Cheerful–By Request by Edna Ferber (page 3)

out of it.

Terry stared down at this congealing remnant. Then she laughed, a hard, high little laugh, pushed a plate away contemptuously with her hand, and walked into the sitting room. On the piano was the piece of music (Bennie Gottschalk’s great song hit, “Hicky Bloo”) which she had been playing the night before. She picked it up, tore it straight across, once, placed the pieces back to back and tore it across again. Then she dropped the pieces to the floor.

“You bet I’m going,” she said, as though concluding a train of thought. “You just bet I’m going. Right now!”

And Terry went. She went for much the same reason as that given by the ladye of high degree in the old English song–she who had left her lord and bed and board to go with the raggle-taggle gipsies-O! The thing that was sending Terry Platt away was much more than a conjugal quarrel precipitated by a soft-boiled egg and a flap of the arm. It went so much deeper that if psychology had not become a cant word we might drag it into the explanation. It went so deep that it’s necessary to delve back to the days when Theresa Platt was Terry Sheehan to get the real significance of it, and of the things she did after she went.

When Mrs. Orville Platt had been Terry Sheehan she had played the piano, afternoons and evenings, in the orchestra of the Bijou theatre, on Cass street, Wetona, Wisconsin. Any one with a name like Terry Sheehan would, perforce, do well anything she might set out to do. There was nothing of genius in Terry, but there was something of fire, and much that was Irish. The combination makes for what is known as imagination in playing. Which meant that the Watson Team, Eccentric Song and Dance Artists, never needed a rehearsal when they played the Bijou. Ruby Watson used merely to approach Terry before the Monday performance, sheet-music in hand, and say, “Listen, dearie. We’ve got some new business I want to wise you to. Right here it goes ‘_Tum_ dee-dee _dum_ dee-dee _tum dum dum_. See? Like that. And then Jim vamps. Get me?”

Terry, at the piano, would pucker her pretty brow a moment. Then, “Like this, you mean?”

“That’s it! You’ve got it.”

“All right. I’ll tell the drum.”

She could play any tune by ear, once heard. She got the spirit of a thing, and transmitted it. When Terry played a march number you tapped the floor with your foot, and unconsciously straightened your shoulders. When she played a home-and-mother song that was heavy on the minor wail you hoped that the man next to you didn’t know you were crying (which he probably didn’t, because he was weeping, too).

At that time motion pictures had not attained their present virulence. Vaudeville, polite or otherwise, had not yet been crowded out by the ubiquitous film. The Bijou offered entertainment of the cigar-box tramp variety, interspersed with trick bicyclists, soubrettes in slightly soiled pink, trained seals, and Family Fours with lumpy legs who tossed each other about and struck Goldbergian attitudes.

Contact with these gave Terry Sheehan a semi-professional tone. The more conservative of her townspeople looked at her askance. There never had been an evil thing about Terry, but Wetona considered her rather fly. Terry’s hair was very black, and she had a fondness for those little, close-fitting scarlet velvet turbans. A scarlet velvet turban would have made Martha Washington look fly. Terry’s mother had died when the girl was eight, and Terry’s father had been what is known as easy-going. A good-natured, lovable, shiftless chap in the contracting business. He drove around Wetona in a sagging, one-seated cart and never made any money because he did honest work and charged as little for it as men who did not. His mortar stuck, and his bricks did not crumble, and his lumber did not crack. Riches are not acquired in the contracting business in that way. Ed Sheehan and his daughter were great friends. When he died (she was nineteen) they say she screamed once, like a banshee, and dropped to the floor.

After they had straightened out the muddle of books in Ed Sheehan’s gritty, dusty little office Terry turned her piano-playing talent to practical account. At twenty-one she was still playing at the Bijou, and into her face was creeping the first hint of that look of sophistication which comes from daily contact with the artificial world of the footlights. It is the look of those who must make believe as a business, and are a-weary. You see it developed into its highest degree in the face of a veteran comedian. It is the thing that gives the look of utter pathos and tragedy to the relaxed expression of a circus clown.

There are, in a small, Mid-West town like Wetona, just two kinds of girls. Those who go down town Saturday nights, and those who don’t. Terry, if she had not been busy with her job at the Bijou, would have come in the first group. She craved excitement. There was little chance to satisfy such craving in Wetona, but she managed to find certain means. The travelling men from the Burke House just across the street used to drop in at the Bijou for an evening’s entertainment. They usually sat well toward the front, and Terry’s expert playing, and the gloss of her black hair, and her piquant profile as she sometimes looked up toward the stage for a signal from one of the performers, caught their fancy, and held it.

Terry did not accept their attentions promiscuously. She was too decent a girl for that. But she found herself, at the end of a year or two, with a rather large acquaintance among these peripatetic gentlemen. You occasionally saw one of them strolling home with her. Sometimes she went driving with one of them of a Sunday afternoon. And she rather enjoyed taking Sunday dinner at the Burke Hotel with a favoured friend. She thought those small-town hotel Sunday dinners the last word in elegance. The roast course was always accompanied by an aqueous, semi-frozen concoction which the bill of fare revealed as Roman punch. It added a royal touch to the repast, even when served with roast pork. I don’t say that any of these Lotharios snatched a kiss during a Sunday afternoon drive. Or that Terry slapped him promptly. But either seems extremely likely.

Terry was twenty-two when Orville Platt, making his initial Wisconsin trip for the wholesale grocery house he represented, first beheld Terry’s piquant Irish profile, and heard her deft manipulation of the keys. Orville had the fat man’s sense of rhythm and love of music. He had a buttery tenor voice, too, of which he was rather proud.

He spent three days in Wetona that first trip, and every evening saw him at the Bijou, first row, centre. He stayed through two shows each time, and before he had been there fifteen minutes Terry was conscious of him through the back of her head. In fact I think that, in all innocence, she rather played up to him. Orville Platt paid no more heed to the stage, and what was occurring thereon, than if it had not been. He sat looking at Terry, and waggling his head in time to the music. Not that Terry was a beauty. But she was one of those immaculately clean types. That look of fragrant cleanliness was her chief charm. Her clear, smooth skin contributed to it, and the natural pencilling of her eyebrows. But the thing that accented it, and gave it a last touch, was the way in which her black hair came down in a little point just in the centre of her forehead, where hair meets brow. It grew to form what is known as a cow-lick. (A prettier name for it is widow’s peak.) Your eye lighted on it, pleased, and from it travelled its gratified way down her white temples, past her little ears, to the smooth black coil at the nape of her neck. It was a trip that rested you.

At the end of the last performance on the second night of his visit to the Bijou, Orville waited until the audience had begun to file out. Then he leaned forward over the rail that separated orchestra from audience.

“Could you,” he said, his tones dulcet, “could you oblige me with the name of that last piece you played?”

Terry was stacking her music. “George!” she called, to the drum. “Gentleman wants to know the name of that last piece.” And prepared to leave.

“‘My Georgia Crackerjack’,” said the laconic drum.

Orville Platt took a hasty side-step in the direction of the door toward which Terry was headed. “It’s a pretty thing,” he said, fervently. “An awful pretty thing. Thanks. It’s beautiful.”

Terry flung a last insult at him over her shoulder: “Don’t thank _me_ for it. I didn’t write it.”

Orville Platt did not go across the street to the hotel. He wandered up Cass street, and into the ten-o’clock quiet of Main street, and down as far as the park and back. “Pretty as a pink! And play!… And good, too. Good.”

A fat man in love.

At the end of six months they were married. Terry was surprised into it. Not that she was not fond of him. She was; and grateful to him, as well. For, pretty as she was, no man had ever before asked Terry to be his wife. They had made love to her. They had paid court to her. They had sent her large boxes of stale drug-store chocolates, and called her endearing names as they made cautious declaration such as:

“I’ve known a lot of girls, but you’ve got something different. I don’t know. You’ve got so much sense. A fellow can chum around with you. Little pal.”

Orville’s headquarters were Wetona. They rented a comfortable, seven-room house in a comfortable, middle-class neighbourhood, and Terry dropped the red velvet turbans and went in for picture hats and paradise aigrettes. Orville bought her a piano whose tone was so good that to her ear, accustomed to the metallic discords of the Bijou instrument, it sounded out of tune. She played a great deal at first, but unconsciously she missed the sharp spat of applause that used to follow her public performance. She would play a piece, brilliantly, and then her hands would drop to her lap. And the silence of her own sitting room would fall flat on her ears. It was better on the evenings when Orville was home. He sang, in his throaty, fat man’s tenor, to Terry’s expert accompaniment.

“This is better than playing for those bum actors, isn’t it, hon?” And he would pinch her ear.

“Sure”–listlessly.

But after the first year she became accustomed to what she termed private life. She joined an afternoon sewing club, and was active in the ladies’ branch of the U.C.T. She developed a knack at cooking, too, and Orville, after a week or ten days of hotel fare in small Wisconsin towns, would come home to sea-foam biscuits, and real soup, and honest pies and cake. Sometimes, in the midst of an appetising meal he would lay down his knife and fork and lean back in his chair, and regard the cool and unruffled Terry with a sort of reverence in his eyes. Then he would get up, and come around to the other side of the table, and tip her pretty face up to his.

“I’ll bet I’ll wake up, some day, and find out it’s all a dream. You know this kind of thing doesn’t really happen–not to a dub like me.”

One year; two; three; four. Routine. A little boredom. Some impatience. She began to find fault with the very things she had liked in him: his super-neatness; his fondness for dashing suit patterns; his throaty tenor; his worship of her. And the flap. Oh, above all, that flap! That little, innocent, meaningless mannerism that made her tremble with nervousness. She hated it so that she could not trust herself to speak of it to him. That was the trouble. Had she spoken of it, laughingly or in earnest, before it became an obsession with her, that hideous breakfast quarrel, with its taunts, and revilings, and open hate, might never have come to pass. For that matter, any one of those foreign fellows with the guttural names and the psychoanalytical minds could have located her trouble in one _seance_.

Terry Platt herself didn’t know what was the matter with her. She would have denied that anything was wrong. She didn’t even throw her hands above her head and shriek: “I want to live! I want to live! I want to live!” like a lady in a play. She only knew she was sick of sewing at the Wetona West-End Red Cross shop; sick of marketing, of home comforts, of Orville, of the flap.

