costing him a great deal and doing nothing whatever
to repay him.

"That's the trouble--it wouldn't have disturbed him a bit!" she laughed
bravely. "Somebody ought to catch a collector and study the species and
find out what will disturb 'em. I think they're made of cast-iron. I
wonder does collecting run in families, or do they just catch 'em young
and harden them."

Sometimes even in the mornings talk like this made him smile. But this
morning he only growled unintelligibly, turning his head on the pillow.
She went softly past the bed into the dressing-room.

Bert had scouted her idea of getting an apartment with a kitchenette.
He said he had not married a cook, and he hated women with burned
complexions and red hands. He made her feel plebeian and common in
preferring a home to a hotel. But she had found when she interviewed
the apartment-house manager and had spent a happy morning buying a
coffee percolator and dainty cups and napkins, that he did not mind
her giving him coffee in bed. She found a deep pleasure in doing it.

The percolator stood behind a screen in the dressing-room. She turned
on the electric switch and, sitting down before the mirror, took off
her lace cap and released her hair from its curlers. Bert liked her
hair curled. Its dark mist framed a face that she regarded anxiously
in the mirror. The features had sharpened a little, and her complexion
had lost a shade of its freshness. Bert would insist on her drinking
with him, and she knew she must do it to keep her hold on him. A sense
of the unreasonableness of men in loving women for their beauty and
then destroying it came into her mind, nebulous, almost a thought. But
she disregarded it, from a habit she had formed of disregarding many
things, and began combing and coiling her hair, carefully inspecting
the result from all angles with a hand mirror.

A few minutes later she came into the bedroom, carrying a tray and
kicking the trailing lengths of her negligée before her. She held the
tray in one hand while she cleared the bedside table with the other,
and when she had poured the coffee she went through the sitting-room
and brought in the morning paper. It had been the taxi-cab man. His
bill, stuck in the crack of the door, fluttered down when she opened
it, and after glancing at the figures hastily, she thrust it out of
sight.

Bert was sitting up in bed, drinking his coffee, and the smile he threw
at her made her happy. She curled on the bed beside his drawn-up knees
and, taking her own cup from the tray, smiled at him in turn. She never
loved him more than at such moments as this, when his rumpled hair
and the eyes miraculously cleared and softened by sleep made him seem
almost boyish.

"Good?"

"You're some little chef when it comes to coffee!" he replied. "It hits
the spot." He yawned. "Good Lord, we must have had a time last night!
Did I fight a chauffeur or did I dream it?"

"It was only a--rather a--dispute," she said hurriedly.

"That little blond doll was some baby!"

He could not intend to be so cruel, not even to punish her for letting
the bell waken him. It was only that he liked to feel his own power
over her He cared only for women that he could control, and she knew
that it was the constant struggle between them, in which he was always
victorious, that gave her her greatest hold on him. But it did hurt her
cruelly in this moment of security to be reminded of the dangers that
always threatened that hold.

"Oh, stunning!" she agreed, keeping her eyes clear and smiling. She
would not fall into the error and the confession of being catty. But
she felt that he perceived her motive, and she knew that in any case
he held the advantage over her. She was in the helpless position of the
one who gives the greater love.

They sipped their coffee in silence broken only by the crackling of the
newspaper. Then, pushing it away, he set down his cup and leaned back
against the pillows, his hands behind his head. A moment had arrived in
which she could talk to him, and behind her carefully casual manner her
nerves tightened.

"It was pretty good coffee," she remarked. "You know, I think it would
be fun if we had a real place, with a breakfast-room, don't you? Then
we'd have grape-fruit and hot muffins and all that sort of thing, too.
I'd like to have a place like that. And then we'd have parties," she
added hastily. "We could keep them going all night long if we wanted to
in our own place."

He yawned.

"Dream on, little one," he said. But his voice was pleasant.

"Now listen, dear. I really mean it. We could do it. It wouldn't be a
bit more trouble to you than a hotel, really. I'd see that it wasn't. I
really want it awfully badly. I know you'd like it if you'd just let me
try it once. You don't know how nice I'd make it for you."

His silence was too careless to be antagonistic, but he was listening.
She was encouraged.

"You don't realize how much time I have when you're gone. I could keep
a house running beautifully, and you'd never even see the wheels go
round. I--"

"A house!" He was aroused. "Great Scott, doesn't it cost enough for the
two of us to live as it is? Don't you make my life miserable whining
about bills?"

The color came into her cheeks, but she had never risked letting
herself feel resentment at anything he chose to say. She laughed
quite naturally. "My goodness!" she said. "You're talking as if I
were a puppy! I've never whined a single whine; it's the howling of
the collectors you've heard. Let 'em howl; it's good enough for 'em!
No, but really, sweetheart, please just let me finish. I've thought
it all out. You don't know what a good manager I am." She hurried on,
forestalling the words on his lips. "You don't know how much I want to
be just a little bit of help. I can't be much, I know. But I'm sure I
could save money--"

"Old stuff!" he interrupted. "It isn't the money you save; it's the
money you make that counts."

"I know!" she agreed quickly. "But we could get a house, we could buy
a house, for less than we're paying here in rent. A very nice house. I
wouldn't ask you to do it, if it cost any more than we're spending now.
But--of course I don't know anything about such things--but I should
think it would give you an advantage in business if you owned some
property. Wouldn't--wouldn't it--make people put more confidence--" She
faltered miserably at the look in his eyes, and before he could speak
she had changed her tactics, laughing.

"I'm just trying to tease you into giving me something I want, and I
know I'm awfully silly about it." She nestled closer to him, slipping
an arm under his neck. "Oh, honey, it wouldn't cost anything at all,
and I do so want to have a house to do things to. I feel so--so
unsettled, living this way. I feel as if I were always sitting on the
edge of a chair waiting to go somewhere else. And I'm used to working
and--and managing a little money. I know it wasn't much money, but I
liked to do it. You're letting a lot of perfectly good energy go to
waste in me, really you are."

He laughed, tightening his arm about her shoulders, and for one
deliriously happy moment she thought she had won. Then he kissed her,
and before he spoke she knew she had lost.

"I should worry! You're giving me all I want," he said, and there
was different delight in the words. She was satisfying him, and for
the moment it was enough. He made the mistake of overconfidence in
emphasizing a point already won and so losing it.

"And as long as I'm giving you three meals a day and glad rags, it
isn't up to you to worry. I'll look after the finances if you'll take
care of your complexion. It's beginning to need it," he added with
brutality that defeated its own purpose. Even in her pain she had an
instant of seeing him clearly and feeling that she hated him.

She slipped to her feet and stood trembling, not looking down at him.

"Well, that's settled, then," she said in a clear, hard little voice.
"I'll go and dress. It's nearly noon."

She felt that her own anger was threatening the most precious thing in
her life; she felt that she was two persons who were tearing each other
to pieces. With a blind instinct of reaching out to him for help she
turned at the dressing-room door. "I know you don't realize what you're
doing to me--you don't realize--what you're throwing away," she said.

There was a cool amusement in his eyes.

"Well, but why the melodrama?" he asked reasonably. She stood convicted
of hysteria and stupidity, and she felt again his superiority and his
mastery over her.

When she came from the dressing-room to find him, careless,
good-humored, handsome, tugging his tie into its knot before the
mirror, she knew that nothing mattered except that she loved him and
that she must hold his love for her. She came close to him, longing
for a reassurance that she would not ask. Unless he gave it to her,
left her with it to hold in her heart, she would be tortured by
miserable doubts and flickering jealousies until he came back. She
would be tied to the telephone, waiting for a call from him, trying to
follow in her imagination the intricate business affairs from which she
was shut out, telling herself that it was business and nothing else
that kept him from her.

"Well, bye-bye," he said, putting on his hat.

"Good-by." Her voice was like a detaining hand. "You--you won't be gone
long?"

He relented.

"I'm going down to see Clark & Hayward. I'm going to put through a deal
with them that'll put us on velvet," he declared.

"Clark & Hayward? They're the real-estate people?"

"You're some little guesser. They certainly are. We're going to be
millionaires when I get through with them! Farewell!"

The very door seemed to click triumphantly behind him, and she heard
him whistling while he waited for the elevator. When he appeared on the
sidewalk below, she was leaning from the window, and she would have
waved to him if he had looked up. Her occupation for the day vanished
when he swung into a street-car and was carried out of sight.

She picked up the pragmatism book again and read a few paragraphs, put
it down restlessly. The untidy bedroom nagged at her nerves, but Bert
was paying for hotel service, and once when she had made the bed he
had told her impatiently that there was no sense in letting the very
servants know she was not used to living decently.

She would go for a walk. There might be something new to see in the
shop windows. She would take the book with her and read it in the dairy
lunch-room where she ate when alone. It seemed criminal to her to spend
money unnecessarily when they owed so much, and she could not help
trying to save it, though all her efforts seemed to make no difference.

If she could have only a small amount of money regularly, she
could manage so much better. Even the salary she had earned as a
telegraph-operator sometimes seemed like riches to her, because she had
known that she would have it every month and had managed it herself.
But every attempt to establish regularity and stability in her present
life ended always in the same failure, and she hurriedly turned even
her slightest thoughts from the memory of conversations like that just
ended.

In the dressing-room she snapped on all the lights and under their
merciless glare critically inspected every line of her face. The
carefully brushed arch of the eyebrows was perfect; the slightest trace
of rouge was spread skillfully on her cheeks, the round point of her
chin, the lobes of her ears. She coaxed loose a tendril of dark hair
and, soaking it with banderine, plastered it against her cheek in a
curve that was the final touch of striking artificiality. She did not
like it, but Bert did.

She took time in adjusting her hat. Everything depended on that, she
knew. She tied her veil with meticulous care. Then, slowly turning
before the long mirror set in the door, she critically inspected every
detail of her costume, the trim little boots, the crisp, even edges of
her skirt, the line of the jacket, the immaculate gloves. A tremendous
amount of thought and effort had gone into the making of that smart
effect, and she felt that she had done a good job. She would still
compare favorably with any of the women Bert might meet. A tiny spark
of cheerfulness was kindled by the thought. She tried to nourish it,
but it went out in dreariness.

What kind of deal was Bert putting through with Clark & Hayward? It
was the first time he had mentioned real estate since the unexplained
failure of his plan to go to Argentine. That was another memory from
which she hastily turned her thoughts, a memory of his alternate
moodiness and wild gaiety, of his angry impatience at her most
tentative show of interest or sympathy, of their ending an ecstatic,
miserable honeymoon by sneaking out of the hotel leaving an unpaid bill
behind them. She still avoided the hotel, though he must long since
have paid the bill. She had not dared ask him, but he had made a great
deal of money since then.

There had been the flurry of excitement about the mining stocks, which
were selling like wild-fire and promised millions until something
happened. And then the scheme for floating a rubber plantation in
Guatemala--his long eastern trip and her diamond ring had come out of
that--and then the affair of the patent monkey-wrench. He had said
again that there were millions in it, and had derided her dislike of
the inventor. She wondered what had become of that enterprise, and
secretly thought that she had been right and that the man had tried to
swindle Bert.

Now it was real estate again. She did not doubt that her clever husband
would succeed in it; she was sure that he would be one of America's
biggest business men some day, when he turned his genius to one line
and followed it with a little more steadiness. But she would have liked
to know more about his business affairs. Since they could not have a
home yet, she would like to be doing something interesting.

She stopped such thoughts with an impatient little mental shake.
Perhaps she would feel better when she had eaten luncheon. With the
book tucked under her arm she walked briskly down the sunny, wind-swept
streets, threading her way indifferently through the tangle of traffic
at the corners with the sixth sense of the city dweller, seeing
without perceiving them the clanging street-cars, the silent, shining
limousines, the streams of cleverly dressed women, preoccupied men,
fluffy dogs on chains, and the panorama of shop-windows filled with
laces, jewels, gowns, furs, hats. She walked surrounded by an isolation
as complete as if she were alone in a forest, and nothing struck
through it until she paused before a window-display of hardware.

She came to that window frequently, drawn by an irresistible
attraction. With a pleasant sense of dissipation she stood before
it, gazing at glittering bathroom fixtures, rank on rank of shining
pans, rows of kitchen utensils, electric flat-irons. To-day there
was a glistening white kitchen cabinet, with ingenious flour-bin and
built-in sifter, hooks for innumerable spoons, sugar and spice jars, an
egg-beater, a market-memorandum device. A tempting yellow bowl stood on
a white shelf.

Some day, she thought, she would have a yellow kitchen. She had in mind
the shade of yellow, a clear yellow, like sunshine. There would be
cream walls and yellow woodwork, at the windows sheer white curtains,
which would wash easily, and on the window-sill a black jar filled with
nasturtiums. The breakfast-room should be a glassed-in porch, and its
curtains should be thin yellow silk, through which the sunshine would
cast a golden light on the little breakfast table spread with a white
embroidered cloth and set with shining silver and china. The coffee
percolator would be bubbling, and the grape-fruit in place, and when
she came from the kitchen with the plate of muffins Bert would look
up from his paper and say, "Muffins again? Fine! You're some little
muffin-maker!"

She dimpled and flushed happily, standing before the unresponsive
sheet of plate glass. Then, with a shrug and a half laugh at herself,
she came back to reality and went on. But the display held her as a
candy-shop holds a child, and she must stop again to look at the next
window, filled with color-cards and cans of paint. Her mind was still
busy with color combinations for a living-room when she entered the
dairy lunch-room and carried her tray to a table.

For a moment she looked at the crowd about her, clerks and shopgirls
and smartly dressed stenographers hurriedly drinking coffee and eating
pie. Then she propped her book against the sugar bowl and began slowly
to eat, turning a page from time to time. This was an astonishing book.
It was not fiction, but it was even more interesting. She read quickly,
skipping the few words she did not understand, grasping their meaning
by a kind of intuition, wondering why she had never before considered
ideas of this kind.

She was so deeply absorbed that she merely felt, without realizing, the
presence of some one hesitating at her elbow, some one who moved past
her to draw out a chair opposite her and set down his tray. She moved
her coffee-cup to make room for it, and apologetically lifted the book
from the sugar bowl, glancing across it to see Paul.

The shock was so great that for an instant she did not move or think.
He stood motionless and stared at her with eyes wiped blank of any
expression. Her cup rattled as the book dropped against it and the
sound roused her. With the sensation of a desperate twist, like that of
a falling cat righting itself in the air, she faced the situation.

"Why--Paul!" she said, and felt that the old name struck the wrong
note. "How you startled me. But of course I'm very glad to see you
again. Do sit down."

In his face she saw clearly his chagrin, his rage at himself for
blundering into this awkwardness, his resolve to see it through. He put
himself firmly into the chair and though his face and even his neck
were red, there was the remembered determination in the set of his lips
and the lift of his chin.

"I'm certainly surprised to see you," he said. "From all I've been
hearing about you I had a notion you never ate in places like this any
more. They tell me you're getting along fine. I'm mighty glad to hear
it." With deliberation he dipped two level spoonfuls of sugar into his
coffee and attacked the triangle of pie.

"Oh, I come in sometimes for a change," she said lightly. "Yes,
everything's fine with me. You're looking well, too."

There was an undeniable air of prosperity about him. His suit was
tailor-made, and the hat on the hook above his head was a new gray felt
of the latest shape. His face had changed very slightly, grown perhaps
a bit fuller than she remembered, and the line of the jaw was squarer.
But he looked at her with the same candid, straight gaze. Of course,
she could not expect warmth in it.

"Well, I can't complain," he said. "Things are going pretty well. Slow,
of course, but still they're coming."

"I'm awfully glad to hear it. Your mother's well?" The situation was
fantastic and ghastly, but she would not escape from it until she could
do so gracefully. She formed the next question in her mind while he
answered that one.

"Do you often get up to the city?"

"Oh, now and then. I only come when I have to. It's too windy and too
noisy to suit me. I just came up this morning to see a real-estate firm
here about a house they've got in Ripley. I'm going back to-night."

"You're buying a house?" she cried in the tone of a child who sees a
toy taken from it. Her anger at her lack of self-control was increased
when she saw that he had misinterpreted her feeling.

"Just to rent," he said hastily. "I'm not thinking of--moving. Mother
and I are satisfied where we are, and I expect it'll be some time
before I get that place paid for. This other house--" It seemed to her
unbearable that he should have two houses. But he went on doggedly,
determined, she saw, to give no impression of a prosperity that was
not his. "I expect you wouldn't think much of it. But there's a big
real-estate firm up here that's going to boom Ripley, and I wanted to
get in on as much of it as I could. They're buying up half the land in
the county, and I had an option on a little piece they wanted, so I
traded it in for this house. I figure I can fix it up some and make a
good thing renting it pretty soon."

She saw that her momentary envy had been absurd. He might have two
houses, but he was only one of the unnumbered customers of a big
real-estate firm. At that moment her husband was dealing as an equal
with the heads of such a firm. There was, of course, no comparison
between the two men, and she made none. The stirring of remembered
affection that she felt for Paul registered in her mind only a pensive
realization of the decay of everything under the erosion of time.

She felt that she was managing the interview very well, and when
she saw Paul resugaring his coffee from time to time, with the same
deliberate measuring of two level spoonfuls, she felt a complex
gratification. She told herself that she did not want Paul to be still
in love with her and unhappy, but there was a pleasure in seeing this
evidence that his agitation was greater than hers. Being ashamed of the
emotion did not kill it.

He told her, with an attempt to control his pride, that he was no
longer with the railroad company. The man who "just about owned Ripley"
had given him a better job. He was in charge of the ice-plant and
lumber-yard now, and he was getting a hundred and fifty a month. He
mentioned the figures diffidently, as one who does not desire to be
boastful.

"That's fine!" she said, and thought that they paid nearly half that
sum for rent, and that the very clothes she was wearing had cost more
than his month's salary. She would have liked him to know these things,
so that he might see how wonderful Bert was, though they did not have
a house, and the cruelty of even thinking this made her hate herself.
"Why, you're doing splendidly," she said. "I'm so glad!"

Paul, though conscientiously modest, agreed with her, and was deeply
pleased by her applause. After an evident struggle between two opposing
impulses, he began to ask questions about her. She found there was very
little to tell him. Yes, she was having a very good time. Yes, she was
very well. His admiration of her rosy color threw her into a strangling
whirlpool of emotions, from which she rescued herself by the sardonic
thought that her technic with rouge had improved since their last
meeting. She told him vaguely that business was fine, and that they had
a lovely apartment on Bush Street.

There was nothing else to tell about herself, and both of them avoided
directly mentioning her husband. She had never more keenly realized the
emptiness of her life, except for Bert, than when she saw Paul's mind
circling about it in an effort to find something there.

He turned at last, baffled, to the book beside her plate.

"Still keeping on reading, I see. I re--" he stopped short. They both
remembered the small book-case with the glass doors that had stood in
his mother's parlor in Masonville, and how they had lingered before
it on the pretext that she was borrowing a book. "Something good?"
he asked hastily. When she showed him the title, he repeated it
doubtfully: "Pragmatism? Well, it's all right, I suppose. I don't go
much for these Oriental notions about religion, myself."

"It isn't a religion, exactly," she said uncertainly. "It's a new way
of looking at things. It's about truth--sort of. I mean, it says there
isn't any, really--not absolutely, you know," she floundered on before
the puzzled question in his eyes. "It says there isn't _absolute_
truth--truth, you know, like a separate thing. Truth's only a sort
of quality, like--well, like beauty, and it belongs to a thing if
the thing works out right. I've got it clear in my head, but I don't
express it very well, I know."

"I don't see any sense to it, myself," he commented. "Truth is just
simply truth, that's all, and it's up to us to tell it all the time."

She knew that an attempt to explain further would fail, and she felt
that her mind had a wider range than his; but she had an impression
of his standing sure-footed and firm on the rock of his simple
convictions, and she saw that his whole life was as secure and stable
as hers was insecure and precarious. She felt about that as she did
about his house, envying him something which she knew was not as
valuable as her own possessions.

A strange pang--a pain she could not understand--struck her when he
stopped at the cashier's grating and paid her check with his own in the
most matter-of-fact way.

They parted at the door of the lunch-room; for seeing his hesitation
she said brightly: "Well, good-by. I'm going the other way." She held
out her hand, and when he took it she added quickly, "I'm so glad to
have seen you looking so well and happy."

"I'm not so blamed happy," he retorted gruffly, as if her words jarred
the exclamation from him. He covered it instantly with a heavy, "So'm
I--I'm glad you are. Good-by."

That exclamation remained in her mind, repeating itself at intervals
like an echo. She had been more deeply stirred than she had realized.
Fragments of old emotions, unrealized hopes, unsatisfied longings, rose
in her, to be replaced by others, to sink, and come back again. "I'm
not so blamed happy." It might have meant anything or nothing. She
wondered what her life would be if she were living in a little house in
Ripley with him, and rejected the picture, and considered it again.

Looking back, she saw all the turnings that had taken her from the
road to a life like that--the road that she had once unquestioningly
supposed that she would take. If she had stayed at home in Masonville,
if she had given up the struggle in Sacramento; if she had been able
to live in San Francisco with nothing to fill her days but work and
loneliness--she saw as a series of merest chances the steps which had
brought her at last to Bert.

One could not have everything. She had him. He was not a man who would
work slowly, day by day, toward a petty job and a small house bought
on the instalment plan. He was brilliant, clever, daring. He would one
day do great things, and she must help him by giving him all her love
and faith and trust. Suddenly it appeared monstrous that she should be
struggling against him, troubling him with her commonplace desires for
a commonplace thing like a home, at the very moment when he needed all
his wit and skill to handle a big deal. She was ashamed of the thoughts
with which she had been playing; they seemed to her an infidelity of
the spirit.




                              CHAPTER XII


Bert was not in the apartment when she reached it; she knew her
disappointment was irrational, for she had told herself he would
not be there. However, he might telephone. She curled up in the big
chair by the window, the book in her lap, and read with a continual
consciousness of waiting. She felt that his coming or the sound of his
voice would rescue her from something within herself.

At six o'clock she told herself that he would telephone within an
hour. Experience had taught her that this way of measuring time helped
it to pass more quickly. With determined effort she concentrated
her attention upon her book, shutting out voices that clamored
heart-shaking things to her. At seven o'clock she was walking up and
down the living-room, despising herself, telling herself that nothing
had happened, that he did these things only to show her his hold on
her, that at any moment now his message would come.

For another hour she thought of many things she might have done
differently. She might have walked past the office of Clark & Hayward,
meeting him as if by accident when he came out. But that might have
annoyed him. She might have gone to some of the cafés for tea on the
chance of meeting him there. But there were so many cafés! He must be
dining in one of them now, and she could not know which one. She could
not know who might be dining with him.

"Helen Davies Kennedy, stop it! Stop it!" she said aloud. She was a
little quieter then, walking to the window, and standing there, gazing
down at the street. Her heart beat suffocatingly at the sight of each
machine that passed; she thought, until it went by, that he might be in
it.

It was the old agony again, and weariness and contempt for herself were
mingled with her pain. So many times she had waited, as she was waiting
now, and always he had come back to her, laughing at her hysteria. Why
could she not learn to bear it more easily? She might have to wait
until midnight, until later than midnight. She set her teeth.

The sudden peal of the telephone-bell in the dark room startled a
smothered cry from her. She ran, stumbling against the table, and the
receiver shook at her ear; but her voice was steady and pleasant.

"Yes?"

"Helen? Bert. I'm going south to-night on the Lark. Pack my suitcases
and ship 'em express to Bakersfield, will you?"

"What? Yes, yes. Right away. Are you--will you--be gone long?"

His voice was going on, jubilant:

"Trust your Uncle Dudley to put it over! D'you know what I got from the
tightest firm in town? Unlimited letter of credit! Get that 'unlimited'?

"Oh Bert!"

"It's the biggest land proposition ever put out in the West! Ripley
Farmland Acres I'm going to put them on the map in letters a mile high!
Believe me, I'm going to wake things up! There's half a million in it
for me if it's handled right, and, believe me, I'm some little handler!"

"I know you are! O Bert, how splendid!"

"All right. Get the suitcases off early--here's my train. Bye-bye."

"Wait a minute--when're you coming back? Can't I come, too?"

"Not yet. I'll let you know. Oh, d'you want some money?"

"Well--I haven't got much--but that isn't--"

"Send you a check. From now on I'm made of money--so long--"

"Bert dear--" she cried, against the click of a closed receiver. Then
with a long, relaxing sigh she slowly put down the telephone. After a
moment she went into the bedroom, switched on the lights, and began
to pack shirts and collars into his bags. She was smiling, because
happiness and hope had come back to her; but her hands shook, for she
was exhausted.

It was thirty-two days before she heard from him again. A post-dated
check for a hundred dollars, crushed into an envelope and mailed on the
train, had come back to her, and that was all. But she assured herself
that he was too busy to write. The month went by slowly, but it was not
unbearably dreary, for she was able to keep uneasy doubts in check,
and to live over in her memory many happy hours with him. She planned,
too, the details of the house they would have if this time he really
did make a great deal of money. He would give her a house, she knew,
whenever he could do it easily and carelessly.

When the telephone awakened her one night at midnight her first
thought was that he had come back. She was struggling into a negligée
and snatching a fresh lace cap from a drawer when it rang again and
undeceived her.

Long distance from Coalinga had a call for her and wished her to
reverse charges. She repeated the name uncertainly, and the voice
repeated: "Call from Mr. Kennedy in Coalinga--"

"Oh, yes, yes! Yes. I'll pay for it. Yes, it's O.K." She waited
nervously in the darkness until his voice came faintly to her.