Orville, you may remember, left at 8.19. The 11.23 bore Terry Chicagoward. She had left the house as it was–beds unmade, rooms unswept, breakfast table uncleared. She intended never to come back.

Now and then a picture of the chaos she had left behind would flash across her order-loving mind. The spoon on the table-cloth. Orville’s pajamas dangling over the bathroom chair. The coffee-pot on the gas stove.

“Pooh! What do I care?”

In her pocketbook she had a tidy sum saved out of the housekeeping money. She was naturally thrifty, and Orville had never been niggardly. Her meals when Orville was on the road, had been those sketchy, haphazard affairs with which women content themselves when their household is manless. At noon she went into the dining car and ordered a flaunting little repast of chicken salad and asparagus, and Neapolitan ice cream. The men in the dining car eyed her speculatively and with appreciation. Then their glance dropped to the third finger of her left hand, and wandered away. She had meant to remove it. In fact, she had taken it off and dropped it into her bag. But her hand felt so queer, so unaccustomed, so naked, that she had found herself slipping the narrow band on again, and her thumb groped for it, gratefully.

It was almost five o’clock when she reached Chicago. She felt no uncertainty or bewilderment. She had been in Chicago three or four times since her marriage. She went to a down town hotel. It was too late, she told herself, to look for a more inexpensive room that night. When she had tidied herself she went out. The things she did were the childish, aimless things that one does who finds herself in possession of sudden liberty. She walked up State Street, and stared in the windows; came back, turned into Madison, passed a bright little shop in the window of which taffy–white and gold–was being wound endlessly and fascinatingly about a double-jointed machine. She went in and bought a sackful, and wandered on down the street, munching.

She had supper at one of those white-tiled sarcophagi that emblazon Chicago’s down town side streets. It had been her original intention to dine in state in the rose-and-gold dining room of her hotel. She had even thought daringly of lobster. But at the last moment she recoiled from the idea of dining alone in that wilderness of tables so obviously meant for two.

After her supper she went to a picture show. She was amazed to find there, instead of the accustomed orchestra, a pipe-organ that panted and throbbed and rumbled over lugubrious classics. The picture was about a faithless wife. Terry left in the middle of it.

She awoke next morning at seven, as usual, started up wildly, looked around, and dropped back. Nothing to get up for. The knowledge did not fill her with a rush of relief. She would have her breakfast in bed! She telephoned for it, languidly. But when it came she got up and ate it from the table, after all. Terry was the kind of woman to whom a pink gingham all-over apron, and a pink dust-cap are ravishingly becoming at seven o’clock in the morning. That sort of woman congenitally cannot enjoy her breakfast in bed.

That morning she found a fairly comfortable room, more within her means, on the north side in the boarding house district. She unpacked and hung up her clothes and drifted down town again, idly. It was noon when she came to the corner of State and Madison streets. It was a maelstrom that caught her up, and buffeted her about, and tossed her helplessly this way and that. The corner of Broadway and Forty-second streets has been exploited in song and story as the world’s most hazardous human whirlpool. I’ve negotiated that corner. I’ve braved the square in front of the American Express Company’s office in Paris, June, before the War. I’ve crossed the Strand at 11 p.m. when the theatre crowds are just out. And to my mind the corner of State and Madison streets between twelve and one, mid-day, makes any one of these dizzy spots look bosky, sylvan, and deserted.

The thousands jostled Terry, and knocked her hat awry, and dug her with unheeding elbows, and stepped on her feet.

“Say, look here!” she said, once futilely. They did not stop to listen. State and Madison has no time for Terrys from Wetona. It goes its way, pellmell. If it saw Terry at all it saw her only as a prettyish person, in the wrong kind of suit and hat, with a bewildered, resentful look on her face.

Terry drifted on down the west side of State Street, with the hurrying crowd. State and Monroe. A sound came to Terry’s ears. A sound familiar, beloved. To her ear, harassed with the roar and crash, with the shrill scream of the crossing policemen’s whistle, with the hiss of feet shuffling on cement, it was a celestial strain. She looked up, toward the sound. A great second-story window opened wide to the street. In it a girl at a piano, and a man, red-faced, singing through a megaphone. And on a flaring red and green sign:

BERNIE GOTTSCHALK’S MUSIC HOUSE!

COME IN! HEAR BERNIE GOTTSCHALK’S LATEST HIT! THE HEART-THROB SONG THAT HAS GOT ‘EM ALL! THE SONG THAT MADE THE KAISER CRAWL!

“_I COME FROM PARIS, ILLINOIS, BUT OH! YOU PARIS, FRANCE!

I USED TO WEAR BLUE OVERALLS BUT
NOW ITS KHAKI PANTS_.”

COME IN! COME IN!

Terry accepted.

She followed the sound of the music. Around the corner. Up a little flight of stairs. She entered the realm of Euterpe; Euterpe with her back hair frizzed; Euterpe with her flowing white robe replaced by soiled white boots that failed to touch the hem of an empire-waisted blue serge; Euterpe abandoning her lyre for jazz. She sat at the piano, a red-haired young lady whose familiarity with the piano had bred contempt. Nothing else could have accounted for her treatment of it. Her fingers, tipped with sharp-pointed grey and glistening nails, clawed the keys with a dreadful mechanical motion. There were stacks of music-sheets on counters, and shelves, and dangling from overhead wires. The girl at the piano never ceased playing. She played mostly by request. A prospective purchaser would mumble something in the ear of one of the clerks. The fat man with the megaphone would bawl out, “‘Hicky Bloo!’ Miss Ryan.” And Miss Ryan would oblige. She made a hideous rattle and crash and clatter of sound compared to which an Indian tom-tom would have seemed as dulcet as the strumming of a lute in a lady’s boudoir.

Terry joined the crowds about the counter. The girl at the piano was not looking at the keys. Her head was screwed around over her left shoulder and as she played she was holding forth animatedly to a girl friend who had evidently dropped in from some store or office during the lunch hour. Now and again the fat man paused in his vocal efforts to reprimand her for her slackness. She paid no heed. There was something gruesome, uncanny, about the way her fingers went their own way over the defenceless keys. Her conversation with the frowzy little girl went on.

“Wha’d he say?” (Over her shoulder).

“Oh, he laffed.”

“Well, didja go?”

“Me! Well, whutya think I yam, anyway?”

“I woulda took a chanst.”

The fat man rebelled.

“Look here! Get busy! What are you paid for? Talkin’ or playin’? Huh?”

The person at the piano, openly reproved thus before her friend, lifted her uninspired hands from the keys and spake. When she had finished she rose.

“But you can’t leave now,” the megaphone man argued. “Right in the rush hour.”

“I’m gone,” said the girl. The fat man looked about, helplessly. He gazed at the abandoned piano, as though it must go on of its own accord. Then at the crowd. “Where’s Miss Schwimmer?” he demanded of a clerk.

“Out to lunch.”

Terry pushed her way to the edge of the counter and leaned over. “I can play for you,” she said.

The man looked at her. “Sight?”

“Yes.”

“Come on.”

Terry went around to the other side of the counter, took off her hat and coat, rubbed her hands together briskly, sat down and began to play. The crowd edged closer.

It is a curious study, this noonday crowd that gathers to sate its music-hunger on the scraps vouchsafed it by Bernie Gottschalk’s Music House. Loose-lipped, slope-shouldered young men with bad complexions and slender hands. Girls whose clothes are an unconscious satire on present-day fashions. On their faces, as they listen to the music, is a look of peace and dreaming. They stand about, smiling a wistful half smile. It is much the same expression that steals over the face of a smoker who has lighted his after-dinner cigar, or of a drug victim who is being lulled by his opiate. The music seems to satisfy a something within them. Faces dull, eyes lustreless, they listen in a sort of trance.

Terry played on. She played as Terry Sheehan used to play. She played as no music hack at Bernie Gottschalk’s had ever played before. The crowd swayed a little to the sound of it. Some kept time with little jerks of the shoulder–the little hitching movement of the rag-time dancer whose blood is filled with the fever of syncopation. Even the crowd flowing down State Street must have caught the rhythm of it, for the room soon filled.

At two o’clock the crowd began to thin. Business would be slack, now, until five, when it would again pick up until closing time at six.

The fat vocalist put down his megaphone, wiped his forehead, and regarded Terry with a warm blue eye. He had just finished singing “I’ve Wandered Far from Dear Old Mother’s Knee.” (Bernie Gottschalk Inc. Chicago. New York. You can’t get bit with a Gottschalk hit. 15 cents each.)

“Girlie,” he said, emphatically, “You sure–can–play!” He came over to her at the piano and put a stubby hand on her shoulder. “Yessir! Those little fingers–“

Terry just turned her head to look down her nose at the moist hand resting on her shoulder. “Those little fingers are going to meet your face–suddenly–if you don’t move on.”

“Who gave you your job?” demanded the fat man.

“Nobody. I picked it myself. You can have it if you want it.”

“Can’t you take a joke?”

“Label yours.”

As the crowd dwindled she played less feverishly, but there was nothing slipshod about her performance. The chubby songster found time to proffer brief explanations in asides. “They want the patriotic stuff. It used to be all that Hawaiian dope, and Wild Irish Rose junk, and songs about wanting to go back to every place from Dixie to Duluth. But now seems it’s all these here flag raisers. Honestly, I’m so sick of ’em I got a notion to enlist to get away from it.”

Terry eyed him with, withering briefness. “A little training wouldn’t ruin your figure.”

She had never objected to Orville’s _embonpoint_. But then, Orville was a different sort of fat man; pink-cheeked, springy, immaculate.

At four o’clock, as she was in the chorus of “Isn’t There Another Joan of Arc?” a melting masculine voice from the other side of the counter said, “Pardon me. What’s that you’re playing?”

Terry told him. She did not look up.

“I wouldn’t have known it. Played like that–a second Marseillaise. If the words–what are the words? Let me see a–“

“Show the gentleman a ‘Joan’,” Terry commanded briefly, over her shoulder. The fat man laughed a wheezy laugh. Terry glanced around, still playing, and encountered the gaze of two melting masculine eyes that matched the melting masculine voice. The songster waved a hand uniting Terry and the eyes in informal introduction.