"Hello, Helen! Bert. Listen. Have you got any money?"

"About thirty dollars."

"Well, listen, Helen. Wire me twenty, will you? I've got to have it
right away."

"Of course. Very first thing in the morning. Are you all right?"

"Am I all right? Good God, Helen! do you think anybody's all right when
he hasn't got any money? We've just got into this rotten burg; been
driving all day long and half the night across a desert hotter than the
hinges of the main gate, and not a drink for a hundred and forty--" His
voice blurred into a buzzing on the wire, and she caught disconnected
words: "Skinflints--over on me--they've got another guess--piker
stunt--"

She reiterated loudly that she would send the money, and heard central
relaying the words Nothing more came over the wire, though she rattled
the receiver. At last she went back to bed, to lie awake till dawn came.

She was waiting at the telegraph-office when the money-order department
opened. After she had sent the twenty dollars she tried to drink a cup
of coffee, and walked quickly back to the apartment. She felt that
she should be able to think of something to do, some action she could
take which would help Bert, and many wild schemes rushed through her
feverish brain. But she knew that she could do nothing but wait.

The telephone-bell was ringing when she reached her door. It seemed
an eternity before she could reach it. Again she assured central that
she would pay the charges, and heard his voice. He wanted to know why
she had not sent the money, then when she had sent it, then why it had
not arrived. He talked a great deal, impatiently, and she saw that his
high-strung temperament had been excited to a frenzy by disasters which
in her ignorance of business she could not know. Her heart ached with a
passion of sympathy and love; she was torn by her inability to help him.

Half an hour later he called again, and demanded the same explanations.
Then suddenly he interrupted her, and told her to come to Coalinga. It
was a rotten hole, he repeated, and he wanted her.

That he should want her was almost too much happiness, but she tried to
be cool and reasonable about it. She pointed out that she had just paid
a month's rent, that she had only ten dollars, that it might be wiser,
she might be less a burden to him, if she stayed in San Francisco.
She would make the ten dollars last a month, and that would give him
time--He interrupted her savagely. He wanted her. Was she coming or was
she throwing him down? Thought he couldn't support her, did she? He
always had done it, hadn't he? Where she'd get this sudden notion he
was no good? He could tell her Gilbert Kennedy wasn't done for yet, not
by a damned sight. Was she coming or--

"Oh, yes! yes! yes! I'll come right away!" she cried.

While she was packing, she wished that she had something to pawn She
would have braved a pawnbroker's shop herself. But the diamond ring had
gone when the Guatemala rubber plantation failed; her other jewels were
paste or semi-precious stones; her furs were too old to bring anything.
She could take Bert nothing but her courage and her faith.

She found that her ticket cost nine dollars and ninety cents. When
she reached Coalinga, after a long restless night on the train and a
two-hours' careful toilet in the swaying dressing-room, she gave the
porter the remaining dime. It was a gesture of confidence in Bert and
in the future. She was going to him with a high spirit, matching his
reckless daring with her own.

He was not on the platform. When the train had gone she still waited a
few minutes, looking at a row of one-story ramshackle buildings which
paralleled the single track. Obviously they were all saloons. A few
loungers stared at her from the sagging board sidewalk. She turned her
head, to see on either side the far level stretches of a desert broken
only by dirty splashes of sage-brush. The whole scene seemed curiously
small under a high gray sky quivering with blinding heat.

She picked up her bags and walked across the street in a white glare
of sunlight. A heavy, sickening smell rose in hot waves from the oiled
road. She felt ill. But she knew that it would be a simple matter to
find Bert in a town so small. He would be at the best hotel.

She found it easily, a two-story building of cream plaster which rose
conspicuously on the one main street. There was coolness and shade in
the wide clean lobby, and the clerk told her at once that Bert was
there. He told her where to find the room on the second floor.

Her heart fluttered when she tapped on the panels and heard Bert call,
"Come in!" She dropped her bags and rushed into a dimness thick with
the smoke of cigars. The room seemed full of men, but when the first
flurry of greetings and introductions were over and she was sitting on
the edge of the bed beside Bert, she saw that there were only five.

They were all young and appeared at the moment very gloomy. Depression
was in the air as thickly as the cigar smoke. She gathered from
their bitter talk that they were land salesmen, that a campaign in
Bakersfield had ended in some sudden disaster,--"blown up," they
said,--and that they found a miserable pleasure in repeating that
Coalinga was a "rotten territory."

Bert, lounging against the heaped-up pillows on the bed, with a cigar
in his hand and whisky and ice-water at his elbow, let them talk
until it seemed that despondency could not be more blacker, then
suddenly sitting up, he poured upon them a flood of tingling words.
His eyes glowed, his face was vividly keen and alive, and his magnetic
charm played upon them like a tangible force. Helen, sitting silent,
listening to phrases which meant nothing to her, thrilled with pride
while she watched him handle these men, awakening sparks in the dead
ashes of their enthusiasm, firing them, giving them something of his
own irresistible confidence in himself.

"I tell you fellows this thing's going to go. It's going to go big.
There's thousands of dollars in it, and every man that sticks is going
to be rolling in velvet. Get out if you want to; if you're pikers, beat
it. I don't need you. I'm going to bring into this territory the livest
bunch of salesmen that ever came home with the bacon. But I don't want
any pikers in my game. If you're going to lay down on me, do it now,
and get out."

They assured him that they were with him. The most reluctant wanted to
know something about details, there was some talk of percentage and
agreements. Bert slashed at him with cutting words, and the others
bore him down with their aroused enthusiasm. Then Bert offered to buy
drinks, and they all went out together in a jovial crowd.

Helen was left alone, to realize afresh her husband's power, and to
reflect on her own smallness and stupidity. She stifled a nagging
little worry about Bert's drinking. She always wished he would not do
it, but she knew it was a masculine habit which she did not understand
because she was a woman. After all, men accomplished the big things,
and they must be allowed to do them in their own way.

She opened the windows, but letting out the smoke let in a stifling
heat and the sickening smell of crude oil. She closed them again and
reduced the confusion of the room to orderliness, smoothing the bed,
gathering up armfuls of scattered papers and unpacking her bags. When
Bert came back a few hours later she was reading with interest a pile
of literature about Ripley Farmland Acres.

He came in exuberantly, and as she ran toward him he tossed into
the air a handful of clinking gold coins. They fell around her and
scattered rolling on the floor. "Trust your Uncle Dudley to put one
over!" he cried. "Pick 'em up! They're yours!"

"Oh, my dear, my dear!" she gasped, between laughter and the tears that
now she could no longer control. Her arms were around his neck, and she
did not mind his laughing at her, though she controlled herself quickly
before his amusement could change to annoyance. "I knew you'd do it!"
she said.

It was a long time before she remembered the money. Then, gathering it
up, she was astonished to find nearly a hundred dollars. He laughed
at her again when she asked him how he had got it. It was all right.
He'd got it, hadn't he? But he told her not to pay for her meals in the
dining-room, to sign the checks instead, and from this she deduced that
his business difficulties were not yet entirely overcome. She put the
money in her purse, resolving to save it.

She discovered that he now owned a large green automobile. Apparently
he had bought it in Bakersfield, for it had been some months since
he had sold the gray one. In the afternoon they drove out to the oil
leases, and she sat in the machine while the salesmen scattered to look
for land-buyers.

The novelty of the scene was sufficient occupation for her. Low hills
of yellow sand, shimmering in glassy heat-waves, were covered with
innumerable derricks, which in the distance looked like a weird forest
without leaf or shade and near at hand suggested to her grotesque
creatures animated by unnatural life, their long necks moving up and
down with a chugging sound. There were huddles of little houses,
patchworks of boards and canvas, and now and then she saw faded women
in calico dresses, or a child sitting half naked and gasping in the hot
shadows. She felt that she was in a foreign land, and the far level
desert stretching into a haze of blue on the eastern sky-line seemed
like a sea between her and all that she had known.

The salesmen were morose when they returned to the machine, and Bert's
enthusiasm was forced. "There's millions of dollars a year pouring out
of these wells," he declared. "We're going to get ours, boys, believe
me!" But they did not respond, and Helen felt an increasing tension
while they drove back to town through a blue twilight. She thought with
relief of the gold pieces in her purse.

After supper Bert sent her to their room, and she lay in her nightgown
on sheets that were hot to the touch, and panted while she read of
Ripley Farmland Acres. The literature was reassuring; it seemed to
her that any one would buy land so good on such astonishingly low
terms. But her uneasiness increased like an intolerable tightening of
the nerves, and her enforced inaction in this crisis that she did not
understand tortured her. It occurred to her that she was still able to
telegraph, and until she dismissed the thought as unfair to Bert she
was tantalized by a wild idea of once more having some control of her
fate.

It was nearly midnight when he came in, and she saw that any questions
would drive him into a fury of irritated nerves. In the morning, she
thought, he would be in a more approachable mood. But when she awakened
in the dawn he was gone.

She did not see him until nearly noon. After sitting for some time in
the lobby and exploring as much of the sleepy town as she could without
losing sight of the hotel entrance to which he might come, she had
returned to the row of chairs beside it and was sitting there when he
appeared in the green automobile.

She ran to the curb. He was flushed, his eyes were very bright, and
while he introduced her to a man and woman in the tonneau, she heard in
his voice the note she had learned to meet with instant alertness. He
told her smoothly that Mr. and Mrs. Andrews were interested in Ripley
Farmland Acres; he was driving them over to look at the proposition.
She leaned across a pile of luggage to shake hands with them and talked
engagingly to the woman, but she did not miss Bert's slightest movement
or change of expression.

When he asked her to get his driving gloves she knew that he would
follow her, and on the stairs she gripped the banister with a hand
whose quivering she could not stop. She was not afraid of Bert in this
mood, but she knew that it threatened an explosion of nervous temper as
sufficient atmospheric tension threatens lightening. He was at the door
of their room before she had closed it.

"Where's that money?"

"Right here." She hesitated, opening her purse. "Bert--it's all we
have, isn't it?"

"What difference does that make? It isn't all I'm going to have."

"Listen just a minute. Did that woman tell you she was going to buy
land?"

"Good Lord, do I have to stand here and talk? They're waiting. Give me
that money."

"But Bert. She's taking another hat with her. She's got it in a bag,
and she's got two suitcases, and she--the way she looks--I believe
she's just going somewhere and getting you to take her in the machine.
And--please let me finish--if it's all the money we have don't you
think--"

She knew that his outburst of anger was her own fault. He was nervous
and over-wrought; she should have soothed him, agreed with him in
anything, in everything. But there had been no time. Shaken as she was
by his words, she clung to her opinion, even tried to express it again.
She felt that their last hold on security was the money in her purse,
and she saw him losing it in a hopeless effort. Against his experience
and authority she could offer only an impression, and the absurdity of
talking about a hatsack in a woman's hand. The futility of such weapons
increased her desperation. His scorn ended in rage. "Are you going to
give me that money?"

Tears she would not shed blinded her. Her fingers fumbled with the
fastening of the purse. The coins slid out and scattered on the floor.
He picked them up, and the slamming of the door told her he was gone.

She no longer tried to hold her self-control. When it came back to her
it came slowly, as skies clear after a storm. Her body was exhausted
with sobs and her face was swollen and sodden, but she felt a great
relief. The glare of sunlight on the drawn shades and the stifling heat
told her that it was late in the afternoon. She undressed wearily,
bathed her face with cool water and, lying down again, was engulfed in
the pleasant darkness of sleep.

The next day and the next passed with a slowness that was like a
deliberate refinement of cruelty. She felt that time itself was
malicious, prolonging her suspense. The young salesmen shared it with
her. They had telegraphed friends and families and were awaiting money
with which to get out of town. One by one they were released and
departed joyfully. Five days passed. Six. Seven.

She would have telegraphed to Clark & Hayward, but she had no money
for the telegram. She would have found work if there had been any that
she could do. The manager of the small telegraph-office was the only
operator. In the little town there were a few stores, already supplied
with clerks, a couple of boarding-houses on Whiskey Row, and scores
of pretty little houses in which obviously no servants were employed.
The local paper carried half a dozen "help wanted" advertisements
for stenographers and cooks on the oil-leases. She did not know
stenography, and she did not have the ability to cook for twenty or
forty hungry men.

A bill in her box at the end of the week told her that her room was
costing three dollars a day, and she dared not precipitate inquiry
by asking for a cheaper one. She was appalled by the prices of the
bill-of-fare, and ate sparingly, signing the checks, however, with a
careless scrawl and a confident smile at the waitress.

She was coming from the dining-room on the evening of the seventh day
when the manager of the hotel, somewhat embarrassed, asked her not to
sign any more checks for meals. It was a new rule of the house, he
said. She smiled at him, too, and agreed easily. "Why, certainly!"
Altering her intention of going up-stairs, she walked into the lobby
and sat relaxed in a chair, glancing with an appearance of interest at
a newspaper.

So it happened that she saw the item in the middle of the column, which
at last gave her news of Bert.

                BERT KENNEDY SOUGHT ON BAD CHECK CHARGE

    Charging Gilbert H. Kennedy, well-known along the city's joy
    zones, with cashing a bogus check for a hundred dollars on the
    Metropolitan National Bank, Judge C. K. Washburne yesterday issued
    a warrant for the arrest of the young man on a felony charge. The
    police search for Kennedy and his young wife, a former candy-store
    girl, has so far proved fruitless. Interviewed at his residence
    in Los Angeles last night, former Judge G. H. Kennedy, father of
    the missing man, controller of the Central Trust Company until
    his indictment some years ago for mishandling its funds, denied
    knowledge of his son's whereabouts, saying that he had not been on
    good terms with his son for several years.

After some time she was able to rise and walk quite steadily across the
lobby. Her hand on the banister kept her from stumbling very much while
she went up-stairs. There was darkness in her room, and it covered her
like a shield. She stood straight and still, one hand pressing against
the wall.

It was Saturday night, and in the happy custom of the oil fields a
block of the oiled street had been roped off for dancing. Already
the musicians were tuning their instruments. Impatient drillers and
tool-dressers, with their best girls, were cheering their efforts with
bantering applause. The ropes were giving way before the pressure of
the holiday crowd in a tumult of shouts and laughter.

Suddenly, with a rollicking swing, the band began to play. The tune
rose gaily through the hot, still night, and beneath it ran a rustling
undertone, the shuffling of many dancing feet. Below her window the
pavement was a swirl of movement and color. Her body relaxed slowly,
letting her down into a crumpled heap, and she lay against the
window-sill with her face hidden in the circle of her arms.




                             CHAPTER XIII


Morning came like a change in an interminable delirium. Light poured
in through the open window, and the smothering heat of the night gave
way to the burning heat of the day. Helen sat up on the tumbled bed,
pressing her palms against her forehead, and tried to think.

The realization of her own position did not rouse any emotion. Her
mind stated the situation baldly and she looked at it with impersonal
detachment. It seemed a curious fact that she should be in a hotel in
the oil fields, without money, with no way of getting food, with no
means of leaving the place, owing bills that she could not pay.

"Odd I'm not more excited," she said, and in the same instant forgot
about it.

The thought of Bert did not hurt her any more, either. She felt it as a
blow on a spot numbed by an anesthetic. But slowly, out of the chaos in
her brain, there emerged one thought. She must do something to help him.

She did not need to tell herself that he had not meant to break
the law; she knew that. She understood that he had meant to cover
the check, that he was in danger because of some accident or
miscalculation. In the saner daylight the succession of events that
had led to this monstrous catastrophe became clear to her. Bert's
over-wrought self-confidence when he brought her the gold, his
feverish insistence that this was a good territory for land sales, his
excitement when he rushed away, believing that he could sell a farm
to that shifty-eyed woman with the hat-box, should have told her the
situation.

Just because Bert had made that tiny mistake in judgment--A frenzy of
protest rose in Helen, beating itself against the inexorable fact. It
could not be true! It could not be true that so small an incident had
brought such calamity. It was a nightmare. She would not believe it.

"O Bert! It isn't true! It isn't--it isn't--O Bert!" She stopped that
in harsh self-contempt. It was true "Get up and face it, you coward,
you coward!"

She made herself rise, bathed her face and shoulders with cool water.
The mirror showed her dull eyes and a mass of frowsy hair stuck through
with hairpins. She took out the pins and began tugging at the snarls
with a comb. Everything had become unreal; the solid walls about her,
the voices coming up from the street below, impalpable things; she
herself was least real of all, a shadow moving among shadows. But she
must go on; she must do something.

Money. Bert needed money. It was the only thing that stood between him
and unthinkable horrors of suffering and disgrace. His father would not
help him. Her people could not. Somehow she must get money, a great
deal of money.

She did not think out the idea; it was suddenly there in her mind. It
was a chance, the only one. She stood at the window, looking out over
the low roofs of Coalinga to the sand hills covered with derricks.
There was money there. "Millions of dollars a year." She would take
Bert's vacant place, sell the farm he had failed to sell, save him.

Her normal self was as lifeless as if it were in a trance, but beneath
its dull weight a small clear brain worked as steadily as the ticking
of a clock. It knew Ripley Farmland Acres; it recalled scraps of talk
with the salesmen; it reminded her of photographs and blank forms and
price lists. She dressed quickly, twisting her hair into a tidy knot,
dashing talcum powder on her perspiring face and neck. From Bert's
suitcase she hurriedly gathered a bunch of Ripley Farmland Acres
literature and tucked it into a salesman's leather wallet. At the door
she turned back to get a pencil.

The hotel was an empty place to her. If the idlers looked at her
curiously over their waving fans when she went through the lobby she
did not know it. It was like opening the door of an oven to meet the
white glare of the street, but she walked briskly into it. She knew
where to find the livery-stable, and to the man who lounged from its
hay-scented dimness to meet her she said crisply:

"I want a horse and buggy right away, please."

She waited on the worn boards of the driveway while he brought out a
horse and backed it between the shafts. He remarked that it was a hot
day; he inquired casually if she was going far. To the oil fields,
she said. East or west? "East," she replied at a venture. "Oh, the
Limited?" Yes, the Limited, she agreed. When she had climbed into the
buggy and picked up the reins, it occurred to her to ask him what road
to take.

When she had passed Whiskey Row the road ran straight before her,
a black line of oiled sand drawn to a vanishing-point on the level
desert. The horse trotted on with patient perseverance, the parched
buggy rattled behind him, and she sat motionless with the reins in her
hands. Around her the air quivered in great waves above the hot yellow
sand; it rippled above the black road like the colorless vibrations on
the lid of a stove. Far ahead she saw a small dot, which she supposed
was the Limited. She would arouse herself when she reached it. Her
brain was as motionless as her body, waiting.

Centuries went past her. She reached the dot, and found a
watering-trough and an empty house. She unchecked the horse, who
plunged his nose eagerly into the water. His sides were rimed with
dried sweat, and with the drinking can she poured over him water, which
almost instantly evaporated. She was sorry for him.

When she was in the buggy again and he was once more trotting patiently
down the long road she found that she was looking at herself and him
from some far distance, and finding it fantastic that one little animal
should be sitting upright in a contrivance of wood and leather, while
another little animal drew it industriously across a minute portion
of the earth's surface. Her mind became motionless again, as though
suspended in the quivering intensity of heat.

Hours later she saw that the road was winding over hills of sand.
A few derricks were scattered upon them. She stopped at another
watering-trough, and in the house beside it a faded woman, keeping the
screen door hooked between them, told her that the Limited was four
miles farther on. It did not occur to her to ask anything more. Her
mind was set, like an alarm clock, for the Limited.

She drove into it at last. It was like a small part of a city, hacked
off and set freakishly in a hollow of the sand hills. A dozen huge
factory buildings faced a row of two-story bunkhouses. Loaded wagons
clattered down the street between them, and electric power wires
crisscrossed overhead. On the hillside was a group of small cottages,
their porches curtained with wilting vines. When she had tied the
horse in the shade she stood for a moment, feeling all her courage and
strength gathering within her. Then she went up the hill.

The screen doors of the cottages opened to her. She heard herself
talking pleasantly, knew that she was smiling, and saw answering
smiles. Tired women with lines in their sallow faces tipped the
earthern ollas to give her a cool drink, pushed forward chairs for her.
Brown-skinned children came shyly to her and touched her dress with
sticky little fingers, laughing when she patted their cheeks and asked
their names. Mothers showed her white little babies gasping in the
heat, and she smiled over them, saying how pretty they were. Beneath it
all she felt trapped and desperate.

It seemed to her that these women should have started at the sight of
her as at a death's-head. There was nothing but friendly interest in
their eyes, and their obliviousness gave her the comfort that darkness
gives to a tortured animal. The hours were going by, relentlessly
taking her one hope.

"Do you own any California land?"

"Yes." There would be a flicker of pride in tired eyes. "My husband
just bought forty acres last week, near Merced. We're going to pay for
it out of his wages, and have it to go to some day!"

"Isn't that fine! Oh yes, the land near Merced is very good land. Your
husband's probably done very well. Do you know any one else who's
looking for a ranch?" No one did.

She kept on doggedly. When she left each cottage desperation clutched
at her throat, and for an instant her breath stopped. But she was so
hopeless that she could do nothing but clench her teeth and go on.
At the next door she smiled again and her voice was pleasant. "Good
afternoon! Might I ask you for a drink of water? Oh, thank you! Yes,
isn't it hot? I'm selling farm land. Do you own a California ranch?"

It was when she approached the sixteenth cottage that the steps, the
wilted vine, the little porch went out in blackness before her eyes.
But she escaped the catastrophe, and almost at once saw them clearly
again and felt the gate-post under her tight fingers. The taste in her
mouth was blood. She had bitten her lips quite badly, but wiping her
mouth with her handkerchief she found that it did not show. She was
past caring for anything but finding some one who would buy land. All
her powers of thinking had narrowed to that and were concentrated upon
it like a strong light on a tiny spot.

In the twentieth cottage a woman said that she had heard that Mr.
MacAdams, who worked in the boiler factory, had been to Fresno to buy
land and had not bought it. Helen thanked her, and went to the boiler
factory.

It was a large building, set high above the ground. Circling it, she
saw a man in overalls and undershirt lounging in a wide doorway above
her. The roar and bang and whir of machinery behind him drowned her
voice, and he stared at her as at an apparition. When he leaped down
beside her and understood her demand to see Mr. MacAdams his expression
of perplexity changed to a broad grin. MacAdams was in a boiler, he
said, and still grinning, he climbed back to the door-step and drew her
up by one arm into a huge room shaking with noise. He led her through
crashing confusion and with his pipe-stem pointed out MacAdams.

MacAdams was crouching in a big cylinder of steel. In his hand he held
a jerking riveter, and the boiler vibrated with its racket. His ears
were stuffed with cotton, his eyes intent on his work. In mute show
Helen thanked the man beside her and, going down on her hands and
knees, crawled into the boiler. When she touched MacAdams's shoulder
the riveter stopped.

"I beg your pardon," she said. "I heard you were interested in buying a
ranch."

MacAdams's astonishment was profound. Mechanically he put a cold pipe
in his mouth and took it out again. She saw that his mind was passive
under the shock. Sitting back on her heels she opened the wallet and
took out the pictures. Her voice sounded thin in her ears.

"There's lots of good land in California. I wouldn't try to tell
you, Mr. MacAdams, that ours is the only land a man can make money by
buying. But what do you think of that alfalfa?"

She knew that it was alfalfa because the picture was so marked on the
back. While he looked at it she studied him, and her life was blank
except for his square Scotch face, the deliberate mind behind it, and
her intensity of purpose.

She saw that she must not talk too much. His mind worked slowly,
standing firmly at each point it reached. He must think he was making
his own decisions. She must guide them by questions, not statements. He
would be obstinate before definite statements. He was interested. He
handed back the picture and asked a question. She answered it from the
information in the advertising, and while she let him reach for another
picture she thought quickly that she must not let him catch her in a
lie. If he asked a question, the answer to which she did not know, she
must say so. She was ready when it came.

"I don't know about that," she answered. "We can find out on the land
if you want to go and look at it."

He was noncommittal. She let the point go. She felt that her life
itself hung on his decisions, and she could do nothing to hasten them.
Her hands were shaking, and she forced her body to relax. She unfolded
a map of Ripley Farmland Acres and pointed out the proposed railroad,
the highway, the irrigation canals. She made him ask why part of the
map was painted red, and then told him that those farms were sold.
He was impressed. She folded the map a second too soon, leaving his
interest unsatisfied.

He said he thought the proposition was worth looking into. She did not
reply because she feared her voice would not be steady. In the pause he
added that he would go over and look at it next Tuesday. She unfolded
the map again. Her fingers were cold and stiff paper rattled between
them, but the moment had come to test her success, and she would not
deceive herself with false hopes.

She told him that she wanted to reserve a certain farm for him to see.
She pointed it out at random. It was a very good piece, she said, the
best piece unsold. She feared it would be sold before Tuesday. It could
not be held unless he would pay a deposit on it. If he did not buy it
the deposit would be returned.

"You don't want to waste your time, Mr. MacAdams, and neither do I."
She felt the foundations of her self-control shaking, but she went on,
looking at him squarely. "If this piece suits you, you will buy it,
won't you?"

He would. If it suited him.

"Then please let me hold it until I can show it to you."

She waited while time ticked by slowly. Then he leaned sidewise,
putting his hand in his pocket. "How much will I have to put up?"

When she backed out of the boiler five minutes later she had a
twenty-dollar gold piece in her hand, and in her wallet was the yellow
slip of paper with his signature on the dotted line. She stumbled down
a lane between whirring machinery and dropped over a door-sill into
the hot dust of the road. Her grip on herself was being shaken loose
by unconquerable forces. She ran blindly to the buggy, and when she
had somehow got into it she heard herself laughing through sobs in her
throat. The horse trotted gladly toward Coalinga.

During the long drive across the desert she sat relaxed, too weary to
be troubled or pleased by anything. The sun sank slowly beyond cool
blue hills, and darkness crept down from them across the level miles
of sand. A crescent of twinkling lights appeared on the lower slopes,
where the western oil fields lay. Their lower rim was Coalinga, and
she thought of bed and sleep. Clutching the gold piece, she reminded
herself that she must eat. She must keep up her strength until she
had sold that piece of land. She was too tired to face that effort
now. The horse took her quickly past Whiskey Row and dashed to the
livery-stable. She climbed down stiffly.

"Charge it." Her voice was stiff, too. "Clark & Hayward, San
Francisco. I'm representing them. H. D. Kennedy--I'm at the hotel."

Her body lagged as she drove it to the telegraph-office. She had
written a telegram to Clark & Hayward before she realized that she
dared not face any inquiry until after Tuesday. It occurred to her then
that she had committed a crime. She was not certain what it was, but
she thought it was obtaining money under false pretenses. She destroyed
the telegram.

Later, when she laid the twenty-dollar gold piece on the check for her
supper, it seemed to her that she was embezzling. A discrepancy vaguely
irritated her. Could one obtain money under false pretenses and then
embezzle it, too? She was too tired to be deeply concerned, but as an
abstract question it annoyed her. The waitress looked at her sharply,
and she wondered if she had said something about it. In a haze she got
up the stairs and into bed.




                              CHAPTER XIV


Very early Tuesday morning she drove to the Limited lease and got
MacAdams. He looked formidable in his good clothes, and now that he had
shaved the scrubby gray beard his chin had an even more obstinate line.
She talked to him in an easy and friendly manner, without mentioning
land. She must not waste her strength. There was a struggle before her
and a menace behind. She had opened a livery-stable account against
Clark & Hayward, who had never heard of her. The hotel, she knew, had
let her go only because she took no baggage and had told the clerk
casually that she would return to-morrow. The ticket to Ripley left
five dollars of the twenty that belonged to MacAdams. And every moment
that the sale was delayed might make it impossible to save Bert.

She sat smiling, listening to a tale of MacAdams' youth, when he was a
sea-faring man.

The train reached Fresno, and MacAdams's gaze rested with joy on leafy
orchards and vineyards and the cool green of alfalfa fields. She
perceived the effect upon him of that refreshing contrast with the
arid desert. Before they reached Ripley his mind would be adjusted to
a green land and ditches filled with running water. She had lost one
point.

Her attention concentrated upon the thoughts slowly forming in
his mind. Each word he spoke was an indication which she seized,
considered, turned this way and that, searching for the roots of it,
the implications growing from it.

The train was now running across a level plain covered with dry grass.
Desolation was written upon it, and small unpainted houses stood here
and there like periods at the end of sentences expressing the futility
of human hope. She smiled above a sinking heart. They alighted at
Ripley.

She had never seen the town before, and she saw now, with MacAdams's
eyes, a yellow station, several big warehouses, a wide dusty road into
which a street of two-story buildings ran at right angles. It was not
much larger than Coalinga. She looked anxiously for the agent from
Ripley Farmland Acres. That morning she had telegraphed him to meet her.

He came toward them and shook MacAdams' hand heartily. His name was
Nichols. He had a consciously frank eye, and a smooth manner. He
hustled them toward a dusty automobile whose sides were covered with
canvas advertisements of the tract, and put MacAdams into the front
seat beside him.

The machine, stirring a cloud of dust behind it, rattled down the
road between fields of dry stubble. She was ignored in the back seat.
Nichols had taken the situation out of her hands, and she did not
trust him. However, she could not trust herself, in the midst of her
uncertainties and ignorance.

Nichols talked too much and too enthusiastically. She was astounded by
his blindness. To her it seemed obvious that his words were of little
importance. It was what MacAdams said that mattered. He gave MacAdams
no silences in which to speak, and he appeared oblivious to the fact
that MacAdams, gazing contemplatively at the sky-line, said nothing.

They drove beneath an elaborate plaster gateway into the tract. Seventy
thousand acres of scorched dry grass lay before them, stretching
unbroken to a misty level horizon. Over it was the great arch of a hot
sky.

The machine carried them out into the waves of dry grass like the
smallest of boats putting out into an ocean of aridity. When it stopped
the sun poured its heat upon them and dust settled on perspiring hands
and faces. Nichols unrolled a map and talked with galvanic enthusiasm.
He talked incessantly and his phrases seemed worn threadbare by
previous repetition. MacAdams said nothing, and Helen tried to devise a
way to ask Nichols to stop talking.

His manner had dropped her outside of consideration, save as a woman
for whom automobile-doors must be opened. She saw that he felt her
presence as a handicap in this affair between men; he apologized for
saying "damn," and his apology conveyed resentment. He was losing her
the sale, and she could not interfere. Her only hope of saving Bert
rested on this sale. She controlled a rising desperation, and smiled at
him.

They got out of the machine and waded through dusty grass, searching
for surveyor's posts. Nichols pointed out the luxuriant growth of wild
hay, asked MacAdams what he thought of that, continued without a pause
to pour facts and figures upon him, heedless that he received no reply.
They got into the car again and Nichols, pulling a pad of blanks from
his pocket, tried to make MacAdams buy a certain piece of land then
and there. He attacked obliquely, as if expecting to trap MacAdams
into signing his name, and MacAdams answered as warily. "Well, I have
seen worse. And I have seen better." He lighted his pipe and listened
equably. He did not sign his name.

They drove further down the road and got out again. Helen caught
Nichols' sleeve, and though he shook his arm impatiently she held him
until MacAdams had walked some distance away and picked up a lump of
soil.

"Leave him to me, please," she said.

"What do you know about the tract?"

"Just the same, I wish you'd give me a chance, please."

"Do you want to sell him or don't you? I know how to handle prospects."

They spoke quickly. Already MacAdams was turning his head.

"He's my prospect. And, by God! I'm going to sell him or lose him
myself!" Her words shocked her like a thunderclap, but the shock
steadied her. And Nichols' overthrow was complete. He said hardly a
word when they reached MacAdams.

Almost in silence they examined that piece of land. MacAdams walked
to each of its corners; he looked at the map for some time; he asked
questions that Nichols answered briefly. He pulled up clumps of grass
and looked at the earth on their roots. At last he walked back to the
machine and leaned against it, lighting his pipe leisurely and looking
out across the tract. The silence was palpitant. When she saw that he
did not mean to break it, Helen asked, "Shall we look at another piece?"

"No. I've seen enough."

They got into the machine, and this time Nichols was alone on the front
seat. They drove back toward the tract office. The sun was sinking, and
a gray light lay over the empty fields. Helen felt herself part of it.
She had lost, and nothing mattered any more. She had no more to lose.
She kept up the hopeless effort, but the approaching end was like the
thought of rest to a struggling man who is drowning.

"What do you think of it, Mr. MacAdams?"

"Well--I have seen worse."

"Were you satisfied with the soil?"

"I wouldn't say anything against it."

"Would you like us to show you anything more of the water system?" What
did she care about water systems!

"No."

The machine stopped before the tract office. They got out.

"Your man's no good. He's a looker, not a buyer," Nichols said to her
in an aside.

"He has money and he wants land," she answered wearily.

"We'll have another go at him. But it's no use."

They went into the office. A smoky lamp stood on a desk littered with
papers. MacAdams asked when the train left Ripley. Nichols told him
that they had half an hour. They sat down, and Nichols, drawing his
chair briskly to the desk, began.

"Now, Mr. MacAdams, in buying land you have to consider four things;
land, water, climate, and markets. Our land--"

She could not go back to Coalinga with him. Probably there would be a
warrant out for her arrest. Oh, Bert! She had done her best, her very
best. There were five dollars left, MacAdams's money. The whole thing
was unreal. She was dreaming it.

Nichols was leading him up to the decision. MacAdams evaded it. Nichols
began again. The blank form was out now and the fountain-pen ready.

"You like the piece, don't you? You're satisfied with it. You've found
everything exactly as we represented it. It's the best buy on the
tract. Well, now we'll just close it up."

MacAdams put his hands in his pockets and gazed at the map on the wall.
"I'm not saying it isn't a good proposition."

Nichols began again. Was forty acres more than MacAdams wanted to
carry? MacAdams would not exactly say that. Would a change in the terms
be more convenient for him? MacAdams had no fault to find with the
terms. Did the question of getting the land into crop trouble him? No.
Well, then they'd get down to the point. The payments on this piece
would be--"I'll not be missing my train, Mr. Nichols?"

Patiently Nichols went back to the beginning. Land, water,
transportation, and cli--Helen could endure it no longer. One straight
question would end it, would leave her facing certainty. She leaned
forward and heard her own voice.

"Mr. MacAdams, you came to look at this land. You've looked at it. Do
you want it?"

There was one startled, arrested gesture from Nichols. Then they
remained motionless. The clock ticked loudly. Slowly MacAdams leaned
back in his chair, straightened one leg, put his hand into his trouser
pocket. He pulled out a grimy canvas bag.

"Yes. How much is the first payment?"

Deliberately he poured out on the desk a heap of golden coins. His
stubby fingers extracted from the sack a wad of banknotes. Nichols was
figuring madly. "Twelve hundred and seventy-three dollars and ninety
cents," he announced in a shaking voice. MacAdams counted it out with
exactness. He signed the contract. Nichols recounted the money and
sealed it in an envelope. They rose.

Helen found herself stumbling against the side of the automobile, and
felt Nichols squeezing her arm exultantly while he helped her into it.
They had reached Ripley before she was able to think. Then she said
that she would not return to Coalinga with MacAdams. They put him on
the train.

She told Nichols that she wanted the money and the contract. She was
going to take the next train to San Francisco. He objected. She argued
through a haze, and her greatest difficulty was keeping her voice
clear. But she held tenaciously to her purpose. Later she was on the
train with the contract and Nichols' check drawn to Clark & Hayward.
She slept then and she slept in the taxi-cab on the way to a San
Francisco hotel. She felt that she was asleep while she wrote her name
on a register She shut a door somehow behind a bell-boy, and at last
could sleep undisturbed.

At nine o'clock the next morning she sat facing Mr. Clark across a big
flat-topped desk. The contract and Nichols' check lay upon it.

       *       *       *       *       *

Mr. Clark was a lean, shrewd-looking man about forty-five years old.
He gave the impression of having kept his nerves at high tension for
so many years that now he must strain them still tighter or relax
altogether. This catastrophe he would have described as "losing his
grip," and Helen felt that he lived in dread of it as the ultimate
calamity. They had been talking for some time. Mr. Clark did not know
where Bert was.

"My dear young lady, if we had known--" he said, and he stopped because
it would be useless cruelty to complete the sentence. She thought that
he would not be cruel unless there were some purpose to be achieved by
it. There was even a kindly expression in his eyes at times.

He had explained clearly the situation in which her husband stood. Bert
had persuaded the firm to give him an unlimited letter of credit. "That
young man has a truly remarkable personality as a salesman. He had us
completely up in the air." He had proposed a gigantic selling campaign
in the oil fields, and had so filled Clark & Hayward with his own
enthusiasm that they had given him free rein.

The campaign had begun with every promise of astounding success. He
had brought huge crowds to hear speakers sent down from the city; had
gathered the names of thousands of "leads"; had imported fifty salesmen
to canvass these names and bring in prospective buyers. Scores of these
had been taken to the land and hundreds more were promised. Clark &
Hayward contemplated hiring special trains for them.

But expenses were running into disquieting amounts for the actual
results produced. Bert's checks poured in, and there began to be
annoying rumors. The firm had begun a quiet investigation and had
decided that he was spending too much of their money for personal
expenses. Mr. Clark need not go into details. They had withdrawn the
letter of credit and advised creditors in Bakersfield that the firm
would no longer pay Mr. Kennedy's bills.

Mr. Kennedy had been informed of this. He had taken one of the firm's
automobiles and disappeared. Later his check had come in. Clark &
Hayward could not make that good, in addition to their other losses.
The matter was now entirely out of their hands. Mr. Clark's gesture
placed it in the hands of inscrutable fate. He was more interested in
the MacAdams sale and the unexpected appearance of Helen.

However, under her insistence he admitted that if the check were made
good, Clark & Hayward could persuade the bank not to press the charge.
Of course the warrant was out, but there were ways. He undertook to
employ them for her, thoughtfully fingering Nichols' check. As to
finding Bert--well, if the police had failed--

Helen asked how much Bert owed the firm. Mr. Clark told her that the
sum was roughly five thousand dollars.

"In thirty days! Why--but--how is it possible?"

The amount included the cost of the automobile. The balance was Mr.
Kennedy's personal expenses, not included in his arrangement with
the firm. "Wine--ah--" Mr. Clark did not complete the triology. "Mr.
Kennedy's--recreations were expensive?" He would have the account
itemized?

"Oh, no. It isn't necessary," said Helen. She would like to know only
the exact sum. Mr. Clark pressed a button and asked the girl who
answered it to look up the amount. "And, by the way, have this sale
entered on the books, and a check made out to--?"

"H. D. Kennedy," said Helen.

"To H. D. Kennedy for the commissions. Seven and a half per cent."

"You were paying the other salesmen fifteen per cent.," said Helen.

That was by special arrangement. The ordinary salesmen in the field
were paid seven and a half percent. Helen accepted the statement, being
unable to refute it. She proposed that she should continue working for
the firm on twelve and a half per cent., five per cent. to apply on
the amount Bert owed them. Mr. Clark countered by offering her ten per
cent. with the same arrangement. She was stubborn, and he yielded.

Helen came out of the office with three hundred dollars in her
purse. She saw that the sun was shining, and as she walked through
the crowded, familiar streets, passing flower-stands gay with color,
feeling the cool breeze on her face, and seeing white clouds sailing
over Twin Peaks, she felt that the bright day was mocking her. She
understood why most suicides occur on days of sunshine.

Her life was beginning again, in a new way, among strange surroundings.
She thought that it would be pleasant to be dead. One would be then as
she was, numb, with no emotion, no interest, no concern for anything,
and one would not have to move or think. "Cheer up! What's the use of
wishing you were dead? You will be some day!" she said to herself,
with an effort to be humorous about it.

She thought that she would go out to the old apartment, pack the things
she had left there, and take them with her. There was a hard bitterness
in the thought that seemed almost sweet to her. To stand unmoved in
that place where she had loved and suffered, to handle with uncaring
hands those objects saturated with memories, would be a desecration of
the past that would prove how utterly dead it was.

But she did not do it. She telephoned from the station, giving up the
apartment and abandoning the personal belongings in it, leaving her
address for the forwarding of mail. Then she shut her mind against
memories and went back to the oil fields.




                              CHAPTER XV


During the weeks that followed she felt that she was moving in a dream,
a shadow among unrealities. She drove across endless yellow plains that
wavered in the heat. The lines were lax in her hands, her thoughts
hardly moved. Again she had the sensation of gazing upon herself
from an infinite distance, and she saw her whole life very small and
far-away and unimportant.

It was odd that she should be where she was.--They would reach the
watering-trough soon, and then the horse could drink.--The lake
she saw rippling upon the burning sand was a mirage.--The horse
was not interested in it. Horses must recognize water by smelling
it.--The sunlight struck her hands, and they were turning browner.
Complexions.--How strange that women cared about them.--How strange
that any one cared about anything.

She reached an oil lease, and part of her brain awoke. It worked so
smoothly that she felt an impersonal pride in it. It was concerned
only with Ripley Farmland Acres. It was intent upon selling them. She
tapped at screen doors, and knew she was being charming to tired women
exhausted by heat and babies. She skirted black pools of oil, climbed
into derricks,--she had learned to call them "rigs,"--and heard herself
talking easily to grimy men beside a swaying steel cable that went
eternally up and down, up and down, in the well-shaft.

Selling land, she found, was not the difficult and intricate business
she had supposed it to be. California's great estates, the huge Mexican
grants of land now passed to the second and third generations, were
breaking up under the pressure of growing population and increased land
taxes; for the first time in the State's history the land-hunger of the
poor man could be satisfied. Deep in the heart of every man imprisoned
by those burning wastes of desert was the longing for a small bit of
green earth, a home embowered in trees and vines. Her task was to find
the workman who had saved enough money for the first payment, the ten
or twenty per cent. of the purchase price asked by the subdividing
land companies, and having found him to play upon his longing and his
imagination until the pictures she painted meant more to him than his
hoarded savings.

Half of his first payment was hers; one sale meant to her five hundred
or even a thousand dollars. But while she talked she forgot this;
she thought only of cool water flowing through fields of alfalfa, of
cows knee-deep in grass beneath the shade of oaks, of the fertile
earth blooming in harvests. The skill in handling another's thoughts
before they took form, teamed in her life with Bert, enabled her to
impress these pictures upon her hearer's mind so that they seemed his
own, and grimy men in oil-soaked overalls, listening to her without
combativeness because she was a woman and not to be taken seriously in
business, felt that they must buy this land so temptingly described.

"I'm not really a land-salesman," she said, believing it. "I know I
can't _sell_ you this land. I can only tell you about it. And then if
you want to buy it, you will. Won't you?" She found that she need only
talk to a sufficient number of men to find one who would buy, and each
sale brought her enough money to give her weeks in which to trudge
from derrick to derrick searching for another buyer. All her life had
narrowed to that search.

She accumulated a store of facts. Drillers were the best prospects
because they earned good salaries and had steady, straight-thinking
brains. Tool-dressers were younger men, inclined to smartness, harder
to handle. Pumpers were lonely and liked to talk; one must not waste
too much time on them; they made small wages, but would give her
"leads" to good prospects. A superintendent of a wild-cat lease was a
good prospect; approach him with talk of a safe investment. Shallow
fields were poor territory to work; jobs were longer and wages surer
among the deeper wells. At a house ask for a drink of water; on a rig
begin conversation by remarking, "Getting pretty deep, isn't she?" She
was known throughout the fields as the Real-Estate Lady.

At twilight she drove back to the hotel. Her khaki skirt was spattered
with crude oil; her pongee waist showed streaks of grime where dust had
dried in perspiration. There was sand in its folds, sand in her shoes,
sand in her hair. Her body seemed as lifeless as her emotions, and her
brain had stopped again. She would not dream to-night.

She smiled again at the hotel clerk. Yes, thank you, business was
fine! There were letters, no word of Bert. Her mother wrote puzzled
and anxious inquiries. What was Helen doing in Coalinga? Was something
wrong? What was her husband doing? Mrs. Updike was telling that she had
seen in the paper--Helen folded the pages. There were a couple of thin
envelopes from Clark & Hayward, announcements of sales, Farm 406--J. D.
Hutchinson; Farms 915-917--H. D. Kennedy.

It was good to be in bed, feeling unconsciousness creeping over her
like dark, cool water, lapping higher and higher.

On her third trip to the land with buyers she met Paul's mother
on the main street in Ripley. Mrs. Masters appeared competent and
self-assured, walking briskly from a butcher-shop with some packages on
her arm. She was bare-headed, carrying a parasol above her smooth, gray
hair. Small as she was, there was something formidable in the lines of
her stocky figure and in the crispness of her stiff white shirt-waist.
She looked at Helen with shrewd, interested eyes, and Helen realized
that her hair was untidy, that there was dust on her shoes and on her
blue serge suit. It was dust from the tract where she had just made
another sale. Helen supposed there was dust on her face, too, when she
perceived Mrs. Masters' eyes fixed so intently upon it.

They shook hands and spoke of the heat. Helen explained that she was
selling land. She had just put one buyer on the Coalinga train and was
waiting in Ripley for another man to meet her next day.

Mrs. Masters asked her to supper. A realization that meeting her might
be embarrassing to Paul flickered through Helen's mind. She made some
excuse, which Mrs. Masters overruled briskly. The strain of making a
sale had left Helen without energy for resistance. She found they were
walking down the street together, and she tried to rouse herself, as
one struggles under an anesthetic. Mrs. Masters was the first person to
whom she had tried to talk of anything but land, and the effort made
her realize that she had been living in something like delirium.

They came to the cottage of which Paul had written her long ago. There
was the little white-picket fence, the yard with rose-bushes in it, and
the peach-tree. The graveled walk led to a tiny porch ornamented with
wooden lace work, and through a screen door they went into the parlor.
The shades were drawn to keep the afternoon sun from the flowered
Brussels carpet; the room was cool and dim and rose-scented. There was
a crocheted mat on the oak center-table; cushions stood stiff and plump
on the sofa; in one corner on an easel was an enlarged crayon portrait
of Paul as a little boy.

There was not a detail of the room that Helen would not have changed,
but as she looked at it tears came unexpectedly into her eyes.
Something was here that she wanted, something that she had always
missed. Currents of indefinable emotion rose in her. Her heart ached,
and suddenly she was shaken by a sense of irretrievable loss.

"I--I'm very tired. You must forgive me--a very hard day. If I
could--lie down a minute?" She could not stop the quivering of her
lips. Mrs. Masters looked at her curiously, leading her to the bedroom
and folding back an immaculate white spread. Helen, hating herself for
her weakness, took off her hat and lay down. She would be all right in
a minute; she was sorry to make so much trouble; Mrs. Masters must not
bother; she was just a little tired.

She lay still, hearing the rattling of pans and sizzling of meat
from the kitchen where Mrs. Masters was getting supper. Voices went
by in the street; a dog barked joyously; a shrill whistling passed,
accompanied by the rattle of a stick along the picket fence. The sharp
shadows of vine-leaves on the shade blurred into the twilight. Mrs.
Masters was singing throatily, "Rock of Ages, cleft for me-e-e," while
she set the table.

It was peace and security and rest. It was all that Helen did not have.
The crudely papered walls enclosed a haven warmed by innumerable homely
satisfactions. How sweet to have no care but the crispness of curtains,
the folding away of linen, the baking of bread! She was an alien spirit
here, with her aching head and heart, her disheveled hair and dusty
shoes. A tear slipped down her cheek and spread into a damp splash on
the white pillow.

She rose quickly, knowing that she must be stronger than the longing
that shook her. The towel lying across the water pitcher was
embroidered. She had always wanted embroidered towels, and she had made
dozens of them. They had been left in the apartment. She bathed her
face for a long time, dashing cool water on her eyelids.

The gate clicked, and Paul came whistling up the path. She stood
clutching the towel, shivering with panic. Had she been mad that she
had come to his house? Oh, for anything, anything, that would erase the
past hour, and let her be anywhere but here! She heard his step on the
porch, the bang of the screen door, his voice. "Hello, Mother? Supper
ready?" And at the same time she saw unrolling in her mind the picture
of herself and Mrs. Masters on the sidewalk, heard the definite, polite
excuse she might have made, saw herself going back to the hotel.
She might easily have done that. Why was her life nothing but one
blundering stupidity? She waited until his mother had time to tell him
she was there. Then she went out, smiling, and met him.

His hand was warm and strong, closing around her cold fingers. He could
not conceal the shock her whiteness and thinness gave him. He stammered
something about it, and reddened. She saw that he felt he had referred
to Bert and hurt her. Yes, she said lightly, the heat in the oil fields
was better than banting. She rather liked it, though, really. And
selling land was fascinating work. She found that she was clinging to
his hand, drawing strength from it, as though she could not let go. She
released her fingers quickly, hoping he had not noticed that second's
delay, which meant nothing, nothing except that she was tired.

Mrs. Masters sat opposite her at the supper table, and with those
polite, neutral eyes upon her it was hard to make conversation. She
told the story of the MacAdams sale, making it humorous instead of
tragic, trying to keep the talk away from Masonville and the people
there. Paul spoke only to offer her food, to advise a small glass of
his mother's blackberry cordial, and urge her to drink it, to suggest
a cushion for her back. Tears threatened her eyes again, and she
conquered them with a laugh.

He went with her to the hotel. They walked in silence through
moon-light and shadow, on the tree-bordered graveled sidewalk. Through
lighted cottage windows Helen saw women clearing supper-tables, men
leaning back in easychairs, with cigar and newspaper. They passed
groups of girls, bare-headed, bare-armed, chattering in the moon-light
They spoke to Paul, and Helen felt their curious eyes upon her.
Children were playing in the street; somewhere a baby wailed thinly,
and farther away a piano tinkled.

"It's very lovely--all this," she said.

"It suits me," Paul replied. A little later he cleared his throat and
said, "Helen--I--I'm sorry."

"I'm all right," she said quickly. It was almost as if she had slammed
a door in his face, and she did not want to be rude to him. "I
mean--it's good of you to care. I'd rather not talk about it."

"I--sometimes I think I could--I could commit murder!" he said thickly.
"When I get to thinking--"

"Don't," she said. It was some time before he spoke again.

"Well, if there is ever any chance for me to do anything--I guess you
know I'd be glad to."

She thanked him. When he left her at the door of the hotel she thanked
him again, and he asked her not to forget. If he could help her with
her sales or the bank people or anything--She said she would surely let
him know.