“Mr. Leon Sammett, the gentleman who sings the Gottschalk songs wherever songs are heard. And Mrs.–that is–and Mrs. Sammett–“

Terry turned. A sleek, swarthy world-old young man with the fashionable concave torso, and alarmingly convex bone-rimmed glasses. Through them his darkly luminous gaze glowed upon Terry. To escape their warmth she sent her own gaze past him to encounter the arctic stare of the large blonde person who had been included so lamely in the introduction. And at that the frigidity of that stare softened, melted, dissolved.

“Why Terry Sheehan! What in the world!”

Terry’s eyes bored beneath the layers of flabby fat. “It’s–why, it’s Ruby Watson, isn’t it? Eccentric Song and Dance–“

She glanced at the concave young man and faltered. He was not Jim, of the Bijou days. From him her eyes leaped back to the fur-bedecked splendour of the woman. The plump face went so painfully red that the makeup stood out on it, a distinct layer, like thin ice covering flowing water. As she surveyed that bulk Terry realised that while Ruby might still claim eccentricity, her song and dance days were over. “That’s ancient history, m’dear. I haven’t been working for three years. What’re you doing in this joint? I’d heard you’d done well for yourself. That you were married.”

“I am. That is I–well, I am. I–“

At that the dark young man leaned over and patted Terry’s hand that lay on the counter. He smiled. His own hand was incredibly slender, long, and tapering.

“That’s all right,” he assured her, and smiled. “You two girls can have a reunion later. What I want to know is can you play by ear?”

“Yes, but–“

He leaned far over the counter. “I knew it the minute I heard you play. You’ve got the touch. Now listen. See if you can get this, and fake the bass.”

He fixed his sombre and hypnotic eyes on Terry. His mouth screwed up into a whistle. The tune–a tawdry but haunting little melody–came through his lips. And Terry’s quick ear sensed that every note was flat. She turned back to the piano. “Of course you know you flatted every note,” she said.

This time it was the blonde woman who laughed, and the man who flushed. Terry cocked her head just a little to one side, like a knowing bird, looked up into space beyond the piano top, and played the lilting little melody with charm and fidelity. The dark young man followed her with a wagging of the head and little jerks of both outspread hands. His expression was beatific, enraptured. He hummed a little under his breath and any one who was music wise would have known that he was just a half-beat behind her all the way.

When she had finished he sighed deeply, ecstatically. He bent his lean frame over the counter and, despite his swart colouring, seemed to glitter upon her–his eyes, his teeth, his very finger-nails.

“Something led me here. I never come up on Tuesdays. But something–“

“You was going to complain,” put in his lady, heavily, “about that Teddy Sykes at the Palace Gardens singing the same songs this week that you been boosting at the Inn.”

He put up a vibrant, peremptory hand. “Bah! What does that matter now! What does anything matter now! Listen Miss–ah–Miss?–“

“Pl–Sheehan. Terry Sheehan.”

He gazed off a moment into space. “H’m. ‘Leon Sammett in Songs. Miss Terry Sheehan at the Piano.’ That doesn’t sound bad. Now listen, Miss Sheehan. I’m singing down at the University Inn. The Gottschalk song hits. I guess you know my work. But I want to talk to you, private. It’s something to your interest. I go on down at the Inn at six. Will you come and have a little something with Ruby and me? Now?”

“Now?” faltered Terry, somewhat helplessly. Things seemed to be moving rather swiftly for her, accustomed as she was to the peaceful routine of the past four years.

“Get your hat. It’s your life chance. Wait till you see your name in two-foot electrics over the front of every big-time house in the country. You’ve got music in you. Tie to me and you’re made.” He turned to the woman beside him. “Isn’t that so, Rube?”

“Sure. Look at _me_!” One would not have thought there could be so much subtle vindictiveness in a fat blonde.

Sammett whipped out a watch. “Just three-quarters of an hour. Come on, girlie.”

His conversation had been conducted in an urgent undertone, with side glances at the fat man with the megaphone. Terry approached him now.

“I’m leaving now,” she said.

“Oh, no you’re not. Six o’clock is your quitting time.”

In which he touched the Irish in Terry. “Any time I quit is my quitting time.” She went in quest of hat and coat much as the girl had done whose place she had taken early in the day. The fat man followed her, protesting. Terry, pinning on her hat tried to ignore him. But he laid one plump hand on her arm and kept it there, though she tried to shake him off.

“Now, listen to me. That boy wouldn’t mind putting his heel on your face if he thought it would bring him up a step. I know’m. Y’see that walking stick he’s carrying? Well, compared to the yellow stripe that’s in him, that cane is a lead pencil. He’s a song tout, that’s all he is.” Then, more feverishly, as Terry tried to pull away: “Wait a minute. You’re a decent girl. I want to–Why, he can’t even sing a note without you give it to him first. He can put a song over, yes. But how? By flashin’ that toothy grin, of his and talkin’ every word of it. Don’t you–“

But Terry freed herself with a final jerk and whipped around the counter. The two, who had been talking together in an undertone, turned to welcome her. “We’ve got a half hour. Come on. It’s just over to Clark and up a block or so.”

If you know Chicago at all, you know the University Inn, that gloriously intercollegiate institution which welcomes any graduate of any school of experience, and guarantees a post-graduate course in less time than any similar haven of knowledge. Down a flight of stairs and into the unwonted quiet that reigns during the hour of low potentiality, between five and six, the three went, and seated themselves at a table in an obscure corner. A waiter brought them things in little glasses, though no order had been given. The woman who had been Ruby Watson was so silent as to be almost wordless. But the man talked rapidly. He talked well, too. The same quality that enabled him, voiceless though he was, to boost a song to success, was making his plea sound plausible in Terry’s ears now.

“I’ve got to go and make up in a few minutes. So get this. I’m not going to stick down in this basement eating house forever. I’ve got too much talent. If I only had a voice–I mean a singing voice. But I haven’t. But then, neither has Georgie Cohan, and I can’t see that it’s wrecked his life any. Look at Elsie Janis! But she sings. And they like it! Now listen. I’ve got a song. It’s my own. That bit you played for me up at Gottschalk’s is part of the chorus. But it’s the words that’ll go big. They’re great. It’s an aviation song, see? Airship stuff. They’re yelling that it’s the airyoplanes that’re going to win this war. Well, I’ll help ’em. This song is going to put the aviator where he belongs. It’s going to be the big song of the war. It’s going to make ‘Tipperary’ sound like a Moody and Sankey hymn. It’s the–“

Ruby lifted her heavy-lidded eyes and sent him a meaning look. “Get down to business, Leon. I’ll tell her how good you are while you’re making up.”

He shot her a malignant glance, but took her advice. “Now what I’ve been looking for for years is somebody who has got the music knack to give me the accompaniment just a quarter of a jump ahead of my voice, see? I can follow like a lamb, but I’ve got to have that feeler first. It’s more than a knack. It’s a gift. And you’ve got it. I know it when I see it. I want to get away from this cabaret thing. There’s nothing in it for a man of my talent. I’m gunning for vaudeville. But they won’t book me without a tryout. And when they hear my voice they–Well, if me and you work together we can fool ’em. The song’s great. And my makeup’s one of these av-iation costumes to go with the song, see? Pants tight in the knee and baggy on the hips. And a coat with one of those full skirt whaddyoucall’ems–“

“Peplums,” put in Ruby, placidly.

“Sure. And the girls’ll be wild about it. And the words!” he began to sing, gratingly off-key:

“Put on your sky clothes,
Put on your fly clothes
And take a trip with me.
We’ll sail so high
Up in the sky
We’ll drop a bomb from Mercury.”

“Why, that’s awfully cute!” exclaimed Terry. Until now her opinion of Mr. Sammett’s talents had not been on a level with his.

“Yeh, but wait till you hear the second verse. That’s only part of the chorus. You see, he’s supposed to be talking to a French girl. He says:

I’ll parlez-vous in Francais plain, You’ll answer, ‘_Cher Americain_,
We’ll both. . . . . . . . . . .”

The six o’clock lights blazed up, suddenly. A sad-looking group of men trailed in and made for a corner where certain bulky, shapeless bundles were soon revealed as those glittering and tortuous instruments which go to make a jazz band.

“You better go, Lee. The crowd comes in awful early now, with all those buyers in town.”

Both hands on the table he half rose, reluctantly, still talking. “I’ve got three other songs. They make Gottschalk’s stuff look sick. All I want’s a chance. What I want you to do is accompaniment. On the stage, see? Grand piano. And a swell set. I haven’t quite made up my mind to it. But a kind of an army camp room, see? And maybe you dressed as Liberty. Anyway, it’ll be new, and a knock-out. If only we can get away with the voice thing. Say, if Eddie Foy, all those years never had a–“

The band opened with a terrifying clash of cymbal, and thump of drum. “Back at the end of my first turn,” he said as he fled. Terry followed his lithe, electric figure. She turned to meet the heavy-lidded gaze of the woman seated opposite. She relaxed, then, and sat back with a little sigh. “Well! If he talks that way to the managers I don’t see–“

Ruby laughed a mirthless little laugh. “Talk doesn’t get it over with the managers, honey. You’ve got to deliver.”

“Well, but he’s–that song _is_ a good one. I don’t say it’s as good as he thinks it is, but it’s good.”

“Yes,” admitted the woman, grudgingly, “it’s good.”

“Well, then?”

The woman beckoned a waiter; he nodded and vanished, and reappeared with a glass that was twin to the one she had just emptied. “Does he look like he knew French? Or could make a rhyme?”

“But didn’t he? Doesn’t he?”

“The words were written by a little French girl who used to skate down here last winter, when the craze was on. She was stuck on a Chicago kid who went over to fly for the French.”

“But the music?”

“There was a Russian girl who used to dance in the cabaret and she–“

Terry’s head came up with a characteristic little jerk. “I don’t believe it!”

“Better.” She gazed at Terry with the drowsy look that was so different from the quick, clear glance of the Ruby Watson who used to dance so nimbly in the Old Bijou days. “What’d you and your husband quarrel about, Terry?”

Terry was furious to feel herself flushing. “Oh, nothing. He just–I–it was–Say, how did you know we’d quarrelled?”

And suddenly all the fat woman’s apathy dropped from her like a garment and some of the old sparkle and animation illumined her heavy face. She pushed her glass aside and leaned forward on her folded arms, so that her face was close to Terry’s.

“Terry Sheehan, I know you’ve quarrelled, and I know just what it was about. Oh, I don’t mean the very thing it was about; but the kind of thing. I’m going to do something for you, Terry, that I wouldn’t take the trouble to do for most women. But I guess I ain’t had all the softness knocked out of me yet, though it’s a wonder. And I guess I remember too plain the decent kid you was in the old days. What was the name of that little small-time house me and Jim used to play? Bijou, that’s it; Bijou.”

The band struck up a new tune. Leon Sammett–slim, sleek, lithe in his evening clothes–appeared with a little fair girl in pink chiffon. The woman reached across the table and put one pudgy, jewelled hand on Terry’s arm. “He’ll be through in ten minutes. Now listen to me. I left Jim four years ago, and there hasn’t been a minute since then, day or night, when I wouldn’t have crawled back to him on my hands and knees if I could. But I couldn’t. He wouldn’t have me now. How could he? How do I know you’ve quarrelled? I can see it in your eyes. They look just the way mine have felt for four years, that’s how. I met up with this boy, and there wasn’t anybody to do the turn for me that I’m trying to do for you. Now get this. I left Jim because when he ate corn on the cob he always closed his eyes and it drove me wild. Don’t laugh.”

“I’m not laughing,” said Terry.

“Women are like that. One night–we was playing Fond du Lac; I remember just as plain–we was eating supper and Jim reached for one of those big yellow ears, and buttered and salted it, and me kind of hanging on to the edge of the table with my nails. Seemed to me if he shut his eyes when he put his teeth into that ear of corn I’d scream. And he did. And I screamed. And that’s all.”

Terry sat staring at her with a wide-eyed stare, like a sleep walker. Then she wet her lips, slowly. “But that’s almost the very–“

“Kid, go on back home. I don’t know whether it’s too late or not, but go anyway. If you’ve lost him I suppose it ain’t any more than you deserve, but I hope to God you don’t get your desserts this time. He’s almost through. If he sees you going he can’t quit in the middle of his song to stop you. He’ll know I put you wise, and he’ll prob’ly half kill me for it. But it’s worth it. You get.”

And Terry–dazed, shaking, but grateful–fled. Down the noisy aisle, up the stairs, to the street. Back to her rooming house. Out again, with her suitcase, and into the right railroad station somehow, at last. Not another Wetona train until midnight. She shrank into a remote corner of the waiting room and there she huddled until midnight watching the entrances like a child who is fearful of ghosts in the night.

The hands of the station clock seemed fixed and immovable. The hour between eleven and twelve was endless. She was on the train. It was almost morning. It was morning. Dawn was breaking. She was home! She had the house key clutched tightly in her hand long before she turned Schroeder’s corner. Suppose he had come home! Suppose he had jumped a town and come home ahead of his schedule. They had quarrelled once before, and he had done that.

Up the front steps. Into the house. Not a sound. She stood there a moment in the early morning half-light. She peered into the dining room. The table, with its breakfast debris, was as she had left it. In the kitchen the coffee pot stood on the gas stove. She was home. She was safe. She ran up the stairs, got out of her clothes and into crisp gingham morning things. She flung open windows everywhere. Down-stairs once more she plunged into an orgy of cleaning. Dishes, table, stove, floor, rugs. She washed, scoured, flapped, swabbed, polished. By eight o’clock she had done the work that would ordinarily have taken until noon. The house was shining, orderly, and redolent of soapsuds.

During all this time she had been listening, listening, with her sub-conscious ear. Listening for something she had refused to name definitely in her mind, but listening, just the same; waiting.

And then, at eight o’clock, it came. The rattle of a key in the lock. The boom of the front door. Firm footsteps.

He did not go to meet her, and she did not go to meet him. They came together and were in each other’s arms. She was weeping.

“Now, now, old girl. What’s there to cry about? Don’t, honey; don’t. It’s all right.”

She raised her head then, to look at him. How fresh, and rosy, and big he seemed, after that little sallow, yellow restaurant rat.

“How did you get here? How did you happen–?”

“Jumped all the way from Ashland. Couldn’t get a sleeper, so I sat up all night. I had to come back and square things with you, Terry. My mind just wasn’t on my work. I kept thinking how I’d talked–how I’d talked–“

“Oh, Orville, don’t! I can’t bear–Have you had your breakfast?”

“Why, no. The train was an hour late. You know that Ashland train.”

But she was out of his arms and making for the kitchen. “You go and clean up. I’ll have hot biscuits and everything in fifteen minutes. You poor boy. No breakfast!”

She made good her promise. It could not have been more than twenty minutes later when he was buttering his third feathery, golden brown biscuit. But she had eaten nothing. She watched him, and listened, and again her eyes were sombre, but for a different reason. He broke open his egg. His elbow came up just a fraction of an inch. Then he remembered, and flushed like a schoolboy, and brought it down again, carefully. And at that she gave a little tremulous cry, and rushed around the table to him.

“Oh, Orville!” She took the offending elbow in her two arms, and bent and kissed the rough coat sleeve.

“Why, Terry! Don’t, honey. Don’t!”

“Oh, Orville, listen–“

“Yes.”

“Listen, Orville–“

“I’m listening, Terry.”

“I’ve got something to tell you. There’s something you’ve got to know.”

“Yes, I know it, Terry. I knew you’d out with it, pretty soon, if I just waited.”

She lifted an amazed face from his shoulder then, and stared at him. “But how could you know? You couldn’t! How could you?”

He patted her shoulder then, gently. “I can always tell. When you have something on your mind you always take up a spoon of coffee, and look at it, and kind of joggle it back and forth in the spoon, and then dribble it back into the cup again, without once tasting it. It used to get me nervous when we were first married watching you. But now I know it just means you’re worried about something, and I wait, and pretty soon–“

“Oh, Orville!” she cried, then. “Oh, Orville!”

“Now, Terry. Just spill it, hon. Just spill it to daddy. And you’ll feel better.”

VI

THE WOMAN WHO TRIED TO BE GOOD

Before she tried to be a good woman she had been a very bad woman–so bad that she could trail her wonderful apparel up and down Main Street, from the Elm Tree Bakery to the railroad tracks, without once having a man doff his hat to her or a woman bow. You passed her on the street with a surreptitious glance, though she was well worth looking at–in her furs and laces and plumes. She had the only full-length sealskin coat in our town, and Ganz’ shoe store sent to Chicago for her shoes. Hers were the miraculously small feet you frequently see in stout women.

Usually she walked alone; but on rare occasions, especially round Christmas time, she might have been seen accompanied by some silent, dull-eyed, stupid-looking girl, who would follow her dumbly in and out of stores, stopping now and then to admire a cheap comb or a chain set with flashy imitation stones–or, queerly enough, a doll with yellow hair and blue eyes and very pink cheeks. But, alone or in company, her appearance in the stores of our town was the signal for a sudden jump in the cost of living. The storekeepers mulcted her; and she knew it and paid in silence, for she was of the class that has no redress. She owned the House With the Closed Shutters, near the freight depot–did Blanche Devine. And beneath her silks and laces and furs there was a scarlet letter on her breast.

In a larger town than ours she would have passed unnoticed. She did not look like a bad woman. Of course she used too much perfumed white powder, and as she passed you caught the oversweet breath of a certain heavy scent. Then, too, her diamond eardrops would have made any woman’s features look hard; but her plump face, in spite of its heaviness, wore an expression of good-humoured intelligence, and her eyeglasses gave her somehow a look of respectability. We do not associate vice with eyeglasses. So in a large city she would have passed for a well-dressed prosperous, comfortable wife and mother, who was in danger of losing her figure from an overabundance of good living; but with us she was a town character, like Old Man Givins, the drunkard, or the weak-minded Binns girl. When she passed the drug-store corner there would be a sniggering among the vacant-eyed loafers idling there, and they would leer at each other and jest in undertones.

So, knowing Blanche Devine as we did, there was something resembling a riot in one of our most respectable neighbourhoods when it was learned that she had given up her interest in the house near the freight depot and was going to settle down in the white cottage on the corner and be good. All the husbands in the block, urged on by righteously indignant wives, dropped in on Alderman Mooney after supper to see if the thing could not be stopped. The fourth of the protesting husbands to arrive was the Very Young Husband, who lived next door to the corner cottage that Blanche Devine had bought. The Very Young Husband had a Very Young Wife, and they were the joint owners of Snooky. Snooky was three-going-on-four, and looked something like an angel–only healthier and with grimier hands. The whole neighbourhood borrowed her and tried to spoil her; but Snooky would not spoil.

Alderman Mooney was down in the cellar fooling with the furnace. He was in his furnace overalls–a short black pipe in his mouth. Three protesting husbands had just left. As the Very Young Husband, following Mrs. Mooney’s directions, cautiously descended the cellar stairs, Alderman Mooney looked up from his tinkering. He peered through a haze of pipe-smoke.

“Hello!” he called, and waved the haze away with his open palm. “Come on down! Been tinkering with this blamed furnace since supper. She don’t draw like she ought. ‘Long toward spring a furnace always gets balky. How many tons you used this winter?”

“Oh–ten,” said the Very Young Husband shortly. Alderman Mooney considered it thoughtfully. The Young Husband leaned up against the side of the cistern, his hands in his pockets. “Say, Mooney, is that right about Blanche Devine’s having bought the house on the corner?”

“You’re the fourth man that’s been in to ask me that this evening. I’m expecting the rest of the block before bedtime. She’s bought it all right.”

The Young Husband flushed and kicked at a piece of coal with the toe of his boot.

“Well, it’s a darned shame!” he began hotly. “Jen was ready to cry at supper. This’ll be a fine neighbourhood for Snooky to grow up in! What’s a woman like that want to come into a respectable street for anyway? I own my home and pay my taxes–“

Alderman Mooney looked up.

“So does she,” he interrupted. “She’s going to improve the place–paint it, and put in a cellar and a furnace, and build a porch, and lay a cement walk all round.”

The Young Husband took his hands out of his pockets in order to emphasize his remarks with gestures.