It was necessary to sleep, because she had another sale, a hard sale,
to make next day. But she was unable to do it. Long after midnight she
was lying awake, beating the pillows with clenched hands and biting her
lips to keep from sobbing aloud. It seemed to her that all of life was
torture and that she could no longer bear it.




                              CHAPTER XVI


Returning to Coalinga after the meeting with Paul, Helen ached
with weariness. But she was alive again. The haze in which she had
been existing was gone. She had risen early that morning, met her
prospective land-buyer at the train, and made the sale. It had been
doubly difficult, because the salesman for Alfalfa Tracts had met the
train, too, and had almost taken the prospect from her, thinking it
would be easy to do because she was only a woman. There was a hard
triumph in her victory. The sale had reduced Bert's debt by another
four hundred dollars, for she could afford now to turn in the entire
commission against it.

The jolting of the train shock her relaxed body. Her cheek lay against
the rough plush of the chairback, for she was too tired to sit upright.
Against the black square of the window her life arranged itself before
her. How many times she had seen her life lying before her like a
straight road, and had determined what its course and end would be! But
she was older now, and wiser, and able to control her destiny.

She was a land-salesman; she was a good salesman. This was the only
thing she had saved from wreckage. At least she would succeed in this.
She would make money; she would clear Bert's name, which was hers; she
would buy a little house and make it beautiful. Perhaps Bert would want
to come to it some day and she would have it waiting for him. She knew
that she would never love him as she had loved him, for she saw him
too clearly now, but she felt that their lives were inextricably bound
together and that the tie between them was stronger because he needed
her.

A letter from Clark & Hayward was in her box at the hotel. She tore it
open quickly. As always, she had a wild thought that it contained news
of Bert.

It said that the firm had given the oil fields territory to two other
salesmen, Hutchinson and Monroe. The oil fields had proved a good
territory, and it was too large for her to handle alone. She would
turn over to Hutchinson and Monroe any leads she had not followed up.
Doubtless she could make arrangements with them as to commissions; the
firm hoped she would continue to work in the fields; Hutchinson and
Monroe would expect an overage on her sales. Mr. Clark trusted they
would work in harmony, and congratulated her on her success.

Her first astonishment changed quickly to a cold rage. Did they think
they could take her territory from her? Her territory, that she had
developed herself, alone? After her days and weeks of hard, exhausting
work, after her hours of talking, of distributing advertising, of
making sales that would lead to more sales, they were coming in and
taking the fruits of it away from her? Oh, she would fight!

The clerk told her that Hutchinson and Monroe had arrived that
afternoon. She asked him to tell them that she would see them in the
parlor at nine o'clock. There would be some slight advantage in making
them come to her.

She was sitting in the small, stuffy room, her eyes fixed on a
newspaper, when they came in. She felt hard, like a machine of steel,
when she rose smiling to meet them.

Hutchinson was a tall, angular man, who moved in an easy-going way as
if his body had nothing to do with the loose-fitting, gray clothes he
wore. His eyes were frank, with a humorous expression in them, but
though his face was lean there were deep lines from his nostrils to the
corners of his mouth, and when he smiled, which he did easily, two more
deep lines appeared in his cheeks.

Monroe was older, shorter, and stout. There was a smooth suavity in
the effect of his neat, dapper person, his heavy gold watch-chain, his
eye-glasses. He removed the glasses at intervals, as if from habit,
wiping them with a silk handkerchief, and at such moments his blandly
paternal manner was accentuated. His eyes were set too close to the
thin bridge of a nose that grew heavy at the tip, but his gray hair,
the kindly patronage of his smile, and his soft, heavy voice were
impressive.

Helen perceived that both of these men were good salesmen, and that
their working together made a happy combination of opposite abilities.
She saw herself opposing them, an inexperienced girl, and felt that the
odds were overwhelmingly against her. But her determination to fight
was not lessened.

Upright on a hard red davenport, she argued. The territory was hers.
She had come into it first. She had developed it. She conceded their
right to work there, but not the justice of their demanding part of the
commissions she earned. The stale little room, filled with smells of
heat-blistered varnish and dusty plush, became a battle-ground, and the
high back of the davenport was a wall against which she stood at bay,
confronting these men who had come to rob her.

But she was a woman. They did not let her forget it. They asked
her permission to smoke, but not her consent to their business
arrangements. They smiled at her arguments. After all, she was of
the sex that must be humored. "My dear Mrs. Kennedy," said Monroe,
gallantly. "Do let us be--ah--reasonable." Their courtesy was perfect.
They would let her talk, since it pleased her to do so. They would
pick up her handkerchief when it slid from her lap. If it was her whim
to work in the oil fields they would even indulge her in it. But she
struck rock when she spoke of commissions. They would take two and a
half per cent. from any sales she made.

It bored Hutchinson to point out the situation to her, but he did
it, courteously. The firm had given them the territory. They were
experienced salesmen. Naturally, Clark would not leave the territory in
the hands of a young saleswoman, however charming personally. This was
business, he gently explained. They would take two and a half per cent.

But she was a woman, and a charming one. Their tone implied that some
slight sentimentality existed even in business. On sales they made from
the leads she gave them, they would be generous. They would give her
two and a half per cent. on those.

At this there was an interval when she sat smiling, speechless with
rage. But she saw that the situation was hopeless. And every one of
those names on her lists was a potential sale that would have paid her
twelve and a half per cent. Anger surged up in her, almost beyond her
control. However, there was no value in fighting when she was beaten.

They parted on the best of terms; she yielded every point; she would
give them the leads in the morning. She left them satisfied, thinking
that women, while annoying, were not hard to handle.

In her room she stood shaken by her anger, by resentment and disgust.
"Oh, beastly, beastly!" she said through clenched teeth. Striking her
hand furiously against the edge of the dresser, she felt a physical
pain that was a relief. She was able even to smile, ironically and
wearily. This was the game she had to play, was it? Well--she had to
play it.

She sat down and from her note-book copied a list of names and
addresses. She chose only those of men to whom she had talked until
convinced they were not land-buyers. In the morning she met Hutchinson
in the lobby and gave him the list. She also insisted on a written
agreement promising her two and a half per cent. commission on sales
made to any of those men. Hutchinson gave it to her in patronizing
good-humor.

Her buggy was waiting as usual in the shade of the hotel building. She
felt grim satisfaction while she climbed into it and drove away, toward
the Limited lease. Hutchinson and Monroe would work industriously for
some time before they perceived her duplicity, and she did not care
for their opinion when they did discover it. Her own conscience was
harder to handle, but she reflected that she would have to revise
her standards of honesty. "My dear Mrs. Kennedy--ah--really--this is
business." She hoped viciously that Monroe would see that she had
quite understood his words. She made another good sale before they
stopped working on the worthless leads. Their attitude toward her
changed abruptly.

"You certainly put one over on us," Hutchinson said without malice, and
from that time they regarded her more as an equal than as a woman.

She was surprised to discover the bitterness developing in her.

       *       *       *       *       *

Often in the evenings she walked in the quiet streets of little houses.
Women were watering the lawns. A cool, sweet odor rose from refreshened
grass and clumps of dripping flowers. Here and there a man leaned
on the handle of a lawnmower, pipe in hand, talking to a neighbor.
Children were playing in the twilight. Their young voices rose in
happy shouts, and their feet pattered on the pavement. Hardness and
bitterness vanished then, and Helen felt only an ache of wistfulness.

Later, lights bloomed through the deepening night, and the houses
became dark masses framing squares of brightness. Vaguely beyond lace
curtains Helen saw a woman swaying in a rocking-chair, a group of girls
gathered at a piano. From dim porches mothers called the children to
bed, and at an up-stairs window a shade came down like an eyelid. Helen
felt alone and very lonely. She realized that she had been walking for
a long time on tired feet. But she did not want to go back to the
hotel. She must remind herself that to-morrow would be another hard day.

In the hotel lobby she encountered Hutchinson or Monroe. Sharpness and
hardness came back then. Monroe was able to handle the smart young
tool-dressers; his bland paternal manner crushed them into a paralyzing
sense of their youth and crudeness. He had got hold of a tool-dresser
she had canvassed and hoped to sell. That meant a fight about the
commissions, in which, of course, Hutchinson backed Monroe. She was
still alone, but now she was among enemies.

"You've got to fight!" she told herself. "Are you going to let them
put it over on you because you're a woman?" She lay awake thinking of
selling arguments, talking points, ways of handling this prospect and
that. Every sale brought her nearer to freedom. Some day she would have
a house, with a big gray living-room, rose curtains, dozens of fine
embroidered towels and tablecloths. She jerked her thoughts back to her
work, angry at herself for letting them stray. But when, triumphantly,
she closed the biggest sale yet,--sixty acres!--she celebrated by
buying a linen lunch cloth stamped in a pattern of wild roses. She sat
in her room in the evenings and embroidered it beautifully with fine
even stitches.

When it was finished and laundered, she folded it in tissue-paper
and put it carefully away in one of the cheap, warped drawers of her
bureau. Often she took it out, spreading the shining folds over the
foot of her bed and looking at it with joy. It lay in her thoughts like
a nucleus of a future contentment. But when her sister Mabel wrote from
Masonville that she was going to marry the most wonderful man in the
world, Bob Mason, "Old Man" Mason's grandson, who was head clerk of
Robertson's store, the rose lunch cloth became something Helen could
not keep. It was too keenly a symbol of all that she had missed, all
that she wanted her little sister to have.

It went to Mabel in a rose-lined white box, with a letter and a check.
Mabel's letter, palpitating with happiness and awkwardly triumphant
over the splendid match,--"though of course it makes no difference,
because I would marry him if he was the poorest man on earth, because
money isn't everything, is it?"--had suggested that Helen come home
for the wedding. But this would mean facing curiosity and sympathy and
whispered discussion of her own tragedy, unforgotten, she knew, in
Masonville. She replied that she could not get away from her work, and
read Mabel's relief in the light regrets sprinkled through her radiant
thanks for the check. "And the table-cloth is beautiful, too, one of
the loveliest ones I have."

"After all, it is good to think that it matters so little to her,"
Helen thought quickly. But the letters had shown her the deep gulf time
had dug between her and her girlhood, and the realization increased her
loneliness. Her life went by. Business filled it, and it was empty.

One day late in the fall she came in early from the oil fields. Over
the level yellow plains a sense of autumn had come, an indefinable
change in the air. She felt another change, too, a vague foreboding,
something altered and restless in the spirit of the men with whom she
had talked. For a week she had not found a new prospect, and two sales
had slipped through her fingers. She stopped at the hotel to get a
newspaper and read the financial news. Then she walked down Main Street
to the little office Hutchinson and Monroe had rented.

Hutchinson was there, leaning back in a chair, his feet crossed on the
desk. He did not move when she came in, save to lift his eyes from the
sporting page and knock the ashes from his cigar. He accepted her now
as an equal in his own game, and there was respect in his voice. "Well,
how's it coming?"

"I'm going to get out of the fields," she said. She pushed back her hat
with a tired gesture and dropped into a chair.

"The hell you say! What's wrong?" Hutchinson set up, dropping the
paper, and leaned forward on the desk. His interest was almost alarmed.
She was making him money.

"Territory's gone bum. K. T. O. 25 will close down in another two
weeks. The Limited's going to stop drilling. I'm going somewhere else."

"What! Who told you?"

"Nobody. I just doped it out."

He was relieved. He cajoled her. She was tired, he said. She was
working in a streak of bad luck. Every salesman struck it sometime.
Look at him; he hadn't made a sale in four weeks, and he hadn't lost
his nerve. Cheer up!

She had been considering a plan, and she had chosen the moment
to present it to him. The obliqueness of real-estate methods had
astounded her. She had always supposed that men thought and acted in
straight lines, logical lines. That, she had thought, gave them their
superiority over irrational womankind. But the waste and blindness
of business as she had seen it had altered her opinion of them. Her
plan was logical, but she did not count upon its logic to impress
Hutchinson. She reckoned on the emotional effect that would be produced
by the truth of her prophecy. Letting that prophecy stand, she began to
unfold her plan.

The big point in making a land sale was getting hold of a good
prospect. That should not be done by personal canvassing. It was too
wasteful of time and energy. It should be done by advertising. Now
Clark & Hayward's advertising was all "Whoop'er up! Come on!" stuff. It
made a bid for suckers. Hutchinson smiled, but she went on.

Men who would fall for that advertising were not of the class that had
bank accounts. Hutchinson had lost a lot of money trying to sell the
type of men who answered those advertisements. She mentioned incidents,
and Hutchinson's smile faded.

She proposed a new kind of real-estate advertising; small type, reading
matter, sensible, straight-forward arguments. She was going into a
settled farming community, where land values were high, and she was
going to try out an advertising campaign for farmers. It had been a
good farming year; farmers had money, and they had brains. She was
going to offer them cheap land, and she was going to sell them.

She had the money to pay for the advertising, but she needed some one
to work with her. She proposed that Hutchinson come in with her on a
fifty-fifty basis. He could have his name on the door; he could make
arrangements with the firm for the territory. They would hesitate to
give it to her. But he knew she could sell land. Together they could
make money.

Hutchinson did not take the proposition very seriously. She had not
expected that he would. He thought about it, and grinned.

"I'd have to be mighty careful my wife didn't get wise!" he remarked.

"Cut that out!" she said in a voice that slashed. She unloosened her
fury at him, at all men, and looked at him with blazing eyes. He
stammered--he didn't mean--"When I talk business to you, don't forget
that it's business," she said. She picked up her wallet of maps and
left the office. As she did so she reflected that the scheme would work
out.

Ten days later word ran through the oil fields that all the K. T. O.
leases were letting out men. Hutchinson's inquiries showed that the
Limited was not starting any new wells. Monroe, who had saved his
money, announced that he would stop work for the winter. Hutchinson,
remembering that Mrs. Kennedy had funds for an advertising campaign,
decided that her proposition offered a shelter in time of storm.

They talked it over again, considering the details, and Hutchinson went
to the city to see Clark. He got a small advance on commission, and the
Santa Clara Valley territory.

On the train, leaving the oil fields for the last time, Helen looked
back at the little station, the sand hills covered with black derricks,
the wide, level desert, and felt that she was leaving behind her the
chrysalis of the woman she had become.




                             CHAPTER XVII


On a hot July afternoon three years later she drove a dusty car through
the traffic on Santa Clara Street in San José, and stopped it at the
curb. When she had jumped to the sidewalk she walked around the car and
thoughtfully kicked a ragged tire with a stubby boot. The tire had gone
flat on the Cupertino road, and it was on her mind that she had put too
much air into the patched tube. For two miles she had been expecting to
hear the explosion of another blow-out, and had been too weary to stop
the car and unscrew the air valve.

"Darn thing's rim-cut, anyway," she said under her breath. "I'll have
to get a new one." She dug her note-book and wallet from the mass of
dusty literature in the tonneau and walked into the building.

Hutchinson was telephoning when she entered their office on the fourth
floor. A curl of smoke rose from his cigar-end on the flat-topped desk
and drifted through the big open window. There were dusty footprints on
the ingrain rug, and the helter-skelter position of the chairs showed
that prospects had come in during her absence. Hutchinson chuckled when
he hung up the receiver.

"Ted's going to catch it when he gets home!" he remarked, picking up
the cigar.

"Stalling his wife again?" Helen was running through her mail. "I
suppose there isn't a man on earth who won't joyfully lie to another
man's wife for him," she added, ripping an envelope.

"Well, Holy Mike! What would you tell her?"

Helen looked up quickly from the letter.

"I'd tell her the--" she began hotly, and stopped. "Oh, I don't know.
I suppose he's got that red-headed girl out in the machine again? He
makes me tired. If you ask me, I think we'd better get rid of him. That
sort of thing doesn't make us any sales."

There was silence while she ripped open the other letters and glanced
through them. Her momentary anger subsided. She reflected that there
were men on whom one could rely. Her thoughts returned to Paul as to a
point of security. His appearance in San José a few months earlier had
been like the sight of a cool spring in a desert. She had not realized
the scorn for all men that had grown in her until she met him again and
could not feel it for him.

She glanced from the window at the clock in the tower of the Bank of
San José building. Half-past four. He would still be at the ice-plant.
This thought, popping unexpectedly into her mind, startled her with the
realization that all day she had been subconsciously dwelling on the
fact that it was the day on which he usually came to San José since
his firm had acquired its interests there.

The clock suggested simultaneously another thought, and she snatched
the telephone-receiver from its hook. "Am I too late for the afternoon
delivery?" she anxiously asked the groceryman who answered the call.
"Oh, thank you. Two heads of lettuce, a dozen eggs, half a pound of
butter. How much are tomatoes? Well, send me a pound. Yes, H. D.
Kennedy, 560 South Green Street. Thank you!" As the receiver clicked
into place, she asked, "Any live ones to-day?"

"Six callers. Two good prospects and a couple that may work up into
something," Hutchinson answered. "Say, the Seals are certainly handing
it to the Tigers. Won in the fifth inning."

"That's good," she said absently. "Closed the Haas sale yet?"

"Oh, he's all right. Tied up solid." Hutchinson yawned. "How's your
man?"

"Dated him for the land next Wednesday. He's live, but hard to handle.
Taking him down in the machine."

"Machine all right?"

"Engine needs overhauling, and we've got to get a new rear tire and
some tubes. Two blow-outs to-day. Time's too valuable to spend it
jacking up cars in this heat. I'm all in. But I can nurse the engine
along till I get back from this trip." She felt that each sentence was
a load she must lift with her voice. "I'm all in," she repeated. "Guess
I'll call it a day."

However, she still sat relaxed in her chair, looking out at the quaint
old red-brick buildings across the street. San José, she thought
whimsically, was like a sturdy old geranium plant, woody-stemmed, whose
roots were thick in every foot of the Santa Clara Valley. She felt an
affection for the town, for the miles of orchard around it, interlaced
with trolley-lines, for the thousands of bungalows on ranches no larger
than gardens. Some day she would like to handle a sub-division of acre
tracts, she thought, and build a hundred bungalows herself.

She brought her thoughts back to the Haas sale, and spoke of it
tentatively. It was all right, Hutchinson assured her with some
annoyance. The old man was tied up solid. He'd sign the final contract
as soon as he got his money, and he had written for it. What did Helen
want to crab about it for?

"I don't mean to be a crab," she smiled. "But--do you know the
definition of a pessimist? He's a man who's lived too long with an
optimist."

Hutchinson covered his bewilderment with a laugh.

"You know, I've often thought I'd look up that word. I see it every
once in a while. Pessimist. But what's the use? You don't need words
like that to sell land."

She had been stupid again, aiming over his head. He was right. You
didn't need words like that to sell land. You didn't need any of the
things she liked, to sell land. She was a fool. She was tired. But she
returned to the Haas sale. The subject must be handled carefully, for
Hutchinson was too good a salesman to offend, though he was lazy. Where
was Haas's money? Hutchinson replied that it was banked in the old
country, Germany.

"Germany! And he's written for it? For the love of--! You grab the
machine and chase out there and make him cable. Pay for the cable. Send
it yourself. Tell 'em to cable the money. Haven't you seen the papers?"

Hutchinson, surrounded by scattered sporting sheets, stared up at her
in amazement.

"Don't you know Austria sent an ultimatum to Servia? Haven't you ever
heard of the Balkan Wars? Don't you know if Russia--Good Lord, man!
And you're letting that money lie in Germany waiting for a letter?
Beat it out there. Make him cable. I'll pay for it myself. Good Lord,
Hutchinson--a fifty acre sale! Don't stop to talk. The cable-office
closes at six. Hurry! And look out for that rear left tire!" she opened
the door to call after him.

The brief flurry of excitement had raised in her an exhilaration that
vanished in a sense of futility and shame. "I'm getting so I swear
like--like a land-salesman!" she said to herself, straightening her
hat before the mirror. There was a streak of dust on her nose, and she
wiped it off with a towel, and tucked up straggling locks of hair. In
the dark strand over one temple a few white lines shone like silver.
"I'm wearing out," she said, looking at them and at her skin, tanned to
a smooth brown. Nobody cared. Why should she carefully save herself?
She shut the closet door on her mirrored reflection, locked the office
door, and went home.

The small, brown bungalow looked at her with empty eyes. The locked
front door and the dry leaves scattered from the rose-vines over the
porch gave the place a deserted appearance. At all the other houses on
the street the doors were open; children played on the lawns, wicker
tables and rocking-chairs and carelessly dropped magazines made the
porches homelike. There was pity in her rush of affection for the
little house; she felt toward it as she might have felt toward an
animal she loved, waiting in loneliness for her coming to make it happy.

The door opened wide into the small square hall, and in the stirred
air a few rose petals drifted downward from the bowl of roses on the
walnut table. She unlatched and swung back the casement windows in the
living-room. Then she dropped her hat and purse among the cushions
on the window-seat, and straightening her body to its full height,
relaxed again in a long, contented sigh. A weight slipped from her
spirit. She was at home.

Her lingering glance caressed the rose-colored curtains rustling softly
in the faint breeze, the flat cream walls, the brown rugs, the brick
hearth on which piled sticks waited for a match. There was her wicker
sewing-basket, and beyond it the crowded book shelves. Here was the
quaint, walnut desk she had found at a second-hand store, and the
big, mannish chair with the brown leather cushions. It was all hers,
her very own. She had made it. She was at home, and free. The silence
around her was like cool water on a hot face.

In the white-tiled bathroom, with its yellow curtains, yellow bath
rug, yellow-bordered fluffy bath-towels, she washed the last memory
of the office from her. She reveled in the daintiness of sheer,
hand-embroidered underwear, in the crispness of the white dress she
slipped over her head. She put on her feet the most frivolous of
slippers, with beaded toes and high heels.

"You're a sybarite, that's what you are! You're a beastly sensualist!"
she laughed at herself in the mirror. "And you're leading a double
life. 'Out, damned spot!'" she added, to the brown triangle of tan on
her neck.

For an hour she was happy. Aproned in blue gingham she watered the
lawn and hosed the last swirling leaf from the front porch. She said
a word or two about roses to the woman next door. They were not very
friendly; all the women on that street looked at her across the gulf of
uncomprehension between quiet, homekeeping women and the vague world
of business. They did not quite know how to take her; they thought her
odd. She felt that their lives were cozy and safe, but very small.

Then she went into the kitchen. She made a salad, broke the eggs for an
omelet, debated with finger at her lip whether to make popovers. They
were fun to make, because of the uncertainty about their popping, but
somehow they were difficult to eat while one read. One could manage
bread-and-butter sandwiches without lifting eyes from the page Odd,
that she should be lonely only while she ate. The moment she laid down
her book at the table the silence of the house closed around her coldly.

She would not have said that she was waiting for anything, but an
obscure suspense prolonged her hesitation over the trivial question.
When the telephone-bell pealed startlingly through the stillness it
was like an awaited summons, and she ran to answer it without doubting
whose voice she would hear.

As always, there was some excuse for Paul's telephoning,--a message
from his mother, a bit of news from Ripley Farmland Acres,--some
negligible matter which she heard without listening, knowing that to
both of them it was unimportant. The nickel mouthpiece reflected an
amused dimple in her cheek, and there was a lilt in her voice when she
thanked him. She asked him to come to supper. His hesitation was a
struggle with longing. She insisted, and when she hung up the receiver
the house had suddenly become warmed and glowing.

She felt a new zest while she took her prettiest lunch cloth from its
lavender-scented drawer and brought in a bunch of roses, stopping to
tuck one in her belt. She felt, too, that she was pushing back into the
depths of her mind many thoughts and emotions that struggled to emerge.
She shut her eyes to them, and resisted blindly. It was better to see
only the placid surface of the moment. She concentrated her attention
upon the popovers, and the egg-beater was humming in her hands when she
heard his step on the porch.

It was a quick, heavy step, masculine and determined, but always there
was something boyishly eager in it.

She called to him through the open doors, and when he came in she gave
him a floury hand, pushing a lock of hair back from her eyes with the
back of it before she went on beating the popovers. He stood awkwardly
about while she poured the mixture into the hot tins and quickly slid
it into the oven, but she knew he enjoyed being there.

The table was set on the screened side porch. White passion flowers
fluttered like moths among the green leaves that curtained it, and in
an open space a great, yellow rose tapped gently against the screen.
The twilight was filled with a soft, orange glow; above the gray roofs
half the sky was yellow and the small clouds were like flakes of
shining gold.

There came over Helen the strange, uncanny sensation that sometime,
somewhere, she had lived through this moment once before. She ignored
it, smiling across the white cloth at Paul. She liked to see him
sitting there, his square shoulders sturdy in the gray business suit,
his lips firm, tight at the corners, his eyes a little stern, but
straight-forward and honest. He gave an impression of solidity and
permanence; one would always know where to find him.

"You're certainly some cook, Helen!" he said. The omelet was delicious,
and the popovers a triumph. She ate only one, that he might have the
others, and his enjoyment of them gave her a deep delight.

Across the little table a subtle current vibrated between them,
intoxicating her, making her a little dizzy with emotions she would not
analyze.

"I certainly am!" she laughed. "The cook-stove lost a genius when
I became a real-estate lady." She was not blind to the shadow that
crossed his face, but part of her intoxication was a perverseness that
did not mind annoying him just a little bit.

"I hate to think about it," he said. His gravity shattered the
iridescent glamor, making her grave, too, and the prosaic atmosphere of
the office and its problems surrounded her.

"Well, you may not have it to think about much longer. What do you
think? Is there going to be real trouble in Europe?"

"How do you mean?"

"War?"