“What’s that got to do with it? I don’t care if she puts in diamonds for windows and sets out Italian gardens and a terrace with peacocks on it. You’re the alderman of this ward, aren’t you? Well, it was up to you to keep her out of this block! You could have fixed it with an injunction or something. I’m going to get up a petition–that’s what I’m going–“

Alderman Mooney closed the furnace door with a bang that drowned the rest of the threat. He turned the draft in a pipe overhead and brushed his sooty palms briskly together like one who would put an end to a profitless conversation.

“She’s bought the house,” he said mildly, “and paid for it. And it’s hers. She’s got a right to live in this neighbourhood as long as she acts respectable.”

The Very Young Husband laughed.

“She won’t last! They never do.”

Alderman Mooney had taken his pipe out of his mouth and was rubbing his thumb over the smooth bowl, looking down at it with unseeing eyes. On his face was a queer look–the look of one who is embarrassed because he is about to say something honest.

“Look here! I want to tell you something: I happened to be up in the mayor’s office the day Blanche signed for the place. She had to go through a lot of red tape before she got it–had quite a time of it, she did! And say, kid, that woman ain’t so–bad.”

The Very Young Husband exclaimed impatiently:

“Oh, don’t give me any of that, Mooney! Blanche Devine’s a town character. Even the kids know what she is. If she’s got religion or something, and wants to quit and be decent, why doesn’t she go to another town–Chicago or some place–where nobody knows her?”

That motion of Alderman Mooney’s thumb against the smooth pipebowl stopped. He looked up slowly.

“That’s what I said–the mayor too. But Blanche Devine said she wanted to try it here. She said this was home to her. Funny–ain’t it? Said she wouldn’t be fooling anybody here. They know her. And if she moved away, she said, it’d leak out some way sooner or later. It does, she said. Always! Seems she wants to live like–well, like other women. She put it like this: She says she hasn’t got religion, or any of that. She says she’s no different than she was when she was twenty. She says that for the last ten years the ambition of her life has been to be able to go into a grocery store and ask the price of, say, celery; and, if the clerk charged her ten when it ought to be seven, to be able to sass him with a regular piece of her mind–and then sail out and trade somewhere else until he saw that she didn’t have to stand anything from storekeepers, any more than any other woman that did her own marketing. She’s a smart woman, Blanche is! She’s saved her money. God knows I ain’t taking her part–exactly; but she talked a little, and the mayor and me got a little of her history.”

A sneer appeared on the face of the Very Young Husband. He had been known before he met Jen as a rather industrious sower of that seed known as wild oats. He knew a thing or two, did the Very Young Husband, in spite of his youth! He always fussed when Jen wore even a V-necked summer gown on the street.

“Oh, she wasn’t playing for sympathy,” west on Alderman Mooney in answer to the sneer. “She said she’d always paid her way and always expected to. Seems her husband left her without a cent when she was eighteen–with a baby. She worked for four dollars a week in a cheap eating house. The two of ’em couldn’t live on that. Then the baby–“

“Good night!” said the Very Young Husband. “I suppose Mrs. Mooney’s going to call?”

“Minnie! It was her scolding all through supper that drove me down to monkey with the furnace. She’s wild–Minnie is.” He peeled off his overalls and hung them on a nail. The Young Husband started to ascend the cellar stairs. Alderman Mooney laid a detaining finger on his sleeve. “Don’t say anything in front of Minnie! She’s boiling! Minnie and the kids are going to visit her folks out West this summer; so I wouldn’t so much as dare to say ‘Good morning!’ to the Devine woman. Anyway a person wouldn’t talk to her, I suppose. But I kind of thought I’d tell you about her.”

“Thanks!” said the Very Young Husband dryly.

In the early spring, before Blanche Devine moved in, there came stonemasons, who began to build something. It was a great stone fireplace that rose in massive incongruity at the side of the little white cottage. Blanche Devine was trying to make a home for herself. We no longer build fireplaces for physical warmth–we build them for the warmth of the soul; we build them to dream by, to hope by, to home by.

Blanche Devine used to come and watch them now and then as the work progressed. She had a way of walking round and round the house, looking up at it pridefully and poking at plaster and paint with her umbrella or fingertip. One day she brought with her a man with a spade. He spaded up a neat square of ground at the side of the cottage and a long ridge near the fence that separated her yard from that of the very young couple next door. The ridge spelled sweet peas and nasturtiums to our small-town eyes.

On the day that Blanche Devine moved in there was wild agitation among the white-ruffled bedroom curtains of the neighbourhood. Later on certain odours, as of burning dinners, pervaded the atmosphere. Blanche Devine, flushed and excited, her hair slightly askew, her diamond eardrops flashing, directed the moving, wrapped in her great fur coat; but on the third morning we gasped when she appeared out-of-doors, carrying a little household ladder, a pail of steaming water and sundry voluminous white cloths. She reared the little ladder against the side of the house mounted it cautiously, and began to wash windows: with housewifely thoroughness. Her stout figure was swathed in a grey sweater and on her head was a battered felt hat–the sort of window-washing costume that has been worn by women from time immemorial. We noticed that she used plenty of hot water and clean rags, and that she rubbed the glass until it sparkled, leaning perilously sideways on the ladder to detect elusive streaks. Our keenest housekeeping eye could find no fault with the way Blanche Devine washed windows.

By May, Blanche Devine had left off her diamond eardrops–perhaps it was their absence that gave her face a new expression. When she went down town we noticed that her hats were more like the hats the other women in our town wore; but she still affected extravagant footgear, as is right and proper for a stout woman who has cause to be vain of her feet. We noticed that her trips down town were rare that spring and summer. She used to come home laden with little bundles; and before supper she would change her street clothes for a neat, washable housedress, as is our thrifty custom. Through her bright windows we could see her moving briskly about from kitchen to sitting room; and from the smells that floated out from her kitchen door, she seemed to be preparing for her solitary supper the same homely viands that were frying or stewing or baking in our kitchens. Sometimes you could detect the delectable scent of browning hot tea biscuit. It takes a brave, courageous, determined woman to make tea biscuit for no one but herself.

Blanche Devine joined the church. On the first Sunday morning she came to the service there was a little flurry among the ushers at the vestibule door. They seated her well in the rear. The second Sunday morning a dreadful thing happened. The woman next to whom they seated her turned, regarded her stonily for a moment, then rose agitatedly and moved to a pew across the aisle. Blanche Devine’s face went a dull red beneath her white powder. She never came again–though we saw the minister visit her once or twice. She always accompanied him to the door pleasantly, holding it well open until he was down the little flight of steps and on the sidewalk. The minister’s wife did not call–but, then, there are limits to the duties of a minister’s wife.

She rose early, like the rest of us; and as summer came on we used to see her moving about in her little garden patch in the dewy, golden morning. She wore absurd pale-blue kimonos that made her stout figure loom immense against the greenery of garden and apple tree. The neighbourhood women viewed these negligees with Puritan disapproval as they smoothed down their own prim, starched gingham skirts. They said it was disgusting–and perhaps it was; but the habit of years is not easily overcome. Blanche Devine–snipping her sweet peas; peering anxiously at the Virginia creeper that clung with such fragile fingers to the trellis; watering the flower baskets that hung from her porch–was blissfully unconscious of the disapproving eyes. I wish one of us had just stopped to call good morning to her over the fence, and to say in our neighbourly, small town way: “My, ain’t this a scorcher! So early too! It’ll be fierce by noon!” But we did not.

I think perhaps the evenings must have been the loneliest for her. The summer evenings in our little town are filled with intimate, human, neighbourly sounds. After the heat of the day it is infinitely pleasant to relax in the cool comfort of the front porch, with the life of the town eddying about us. We sew and read out there until it grows dusk. We call across-lots to our next-door neighbour. The men water the lawns and the flower boxes and get together in little quiet groups to discuss the new street paving. I have even known Mrs. Hines to bring her cherries out there when she had canning to do, and pit them there on the front porch partially shielded by her porch vine, but not so effectually that she was deprived of the sights and sounds about her. The kettle in her lap and the dishpan full of great ripe cherries on the porch floor by her chair, she would pit and chat and peer out through the vines, the red juice staining her plump bare arms.

I have wondered since what Blanche Devine thought of us those lonesome evenings–those evenings filled with little friendly sights and sounds. It is lonely, uphill business at best–this being good. It must have been difficult for her, who had dwelt behind closed shutters so long, to seat herself on the new front porch for all the world to stare at; but she did sit there–resolutely–watching us in silence.

She seized hungrily upon the stray crumbs of conversation that fell to her. The milkman and the iceman and the butcher boy used to hold daily conversation with her. They–sociable gentlemen–would stand on her doorstep, one grimy hand resting against the white of her doorpost, exchanging the time of day with Blanche in the doorway–a tea towel in one hand, perhaps, and a plate in the other. Her little house was a miracle of cleanliness. It was no uncommon sight to see her down on her knees on the kitchen floor, wielding her brush and rag like the rest of us. In canning and preserving time there floated out from her kitchen the pungent scent of pickled crab apples; the mouth-watering, nostril-pricking smell that meant sweet pickles; or the cloying, tantalising, divinely sticky odour that meant raspberry jam. Snooky, from her side of the fence, often used to peer through the pickets, gazing in the direction of the enticing smells next door. Early one September morning there floated out from Blanche Devine’s kitchen that clean, fragrant, sweet scent of fresh-baked cookies–cookies with butter in them, and spice, and with nuts on top. Just by the smell of them your mind’s eye pictured them coming from the oven–crisp brown circlets, crumbly, toothsome, delectable. Snooky, in her scarlet sweater and cap, sniffed them from afar and straightway deserted her sandpile to take her stand at the fence. She peered through the restraining bars, standing on tiptoe. Blanche Devine, glancing up from her board and rolling-pin, saw the eager golden head. And Snooky, with guile in her heart, raised one fat, dimpled hand above the fence and waved it friendlily. Blanche Devine waved back. Thus encouraged, Snooky’s two hands wigwagged frantically above the pickets. Blanche Devine hesitated a moment, her floury hand on her hip. Then she went to the pantry shelf and took out a clean white saucer. She selected from the brown jar on the table three of the brownest, crumbliest, most perfect cookies, with a walnut meat perched atop of each, placed them temptingly on the saucer and, descending the steps, came swiftly across the grass to the triumphant Snooky. Blanche Devine held out the saucer, her lips smiling, her eyes tender. Snooky reached up with one plump white arm.

“Snooky!” shrilled a high voice. “Snooky!” A voice of horror and of wrath. “Come here to me this minute! And don’t you dare to touch those!” Snooky hesitated rebelliously, one pink finger in her pouting mouth. “Snooky! Do you hear me?”

And the Very Young Wife began to descend the steps of her back porch. Snooky, regretful eyes on the toothsome dainties, turned away aggrieved. The Very Young Wife, her lips set, her eyes flashing, advanced and seized the shrieking Snooky by one writhing arm and dragged her away toward home and safety.

Blanche Devine stood there at the fence, holding the saucer in her hand. The saucer tipped slowly, and the three cookies slipped off and fell to the grass. Blanche Devine followed them with her eyes and stood staring at them a moment. Then she turned quickly, went into the house and shut the door.

It was about this time we noticed that Blanche Devine was away much of the time. The little white cottage would be empty for a week. We knew she was out of town because the expressman would come for her trunk. We used to lift our eyebrows significantly. The newspapers and handbills would accumulate in a dusty little heap on the porch; but when she returned there was always a grand cleaning, with the windows open, and Blanche–her head bound turbanwise in a towel–appearing at a window every few minutes to shake out a dustcloth. She seemed to put an enormous amount of energy into those cleanings–as if they were a sort of safety valve.

As winter came on she used to sit up before her grate fire long, long after we were asleep in our beds. When she neglected to pull down the shades we could see the flames of her cosy fire dancing gnomelike on the wall.

There came a night of sleet and snow, and wind and rattling hail–one of those blustering, wild nights that are followed by morning-paper reports of trains stalled in drifts, mail delayed, telephone and telegraph wires down. It must have been midnight or past when there came a hammering at Blanche Devine’s door–a persistent, clamorous rapping. Blanche Devine, sitting before her dying fire half asleep, started and cringed when she heard it; then jumped to her feet, her hand at her breast–her eyes darting this way and that, as though seeking escape.

She had heard a rapping like that before. It had meant bluecoats swarming up the stairway, and frightened cries and pleadings, and wild confusion. So she started forward now, quivering. And then she remembered, being wholly awake now–she remembered, and threw up her head and smiled a little bitterly and walked toward the door. The hammering continued, louder than ever. Blanche Devine flicked on the porch light and opened the door. The half-clad figure of the Very Young Wife next door staggered into the room. She seized Blanche Devine’s arm with both her frenzied hands and shook her, the wind and snow beating in upon both of them.

“The baby!” she screamed in a high, hysterical voice. “The baby! The baby–“

Blanche Devine shut the door and shook the Young Wife smartly by the shoulders.

“Stop screaming,” she said quietly. “Is she sick?”

The Young Wife told her, her teeth chattering:

“Come quick! She’s dying! Will’s out of town. I tried to get the doctor. The telephone wouldn’t–I saw your light! For God’s sake–“

Blanche Devine grasped the Young Wife’s arm, opened the door, and together they sped across the little space that separated the two houses. Blanche Devine was a big woman, but she took the stairs like a girl and found the right bedroom by some miraculous woman instinct. A dreadful choking, rattling sound was coming from Snooky’s bed.

“Croup,” said Blanche Devine, and began her fight.

It was a good fight. She marshalled her little inadequate forces, made up of the half-fainting Young Wife and the terrified and awkward hired girl.

“Get the hot water on–lots of it!” Blanche Devine pinned up her sleeves. “Hot cloths! Tear up a sheet–or anything! Got an oilstove? I want a teakettle boiling in the room. She’s got to have the steam. If that don’t do it we’ll raise an umbrella over her and throw a sheet over, and hold the kettle under till the steam gets to her that way. Got any ipecac?”

The Young Wife obeyed orders, whitefaced and shaking. Once Blanche Devine glanced up at her sharply.

“Don’t you dare faint!” she commanded.

And the fight went on. Gradually the breathing that had been so frightful became softer, easier. Blanche Devine did not relax. It was not until the little figure breathed gently in sleep that Blanche Devine sat back satisfied. Then she tucked a cover ever so gently at the side of the bed, took a last satisfied look at the face on the pillow, and turned to look at the wan, dishevelled Young Wife.

“She’s all right now. We can get the doctor when morning comes–though I don’t know’s you’ll need him.”

The Young Wife came round to Blanche Devine’s side of the bed and stood looking up at her.

“My baby died,” said Blanche Devine simply. The Young Wife gave a little inarticulate cry, put her two hands on Blanche Devine’s broad shoulders and laid her tired head on her breast.

“I guess I’d better be going,” said Blanche Devine.

The Young Wife raised her head. Her eyes were round with fright.

“Going! Oh, please stay! I’m so afraid. Suppose she should take sick again! That awful–awful breathing–“

“I’ll stay if you want me to.”

“Oh, please! I’ll make up your bed and you can rest–“

“I’m not sleepy. I’m not much of a hand to sleep anyway. I’ll sit up here in the hall, where there’s a light. You get to bed. I’ll watch and see that everything’s all right. Have you got something I can read out here–something kind of lively–with a love story in it?”

So the night went by. Snooky slept in her little white bed. The Very Young Wife half dozed in her bed, so near the little one. In the hall, her stout figure looming grotesque in wall-shadows, sat Blanche Devine pretending to read. Now and then she rose and tiptoed into the bedroom with miraculous quiet, and stooped over the little bed and listened and looked–and tiptoed away again, satisfied.

The Young Husband came home from his business trip next day with tales of snowdrifts and stalled engines. Blanche Devine breathed a sigh of relief when she saw him from her kitchen window. She watched the house now with a sort of proprietary eye. She wondered about Snooky; but she knew better than to ask. So she waited. The Young Wife next door had told her husband all about that awful night–had told him with tears and sobs. The Very Young Husband had been very, very angry with her–angry and hurt, he said, and astonished! Snooky could not have been so sick! Look at her now! As well as ever. And to have called such a woman! Well, really he did not want to be harsh; but she must understand that she must never speak to the woman again. Never!

So the next day the Very Young Wife happened to go by with the Young Husband. Blanche Devine spied them from her sitting-room window, and she made the excuse of looking in her mailbox in order to go to the door. She stood in the doorway and the Very Young Wife went by on the arm of her husband. She went by–rather white-faced–without a look or a word or a sign!

And then this happened! There came into Blanche Devine’s face a look that made slits of her eyes, and drew her mouth down into an ugly, narrow line, and that made the muscles of her jaw tense and hard. It was the ugliest look you can imagine. Then she smiled–if having one’s lips curl away from one’s teeth can be called smiling.

Two days later there was great news of the white cottage on the corner. The curtains were down; the furniture was packed; the rugs were rolled. The wagons came and backed up to the house and took those things that had made a home for Blanche Devine. And when we heard that she had bought back her interest in the House With the Closed Shutters, near the freight depot, we sniffed.

“I knew she wouldn’t last!” we said.

“They never do!” said we.

VII

THE GIRL WHO WENT RIGHT

There is a story–Kipling, I think–that tells of a spirited horse galloping in the dark suddenly drawing up tense, hoofs bunched, slim flanks quivering, nostrils dilated, ears pricked. Urging being of no avail the rider dismounts, strikes a match, advances a cautious step or so, and finds himself at the precipitous brink of a newly formed crevasse.

So it is with your trained editor. A miraculous sixth sense guides him. A mysterious something warns him of danger lurking within the seemingly innocent oblong white envelope. Without slitting the flap, without pausing to adjust his tortoise-rimmed glasses, without clearing his throat, without lighting his cigarette–he knows.

The deadly newspaper story he scents in the dark. Cub reporter. Crusty city editor. Cub fired. Stumbles on to a big story. Staggers into newspaper office wild-eyed. Last edition. “Hold the presses!” Crusty C.E. stands over cub’s typewriter grabbing story line by line. Even foreman of pressroom moved to tears by tale. “Boys, this ain’t just a story this kid’s writin’. This is history!” Story finished. Cub faints. C.E. makes him star reporter.

The athletic story: “I could never marry a mollycoddle like you, Harold Hammond!” Big game of the year. Team crippled. Second half. Halfback hurt. Harold Hammond, scrub, into the game. Touchdown! Broken leg. Five to nothing. “Harold, can you ever, ever forgive me?”

The pseudo-psychological story: She had been sitting before the fire for a long, long time. The flame had flickered and died down to a smouldering ash. The sound of his departing footsteps echoed and re-echoed through her brain. But the little room was very, very still.

The shop-girl story: Torn boots and temptation, tears and snears, pathos and bathos, all the way from Zola to the vice inquiry.

Having thus attempted to hide the deadly commonplaceness of this story with a thin layer of cynicism, perhaps even the wily editor may be tricked into taking the leap.

* * * * *

Four weeks before the completion of the new twelve-story addition the store advertised for two hundred experienced saleswomen. Rachel Wiletzky, entering the superintendent’s office after a wait of three hours, was Applicant No. 179. The superintendent did not look up as Rachel came in. He scribbled busily on a pad of paper at his desk, thus observing rules one and two in the proper conduct of superintendents when interviewing applicants. Rachel Wiletzky, standing by his desk, did not cough or wriggle or rustle her skirts or sag on one hip. A sense of her quiet penetrated the superintendent’s subconsciousness. He glanced up hurriedly over his left shoulder. Then he laid down his pencil and sat up slowly. His mind was working quickly enough though. In the twelve seconds that intervened between the laying down of the pencil and the sitting up in his chair he had hastily readjusted all his well-founded preconceived ideas on the appearance of shop-girl applicants.

Rachel Wiletzky had the colouring and physique of a dairymaid. It was the sort of colouring that you associate in your mind with lush green fields, and Jersey cows, and village maids, in Watteau frocks, balancing brimming pails aloft in the protecting curve of one rounded upraised arm, with perhaps a Maypole dance or so in the background. Altogether, had the superintendent been given to figures of speech, he might have said that Rachel was as much out of place among the preceding one hundred and seventy-eight bloodless, hollow-chested, stoop-shouldered applicants as a sunflower would be in a patch of dank white fungi.