"Oh, I doubt it. Not in this day and age. We've got beyond that, I
hope." His casual dismissal of the possibility was a relief to her, but
not quite an assurance.

"I hope so." She stirred her coffee, thoughtfully watching the glimmer
of the spoon in the golden-brown depths. "I'll be glad when it blows
over. That Balkan situation--If Austria stands by her ultimatum, and
Servia does pull Russia into it, there's Germany. I don't know much
about world politics, but one thing's certain. If there is war, the
bottom'll drop out of my business."

He was startled.

"I don't know what it's got to do with us over here."

"It hasn't anything to do with you or your affairs. But farmers are the
most cautious class on earth. The minute there is a real storm cloud in
Europe every one of 'em'll draw in his money and sit on it. The land
game's entirely a matter of psychology. Let the papers begin yelling,
'War!' though it's eight thousand miles away, and every prospect I
have will figure that good hard cash in hand is better than a mortgage
with him on the wrong side of it. That means thumbs down for me. It's
hard enough to keep up the office expenses and pay garage bills as it
is."

Alarm was driven from his face by a chaos of emotions. He flushed
darkly, his eyes on his plate. "You oughtn't to have to be worrying
about such things."

"Oh, I won't mind if it does happen," she said quickly. "In a way, I'd
be glad. I'd be out of business anyway; I'd find something else to do.
Nobody knows how I hate business--nothing but an exploiting of stupid
people by people just a little less stupid."

She caught at the impersonality of the subject, trying to control
the intoxication that rose in her again, fed by his silence, by the
currents it set vibrating between them once more. She threw her words
into it as if their hard-matter-of-factness would break a growing spell.

"Six-tenths of our business can be wiped out without doing any harm.
A real-estate salesman hasn't any real reason for existing. We're
just a barrier between the land and the people who want it. We aren't
needed a bit. The people would simply take the land if they weren't
like horses, too stupid to know their own strength, letting us grow
fat on their labor. Hoffman, owning the land and making a hundred per
cent. on its sale; Clark & Hayward, with their fifty per cent. expenses
and commissions; me, with my fifteen per cent, and the salesman under
me--we're just a lot of parasites living off the land without giving
anything in return. Oh, don't think I don't know how useless these last
three years--"

She knew he was not listening. Nothing she was saying set his cup
chattering against the saucer as he put it down. The twilight was
prolonged by the first radiance of a rising moon, and in the strange,
silver-gray light the white passion flowers, the green spray of the
pepper-tree on the lawn, took on an unearthly quality, like beauty in
a dream. Her voice wavered into silence. Through a haze she became
aware that he was about to speak. Her own words forestalled him, still
pleasantly commonplace.

"It's getting dark, isn't it? Let's go in and light the lamps."

His footsteps followed her through the ghostly dimness of the house.
The floor seemed far beneath her feet, and through her quivering
emotions shot a gleam of amusement. She was feeling like a girl in
her teens! Her hand sought the electric light-switch as it might have
clutched at a life-line.

"Helen, wait a minute!" She started, stopped, her arm out-stretched
toward the wall "I've got to say something."

The tortured determination of his voice told her that the coming moment
could not be evaded. A cool, accustomed steadiness of nerves and
brain rose to meet it. She crossed the room, and switched on the tiny
desk-lamp, the golden-shaded light of which only warmed the dusk. But
her opened lips made no sound; she indicated the big, leather chair
only with a gesture, settling herself on the cushioned window-seat.
He remained standing, his hands in his coat-pockets, his gaze on the
fingers interlaced on her knees.

"You're a married woman."

A shock ran through her. She had worn those old bonds so long without
feeling them that she had forgotten they were there. Why--why, she was
herself, H. D. Kennedy, salesman, office-manager, householder.

His voice went on stubbornly, hoarse.

"I haven't got any right to talk this way. But, Helen, what are you
going to do? Don't you see I've got to know? Don't you see I can't go
on? It isn't fair." He faltered, dragging out the words as though by
muscular effort. "It isn't fair to--him. Or me or you. Helen, if--if
things do go to pieces, as you said--can't you see I'll--just have to
be in a position to _do_ something?"

The tremulous intoxication was gone. Her composed self-possession of
the moment before seemed a cheap, smug attitude. She saw a naked,
tortured soul, and the stillness of the room was reflected in the
stillness within her.

"What do you want me to do?" she said at last.

He walked to the cold hearth and stood looking down at the piled
sticks. His voice, coming from the shadows, sounded as though muffled
by them. "Tell me--do you still care about him?"

All the wasted love and broken hopes, the muddied, miserable tangle
of living, swept over her, the suffering that had been buried by many
days, the memories she had locked away and smothered, Bert, and all
that he had been to her. And now she could not remember his face. She
could not see him clearly in her mind; she did not know where he was.
When had she thought of him last?

"No," she said.

"Then--can't you?"

"Divorce, you mean?"

Paul came back to her, and she saw that he was even more shaken than
she. He spoke thickly, painfully. He had never thought that he would do
such a thing. God knew, he said without irreverence, that he did not
believe in divorce. Not usually. But in this case--He had never thought
he could love another man's wife. He had tried not to. But she was so
alone. And he had loved her long ago. She had not forgotten that? It
hadn't been easy to keep on all these years without her. And then when
she had been treated so, and he couldn't do anything.

But it wasn't altogether that. Not all unselfish, "I--I've wanted
you so! You don't know how I've wanted you. Nobody ever seems to
think that a man wants to be loved and have somebody caring just
about him, somebody that's glad when he comes home, and that--that
cares when he's blue. We--we aren't supposed to feel like that. But
we do. I do--terribly. Not just 'somebody.' It's always been you I
wanted. Nobody else. Oh, there were girls. I even tried to think that
maybe--but somehow, none of them were you. I couldn't help coming back."

"Oh, my dear, my dear!" she said, with tears on her cheeks.

Perhaps, after all, forgetting the past and the things that had been
between them, they could come together again and be happy. But he was
tortured by a dread of being unfair to Bert. If she did still care for
him, if he had any rights.--"Of course he has rights. He's your--I
never thought that I could talk like this to a woman who hadn't any
right to listen to me."

"Hush! Of course I have a right to listen to you. I have every right to
do as I please with myself."

The tragedy that shook her was that it was true, that all the passion
and beauty of her old love for Bert was dead, lying like a corpse in
her heart, never to be awakened and never utterly forgotten. "I will
be free," she promised, knowing that she never would be. But in her
deepest tenderness toward Paul she could shut her eyes to that.

The promise made him happy. Despite his doubts, his restless conscience
not quite silenced, he was happy, and his happiness was reflected in
her. Something of magic revived, making the moment glamorous. She need
not think of the future; she need made no promises beyond that one. "I
will be free." A year, a year at least. Then they would plan.

For the moment her tenderness enfolded him, who loved her so much, so
much that she could never give him enough to repay him. It came to her
in a clear flash of thought through one of their silences that the
maternal quality in a woman's love is not so much due to the mother in
the woman as to the child in the man.

"You dear!" she said.

He had to go at last. The morning train for Ripley, but he would write
her every day. "And you'll see--about it--right away?"

"Yes, right away." The leaves of the rose-vines over the porch rustled
softly; a scented petal floated down through the moon-light. "Good-by,
dear."

"Good-by." He hesitated, holding her hand. "Oh, Helen,--
_sweetheart_--" Then, quickly, he went without kissing her.

She entered a house filled with a silence that turned to her many
faces, and switching out the little lamp she sat a long time in the
darkness, looking out at the moonlit lawn. She was tired. It was good
to be alone in the stillness, not to think, but to feel herself slowly
growing quiet and composed again around a quietly happy heart.

Something of the glow went with her to the office next morning,
stayed with her all day, while she talked sub-soils, water-depths,
prices, terms, while she answered her letters, wrote her next week's
advertising, corrected proofs. The news in the papers was disquieting;
it appeared that the cloud over Europe was growing blacker. How long
would it be if war did come before its effects reached her territory,
slowly cut off her sales? Ted Collin's bill for gasoline was out of all
reason; there was a heated discussion in the office, telephone messages
to Clark in San Francisco. Business details engulfed her.

On Wednesday she took her difficult prospect to the Sacramento lands
in the machine. He was hard to handle; salesmen for other tracts had
clouded the clear issue. She fell back on the old expedient of showing
him all those other tracts herself, with a fair-seeming impartiality
that damned them by indirection. There was no time for dreaming during
those hard three days; toiling over dusty fields with a soil-augur,
skilfully countering objections before they took form, nursing an
engine that coughed on three cylinders, dragging the man at last by
sheer force of will power to the point of signing on the dotted line.
She came exhausted into the Sacramento hotel late the third night, with
no thought in her mind but a bath and bed.

Stopping at the telegraph counter to wire the firm that the sale was
closed, she heard a remembered voice at her elbow, and turned.

"Mr. Monroe! You're up here too! How's it going?" She gave him a
dust-grimed hand.

"Well, I'm not complaining, Mrs. Kennedy--not complaining. Just closed
thirty-five acres. And how are you? Fortune smiling, I hope?"

"Just got in from the tract. Sold a couple of twenty-acre pieces."

"Well, well, is that so? Fine work, fine work! Keep it up. It's a
pleasure to see a young lady doing so well. Well, well, and so you've
been out on the tract! I wonder if you've seen Gilbert yet?" His shrewd
old gossip-loving eyes were upon her. She turned to her message on the
counter, and after a pause of gazing blindly at it, she scrawled, "H.
D. Kennedy," clearly below it. "Send collect," she said to the girl,
and over her shoulder, "Gilbert who? Not my husband?"

Yes. Monroe had run across him in San Francisco, and he was looking
well, very well indeed. Had asked about her; Monroe had told him she
was in San José. "But if you were on the tract, no doubt he failed to
find you?"

"Yes," she said. "I've been lost to the world for three days. Showed my
prospect every inch of land between here and Patterson. You know how it
is. I'm all in. Well, good-by. Good luck." As she crossed the lobby to
the elevator she heard her heels clicking on the mosaic floor, and knew
she was walking with her usual quick, firm step.




                             CHAPTER XVIII


Sleep was impossible. Helen's exhausted nerves reacted in feverish
tenseness to the shock of this unexpected news of Bert. From long
experience she knew that in this half-delirious state she could not
trust her reasoning, must not accept seriously its conclusions, but she
could not stop her thoughts. They scurried uncontrolled through her
brain as if driven by a life of their own. She could only endure them
until her over-taxed body crushed them with its tired weight. To-morrow
she would be able to think.

In the square hotel room, under the garish light that emphasized the
ugliness of red carpet and varnished mahogany furniture, she moved
about as usual, opening the windows, hanging up her hat and coat,
unfastening her bag. She did not forget the customary pleasant word to
the bell-boy who brought ice-water, and he saw nothing unusual in her
white face and bright eyes. This hotel saw her only on her return trips
from the tract, and she was always exhausted after making or losing a
sale. She locked the door behind him, and began to undress.

Paul must pot be involved. She must manage to shield him. A sensation
of nausea swept over her. The vulgarity, the cheap coarseness of it!
But she must not think. She was too tired. Why had she blundered into
such a situation? What change had the years made in Bert? Her thoughts,
touching him, recoiled. She would not think of Paul. To have the
two in her mind together was intolerable, it was the essence of her
humiliation. Married to one man, bound to him by a thousand memories
that rushed upon her, and loving another, engaged to him! No fine,
self-respecting woman could be in such a position. But she was. She
must face that fact. No, she must not face it Not until she was rested,
in command of herself.

She bathed, scrubbing her skin until it glowed painfully. Cold-cream
was not enough for her face and hands. She rubbed them with soap, with
harsh towels. At midnight she was washing her hair. If only she could
slip out of her body, run away from herself into a new personality,
forget completely all that she was or had been!

This was hysteria, she told herself. "Only hold on, have patience,
wait. The days will go past you. Life clears itself, like running
water. It will be all right somehow. Don't try to think. You're too
tired."

At dawn her eyelids were weary at last, and she fell asleep. She
prolonged the sleep consciously, half waking at intervals as the day
grew brighter, pulling oblivion over her head again to shield herself
from living, as a child hides beneath a quilt to keep away darkness.

Outside the world had awakened, going busily about its affairs
while the day passed over it. The noise of the streets, voices,
automobile-horns, rumbling wheels, came through the open windows with
the hot sunshine, running like the sound of a river through her sleep.
She awoke in the late afternoon, heavy-lidded, with creased cheeks, but
once more quietly self-controlled.

Refreshed by a cold plunge, crisply dressed, composed, she ate dinner
in the big, softly lighted dining-room, nodding across white tables
to the business men she knew. Then, led by an impulse she did net
question, she went out into the crowded streets. With her walked
the ghost of the girl who had come down from Masonville, dazzled,
wide-eyed, so pitifully sure of herself, to learn to telegraph.

Sacramento had changed. It had been a big town; it was now a city,
radiating interurban lines, thrusting tall buildings toward the sky,
smudging that sky with the smoke of factories and canneries. Its
streets were sluggishly moving floods of automobiles; its wharves were
crowded with boats; across the wide, yellow river spans of new bridges
were reaching toward each other.

All the statistics of the city's growth, of the great reclamation
projects, of the rich farms spreading over the old grain lands, were
at Helen's finger-tips. A hundred times she had gone over them, drawn
conclusions from them, pounded home-selling arguments with them, since
she had added Sacramento valley lands to the San Joaquin properties she
handled. But more eloquently her reviving memories showed her the gulf
between the old days and the new.

Mrs. Brown's little restaurant and the room where Helen had lived,
were gone. In their place stood a six-story office building of raw new
brick. That imposing street down which she had stumbled awkwardly after
Mrs. Campbell was now a row of dingy boarding-houses. Mrs. Campbell's
house itself, once so awe-inspiring, had become a disconsolate building
with peeling paint, standing in a ragged lawn, and across the porch
where she and Paul had said good-by in the dawn there was now a black
and gold sign, "Ah Wong, Chinese Herb Doctor." She went quickly past it.

For the first time in the hurried years her thoughts turned inward,
self-questioning, and she tried to follow step by step the changes that
had taken place in her. But she could not see them clearly for the
memory of the girl that she had been, a girl she saw now as a piteous
young thing quite outside herself, a lovely, emotional, valiant young
struggler against unknown odds. She felt an aching compassion, a
longing to shield that girl from the life she had faced with such blind
courage, to save her youth and sweetness. But the girl, of course,
was gone, like the room from which she had looked so eagerly at the
automobile.

It was eleven o'clock when she walked briskly through the groups in the
hotel lobby, took her key from the room clerk and left a call for the
early San Francisco train. She would reach the city in time to get the
final contracts for the sale she had made yesterday, to take them to
San José and get them signed the same day. The thought of Bert lay like
a menace in the back of her mind, but she kept it there. She could not
foresee what would happen; she would meet it when it occurred. Meantime
she would go about her work as usual. Her attitude toward the future,
her attitude toward even herself, was one of waiting. She fell quietly
asleep.

On the train next morning she bought the San Francisco papers. The
headlines screamed the news at her. It was war. She missed one train
to San José in order to talk to Mr. Clark. The news had made no change
in the atmosphere of Clark & Hayward's wide, clean-looking office,
where salesmen lounged against the counters, their elbows resting on
plate glass that covered surveyor's maps and photographs of alfalfa
fields. The talk, as she stopped to speak to one and another, was the
usual news of sales made and lost, quarrels over commissions, personal
gossip. She waited her turn to enter Mr. Clark's office, and when it
came she looked at him with a keenness hidden under the friendliness of
her eyes.

She liked to talk to Mr. Clark. Three years of working with him had
brought her an understanding of this nervous, quick-witted, harassed
man. There was comradeship between them, a sympathy tempered by
wariness on both sides. Neither would have lost the slightest business
advantage for the other, but beyond that necessary antagonism they
were friends. She watched with pleasure the quick play of his mind,
managing hers as he would have handled the thoughts of a buyer; she was
conscious that he saw the motives behind her method of counter-attack;
a business interview between them was like a friendly bout between
fencers. But he spoke to her sometimes of the wife and children whose
pictures were on his desk; she knew how deeply he was devoted to them.
And once, during an idle evening in a Stockton hotel, he had held her
breathless with the whole story of his business career, talking to her
as he might have talked to himself.

To-day there seemed to her an added shade of effort in his briskly
cheerful manner. The lines around his shrewd eyes had deepened since
she first knew him, and it struck her, as she settled into the chair
facing his across the flat desk, that his hair was quite gray. With
the alert, keen expression taken from his face he would appear an old
man.

This expression was intensified when she spoke of the war, questioned
its effect on the business. It would have no effect, he assured her.
The future had never been brighter; Sacramento lands were booming;
fifty new settlers were going into Ripley Farmland Acres that fall.
Chaos on the stock market would make the solid investment values of
land even more apparent. If the war lasted a year or longer the prices
of American crops would rise.

"I was wondering about the psychological effect," she murmured. Mr.
Clark ran a nervous hand through his hair.

"Oh, that's all right. High prices will take care of the buyer's
psychology."

She laughed.

"While you take care of the salesman's." A twinkle in his eyes answered
the smile in hers, but she spoke again before he replied. "Mr. Clark,
I'd like to ask you something--rather personal. What do you really get
out of business?"

A quizzical smile deepened the lines around his mouth.

"Well, I got two million dollars out of it in the Portland boom! It's
a game," he said after a moment. "Just a game. That's all. I've made
two fortunes--you know that--and lost them. And now I'm climbing up
again. Oh, if I had it to do over again, I--" He changed the words on
his lips,--"I'd do the same thing. No doubt about it. We all think we
wouldn't, but we would. We don't make our lives. They make us."

"Fatalist?"

"Fatalist." They smiled at each other again as she rose and held out
her hand. He kept it a moment in a steadying grasp. "By the way, have
you heard that your husband's around?"

"Yes." She thanked him with her eyes. "Good-by."

She was oppressed by a sense of futility, of the hopeless muddle of
living, while the train carried her down the peninsula toward San José.
To escape from it she concentrated her attention on the afternoon
papers.

They were filled with wild rumors, with names of strange towns in
Belgium, a mass of clamoring bulletins, confusing, yet somehow making
clear a picture of gray hordes moving, irresistible as a monstrous
machine, toward France, toward Paris. She was surprised by her passion
of resistance. Intolerable, that the Germans should march into Paris!
Why should she care so fiercely, she who knew nothing of Paris, nothing
but chance scraps of facts about Europe?

"I must learn French," she said to herself, and was appalled by the
multitude of things she did not know, both without and within herself.

The unsigned contracts in their long manila envelope were like an
anchor in a tossing sea. She must get them signed that night. It was
something to do, a definite action. She telephoned from the station,
making an appointment with the buyer, and felt the familiar routine
closing around her again while the street-car carried her down First
Street to her office.

Bert was sitting in her chair, smoking and talking enthusiastically to
Hutchinson, when she opened the door. The shock petrified them all.
The two men stared at her, Hutchinson's expression of easy good humor
frozen on his face; Bert's hand, extended in the old, flashing gesture,
suspended in the air. The door closed behind her.

Later she remembered Hutchinson's blood-red face, his awkward, even
comical, efforts to stammer that he hadn't expected her, that he must
be going, his blind search for his hat, his confused departure. At the
moment she seemed to be advancing to meet Bert in an otherwise empty
room, and though she felt herself trembling from head to foot her hands
and her voice were quite steady.

"How do you do?" she said, beginning to unbutton her gloves:

Though she had not been able to remember his face, it was as familiar
as if she had seen it every day; the low white forehead with the lock
of fair hair across it, the bright eyes, the aquiline nose, the rather
shapeless mouth--No, she had not remembered that his mouth was like
that. Her experienced eye saw self-indulgence and dissipation in the
soft flesh of his cheeks, the faint puffiness of the eyelids. Her
trembling was increasing, but it did not affect her. She was quite cool
and controlled.

She heard unmoved his cajoling, confident expostulation. That was a
nice way to meet a man when he'd come--she brushed aside his embracing
arm with a movement of her shoulder. "We'd better sit down. Pardon
me." She took the chair he had left, her own chair, from which she had
handled so many land-buyers.

"God, but you're hard!" His accusation held an unwilling admiration.
She saw that the way to lose this man was to cling to him; he wanted
her now, because she had no need of him. Memories of all the wasted
love, the self-surrender and faith she had given him, for which he had
not cared at all, which he had never seen or known how to value, came
back to her in a flood of pain. Her lips tightened, and looking at him
across the desk, she said:

"Do you think so? I'm sorry. But--just what do you want?"

He met her eyes for a moment, and she saw his effort to adjust himself,
his falling back upon his old self-confidence in bending other minds
to his desires. He could not believe that any one would successfully
resist him, that any woman was impervious to his charm. And suddenly
she felt hard, hard through and through. She wanted to hurt him
cruelly; she wanted to tear and wound his self-centered egotism, to
reach somewhere a sensitive spot in him and stab it.

He wanted her, he said. He wanted his wife. She heard in his voice a
note she knew, the deep, caressing tone he kept for women, and she saw
that he used it skilfully, aware of its effect.

He had gone through hell. "Through _hell_," he repeated vibrantly.
He did not expect her to understand. She was a woman. She could not
realize the tortures of remorse, the agonies of soul, the miseries
of those years without her. He sketched them for her, with voice and
gestures appealing to her pity. He had been a brute to her; he had been
a yellow cur to leave her so. He admitted it, magnificently humble.

He had promised himself that he would not come back to her until he was
on his feet again. He had reformed. He was going to work. He was going
to cut out the booze. Already he had the most glittering prospects.
Fer de Leon, the king of patent-medicine men, was going to put on a
tremendous campaign in Australia. Fer de Leon had absolute confidence
in him; he could sign a contract at any time for fifteen thousand a
year.

He wanted her to come with him. He needed her. With her beside him he
could resist all temptations. She was an angel; she was the only woman
he had ever really loved and respected. With her he could do anything.
Without her he would be hopeless, heartsick. God only knew what would
happen. "You'll forgive me, won't you? You won't turn me down. You'll
give me another chance?"

She was looking down at her hands, unable any longer to read what her
eyes saw in him. Her hands lay folded on the edge of the desk, composed
and quiet, not moved at all by the sick trembling that was shaking her.
The desire to hurt him was gone. His appeal to her pity had dissolved
it in contempt.

"I'm sorry," she said with effort. "I hope you--you will go on
and--succeed in everything. I know you will, of course." She said it in
a tone of strong conviction, trying now to save his egotism. She did
not want to hurt him. "I know you have done the best you could. It's
all right. It isn't anything you've done. I don't blame you for that.
But it seems to me--"

"Good God! How can you be so cold?" he cried.

Even her hands were shaking now, and she quieted them by clasping
them together. "Perhaps I am cold," she said. "You see already that
we couldn't--make a success of it. It isn't your fault. We just
don't--suit each other. We never did really. It was all a mistake." Her
throat contracted.

"So it's another man!" he said. "I might have known it."

"No." She was quiet even under the sneer. "It isn't that. But there
was never anything to build on between you and me. You think you want
me now only because you can't have me. So it will not really hurt
you if I get a divorce. And I'd rather do that. Then we can both
start again--with clean slates. And I hope you will succeed. And have
everything you want." She rose, one hand heavily on the desk, and held
out the other. "Good-by."

Her attempt to end the scene with frankness and dignity failed. He
could not believe that he had lost this object he had attempted to
gain. His wounded vanity demanded that he conquer her resistance. He
recalled their memories of happiness, tried to sway her with pictures
of the future he would give her, appealed to generosity, to pity, to
admiration. He played upon every chord of the feminine heart that he
knew.

She stood immovable, sick with misery, and saw behind his words
the motives that prompted them, self-love, self-assurance, baffled
antagonism. She felt again, as something outside herself, the
magnetism, the force like an electric current, that had conquered her
once.

"I really wish you would go," she said. "All this gains nothing for
either of us." At last he went.

"You women are all alike. Don't think you've fooled me. It's another
man with more money. If I were not a gentleman you wouldn't get away so
easily with this divorce talk. But I am. Go get it!" The door crashed
behind him.

She did not move for a long moment. Then she went into the inner
office, locked the door behind her, and sat down. Her glance fell on
her clenched hands. She had not worn her wedding-ring for some time,
but the finger was still narrowed a little, and on the inner side a
smooth, white mark showed where it had been. Quietly she folded her
arms on the desk and hid her face against them. After a little while
she began to sob, rough, hard sobs that tore her throat and forced a
few burning tears from her eyes.

An hour went by, and another. She was roused, then, by the sound of
steps in the outer office. Doubtless a prospect had come in. She lifted
her head, and waited, without moving, until the steps went out again.
The noise of the streets came up to her as usual; street-cars clanged
past, a newsboy cried an extra. Across the corner the hands of the
clock in the Bank of San José building marked off the minutes with
little jerks.

It was six o'clock. An urgent summons knocked at a closed door in her
mind. Six o'clock. She looked at her wrist-watch, and memory awoke. She
had an appointment at six-thirty, to close the final contracts on the
forty-acre sale. Hutchinson was depending on her to handle it. Below
the window the newsboy cried "War!" again.

Wearily she bathed her face with cold water, combed her hair, adjusted
her hat. Contracts in hand, she locked the office door behind her,
and her face wore its necessary pleasant, untroubled expression. The
buyer's wife was charmed by her smile, and although the man was already
somewhat disturbed by the war news, Helen was able to persuade them to
sign the contracts.

       *       *       *       *       *

A week later she announced to Hutchinson that she was going to stop
selling land. She could give him no reasons that satisfied his startled
curiosity. She was simply quitting; that was all. He could manage the
office himself or get another partner; her leaving would make little
difference.

He protested, trying half-heartedly to shake her determination. The
shattering of accustomed and pleasant routine shocked him; he was like
a man thrown suddenly from a boat into the unstable water.

"But what do you want to do it for? What's the idea? Aren't we getting
along all right?" He was longing to ask if she were going to Bert,
whose arrival and immediate departure had not been explained to him.
The whole organization, she knew, was discussing it, and Hutchinson, on
the very scene of their meeting, was in the unhappy position of being
unable to give the interesting details. But he did not quite venture
to break through her reserve with a direct question. He scouted her
suggestion that the war would affect business. "Why, things have never
looked better! Here we've just made a forty-acre sale. Sacramento's
booming, and so is the San Joaquin. Fifty new settlers are going into
Farmland Acres this fall. There's going to be a boom in land. Folk
are going to see what a solid investment it is, the way stocks are
tumbling. And the farmers are going to make money hand over fist if the
war lasts a couple of years."

"Oh, well, maybe you're right," she conceded, remembering the twinkle
in Mr. Clark's eye when she had accused him of taking care of the
salesman's psychology. She still believed that spring would see a slump
in real-estate business. She had learned too well that men did not
handle their affairs on a basis of cool logic; too often in her own
work she had taken advantage of the gusts of impulse and unreasoning
emotion that swayed them. There would be a period when they would be
afraid; no facts or arguments would persuade them to exchange solid
cash for heavily mortgaged land. But the point no longer interested her.

She felt a profound weariness, an unease of spirit that was like the
ache of a body too long held motionless. Business had rested on her
like a weight for nearly four years. She could bear it no longer. She
must relax the self-control that held her own impulses and emotions in
its tight grip. The need was too strong to be longer resisted, too deep
in herself to be clearly understood. "I'm tired," she said. "I'm going
to quit."

An agreement dividing their deferred commissions must be drawn up
and filed with the San Francisco office. Hutchinson took over her
half-interest in the automobile she had left to be repaired in
Sacramento. Already his mind was busy with new plans. Since she would
no longer write the advertising he would cut it out. "Want ads'll be
cheaper and good enough," he said.

Thus simply the bonds were cut between her and all that had filled her
days and thoughts. She went home to the little bungalow, put the files
of her land advertisements out of sight, hung her hat and coat in the
closet.

The house seemed strange, with early-afternoon sunlight streaming
through the living-room windows. It was delightfully silent and empty.
Long hours, weeks, months, stretched before her like blank pages on
which she might write anything she chose.

She went through the rooms, straightening a picture, moving a chair,
taking up a vase of withering flowers. The curtains stirred in a cool
breeze that poured through the open windows and ruffled her hair. It
seemed to blow through her thoughts, too; she felt clean and cool and
refreshed. With a deep, simple joy she began to think of little things.
She would discharge the woman who came to clean; she would polish the
windows and dust the furniture and wash the dishes herself. To-morrow
she would get some gingham and make aprons. Perhaps Mabel and the baby
would come down for a visit; she would write and ask them.

She was cutting roses to fill the emptied vase when she thought of
Paul. He came into her thoughts quite simply, as he had come before
Bert's return. She thought, with a warmth at her heart and a dimple in
her cheek, that she would telephone him to come next Sunday, and she
would make a peach shortcake for him.




                              CHAPTER XIX


The shortcake was a triumph when she set it, steaming hot and oozing
amber juice, on the table between them. "You certainly are a wonder,
Helen!" Paul said, struck by its crumbling perfection. "Here we haven't
been in the house an hour, and with a simple twist of the wrist you
give a fellow a dinner like this! Lucky we aren't living a couple of
centuries ago. You'd been burned for a witch." His eyes, resting on
her, were filled with warm light.

Already he seemed to irradiate a glow of contentment; the hint of
sternness in his face had melted in a joy that was almost boyish, and
all day there had been a touch of possessive pride in his contemplation
of her. It intoxicated her; she felt the exhilaration of victory in her
submission to it, and a sense of her power over him gave sparkle to her
delight in his nearness.

Her bubbling spirits had been irrepressible: she had flashed into
whimsicalities, laughed at him, teased him, melted into sudden
tendernesses. Together they had played with light-hearted absurdities,
chattering nonsense while they explored a rocky canyon in Alumn Rock
Park, a canyon peopled only with bright-eyed furtive creatures of the
forest whisking through tangled underbrush and over fallen logs. They
had looked at each other with dancing eyes, smothering bursts of mirth
like children hiding some riotous joke, when they came down into the
holiday crowd around the hot-dog counters at the park gate, and side by
side with Portuguese and Italians, they had bought ice-cream cones from
a hurdy-gurdy and listened to the band.

Now she looked at him across her own dinner-table, and felt that the
last touch of perfection had been given a happy day. She laughed
delightedly.

"It's a funny thing when you think of it," he went on, pouring
cream over the fruity slices. "Here you're working all week in an
office--just about as good a little business woman as they make 'em, I
guess--and then on top of it you come home and cook like mother never
did. It beats me."

"Well--you see I like to cook," she said. "It's recreation. Lots of
successful business men are pretty good golf players. Besides I'm not a
business woman any more. I've left the office. Shall I pour your coffee
now?"

"Left the office!" he exclaimed. "What for? When?"

"The other day. I don't know why. I felt--oh, I don't know. I just
quit. Why, Paul!" She was startled by his expression.

"Well--it would rather surprise anybody," he said. "A sudden change
like this. You didn't give me any idea--" There was a shade of reproach
in his tone, which shifted quickly to pugnacity. "That partner of
yours--what's-his-name? He hasn't been putting anything over on you?"

"Why, no, of course not! I just made up my mind to stop selling land.
I'm tired of it. Besides, it looks as though there'd be a slump in the
business."

"Well, you can't tell. However, you may be right," he conceded. He
smiled ruefully. "It's going to be pretty hard on me, though--your
quitting. It's a long way to Masonville."

"To Masonville?" she repeated in surprise.

"Aren't you going there?"

"Why on earth should I go to Masonville?" She caught at the words, not
quite quickly enough to stop them. "Oh, I know--my mother. Of course.
But, to tell the truth, Paul, I'm fond of her and all that, you know
I've been up to see her a good many times,--but after all we've been
apart a long time, and my life's been so different. She doesn't exactly
know what to make of me. I honestly don't think either of us would be
very happy if I were to go back there now. She has Mabel, you know,
and the baby. It isn't as though--" Floundering in her explanations,
she broke through them, with a smile, to frankness. "As a matter of
fact, I never even thought of going back there."

There was bewilderment in his eyes, but he repressed a question.

"Just as you like, of course. Naturally I supposed,--but I'm glad you
aren't going. Two lumps, please."

"As though I wouldn't remember!" she laughed. But as she dropped the
sugar into his cup and tilted the percolator, a memory flashed across
her mind. She saw him sitting at a little table in a dairy lunch-room,
struggling to hide his embarrassment, carefully dipping two spoonsful
of sugar from the chipped white bowl, and the memory brought with it
many others.

The iridescent mood of the afternoon was gone, and reaching for the
deeper and more firm basis of emotion between them, she braced herself
to speak of another thing she had not told him.

Constraint had fallen upon them; they were separated by their diverging
thoughts, and uneasily, with effort, they broke the silence with
disconnected scraps of talk. Time was going by; already twilight crept
into the room, and looking at his watch, Paul spoke of his train.
Helen led the way to the porch, where the shade of climbing rose-vines
softened the last clear gray light of the day. There was sadness in
this wan reflection of the departed sunlight; the air was still, and
the creaking of the wicker chair, when Helen settled into it, the sharp
crackle of Paul's match as he lighted his after-dinner cigar, seemed
irreverently loud. With a sudden keen need to be nearer him, Helen drew
a deep breath, preparing to speak and to clear away forever the last
barrier between them.

But his words met hers before they were uttered.

"What are you going to do, then, Helen?--If you aren't going home?" he
added, before her uncomprehension.

"Oh, that! Why--I haven't thought exactly. I'd like to stay at home,
stay here in my own house. There's so much to do in a house," she
said, vaguely. "I've never had time to do it before."

His voice was indulgent.

"That'll be fine! It's just what you ought to have a chance to do. But,
see here, Helen, of course it's none of my business yet, in a way, but
naturally I'd worry about it. It takes an income to keep up a house,
you know. I'd like--you know everything I've got is--is just the same
as yours, already."

"Paul, you dear! Don't worry about that at all. If I needed any help
I'd ask you, truly. But I don't."

"Well, we might as well look at it practically," he persisted. "It's
going to figure up maybe more than you think to keep this house going.
Not that I want you to give it up if you'd rather stay here," he
parenthesized, quickly. "I'd rather have you here than in Masonville,
and I'd rather have you in Ripley than here, for that matter. Say, why
couldn't you come down there? I could fix up that little bungalow on
Harper Street. And every one knows you're an old friend of mother's."

"I might do something like that," she said at random. She was troubled
by the knowledge that their hour was slipping past and the conversation
going in the wrong direction.

"It would cost you hardly anything to live there. And we could--"

"Yes," she said. "I'd love that part of it. You know how I'd like to
see you every minute. But there's plenty of time. I'll think about it,
dear."

"That's just the point. There is so much time. A whole year and more
before I can--and it would be just like you to half starve yourself and
never say a word to me about it."

"O Paul!" she laughed, "you are so funny! And I love you for it. Well,
then, listen. I have a little over twelve hundred dollars in the bank.
Not much, is it, to show for all the years I've been working? But it
will keep me from growing gaunt and hollow-eyed for lack of food, quite
a little while. And if I really did need more there's a whole world
full of money all around me, you know. So please don't worry. I promise
to eat and eat. I promise never to stop eating as long as I live.
Regularly, three times a day, every single day!"

"All right," he said. His cigar-end glowed red for a minute through the
gathering dusk. She put her hand on his sleeve, and it moved beneath
her fingers until its firm, warm grip closed over them. Palm against
palm and fingers interlaced, they sat in silence. "It's going to be a
long time," he said. After a long moment he added gruffly, "I suppose
you've--begun the thing--seen a lawyer?"

"I'm going to, this week. I--hate to--somehow. It's so--"

"You poor dear! I wish to heaven you didn't have to go through it. But
I suppose it won't be--there won't be any trouble. Tell me, Helen,
honestly. You do want to do it? You aren't keeping--anything from me?"

"No. I do want to. But there's something I've got to tell you. He's
come back." He was instantly so still that his immobility was more
startling than a cry. At the faint relaxing of his hand, her own fled,
and clenched on the arm of her chair. Quietly, in a voice that was
stiff from being held steady, she told him something of her interview
with Bert. "I thought you ought to know. I didn't want you to hear it
from some one else."

"I'm glad you told me. But--don't let's ever speak of him again." His
gesture of repugnance flung the cigar in a glowing arc over the porch
railing, and it lay a red coal in the grass.

"I don't want to." She rose to face him, putting her hands on his
shoulders. "But, Paul, I want you to understand. He never was anything
to me, really. Nothing real, I mean. It was just because I was a
foolish girl and lonely and tired of working--and I didn't understand.
We never were really _married_." She stumbled among inadequate words,
trying to make him feel what she felt. "There wasn't any reality
between us, any real love, nothing solid to build a marriage on. And I
think there is between you and me."

"The only thing I want," he said, his arms around her, "the only thing
I want in the world is just to take you home and take care of you."

She kissed him, a hushed solemnity in her heart. He was so good, so
fine and strong. With all her soul she longed to be worthy of him, to
make him happy, to be able to build with him a serene and beautiful
life.

       *       *       *       *       *

The days went by with surprising slowness. In the mornings, waking
with the first twittering of the birds in the vines over the sleeping
porch, she started upright, to relax again on the pillows and stretch
luxuriously between the cool sheets, with delicious realization that
the whole, long day was hers. But her body, filled with energy,
rebelled at inaction. She rose, busying her mind with small plans while
she dressed and breakfasted. At ten o'clock she could think of nothing
more to do to the house or the garden, and still time stretched before
her, prolonged indefinitely, empty.

The house, lamentably failing as an occupation, became a prison. She
escaped from it to the streets. She shopped leisurely, comparing colors
and fabrics and prices, seeking the bargains she had been obliged to
forego while she was working. An afternoon spent in this way might
save her a dollar, and her business sense grinned at her sardonically.
She might meet an acquaintance, a woman who lived near her, and over
ices elaborately disguised with syrups and nuts they could talk of the
movies, the weather, the stupidities of servants. Time had become an
adversary to be destroyed as pleasantly as possible. In the long, lazy
afternoons she sat on a neighboring porch, listening to talk about
details, magnified, distorted, handled over and over again, and while
her fingers were busy at an embroidery hoop, stitching bits of thread
back and forth through bits of cloth, her mind yawned with boredom.

At night, letting down her hair, she looked back at a day gone from her
life, a day spent in sweeping and dusting and making pleasant a house
that must be swept and dusted and made pleasant on the morrow, a day
that had accomplished several inches of scalloping on a table-cloth,
and she was overwhelmed with a sense of futility. "After all, I've
rather enjoyed it," she said. "To enjoy a day--what more can one do
with it?" The argument rang hollow in her mind, answered only by an
uneasy silence.

If she were with Paul the days would mean more, she told herself. But
it seemed best to remain in San José until the first legal formalities
were done. The case, her lawyer told her, would come on the court
calendar in four or five weeks. She would have no difficulty in getting
a decree. "But can't you charge something to make it more impressive?
No violence? He never hit you or threw anything at you?" The lawyer's
eyes filled with a certain eagerness. Wincing, she told him with cold
fury that she would charge nothing but desertion. No, she wanted no
alimony. When, disappointed, he had jotted these details on a pad and
tried with professional jocularity to make her smile, she escaped,
shrinking with loathing.

Something like this she must endure again, upon a witness-stand in open
court. Better to face it alone, to finish it and push it behind her
into the past before she went to Ripley to meet the shrewd interest
of Mrs. Masters and the warmth of Paul's sympathy. Meantime her life
seemed motionless as a treadmill is motionless, and a vague irritation
nagged at her nerves.

She began to frequent the public library. In a locked room, to which
the librarian gave her the key after an embarrassed scrutiny, she
found on forbidden shelves a history of marriage, and curled among
the cushions on her window-seat, she spent an afternoon absorbed in
tracing that institution from the first faint appreciation of the
property value of women into the labyrinth of custom and morality to
which it led. She became interested in marriage laws, and discovered
with amazement the contracts so blithely entered upon by men and
women who would not so unquestioningly subscribe to any other legal
agreement. When she wearied of this subject, she turned to others
and, with an interest sharpened by the European news, she devoured
history and floundered beyond her depths in economics. She bought a
French dictionary and grammar and, finding them but palely alluring
in themselves, she boldly attacked _La Livre de Mon Ami_, digging the
meaning from its charming pages eagerly as a miner washing gold. But
the nights found her still haunted by a restlessness as miserable and
vague as that of unused muscles. "I wish I were doing something!" she
cried.




                              CHAPTER XX


Two weeks after she left the office her feet took her back to it, as if
by volition of their own. The familiar walls, covered with photographs
of alfalfa fields and tract maps painted with red ink, closed around
her like the walls of home. Hutchinson sat smoking at his desk; nothing
had changed. She said that she had only dropped in for a moment. How
was business? Her eye automatically noted the squares of red on the
maps. "Hello! That three-cornered piece by Sycamore Slough's gone! Who
sold it?"

"Watson," said Hutchinson. "He's uncovered a gold mine in the
Healdsburg country, selling the farmers hand over fist. Last week he
brought down a prospect who--" She heard the story to its end, capped
it with one of her own, and two hours had passed before she realized it.

In another week it had become her habit to drop in at the office every
time she came down town, to discuss Hutchinson's difficulties with him,
even on occasion to help him handle a sale. Business prospects were
not brightening; the prune market was disrupted by the European War,
orchardists were panic stricken; already a formless, darkening shadow
hung over men's minds. In any case she had no intention of going back
into business; she told herself that she detested it. And she continued
to go to the office.

Hutchinson awaited her one day with a bit of news. A man named MacAdams
had been telephoning; he was coming to the office; he wanted to see
her. "MacAdams?" she repeated. "Odd--I seem to remember the name."

MacAdams came in five minutes later, and the sight of his square,
deeply lined face, the deep-sunken eyes under bushy gray brows, brought
back to her vividly all the details of her first sale. She met him with
an out-stretched hand, which MacAdams ignored. "I'd like a few words
with you, miss."

She led him into the inner office, closed the door, made him sit down.
He sat upright, gnarled hands on his knees, and badly, in simple words,
laid his case before her. The land she had sold him was no good. It
was hard-pan land. After he bought it he had saved his money for a
year and moved to that land. "They told me I could make the payments
from the crops." He had leveled the forty acres, checked it, seeded it
to alfalfa. The alfalfa had begun to die the second year. That fall
he plowed it up and sowed grain. He made enough from that to pay for
seed and meet the water-tax. In the spring he and his boy had planted
beans. The boy had cultivated them, and he had worked out, making money
enough for food. The irrigation ditch broke; they could get no water
for the beans when they needed it. The beans had died. He was two years
behind in his payments; he could not meet the interest; he owed a
hundred dollars in grocery bills.

"I put three thousand dollars into that land. I went to see your firm
about it. They said they would give me more time to pay the rest if I
would keep up the interest. But I want no more farming; I'm done. They
can have the land. It's no good on God's earth. I'm blaming nobody,
miss. A man that is a fool is a fool. But I want back some of the
money, so I can move my family to the city and live till I get a job.
It is no more than justice, and I come to ask you for it."

She heard him to the end, one hand supporting her cheek, the other
drawing aimless pencil marks on the desk blotter. His request was
hopeless, she knew; even if Clark had wanted to return the money, it
had gone long ago in overhead and in payments to the owners of the
land. No one could be compelled to return any part of the payment
MacAdams had made on the contract he had signed. Clearly before her
eyes rose the picture of the little tract office, the smoky oil lamp,
Nichols in his chair, and she herself awaiting the word from MacAdams'
lips that would decide her fate and Bert's. Parrot-like words, repeated
many times, resaid themselves. "I'm sorry. Of course you know that
in any large tract of land there will be a few poor pieces. I acted
in perfectly good faith; you saw the land, examined it--" She met
MacAdams's eyes. "I'll give back all the money I made on it," she said.

She wrote a check for six hundred dollars, blotted it carefully, handed
it to him. His stern face was as tremulous as water blown upon by the
wind, but he said nothing, shaking her hand with a force that hurt and
going away quickly with the check. After the door closed behind him
she remembered that she had got only three hundred dollars from the
sale. The remainder had gone to cover Bert's debts. At this, shaken by
emotions, she laughed aloud.

"Well, anyway, now you'll have plenty to do!" she said to herself. "Now
you'll get out and scurry for money to live on!" She felt a momentary
chill of panic, but there was exhilaration in it.

She would not return to selling land. Her determination was reinforced
by the possibility that if she did she would find herself penniless
before she had made a sale. No, she must earn money in some other way.
She walked slowly home, wrapped in abstraction, searching her mind
for an idea. It was like gazing at the blankness of a cloudless sky,
but her self-confidence did not waver. All about her men no wiser, no
better equipped than she, were making money.

Sitting at the walnut desk in her sunny living-room she drew a sheet
of paper before her and prepared to take stock of her equipment. Her
thoughts became clearer when they were written. But after looking for
some time at the blank sheet, she began carefully to draw interlacing
circles upon it. There seemed nothing to write.

She was twenty-six years old. She had been working for eight years.
Telegraphing was out of the question; she would not go back to that.
Her four years of selling land had brought her nothing but a knowledge
of human minds, a certain cleverness in handling them, and a distaste
for doing it. And advertising. She could write advertisements; she
had records in dollars and cents that proved it. What she needed was
an idea, something novel, striking and soundly valuable, with which
to attack an advertiser. Her mind remained quite blank. Against the
background of the swaying rose-colored curtains picture after picture
rose before her vague eyes. But no idea.

Suddenly she thought of Paul, of her plan of going to Ripley, now
demolished. She could not work there; if Paul suspected her difficulty
he would insist upon helping her. He would be hurt by her refusal,
however carefully she tried not to hurt him. "Oh, you little idiot!
You have made a mess of things!" she said.

Half-formed thoughts began to scamper frantically through her mind.
This was no way to face a problem, she knew. She would think no more
about it until to-morrow. Smiling a little, she began a letter to Paul,
a long, whimsical letter, warmed with tenderness, saying nothing and
saying it charmingly. An hour later, rereading it and finding it good,
she folded it into its envelope and put a tiny kiss upon the flap,
smiling at herself.

Lest her perplexities come back to break the contentment of her
mood, she barricaded herself against the silence of the house with a
magazine. It was the "Pacific Coast," a San Francisco publication of
particular interest to her because of its articles on California land.
She had once wished to write a series of reading-matter advertisements
to be printed in it, but Clark had overruled her idea, favoring display
type.

She was buried in a story of the western mining camps when from the
blank depths of her mind the idea she had wanted sprang with the
suddenness of an explosion. What chance contact of buried memories had
produced it she could not tell, but there it was. As she considered
it, it appeared now commonplace and worthless, now scintillating with
bright possibilities. In the end, composing herself to sleep on the
star-lit porch, she decided to test it.

Early the next afternoon she arrived at the San Francisco offices of
the "Pacific Coast" and asked to speak to the circulation manager.

She was impressed by the atmosphere of dignity and restraint in the
large, bland offices. Sunshine streamed through big windows over tidy
desks and filing-cabinets; girls moved about quietly, carrying sheaves
of typewritten matter in smooth, ringless hands; even the click of
typewriters was subdued, like the sound of well-bred voices. Her
experiences of newspaper offices had not prepared her for this, and her
pulses quickened at this glimpse of a strange, uncharted world.

The circulation manager was a disappointment. He was young, and
desirous of concealing the fact. His manner, a shade too assertive,
betrayed suppressed self-distrust; being doubtful of his own ability
he sought to reassure himself by convincing others of it. Had she been
selling him land, she would have played upon this shaky egotism, but
here the weapon turned against her. He was prepared to demonstrate his
efficiency by swiftly dismissing her.

Drawing upon all her resources of salesmanship, she presented her plan.
She wished to organize a crew of subscription solicitors and cover the
state, section by section. She would interview chambers of commerce,
boards of trade, business men, and farmers, gathering material for an
article on local conditions; she would get free publicity from the
newspapers; she would stimulate interest in the "Pacific Coast."

"Every one likes to read about himself, and next he likes to read
about his town. I will see that every man and woman in the territory
knows that the "Pacific Coast" will run articles about his own
local interests. Then the solicitors will come along and take his
subscription. The solicitors will work on commission; the only
expense will be my salary and the cost of writing the articles. And
the articles will be good magazine features, in addition to their
circulation value."

His smile was pityingly superior.

"My dear young lady, if I used our columns for schemes like that!"
She perceived that she had encountered a system of ethics unknown
to her. "We are not running a cheap booster's magazine, angling for
subscriptions." And he pointed out that every article must interest a
hundred thousand subscribers, while an article on one section of the
state appealed only to the local interest. The talk became an argument
on this point.

"But towns have characters, like people. Every town in California is
full of stories, atmosphere, romance, color. Why, you couldn't write
the character of one of them without interesting every reader of your
magazine!"

He ended the interview with a challenge.

"Well, you bring me one article that will pass one of our readers and
I may consider the scheme." He turned to a pile of letters, and his
gesture indicated his satisfaction in dismissing her so neatly and
finally.

It left a sting that pricked her pride and made her nerves tingle.
She was passed outward through the suave atmosphere of the offices,
and every shining wood surface affected her like a smile of conscious
superiority.

She went to see Mr. Clark, who welcomed her with regrets that she had
left the organization, and at her suggestion readily promised her a
place in his office at a moderate salary. But to take it seemed a
self-confession of failure. Mr. Clark's offer was left open, and she
returned to San José smarting with resentful humiliation.

The sun was low when she alighted at the station. Amber-colored light
lay over the green of St. James Park, and the long street beyond
glowed with the dull, warm tone of weathered brick. The tall windows
and gabled roofs of the old business blocks threw back the flames of
the level sun-rays. In the gray light below them the bell of El Camino
Real stood voiceless at the corner of the old Alameda beside a red
fire-alarm box, and around it scores of farmers' automobiles fringed
the wide cement sidewalks.

Here, within the memory of men yet living, fields of wild mustard had
hidden hundreds of grazing cattle and vaqueros, riding down to them
from the foot-hills, had vanished in seas of yellow bloom; here the
padres had trudged patiently on the road from Santa Clara to Mission
San José; here pioneers had broken the raw soil and lined the cup of
the valley with golden wheat fields, and Blaine had come in the heyday
of his popularity, counseling orchards.

Now, mile after mile to the edge of the blue hills, prune-trees and
apricots and cherries stood in trim rows, smooth boulevards hummed with
the passing of motor-cars, and where the vaqueros had broken the wild
mustard, San José stood, the throbbing heart of all these arteries
reaching into past and present and future.

"And he says there's nothing of interest here!" she cried. "Oh, if only
I could write it! If I could write one tenth of it!"