He himself was one of those bleached men that you find on the office floor of department stores. Grey skin, grey eyes, greying hair, careful grey clothes–seemingly as void of pigment as one of those sunless things you disclose when you turn over a board that has long lain on the mouldy floor of a damp cellar. It was only when you looked closely that you noticed a fleck of golden brown in the cold grey of each eye, and a streak of warm brown forming an unquenchable forelock that the conquering grey had not been able to vanquish. It may have been a something within him corresponding to those outward bits of human colouring that tempted him to yield to a queer impulse. He whipped from his breast-pocket the grey-bordered handkerchief, reached up swiftly and passed one white corner of it down the length of Rachel Wiletzky’s Killarney-rose left cheek. The rude path down which the handkerchief had travelled deepened to red for a moment before both rose-pink cheeks bloomed into scarlet. The superintendent gazed rather ruefully from unblemished handkerchief to cheek and back again.

“Why–it–it’s real!” he stammered.

Rachel Wiletzky smiled a good-natured little smile that had in it a dash of superiority.

“If I was putting it on,” she said, “I hope I’d have sense enough to leave something to the imagination. This colour out of a box would take a spiderweb veil to tone it down.”

Not much more than a score of words. And yet before the half were spoken you were certain that Rachel Wiletzky’s knowledge of lush green fields and bucolic scenes was that gleaned from the condensed-milk ads that glare down at one from billboards and street-car chromos. Hers was the ghetto voice–harsh, metallic, yet fraught with the resonant music of tragedy.

“H’m–name?” asked the grey superintendent. He knew that vocal quality.

A queer look stole into Rachel Wiletzky’s face, a look of cunning and determination and shrewdness.

“Ray Willets,” she replied composedly. “Double l.”

“Clerked before, of course. Our advertisement stated–“

“Oh yes,” interrupted Ray Willets hastily, eagerly. “I can sell goods. My customers like me. And I don’t get tired. I don’t know why, but I don’t.”

The superintendent glanced up again at the red that glowed higher with the girl’s suppressed excitement. He took a printed slip from the little pile of paper that lay on his desk.

“Well, anyway, you’re the first clerk I ever saw who had so much red blood that she could afford to use it for decorative purposes. Step into the next room, answer the questions on this card and turn it in. You’ll be notified.”

Ray Willets took the searching, telltale blank that put its questions so pertinently. “Where last employed?” it demanded. “Why did you leave? Do you live at home?”

Ray Willets moved slowly away toward the door opposite. The superintendent reached forward to press the button that would summon Applicant No. 180. But before his finger touched it Ray Willets turned and came back swiftly. She held the card out before his surprised eyes.

“I can’t fill this out. If I do I won’t get the job. I work over at the Halsted Street Bazaar. You know–the Cheap Store. I lied and sent word I was sick so I could come over here this morning. And they dock you for time off whether you’re sick or not.”

The superintendent drummed impatiently with his fingers. “I can’t listen to all this. Haven’t time. Fill out your blank, and if–“

All that latent dramatic force which is a heritage of her race came to the girl’s aid now.

“The blank! How can I say on a blank that I’m leaving because I want to be where real people are? What chance has a girl got over there on the West Side? I’m different. I don’t know why, but I am. Look at my face! Where should I get red cheeks from? From not having enough to eat half the time and sleeping three in a bed?”

She snatched off her shabby glove and held one hand out before the man’s face.

“From where do I get such hands? Not from selling hardware over at Twelfth and Halsted. Look at it! Say, couldn’t that hand sell silk and lace?”

Some one has said that to make fingers and wrists like those which Ray Willets held out for inspection it is necessary to have had at least five generations of ancestors who have sat with their hands folded in their laps. Slender, tapering, sensitive hands they were, pink-tipped, temperamental. Wistful hands they were, speaking hands, an inheritance, perhaps, from some dreamer ancestor within the old-world ghetto, some long-haired, velvet-eyed student of the Talmud dwelling within the pale with its squalor and noise, and dreaming of unseen things beyond the confining gates–things rare and exquisite and fine.

“Ashamed of your folks?” snapped the superintendent.

“N-no–No! But I want to be different. I am different! Give me a chance, will you? I’m straight. And I’ll work. And I can sell goods. Try me.”

That all-pervading greyness seemed to have lifted from the man at the desk. The brown flecks in the eyes seemed to spread and engulf the surrounding colourlessness. His face, too, took on a glow that seemed to come from within. It was like the lifting of a thick grey mist on a foggy morning, so that the sun shines bright and clear for a brief moment before the damp curtain rolls down again and effaces it.

He leaned forward in his chair, a queer half-smile on his face.

“I’ll give you your chance,” he said, “for one month. At the end of that time I’ll send for you. I’m not going to watch you. I’m not going to have you watched. Of course your sale slips will show the office whether you’re selling goods or not. If you’re not they’ll discharge you. But that’s routine. What do you want to sell?”

“What do I want to–Do you mean–Why, I want to sell the lacy things.”

“The lacy–“

Ray, very red-cheeked, made the plunge. “The–the lawnjeree, you know. The things with ribbon and handwork and yards and yards of real lace. I’ve seen ’em in the glass case in the French Room. Seventy-nine dollars marked down from one hundred.”

The superintendent scribbled on a card. “Show this Monday morning. Miss Jevne is the head of your department. You’ll spend two hours a day in the store school of instruction for clerks. Here, you’re forgetting your glove.”

The grey look had settled down on him again as he reached out to press the desk button. Ray Willets passed out at the door opposite the one through which Rachel Wiletzky had entered.

Some one in the department nick-named her Chubbs before she had spent half a day in the underwear and imported lingerie. At the store school she listened and learned. She learned how important were things of which Halsted Street took no cognisance. She learned to make out a sale slip as complicated as an engineering blueprint. She learned that a clerk must develop suavity and patience in the same degree as a customer waxes waspish and insulting, and that the spectrum’s colours do not exist in the costume of the girl-behind-the-counter. For her there are only black and white. These things she learned and many more, and remembered them, for behind the rosy cheeks and the terrier-bright eyes burned the indomitable desire to get on. And the finished embodiment of all of Ray Willets’ desires and ambitions was daily before her eyes in the presence of Miss Jevne, head of the lingerie and negligees.

Of Miss Jevne it might be said that she was real where Ray was artificial, and artificial where Ray was real. Everything that Miss Jevne wore was real. She was as modish as Ray was shabby, as slim as Ray was stocky, as artificially tinted and tinctured as Ray was naturally rosy-cheeked and buxom. It takes real money to buy clothes as real as those worn by Miss Jevne. The soft charmeuse in her graceful gown was real and miraculously draped. The cobweb-lace collar that so delicately traced its pattern against the black background of her gown was real. So was the ripple of lace that cascaded down the front of her blouse. The straight, correct, hideously modern lines of her figure bespoke a real eighteen-dollar corset. Realest of all, there reposed on Miss Jevne’s bosom a bar pin of platinum and diamonds–very real diamonds set in a severely plain but very real bar of precious platinum. So if you except Miss Jevne’s changeless colour, her artificial smile, her glittering hair and her undulating head-of-the-department walk, you can see that everything about Miss Jevne was as real as money can make one.

Miss Jevne, when she deigned to notice Ray Willets at all, called her “girl,” thus: “Girl, get down one of those Number Seventeens for me–with the pink ribbons.” Ray did not resent the tone. She thought about Miss Jevne as she worked. She thought about her at night when she was washing and ironing her other shirtwaist for next day’s wear. In the Halsted Street Bazaar the girls had been on terms of dreadful intimacy with those affairs in each other’s lives which popularly are supposed to be private knowledge. They knew the sum which each earned per week; how much they turned in to help swell the family coffers and how much they were allowed to keep for their own use. They knew each time a girl spent a quarter for a cheap sailor collar or a pair of near-silk stockings. Ray Willets, who wanted passionately to be different, whose hands so loved the touch of the lacy, silky garments that made up the lingerie and negligee departments, recognised the perfection of Miss Jevne’s faultless realness–recognised it, appreciated it, envied it. It worried her too. How did she do it? How did one go about attaining the same degree of realness?

Meanwhile she worked. She learned quickly. She took care always to be cheerful, interested, polite. After a short week’s handling of lacy silken garments she ceased to feel a shock when she saw Miss Jevne displaying a _robe-de-nuit_ made up of white cloud and sea-foam and languidly assuring the customer that of course it wasn’t to be expected that you could get a fine handmade lace at that price–only twenty-seven-fifty. Now if she cared to look at something really fine–made entirely by hand–why–

The end of the first ten days found so much knowledge crammed into Ray Willets’ clever, ambitious little head that the pink of her cheeks had deepened to carmine, as a child grows flushed and too bright-eyed when overstimulated and overtired.

Miss Myrtle, the store beauty, strolled up to Ray, who was straightening a pile of corset covers and _brassieres_. Miss Myrtle was the store’s star cloak-and-suit model. Tall, svelte, graceful, lovely in line and contour, she was remarkably like one of those exquisite imbeciles that Rossetti used to love to paint. Hers were the great cowlike eyes, the wonderful oval face, the marvellous little nose, the perfect lips and chin. Miss Myrtle could don a forty-dollar gown, parade it before a possible purchaser, and make it look like an imported model at one hundred and twenty-five. When Miss Myrtle opened those exquisite lips and spoke you got a shock that hurt. She laid one cool slim finger on Ray’s ruddy cheek.

“Sure enough!” she drawled nasally. “Whereja get it anyway, kid? You must of been brought up on peaches ‘n’ cream and slept in a pink cloud somewheres.”

“Me!” laughed Ray, her deft fingers busy straightening a bow here, a ruffle of lace there. “Me! The L-train runs so near my bed that if it was ever to get a notion to take a short cut it would slice off my legs to the knees.”

“Live at home?” Miss Myrtle’s grasshopper mind never dwelt long on one subject.

“Well, sure,” replied Ray. “Did you think I had a flat up on the Drive?”

“I live at home too,” Miss Myrtle announced impressively. She was leaning indolently against the table. Her eyes followed the deft, quick movements of Ray’s slender, capable hands. Miss Myrtle always leaned when there was anything to lean on. Involuntarily she fell into melting poses. One shoulder always drooped slightly, one toe always trailed a bit like the picture on the cover of the fashion magazines, one hand and arm always followed the line of her draperies while the other was raised to hip or breast or head.