Midnight found her sitting before her typewriter, disheveled, hot-eyed,
surrounded by crumpled sheets of paper, pondering over sentences,
discarding paragraphs, by turns glowing with satisfaction and chilled
by hopelessness. "I could write an advertisement about it," she
thought. "I could interest a buyer. Magazine articles are different.
But human beings are all alike. Interest them. I've got to interest
them. If I can just make it human, make them see--Oh, what an idiot
that man was!" Absorbed in her attempt to express the spirit of San
José, she still felt burning within her a rage against him. "I'll show
him, anyway, that there are some things he doesn't see!"

Next morning she read her work and found it worthless.

"I'll write it like a letter," she thought, and pages poured easily
from the typewriter. She spent the next day slashing black pencil-marks
through paragraphs, shifting sentences, altering words. The intricacy
of the work fascinated her; it allured like an embroidery pattern,
challenged like a land sale, roused all her energies.

When she could do no more, she read and re-read the finished article.
She thought it hopelessly stupid; she thought it as good as some she
had read; a sentence glinted at her like a ray of light, and again it
faded into insignificance. She did not know what she thought about it.
The memory of that irritating young man decided her. "It may be done
absurdly, but it will prove my point. There is something here to write
about." She sent it to him.

After five empty days, during which she struggled in a chaos of
indecisions, she tore open an envelope with the "Pacific Coast"
imprint. "Perhaps that plan will go through, after all," she thought.
She read a note asking her to call, a note signed "A. C. Hayden,
Editor."

The next afternoon she was in his office. It was a quiet room, lined
with filled bookcases, furnished with comfortable chairs and a huge
table loaded with proofs and manuscripts piled in orderly disorder. Mr.
Hayden himself gave the same impression of leisurely efficiency; Helen
felt that he accomplished a great deal of work without haste, smiling.
He was not hurried; he was quite willing to discuss her circulation
scheme, listening sympathetically, pointing out the reasons why it
was not advisable. Her article lay on the desk. It had brought her a
pleasant interview. After all, there was no reason why she should not
accept Clark's offer.

"Now this," Mr. Hayden said, unfolding her manuscript. "We can use
this, simply as a story, if you want to sell it to us. With the right
illustrations and a few changes it will make a very good feature. Our
rates, of course--" Helen had made no sound, but some quality in her
breathless silence interrupted him. He looked at her questioningly.

"You don't mean--I can write?"

He was amused.

"People do, you know. In fact, most people do--or try. You'd realize
that if you were a magazine editor. Have you never written before?"

"Well--reader advertisements and letters, of course. I haven't thought
of really writing, not since I was a school girl." She was dazzled.

"Advertisement! That accounts for it. You cramp your style here and
there. But you can write. You have an original viewpoint; you write
with a sense of direction, and you pack in human interest--human
interest's always good. And you know the values of words."

"When you're paying three dollars and eighty cents an inch for
space you do think about them!" she laughed. His words revealed the
unmeasured stretches of her ignorance in this new field, but the blood
throbbed in her temples. Her mind became a whirl of ideas; she saw
the world as a gold mine, crammed with things to write about. Eagerly
attentive, she listened to Mr. Hayden's criticisms of the manuscript.

Her lead was too long. "You spar around before you get to the point.
The story really begins here." His pencil hovered over the page. "If
you don't object to our making changes?"

"Oh, please dot I want to learn."

An hour went by, and another. Mr. Hayden was interested in her opinions
on all subjects; he led her to talk of land selling, of advertising, of
the many parts of California that she knew. He suggested a series of
articles similar to the one he held in his hand. He would be glad to
consider them if she would write them. If she had other ideas, would
she submit them?

She left the office with a check in her purse, and her mind was filled
with rainbow visions. She saw a story in every newsboy she met, ideas
clothed with romance and color jostled each other for place in her
mind, and the world seemed a whirling ball beneath her feet. For the
first time since the interview with MacAdams she longed to rush to
Paul, to share with him her glittering visions.




                              CHAPTER XXI


Paul was aggrieved. He stood in the dismantled living-room of the
little bungalow, struggling between forbearance and a sense of the
justice of his grievance. "But look here!" he said for the hundredth
time, "why couldn't you let a fellow know? If I'd had a chance to show
you how unreasonable, how unnecessary--" He thrust his hands deep into
his coat-pockets and walked moodily up and down between the big trunk
and the two bulging suitcases that stood on the bare floor.

Helen, drooping wearily on one of the suitcases, contritely searched
her mind for a reply. It was bewildering not to find one. On all other
points of the discussion her reasons were clear and to her convincing.
But surely she should have informed him of her plans. He had never for
a moment been forgotten; the knowledge of him continually glowed in her
heart, warming her even when her thoughts were furthest from him.

She could not understand the disassociation of ideas that had caused
this apparent neglect of him. There was no defense against her
self-accusation.

"I'm terribly sorry," she murmured inadequately. He had already passed
over the point, beginning again the circling argument that had occupied
them since his unexpected arrival.

"Can't you see, dear, there's no reason under the sun for a move
like this? You'll no more than get settled in the city before--" His
moodiness vanished. "Oh, come on, sweetheart! Chuck the whole thing.
Come on down to Ripley. It's only for a little while. Why should you
care so much about a little money? You'll have to get used to my paying
the bills some time, you know; it might as well be now. No? Yes!" His
arm was around her shoulders, and she smiled up into his coaxing,
humorous eyes.

"You're a dear! No, but seriously, Paul, not yet. It's all
arranged--the 'Pacific Coast' is counting on me, and I've got the new
series started in the 'Post.' Just think of all the working girls you'd
rob of oodles of good advice that they won't follow! Please don't feel
so badly, dear." Her voice deepened. "I'll tell you the real reason I
want to go. If I can get really started, if I can get my name pretty
well known--A name in this writing game, you know, is just like a
trade-mark. It's established by advertising. Well, if I can do that, I
can keep on writing wherever I am, even in Ripley. And then I'll have
something to do and a little income. I--I would like that. Don't you
see how beautiful it would be?"

"It may be your idea of beautifulness, but I can't say I'm crazy about
it," he replied. He sat on the suitcase, his hands clasped between his
knees, and stared glumly at his boots. "Why do you want an income? I
can take care of you."

"Of course!" she assured him, hastily. "I didn't mean--"

"And when it comes to something to do--you're going to have me on your
hands, you know!" he continued, with a troubled smile.

"I do believe he's jealous!" She laughed coaxingly, slipping a hand
through the crook of his unyielding arm. "Are you jealous? Just as
jealous as you can be? Jealous of my typewriter?" She bent upon him a
horrific frown. "Answer to me, sir! Do you love that electric plant?
How dare you look at dynamos!"

He surrendered, laughing with her.

"You little idiot! Just the same--oh, well, what's the use? Just so
you're happy."

It was the first time there had been a sense of reservations behind
their kiss. But he seemed not to know it, radiating content.

"All right, run along and play in San Francisco. I don't care. I do
care. I do care like the devil. But it won't be long. Only I warn you,
I'm not going to be called Mr. Helen Davies!"

She laughed too, rising and tucking up her hair.

"As if I wanted you to be! I'll never be so well-known as that, don't
fear! Now if I were a real writer--" The trace of wistfulness in her
voice was quickly repressed. "Then, young man, you'd have reason to
worry! But I'm not. I wonder if that expressman's never coming!"

"You oughtn't to be trying to manage all this yourself," he said. "I
wish I'd known in time. I could have come up and done it for you."

She was touched by his whole-hearted acceptance of her plans, and she
felt a twinge of regret, a longing to acquiesce in his. But some strong
force within herself would not yield. She could not be dependent upon
him, not yet. Later--later she would feel differently.

There were six months between her and final legal freedom. The
miserable half hour that had given her an interlocutory decree of
divorce had been buried by the rush of new events; routine completion
of the court's action had no vital meaning for her. She had in reality
been long divorced from the past she wished to forget. The date six
months in the future meant only the point at which she would face the
details of a new life. Until that time she need not consider them too
closely. It was enough to know that she and Paul loved each other. All
difficulties when she reached them would be conquered by that love.

She turned a bright face to him.

"Let's go out and walk in the sunshine. An empty house is so sorrowful.
And I have heaps of things to tell you."

They walked slowly up and down the pleasant tree-shaded street, passing
the homelike porches at which she no longer looked wistfully. Her mind
was filled with the immediate, intoxicating future, and she tumbled out
for Paul's inspection all her anticipations.

Mr. Hayden had refused her last story, about immigration conditions
on Angel Island, and she had sent it to an Eastern weekly. Wouldn't
it be splendid if they took it! And wasn't it a bit of luck, getting
the "Post's" city editor to take her idea of a department for
working-girls' problems?

And the new series--the series that was taking her to San Francisco.
"O Paul, if I can only do it half as well as I want to! I'm just sure
Mr. Hayden would take it. 'San Francisco Nights.' Bagdad-y stuff, you
know, Arabian Nights. You've no idea how fascinating San Francisco is
at night. The fishing fleet, going out from Fisherman's Wharf over the
black water, with Alcatraz Light flashing across the colored boats, and
the fishermen singing 'Il Trovatore.' Honestly, Paul, they do. And the
vegetable markets, down in the still, ghostly, wholesale district at
three o'clock in the morning, masses of color and light, the Italian
farmers with their blue jackets and red caps, and the huge, sleepy
horses, and the Chinese peddlers pawing over the vegetables, with their
long, yellow fingers."

"At three o'clock in the morning! You don't mean you're dreaming of
going down there?"

"I've already been," she said guiltily. "With one of the girls, Marian
Marcy. I told you about her last week. The girl on the 'Post,' you
know?"

"Well, I hope at least you had a policeman with you."

"Naturally one would have," she replied diplomatically. Absorbed in
the interest of these new experiences, she had not thought of being
fearful; without considering the question, she had felt quite capable
of meeting any probable situation. But she perceived that she was
alarming Paul.

It seemed safer to discuss the little house she had rented, the
little house that hung like a swallow's nest on the steep slopes of
Russian Hill, overlooking the islands of the bay and the blue Marin
hills. Eager to take Paul's imagination with her, she described it
minutely, its wood-paneled walls, its great windows, the fireplace, the
kitchenette where they would cook supper together when he came to see
her.

"And you'll come often? Every week?" she urged.

"You'll see me spending the new parlor wall-paper for railroad fares!"
he promised.

"Just as well. I don't want wall-paper there, anyway!"

When the expressman had come and gone, she locked the door of the
bungalow for the last time, with a sense of efficient accomplishment.

"Now!" she said, "We'll play until time for the very latest train for
San Francisco."

Their delight in each other seemed all the brighter for the temporary
disagreement, like sunshine after a foggy morning. Her heart ached when
the evening ended and he had to put her on the train.

"I'll be glad when I'm not saying good-by to you all the time!" he told
her almost fiercely.

"Oh, so will I!"

She sprang lightly up the car steps, seeing too late his effort to help
her, and regret increased the warmth of her thanks while he settled her
bags in the rack, hung up her coat, adjusted the footstool for her.
These unaccustomed services embarrassed her a little. She was aware of
awkwardness in accepting them, but for a little while longer they kept
him near her.

He lingered until the last minute, leaning over the red plush seat,
jostled by incoming passengers, gazing at her with eyes that said more
than lips or hands dared express under the harsh lights and glances of
passengers.

"Well--good-by."

"Good-by. And you'll come to see the new house soon?"

She watched his sturdy back disappear through the car-door. Her fancy
saw the sure, quick motion with which he would fling himself from the
moving train, and with her face close against the jarring pane, she
caught a last glimpse of his eager face and waving hat beneath the
station lights.

Smiling, she saw the street lamps flash past, vanish. Against rushing
blackness the shining window reflected her own firm mouth, the strong
curve of her cheek, the crisp line of the small hat. The swaying motion
of a train always delighted her; she liked the sensation of departure,
and the innumerable small creakings, the quickening click-click-click
of the wheels, gave her the feeling of being flung through space toward
an unknown future. Her cheek against the cool pane, she shut out the
shimmering lights and gazed into vague darkness.

Her heart was warm with contentment; her love for Paul lay in it like a
hidden warmth. She thought of the articles she meant to write, of the
brown cottage on Russian Hill, of the little group of women she might
gather there, Marian Marcy's friends. With something of wistful envy
she thought of the affection that held them together; she hoped they
would like her, too. The friendship of women was a new thing to her,
and the bond she had glimpsed among these girls appeared to her special
and beautiful.

Wondering, she considered them one by one, so widely differing in
temperament and character, and yet so harmonious beneath their heated
arguments. One would say they quarreled at the luncheon table where
they met daily, flinging pointed epigrams and sharp retorts at each
other, growing excited over most incongruous subjects,--the war, poems,
biology, hairdressers,--arguing, laughing, teasing each other all in
a breath. But their good humor never failed, and affection for each
other burned like an unflickering candle flame in all their gusts of
controversy.

"It's a wonderful crowd," Marian Marcy had said inclusively, and Helen
knew that her invitation to lunch with them indicated genuine liking. A
stranger among them, she felt herself on trial, and a hope of gathering
them all at her fireside and perhaps becoming one of their warm circle
had been her strongest motive in taking the cottage.

Her days were full of work. With a kind of fury she threw herself into
the task of conquering the strange world before her. There was so much
to learn and so very little time. Her six months became a small hoard
of hours, every minute precious. In the earliest dawn, while the sky
over the Berkeley hills blushed faintly and long silver lines lay
on the gray waters of the bay, she was plunging into her cold tub,
lighting the gas beneath the coffee-pot, tidying the little house. The
morning papers gave her ideas for stories,--already she had learned
to call everything written "a story"--and she rode down the hill on
the early cable-car with stenographers and shopgirls, thinking of
interviews.

Her business sense, sharply turned upon magazine pages and Sunday
papers, showed her an ever-widening market. She saw scores of stories
on innumerable subjects; they came into her mind dressed in all the
colors of fancy, perfect, clear-cut, alive with interest. Then at her
typewriter she set herself to make them live in words, and through long
afternoons she toiled, struggling, despairing, seeing fruitless hours
go by, knowing at last that she had produced a maimed, limping thing.
Her bookcases now filled her with awe. All those volumes so easily
read, apparently produced so effortlessly, appeared in this new light
tremendous, almost miraculous achievements.

"I can never write real books," she said. "I am not an artist."

She was not embarking upon an artistic career; she was learning a
trade. But seeing about her so many newspapers, so many magazines,
carloads of volumes in the department stores, she reflected that it was
a useful trade. These miles of printing brought refreshment and wider
viewpoint to millions. "If I can be only a good workman, producing
sound, wholesome, true things, I will be doing something of value," she
consoled herself.

Mr. Hayden accepted the first story in the "San Francisco Nights,"
series, refused the second. She began on a third, and when her article
on immigration was returned from the East she sent it out again. She
had better fortune with a story on California farming conditions, which
sold to a national farm paper. Establishing a market for her work was
her hope for the future; if she succeeded she could still work in
Ripley, and the work would be something entirely her own.

She did not analyze this need to keep a fragment of life apart for
herself, but quite plainly she saw the value of having her own small
income. Her relation to Paul had nothing to do with money; in their
love they were equal, and when Paul added the fruit of his work to the
scale the balance would be uneven. She knew too well the difference
between earning money and caring for a house to believe that her tasks
would earn what he must give her.

Working against time, she poured her energies into building an
acquaintance with editors, into learning their requirements. Meantime
her department in the "Post" gave her the tiny income that met her
expenses. Late at night she sat opening letters and typing prudent
replies for its columns.

"And the unions are striking for an eight-hour day!" she said to
Marian, encountering her amid clattering typewriters in the "Post's"
local room. "Me, I'd strike for forty-eight hours between sun and sun!"

"'The best of all ways to lengthen your days is to steal a few
hours from the night, my dear'!" Marian quoted gaily. Her piquant,
kitten-like face, with its pointed chin and wide gray eyes beneath a
tangle of black hair, was white with fatigue. She straightened her hat,
and dabbed at her nose with a powder puff. "The crowd's going over to
the beach at Tiburon for a picnic supper. Come along?"

"I'd love to!"

"Then run out and get some pickles and things while I finish this
story. Mother-of-Pearl! If those club women knew what I really think of
most of 'em!" The typewriter keys clacked viciously under her flying
fingers.

Smiling, Helen obeyed, and while she explored a delicatessen and loaded
her arms with packages, she felt a flutter of pleased anticipation. It
would be good to lie on the beach under the stars and listen to more of
the curious talk of these girls. "But I must contribute something," she
thought. "I must make them like me if I can."

When they assembled at the ferry, however, she found that they were
not inclined to talk. Almost silently they waited for the big gates to
open, surged with the crowd across the gang-plank and found outside
seats where the salt winds swept upon them.

"Tired, Marian?" said Anne Lester.

"Dead!" Marian answered. She rearranged the packages, took off her
coat, put it on again, and began to walk restlessly up and down the
deck.

"She lives on sheer nerve," Anne remarked. "Never relaxes." Her own
long, thoroughbred body was a picture of reposeful lines. She said
nothing more.

"How beautifully they let each other alone!" Helen thought, and in
the restful silence she too relaxed, idly studying the others. They
all worked. Beyond that she could see nothing in common; even their
occupations differed widely. She checked them off, startled a little at
the incongruity.

Anne, high-bred, imperious, with something of untamed freedom in every
gesture--Anne was a teacher of economics! Beside her Willetta, demure,
brown-eyed, brown-haired, knitting busily, had come from unknown labors
in social service work. Across the aisle Sara and Mrs. Austin--they
called her Dodo--were discussing samples of silk. And Sara was a
miniature painter, Dodo executive secretary of an important California
commission.

"I give it up!" Helen said to herself, marvelling again at the obvious
affection that held them together. Turning her face to the keen cool
wind blowing in through the Golden Gate she watched the thousand
white-capped waves upon the bay and the flight of silvery-gray seagulls
against a glowing sunset sky, drinking in the beauty of it all without
thinking, letting the day's burden of effort slip from her.

Around the camp-fire on the white half-moon of beach beyond the
fisherman's village of Tiburon the talk awoke again, idle talk,
flippant, serious, bantering, dropping now and then into silence.

Sara sat on a bit of driftwood, her long, sensitive hands clasped
around her knees, her eyes full of dreams. "How beautiful it is!" she
said at intervals, lifting her face to the dark sky full of stars, or
indicating with a nod the lights flung over the Berkeley hills like
handfuls of jewels. Anne, stretched on the sand, spoke with passion
of labor unions and I. W. W.'s, of strikes and lockouts, and the red
glimmer of her cigarette sketched her gestures upon the darkness.
Argument raged between her and Dodo, cross-legged like a boy, her fine,
soft hair let down upon her shoulders. Hot words were exchanged. "Oh,
you don't know what you're--" "If you'd read the reports of your own
commission!" "Let me tell you, Anne Lester,--where are the matches?"
The twinkling flame lighted Dodo's calm, unruffled brow as a thin
curl of smoke came from her serious lips. "Just let me tell you, Anne
Lester--" In the circle of fire-light Marian was busily gathering up
paper napkins, bits of string, wrapping paper. "Marian's got to tidy
the whole sea-shore!" they laughed, reaching lazily to help her. After
a long silence they spoke of the war.

"It didn't get me so much at first--it was like an earthquake shock.
But lately--" "One feels like doing something. I know. What is a little
Red Cross work here at home, when you think--"

"Oh, it's all too horrible!" Sara cried.

"Yes. But lots of things are horrible. War isn't the worst one. One has
to--" "Yes, get up and face them. And do something. As much as you can."

The words echoed Helen's own feeling. In the folds of her coat, curled
against a drift log, she listened, quiet, adding a word occasionally.
She felt now the charm of this companionship, demanding nothing,
unconstrained, full of understanding. It was freedom, relaxation,
without loneliness. Like a plant kept too long in constricting soil
and now transplanted to friendlier earth, she felt stirring within her
innumerable impulses reaching out for nourishment.

"You know," said Dodo suddenly, putting a warm hand over Helen's. "I
like you."

Helen flushed with delight.

"I like you too."

She remembered the words for long months, remembered the glow of
fire-light, the white, curving line of foam on the sand, the far lights
scattered on a dozen hills, and the cool darkness over the bay. That
evening had made her one of the group, given her the freedom of the
luncheon table reserved for them in the quiet little restaurant, opened
for her the door of a new and satisfying relationship.

She could always find one or two of the girls at the table, rarely all
of them. They dropped in when they pleased, sure of finding a friend
and sympathetic talk. When she had an idle half hour after luncheon
she might go shopping with Willetta, always hunting bargains in dainty
things for the little daughter in a convent. She learned the tragedy
that had shattered Willetta's home, and the reason for the cynicism
that sometimes sharpened Dodo's tongue. If they wondered about her own
life they asked no questions, and they accepted Paul's Sunday visits
without comment.

Any other evening in the week might see Willetta running up the steps,
knitting in hand, to spend an hour curled among the cushions on the
hearth or to depart blithely if Helen were busy. Dodo's voice might
come over the telephone. "Tickets for the concert! Want to come down?"
The crackling fire might blaze upon them all, gathered by chance,
chattering like school-girls while Marian speared marshmallows with a
hat-pin, toasting them and her tired, sparkling face at the same time.
But Sunday found Helen tacitly left to Paul.

His unexpected coming upon the whole group broke ever so slightly the
charm of their companionship. She had felt the same thing in entering
her office when all the salesmen were there. Some intangible current
of sympathy was cut, an alien element introduced. One thought before
speaking, as if to a stranger who did not perfectly comprehend the
language.

"There is a subtle division between men and women," she thought,
talking brightly to Paul while they climbed Tamalpais together or
wandered in Golden Gate park. "Each of us has his own world." After a
silence, passing some odd figure on the trail or struck breathless by
a vista of heart-stopping beauty, she sought his eyes for the flash
of intimate understanding she expected, and found only adoration or
surprise.

She felt that the shortening summer was rushing her toward a fate
against which some blind impulse in her struggled. Paul's eager
happiness, his plans, his confident hand upon her life, were
compulsions she tried to accept gladly. She should be happy, she told
herself; she was happy. Searching her heart she knew that she loved
Paul. His coming was like sunshine to her; she loved his sincerity, his
sweet, clean soul, the light in his eyes, the touch of his hand. When
he went away her heart flew after him like a bird, and at the same time
some almost imperceptible strain upon her was gone. Alone in her silent
house she felt herself become whole again and free.

"You're feeling like a girl again!" she told herself. The watch on her
wrist ticked off the night hours while she sat motionless, staring at
the red embers of the fire crumbling to ashes. She saw the twilight
of a long-dead summer's day and a girl swept by tides of emotion,
struggling blindly against them.

But it was not Paul's kisses that she shrank from now. She wanted them.
She was no longer a girl caught unawares by love's terrible power and
beauty. She was a woman, clear-eyed, deliberately choosing. Why, then,
did she feel that she was compelling herself to do this thing that she
wanted to do? "It's late, and I'm tired. I'm getting all sorts of wild
fancies," she said, rising wearily, chilled.

With passionate intensity she wrung all the joy from every moment of
these happy days. She loved the changing colors of the bay, the keen,
cool dawns when she breakfasted alone on her balcony with the morning
papers spread beside her plate and an unknown day stretching before
her. She loved her encounters with many sides of life; the talk of the
Italian waiter in a quaint Latin Quarter café; her curious friendship
with a tiny Chinese mother who lived in the Wong "family house," the
shadowy corridors of which were filled with a constant whispering
shuffle of sandaled feet; the hordes of ragged, adorable Spanish
children who ran to her for cakes when she climbed the crazy stairs
that were the streets of Telegraph Hill.

And there were evenings at the Radical Club, where she heard strange,
stimulating theories contending with stranger ones, and met Russian
revolutionists, single-taxers, stand-pat Marxian socialists, and
sensation seekers of many curious varieties, while next day at a
decorous luncheon table she might listen to a staid and prosperous
business man seriously declaring, "All these folks that talk
violence--all those anarchists and labor men and highwaymen--ought to
be strung up by a good old-fashioned vigilance committee! I'm not a
believer in violence and never was, and hanging's too good for those
that do." The romance of life enthralled her, and she felt that she
could never see enough of it.

Best of all she loved the girls, that "wonderful crowd" that never
failed her when she wanted companionship, and never intruded when she
wished to be alone. In the evenings when they gathered around her
fireplace, relaxing from the strain of the day, among her cushions
in the soft light of the purring flames, talking a little, silent
sometimes, she was so happy that her heart ached.

Sitting on a cushion, she sewed quietly by the light of a candle at
her shoulder. Willetta's knitting needles clicked rhythmically while
she told a story of the department-store girls' picnic; Anne, flung
gracefully on the hearth-rug, kept her finger between the pages of a
"History of the Warfare of Science and Religion in Christendom," while
she listened, and on the other side of the candle Dodo, chin propped
on hands, and feet in the air, obliviously read Dowson, reaching out a
hand at intervals for a piece of orange Sara was peeling with slender,
fastidious fingers.

"Orange, Helen?" She shook her head.

"Girls, just look what Helen's doing! Isn't it gorgeous?"

"Too stunning for anything but a trousseau," Marian commented. "One
of us'll have to get married. I tell you, Helen, put it up as a
consolation prize! The first one of us--"

"No fair. You've decided on your Russian," remarked Dodo, turning a
page.

"Mother-of-pearl! I should say not! I don't know why I never seem to
find a man I want to marry--" she went on, plaintively. "One comes
along, and I think,--well, maybe this one,--and then--"

They laughed.

"No, really, I mean it." She sat up, the fire-light on her pretty,
serious face and fluffy hair. "I'd like to get married. I want a lovely
home and children, as much as anybody. And there've been--well, you
girls know. But always there's something I can't stand about them.
Nicolai, now--he has just the kind of mind I like. He's brilliant and
witty, and he's radical. But I couldn't live with his table manners!
Oh, I know I ought to be above that. But when I think,--three times a
day, hearing him eat his soup--Oh, why don't radical men ever have good
table manners? _I_'m radical, and _I_ have."

"Oh, Marian, you're too funny!"

"The real reason you don't marry is the reason none of us'll marry,
except perhaps Sara," said Anne.

Sara's defensive cry was covered by Helen's, "What's that, Anne?"

"Well, what's the use? We don't need husbands. We need wives. Some one
to stay at home and do the dishes and fluff up the pillows and hold our
hands when we come home tired. And you wouldn't marry a man who'd do
it, so there you are."

"Oh, rats, Anne!"

"All right, Dodo-dear. But I don't see you marrying Jim."

Dodo sat up, sweeping her long, fine hair backward over her shoulders.

"Of course not. Jim's all right to play around with--"

"But when it comes to marrying him--exactly. There are only two kinds
of men, strong and weak. You despise the weak ones, and you won't marry
the strong ones."

"Now wait a minute!" she demanded, in a chorus of expostulation. "The
one thing a real man wants to do is to shelter his wife; they're rabid
about it. And what use have we for a shelter? Any qualities in us that
needed to be shielded we've got rid of long ago. You can't fight life
when you give hostages to it. We've been fighting in the open so long
we're used to it--we like it. We--"

"Like it!" cried Willetta. "Oh, just lead me to a nice, protective
millionaire and give me a chance to be a parasite. Just give me a
chance!"

"Willetta's right, just the same," Dodo declared through their
laughter. "It's the money that's at the root of it. You don't want to
marry a man you'll have to support--not that you'd mind doing it, but
his self-respect would go all to pieces if you did. And yet you can't
find a man who makes as much money as you do, who cares about music and
poetry and things. I'm putting money in the bank and reading Masefield.
I don't see why a man can't. But somehow I've never run across a man
who does."

"Well, that's exactly what I'm driving at, only another angle on it."
Anne persisted. "The trouble is that we're rounded out, we've got both
sides of us more or less developed. It all comes down to the point that
we're self-reliant. We give ourselves all we want."

"You aren't flattering us a bit, are you?" said Marian. "I only wish I
did give myself all I want."

"I don't know what you're all talking about," Sara ventured softly. "I
should think--love--would be all that mattered."

"We aren't talking about love, honey. We're talking about marriage."

"But aren't they the same things--in a way?"

"You won't say that when you've been married three years, child," said
Dodo, with the bitterness that recalled her eight-years'-old divorce.

"Not exactly the same things, I suppose," Helen said quickly.
"Marriage, I'd say, is a partnership. It's almost that legally in
California. You couldn't build it on nothing but emotion--love. You'd
have to have more. But Anne, why can't you make a marriage of two
'rounded out' personalities?"

"Because you can't make any complete whole of two smaller ones. They
don't fit into--Look here. When I was a youngster down in Santa Clara
we had two little pine-trees growing in our yard. I was madly in love
then--with the music-teacher! Well, I used to look at those trees. They
grew closer together, not an inch between their little stems, and their
branches together made one perfect pinetree. I was a poetic fool kid.
These trees were my idea of a perfect marriage. I fell out of love
with the music-teacher because he was so unreasonable about scales,
I remember! But that's still my notion of marriage, the ideal of the
old, close, conventional married life. And--well, it can't be done
with two complete and separate full-grown trees, not by any kind of
transplanting."

"Well, maybe--" The fire crackled cheerfully in the silence.

"But if you break it up--free love and so on,--what are you going to do
about children?" said Marian.

"Good Lord, I'm not going to do anything about anything! I'm only
telling you--"

"Any one of us would make a splendid mother, really. We have so much to
give--"

"Going to waste. When you think of the thousands of women--"

"Simply murdering their babies!" cried Willetta. "Not to mention giving
them nothing in inspiration or proper environment."

"I'm not so sure we'd make good mothers. Just loving children and
wanting them doesn't do it. There were six of us at home, and I know. I
tell you, it's a question of sinking yourself in another individuality,
first the husband and then the child. There's something in us that
resists. We've been ourselves too long. We want to keep ourselves to
ourselves. No, not want to, exactly--it's more that we can't help it."

"If you're right, Anne, it's a poor outlook for the race. Think of all
the women like us--thousands more every year--who don't have children.
We're really the best type of women. We're the women that ought to have
them."

"We are not!" said Dodo. "We're freaks. We don't represent the mass of
women. We go around and around in our little circles and think we're
modern women because we make a lot of noise. But we aren't. We're of no
importance at all, with our charity boards and our social surveys and
our offices. It's the girls who marry in their teens--millions of 'em,
in millions of the little homes all over America--that really count."

"In America!" Anne retorted. "You won't find them in their homes any
more in France or England. The girls aren't marrying in their teens
over there, not since the war. They're going to work--just as we did.
They're going into business. Already French women are increasing the
exports of France--_increasing_ them! We may be freaks, Dodo, but we're
going to have lots of company."

"It's interesting--what the war will do to marriage." They were silent
again, gazing with abstracted eyes at the opaque wall of the future.

"Just the same," Sara insisted softly, "you leave out everything
that's important when you leave out love."

Anne's small exclamation was half fond and half weary.

"We'll always have love. Every one of us has some one around in the
background, sending us flowers. A woman without a man who loves her
feels like a promissory note without an endorsement. But marriage!"

"And there's always the question--what _is_ love?" Helen roused at the
little flutter of merriment, and after a moment she joined it with her
clear laugh.

"Why, love is just love," said Sara, bewildered.

"Of course. There's only one definition. It's something that isn't
there when you're trying to analyze it. And every one of us would,"
said Dodo. "Give me an orange, Sara darling, and tell us about the new
pictures."

It was their last evening together in the little house. Precious as
each moment of it was to Helen, with the coming change in her own life
hanging over it, she had no more premonition than the others of the
events that would so soon whirl them apart.




                             CHAPTER XXII


Marian rushed in upon them at luncheon next day, glowing with
excitement, to announce that she would leave that night for New York on
her way to France.

"I'm going as a correspondent, of course. I never dreamed that I could
pull it off. But the United Press has come through with credentials.
Girls, when I get over there, stories or no stories, I'm going to do
something to help. I'm going to find a place where I'll be useful."

"Wait till to-morrow," said Dodo, quietly. "I'll go with you as far
as Washington." Smiling at their stunned faces, she explained, still
unruffled: "I've been thinking about it for some time. My assistants
can keep things going here till I can arrange to put in some one else.
I don't know whether this country's going into the war or not, but if
it does, I want to be in the heart of things. I'd be no good in France,
but I can do something in our own Department of Labor."

Two days later they were gone. Helen's own wistfulness was echoed in
Willetta's mournful exclamation: "Lucky dogs! What wouldn't I give! But
there's no use. The East is no place to bring up children, even if
I could afford to take a chance, with the infant to think about. Oh,
well, you girls'll come back twenty years from now to find me in the
same old grind."

"Never mind, Willie dear. I'll be right here the rest of my life,
too," said Helen, and for a moment Paul's name was on her lips. She
felt that speaking of him would be a defense against her own illogical
depression, and these girls would understand. It would not even occur
to them that legally she was still another man's wife. But Willetta's
"Oh, you! You're going to leave all the rest of us a million miles
behind!" silenced her.

"None of us have developed the way you have in this one year," said
Willetta. "If you knew what I hear everywhere about your work!" Though
she knew in her heart that she would never be a great writer, praise
for her work always gave Helen a throb of deep delight.

Two weeks later she sat in Mr. Hayden's office listening to a
suggestion that left her breathless.

"Why don't you go to the Orient?" Mr. Hayden's eyes, usually faintly
humorous, were quite serious. "There's a big field there right now. The
undercurrents in Shanghai, Japan's place in the war, the developments
in Mesopotamia or Russia. France is done to death already. Every one's
writing from there. But the East is still almost untouched. There's a
big opportunity there for some one."

"Do you think I could handle it?"

"Of course you could. It's a matter of being on the ground and
reporting. All it needs is the ability to see things clearly and tell
them graphically. You have that. It would take money, of course. I
don't know how you're fixed for that."

She thought quickly, her pulses leaping.

"With these last two checks--and I have a little coming in from
deferred land commissions--I'd have not quite a thousand dollars."

"Hm--well, it's not much, of course. It would be something of a gamble.
If you want to try it, we'll give you transportation and letters and
take a story a month. And I don't think you'd have any difficulty
finding other markets in the East."

For a moment she tried to consider the question coolly, while pictures
of Chinese pagodas, paper-walled houses of Japan, Siberian prairies,
raced dizzily before her eyes. Then, with a shock of self-accusation,
she remembered.

"I couldn't go. Other arrangements."

"Don't decide too quickly. Think it over. There's a great opportunity
there, and I believe you could handle it. It would make you, as a
magazine writer. If you make up your mind to go, let me know right
away? There's a boat on the twentieth. If you sailed on that, it would
give us time to announce the series for the winter, when our renewals
are coming in."

"I'll think about it," she promised. "But I'm quite sure I can't go."

She walked quickly down the windy street toward Market. The whirling
dust-eddies over the cobbles, the blown scraps of paper, the flapping
of her skirts, seemed part of the miserable confusion in her own mind.

How could she have forgotten Paul even for a moment? She had been
heartless, head-strong, foolish to stay on in San Francisco, trifling
so with the most precious thing in her life. Paul had been superhumanly
patient and kind and unselfish to let her do it. She had never loved
him more deeply than at that moment when with a dim sense of fleeing
to him for refuge she hurried toward a telephone. Her voice trembled
unmanageably when at last his came thin and faint across the wires. She
had to speak twice to make him hear.

"Paul? Oh, Paul! It's Helen.--No, nothing's the matter. Only--I want
to see you. Listen--I want to get away--Can you hear me? I say, I
want to come down there for a while. Would your mother have room
for me?--Right away. I could take the next train.--No, nothing,
only I want to see you." The joy in his voice hurt her. "Why, don't
you know I've always wanted that? You dear!--To-morrow morning,
then.--I'll be glad, too,--so glad! Of course.--Truly, honest and
true.--Foolish!--Good-by--till to-morrow."




                             CHAPTER XXIII


At the end of a long, warm summer day Helen lay in a hammock swung
between two apricot-trees. From time to time, with a light push of a
slippered foot on the grass, she set the hammock swaying, and above
her head the pale, translucent leaves and ruddy fruit shifted into new
patterns against a steel-gray sky.

The mysterious, erie hush of twilight was upon her spirit. Murmuring
voices came vaguely through it; across the street two women were
sitting on the porch of a bungalow, and on its lawn a little girl
played with a dog. The colors of their dresses, of the dog's tawny fur,
of geraniums against brown shingles, were sharp and vivid in the cold
light.

"Mother seems to be staying quite a while at Mrs. Chester's," said
Paul. He moved slightly in the wicker chair, dislodging the ashes from
his cigar with a tap of his finger, and she felt his caressing eyes
upon her. She did not turn her head, saying nothing, holding to the
quietness within her as one clings to a happy dream when something
threatens sleep. A puff of smoke drifted between her and the leaves.

"It _is_ pleasant outdoors, this time of day," he persisted after a
moment. Her low murmur, hardly audible, left him unsatisfied.

"Well, did you have a good time this afternoon?" His voice was brisker
now, full of affectionate interest. She felt his demand for her
response as if he had been tugging at her with his hands.

"Pretty good. Oh, yes, a very good time."

"What did you do?" She might have said, "Please let me alone. Let's be
quiet." But Paul would be worried, hurt; he would not understand; he
would ask questions. She turned a bright face to him.

"Oh, your mother and I went down town, and then we came home, and Mrs.
Lamson came in."

"She's a fine little woman, Mrs. Lamson."

"Yes? Oh, I suppose so. I don't care much for her."

"You will. You'll like her when you know her better." The definiteness
of his tone left her no reply. She felt that it was proper to like Mrs.
Lamson, that he expected her to like Mrs. Lamson, that she must like
Mrs. Lamson. A flash of foolish, little-girl anger rose in her; she
would have liked to stamp her foot and howl that she would _not_ like
Mrs. Lamson. The absurdity of it made her smile.

"What are you smiling at, dear?"

She sat up, setting the hammock swinging.

"Oh, I don't know. Let's go somewhere," she said restlessly. "Let's
take a long walk."

"All right." He was eager to please her. "I'll tell you something
better than that I'll get the car, and we'll ride down to Merced and
get a sundae. Run put on your coat. You'll need it, with that thin
dress."

His pride in the new car was deep and boyish. It was quite the most
costly, luxurious car in town; it was at once the symbol of his
commanding place in the community, and a toy to be endlessly examined
and discussed. She would not think of telling him that at the moment
she would rather walk than ride in it. Like an obedient child she went
for her coat.

The house was dim and quiet. She closed the door of her room behind
her with a little quick gesture, and stood for a moment with her back
against it. She thought that it would be pleasant to stay there. Then
she thought of a long, silent walk under the stars, all alone, quiet,
in the darkness. Then she realized quite clearly that she did not
like Mrs. Lamson, and she thought of the reasons why that amiable,
empty-headed little woman bored her. At that moment the automobile-horn
squawked. Paul was waiting. Hastily she seized her coat and ran out to
the curb.

When the purring machine turned into the brilliantly lighted business
district and the arched sign, "WELCOME TO RIPLEY," twinkled upon them,
tawdry against the pale sky, she felt that she could not bear to go to
Merced. "Let's just run up the boulevard, where it's cool and quiet,
away from people," she said coaxingly.

"Well, if you want to." The car ran smoothly up the long gray highway
hedged with ragged eucalyptus trees. Between their gaunt trunks she
caught glimpses of level alfalfa fields, and whiffs of sun-warmed
perfume swept across her face with the rushing air. In the brimming
irrigation canals, shimmering like silver mirrors across the green
fields, bright-colored caps bobbed and white arms splashed. Beside her
Paul talked with enthusiasm of the car.

"Isn't she a beauty? She'd make eighty miles easy if I wanted to let
her out. And see how flexible! Watch, now."

"Yes, dear. Wonderful!" She was not accustomed to being with people
all day, that was the trouble. Those hours of making conversation with
women who did not interest her seemed to have drained her of some vital
force. When she had her own house she could be alone as much as she
liked. Poor boy, he had been working all day; of course he wanted her
companionship now. "You must let me take it out some day soon, will
you?"

"Why, it's a pretty big car, Helen. I'd rather you'd let me drive it."

She laughed.

"All right, piggy-wig, keep your old car! Some day I'll get a little
Blix roadster and show you how I drive!"

She was astonished at the shadow that crossed his face. His smile was a
bit forced.

"I only meant it would be pretty heavy for a woman to handle. Of course
you can drive it if you want to."

They ran past the gateway of Ripley Farmland Acres, and gazing at the
little town, the thriving farms, and the twinkling lights scattered
over the land that had been a desolate plain, she forgot his words in a
thrill of pride. She had helped build these homes. When he spoke again
she groped blindly for his allusion.

"I don't think you realize, Helen. I wish you wouldn't say things like
that."

"Like what?"

"About the roadster. I wish you would say 'we' sometimes. Last night at
the minister's you said, 'I think I'll buy a little farm and see what I
can do with apricots.' I know you didn't realize how funny it sounded.
It sort of hurts, you know."

"Oh, my dear!" Her cry of pain, her words of miserable apology, made
even more clear to her the chasm between them. How could she apologize
for this, a thing she had done without knowing she was doing it? Gray
desolation choked her like a fog.

"All right. It's all right. I know you didn't mean to," he said
cheerfully. He took one hand from the wheel to put an arm around her
shoulders. "Never mind. You'll learn." His tone confidently took
possession of her, and in a heartsickening flash she saw his hope of
making her what he wanted his wife to be. She felt his hand upon her
tastes, her thoughts, her self, trying to reshape them to his ideal of
her. "You suit me, sweetheart. I know what you are, my wonderful girl!"

Her heart stopped, and she felt that her lips were cold under his
forgiving kiss. He talked happily while they swept on through the
gathering darkness, and she responded in tones that sounded strange
to her. Mysterious darkness covered the wide level land, farm-house
windows glowed warmly yellow through it, and a great moon, rising
slowly over the far hills, flooded the sky with pale light and put out
the stars. At last they rode into Ripley, past the piles of raw lumber
and stone that were to be their bungalow, and down the quiet street.
The wheels crunched the gravel of the driveway. Paul's warm hand
clasped hers, and she stumbled from the running-board into his arms.
His lips were close against his cheek.

"Love me, sweetheart? Tell me. It's been a long, long time since you
said it." She stood rigid, voiceless. "Please?"

In a passion of pity and wild pain she held him close, lifting her face
to his kiss in the darkness. She felt that her heart was breaking.

"You do," he said in deep content. "My dear, my dear!"

When she could reach her room she turned on the full glare of the
electric lights and went softly to the mirror. She stood for a long
time, her hands tight against her breast, looking into the eyes that
stared back at her. "He doesn't love you," she said to them. "He
doesn't want you. It's some one else he wants--the girl you used to
be. O Paul, how can I hurt him so! You'll hurt him more cruelly if you
marry him. You can't be what he wants. You can't. You're some one else.
You couldn't stand it. You can't make yourself over. After all these
years. O Paul, my dear, my dear, I didn't mean to hurt you!"

Some hours later she remembered that a boat sailed for the Orient on
the twentieth. She would have to act quickly, and it was good that
there was so much to do.




                             CHAPTER XXIV


Early on the morning of the nineteenth she climbed the steps to the
little brown house on Russian Hill. She had traveled all night from
Masonville, awake in her berth, and she was very tired. She was so
tired that it seemed impossible to feel any more emotion, and she
looked indifferently at the sunny, redwood-paneled room so full of
memories. A score of disconnected thoughts worried her mind; her
mother's tearful face, the telegram to Washington for her passports,
the steamer-trunk she must buy, Mabel looking at her enviously over the
baby's head.

Brushing a hand across her blurry eyes, she sat down at her desk. She
must write to Paul. She must tell him that she was going away; make him
understand that their smiling farewell at the Ripley station was her
good-by. She must try to show him that it was best, so that he would
not hold her memory too long.

When she had finished, she folded the sheet carefully, slipped it into
its envelope, and sealed the flap. It was done. She felt that she had
torn away a part of herself, leaving a bleeding emptiness. Her brain,
wise with experience of suffering, told her that the wound would heal,
would even in time be forgotten, but her wisdom did not dull the pain.

A thousand memories rushed upon her, torturing, unbearable. She rose,
trying to push them from her, reaching in agony for the anodyne of
work. Her trunks must be packed; there were shelves of books to give
away; she must telephone the tailor and the expressman. A horde of such
details stretched saving hands to her, and a self-control strengthened
by long use took her through them, with her chin up and a smile on her
lips.

The luncheon table had never seen her gayer, amid the excited
congratulations of the girls, and she rushed through an afternoon of
shopping to meet them all for tea, and to spend a last intimate, warm,
half-tearful evening with them around the fire.

"The old crowd's breaking up," they said. "Marian in France, and Dodo
in Washington, and now Helen's going. Nothing's going to be the same
any more."

"Nothing ever is," she answered soberly. "We can't keep anything in the
world, no matter how good it is. And hasn't it been good--all this! The
way we've cared for each other, and our happy times together, and all
you've meant to me--I can't tell you. I don't think there's anything in
the world more beautiful than the friendship of women. It's been the
happiest year of my whole life."

"It's been lovely, all of it," Sara murmured, curled in a heap of
cushions on the floor by Helen's low chair. She laid her long,
beautiful artist's hand on Helen's. "It's terrible to see things end."

The fire settled together with a soft, snuggling sound. In the dusk
Willetta's face was dimly white, and the little spark of red on Anne's
cigarette-tip glowed and faded. They sat about the dying fire in a
last communion of understanding that seemed threatened by the darkness
around them. Already the room had taken on something of the forlornness
of all abandoned places, a coldness and strangeness shared in Helen's
mind by the lands to which she was going, the unknown days before her.

The dull ache at her heart became pain at a sudden memory of Paul's
face. She straightened in her chair, closing her fingers more warmly
around Sara's.

"I'm sure of one thing," she said earnestly. "It hurts to--to let go
of anything beautiful. But something will come to take its place,
something different, of course, but better. The future's always better
than we can possibly think it will be. We ought to know that--really
_know_ it. We ought to be so sure of it that we'd let go of things more
easily, strike out toward the next thing. Like swimming, you know.
Confidently. We ought to live _confidently_. Because whatever's ahead,
it's going to be better than we've had. I tell you, girls, I know it
is."

       *       *       *       *       *

She arrived breathlessly at the docks next day, rushing down at the
last minute in a taxi-cab jammed with bundles. Sara and Willetta were
part of the mad whirl of the morning, dashing with her to straighten
out a last unexpected difficulty with the passports, hounding a
delaying express company, telephoning finally for a taxi-cab to carry
the trunks to the docks. Willetta had gone with it to see that the
trunks got aboard; Sara had made coffee and toast and pressed them upon
Helen while she was dressing. The telephone had rung every moment.

It was ringing again when Helen, clutching her bag, her purse, her
gloves, slammed the door of the little house and ran down the stairs
of Jones Street to the waiting cab. Bumping over the cobbles, with
Sara beside her, and the bags, the hat-box, an armful of roses, the
shawl-strapped steamer-rug, jostled in confusion about her, she looked
through the plate-glass panes at San Francisco's hilly streets,
Chinatown's colorful vegetable markets and glittering shops, Grant
Avenue's suave buildings, and felt nothing but a sense of unreality.
Incredible that these would still be here when she was gone! Incredible
that she was going, actually going!

"You have the keys, Helen dear?" Sara's lips quivered.

"Yes--I think so." She dug them from her purse. "Give them to Willetta
for me, will you? I'm afraid I'll forget. I hope she'll be happy in the
little house." For the hundredth time she glanced at her wrist-watch.
"If you hear who it was that was telephoning, explain to them that I
simply had to run or I'd miss the boat, won't you dear? And you'll
write." How inadequate, these commonplace little remarks! Yet what else
could one say?

The taxi-cab stopped in the throng of automobiles about the wharves,
the man must be paid, bags and steamer-rug and flowers pulled out.
Willetta was there, laughing with tears in her eyes. The little Chinese
woman was there and Anne and Mr. Hayden. She was surrounded, laughing,
shaking hands, saying something, anything.

They were at the gang-plank, across it, on the deck of the steamer now,
in the packed crowd. All around them were tears and laughter, kisses,
farewells. She was shaking hands again. Miss Peterson, the stenographer
from the "Post," was pressing a white package into her hands; two
little girls from Telegraph Hill had come down to bring a hot, wilted
bunch of weed-flowers; Mary O'Brien, from the settlement house she had
written about, and others, acquaintances she had hardly remembered,
men with whom she had danced at the Press Club--"Oh, Mr. Clark! How
good of you to come--! Good-by!--Good-by!" "Hope you have a fine trip."
"Oh, thank you!--Thank you!--Good-by!"

The whistle blew; the crowd eddied about her. A last hug from Sara,
tremulous kisses, Willetta's damp cheek pressed against hers, a sob in
her throat. The last visitors were being hurried from the ship. Some
one threw a bright paper ribbon, curling downward to the wharf. Another
and another, scores of them, hundreds, sped through the sunshine,
interlacing, caught by the crowd below, while others rose in long
curves to the deck, till the steamer was bound to the shore by their
rainbow colors.

Another whistle. Slowly, with a faint quivering of its great hulk, the
ship awoke, became a living thing beneath her feet. The futile, bright
strands parted, one by one, curled, fell into the water. The crowd
below was a blur of white faces. Brushing her hand across her eyes,
she found her own little group, Willetta, Anne, Sara, close together,
waving handkerchiefs. Across the widening strip of water she waved her
roses, waved and waved them till the docks were blots of gray and she
could no longer see the answering flutter of white. The ship was slowly
turning in the stream, heading out through the Golden Gate.

When the last sight of the dear gray city was lost, when the Ferry
Tower, the high cliffs of Telegraph, the castle-like height of Russian
Hill, the Presidio, Cliff House, the beach, had sunk into grayness
on the horizon, she went down to her stateroom. It was piled with
gifts, long striped boxes that held flowers, baskets of fruit, square
silver-corded packages that spoke of bonbons, others large and small
She had not known that so many people cared.

A blind impulse had brought her into this little place where she could
lock a door behind her and be alone. She had felt that she could give
way there to all the tears she had not shed. But she felt only a sense
of peace. She laughed a little, wiping away the few tears that did brim
over her lashes, thinking of the girls who still loved her and would
love her wherever she was.

Deliberately she thought of Paul, and already the deep hurt was gone.
He would be reading her letter now; she felt a pang of sharp pain
because she had made him suffer. But he would forget her now. In time
there would be another girl, such a girl as she had been,--the girl he
had loved and that no longer lived in her.

"That's why it hurt me so!" she thought, with sudden illumination. "Not
because I wanted him, but because I wanted to be all that I had been,
and to have all that I have missed and never will have. Marriage and
home and children. No, I can't ever fit into it now. But--there's all
the world, all the world, outside, waiting for me!"

Her thoughts turned forward to it.


                                THE END





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