Ray’s busy hands paused a moment. She looked up at the picturesque Myrtle. “All the girls do, don’t they?”

“Huh?” said Myrtle blankly.

“Live at home, I mean? The application blank says–“

“Say, you’ve got clever hands, ain’t you?” put in Miss Myrtle irrelevantly. She looked ruefully at her own short, stubby, unintelligent hands, that so perfectly reflected her character in that marvellous way hands have. “Mine are stupid-looking. I’ll bet you’ll get on.” She sagged to the other hip with a weary gracefulness. “I ain’t got no brains,” she complained.

“Where do they live then?” persisted Ray.

“Who? Oh, I live at home”–again virtuously–“but I’ve got some heart if I am dumb. My folks couldn’t get along without what I bring home every week. A lot of the girls have flats. But that don’t last. Now Jevne–“

“Yes?” said Ray eagerly. Her plump face with its intelligent eyes was all aglow.

Miss Myrtle lowered her voice discreetly. “Her own folks don’t know where she lives. They says she sends ’em money every month, but with the understanding that they don’t try to come to see her. They live way over on the West Side somewhere. She makes her buying trip to Europe every year. Speaks French and everything. They say when she started to earn real money she just cut loose from her folks. They was a drag on her and she wanted to get to the top.”

“Say, that pin’s real, ain’t it?”

“Real? Well, I should say it is! Catch Jevne wearing anything that’s phony. I saw her at the theatre one night. Dressed! Well, you’d have thought that birds of paradise were national pests, like English sparrows. Not that she looked loud. But that quiet, rich elegance, you know, that just smells of money. Say, but I’ll bet she has her lonesome evenings!”

Ray Willets’ eyes darted across the long room and rested upon the shining black-clad figure of Miss Jevne moving about against the luxurious ivory-and-rose background of the French Room.

“She–she left her folks, h’m?” she mused aloud.

Miss Myrtle, the brainless, regarded the tips of her shabby boots.

“What did it get her?” she asked as though to herself. “I know what it does to a girl, seeing and handling stuff that’s made for millionaires, you get a taste for it yourself. Take it from me, it ain’t the six-dollar girl that needs looking after. She’s taking her little pay envelope home to her mother that’s a widow and it goes to buy milk for the kids. Sometimes I think the more you get the more you want. Somebody ought to turn that vice inquiry on to the tracks of that thirty-dollar-a-week girl in the Irish crochet waist and the diamond bar pin. She’d make swell readin’.”

There fell a little silence between the two–a silence of which neither was conscious. Both were thinking, Myrtle disjointedly, purposelessly, all unconscious that her slow, untrained mind had groped for a great and vital truth and found it; Ray quickly, eagerly, connectedly, a new and daring resolve growing with lightning rapidity.

“There’s another new baby at our house,” she said aloud suddenly. “It cries all night pretty near.”

“Ain’t they fierce?” laughed Myrtle. “And yet I dunno–“

She fell silent again. Then with the half-sign with which we waken from day dreams she moved away in response to the beckoning finger of a saleswoman in the evening-coat section. Ten minutes later her exquisite face rose above the soft folds of a black charmeuse coat that rippled away from her slender, supple body in lines that a sculptor dreams of and never achieves.

Ray Willets finished straightening her counter. Trade was slow. She moved idly in the direction of the black-garbed figure that flitted about in the costly atmosphere of the French section. It must be a very special customer to claim Miss Jevne’s expert services. Ray glanced in through the half-opened glass and ivory-enamel doors.

“Here, girl,” called Miss Jevne. Ray paused and entered. Miss Jevne was frowning. “Miss Myrtle’s busy. Just slip this on. Careful now. Keep your arms close to your head.”

She slipped a marvellously wrought garment over Ray’s sleek head. Fluffy drifts of equally exquisite lingerie lay scattered about on chairs, over mirrors, across showtables. On one of the fragile little ivory-and-rose chairs, in the centre of the costly little room, sat a large, blonde, perfumed woman who clanked and rustled and swished as she moved. Her eyes were white-lidded and heavy, but strangely bright. One ungloved hand was very white too, but pudgy and covered so thickly with gems that your eye could get no clear picture of any single stone or setting.

Ray, clad in the diaphanous folds of the _robe-de-nuit_ that was so beautifully adorned with delicate embroideries wrought by the patient, needle-scarred fingers of some silent, white-faced nun in a far-away convent, paced slowly up and down the short length of the room that the critical eye of this coarse, unlettered creature might behold the wonders woven by this weary French nun, and, beholding, approve.

“It ain’t bad,” spake the blonde woman grudgingly. “How much did you say?”

“Ninety-five,” Miss Jevne made answer smoothly. “I selected it myself when I was in France my last trip. A bargain.”

She slid the robe carefully over Ray’s head. The frown came once more to her brow. She bent close to Ray’s ear. “Your waist’s ripped under the left arm. Disgraceful!”

The blonde woman moved and jangled a bit in her chair. “Well, I’ll take it,” she sighed. “Look at the colour on that girl! And it’s real too.” She rose heavily and came over to Ray, reached up and pinched her cheek appraisingly with perfumed white thumb and forefinger.

“That’ll do, girl,” said Miss Jevne sweetly. “Take this along and change these ribbons from blue to pink.”

Ray Willets bore the fairy garment away with her. She bore it tenderly, almost reverently. It was more than a garment. It represented in her mind a new standard of all that was beautiful and exquisite and desirable.

Ten days before the formal opening of the new twelve-story addition there was issued from the superintendent’s office an order that made a little flurry among the clerks in the sections devoted to women’s dress. The new store when thrown open would mark an epoch in the retail drygoods business of the city, the order began. Thousands were to be spent on perishable decorations alone. The highest type of patronage was to be catered to. Therefore the women in the lingerie, negligee, millinery, dress, suit and corset sections were requested to wear during opening week a modest but modish black one-piece gown that would blend with the air of elegance which those departments were to maintain.

Ray Willets of the lingerie and negligee sections read her order slip slowly. Then she reread it. Then she did a mental sum in simple arithmetic. A childish sum it was. And yet before she got her answer the solving of it had stamped on her face a certain hard, set, resolute look.

The store management had chosen Wednesday to be the opening day. By eight-thirty o’clock Wednesday morning the French lingerie, millinery and dress sections, with their women clerks garbed in modest but modish black one-piece gowns, looked like a levee at Buckingham when the court is in mourning. But the ladies-in-waiting, grouped about here and there, fell back in respectful silence when there paced down the aisle the queen royal in the person of Miss Jevne. There is a certain sort of black gown that is more startling and daring than scarlet. Miss Jevne’s was that style. Fast black you might term it. Miss Jevne was aware of the flurry and flutter that followed her majestic progress down the aisle to her own section. She knew that each eye was caught in the tip of the little dog-eared train that slipped and slunk and wriggled along the ground, thence up to the soft drapery caught so cunningly just below the knee, up higher to the marvelously simple sash that swayed with each step, to the soft folds of black against which rested the very real diamond and platinum bar pin, up to the lace at her throat, and then stopping, blinking and staring again gazed fixedly at the string of pearls that lay about her throat, pearls rosily pink, mistily grey. An aura of self-satisfaction enveloping her, Miss Jevne disappeared behind the rose-garlanded portals of the new cream-and-mauve French section. And there the aura vanished, quivering. For standing before one of the plate-glass cases and patting into place with deft fingers the satin bow of a hand-wrought chemise was Ray Willets, in her shiny little black serge skirt and the braver of her two white shirtwaists.

Miss Jevne quickened her pace. Ray turned. Her bright brown eyes grew brighter at sight of Miss Jevne’s wondrous black. Miss Jevne, her train wound round her feet like an actress’ photograph, lifted her eyebrows to an unbelievable height.

“Explain that costume!” she said.

“Costume?” repeated Ray, fencing.

Miss Jevne’s thin lips grew thinner. “You understood that women in this department were to wear black one-piece gowns this week!”

Ray smiled a little twisted smile. “Yes, I understood.”

“Then what–“

Ray’s little smile grew a trifle more uncertain. “–I had the money–last week–I was going to–The baby took sick–the heat I guess, coming so sudden. We had the doctor–and medicine–I–Say, your own folks come before black one-piece dresses!”

Miss Jevne’s cold eyes saw the careful patch under Ray’s left arm where a few days before the torn place had won her a reproof. It was the last straw.

“You can’t stay in this department in that rig!”

“Who says so?” snapped Ray with a flash of Halsted Street bravado. “If my customers want a peek at Paquin I’ll send ’em to you.”

“I’ll show you who says so!” retorted Miss Jevne, quite losing sight of the queen business. The stately form of the floor manager was visible among the glass showcases beyond. Miss Jevne sought him agitatedly. All the little sagging lines about her mouth showed up sharply, defying years of careful massage.

The floor manager bent his stately head and listened. Then, led by Miss Jevne, he approached Ray Willets, whose deft fingers, trembling a very little now, were still pretending to adjust the perfect pink-satin bow.

The manager touched her on the arm not unkindly. “Report for work in the kitchen utensils, fifth floor,” he said. Then at sight of the girl’s face: “We can’t have one disobeying orders, you know. The rest of the clerks would raise a row in no time.”

Down in the kitchen utensils and household goods there was no rule demanding modest but modish one-piece gowns. In the kitchenware one could don black sateen sleevelets to protect one’s clean white waist without breaking the department’s tenets of fashion. You could even pin a handkerchief across the front of your waist, if your job was that of dusting the granite ware.

At first Ray’s delicate fingers, accustomed to the touch of soft, sheer white stuff and ribbon and lace and silk, shrank from contact with meat grinders, and aluminum stewpans, and egg beaters, and waffle irons, and pie tins. She handled them contemptuously. She sold them listlessly. After weeks of expatiating to customers on the beauties and excellencies of gossamer lingerie she found it difficult to work up enthusiasm over the virtues of dishpans and spice boxes. By noon she was less resentful. By two o’clock she was saying to a fellow clerk:

“Well, anyway, in this section you don’t have to tell a woman how graceful and charming she’s going to look while she’s working the washing machine.”

She was a born saleswoman. In spite of herself she became interested in the buying problems of the practical and plain-visaged housewives who patronised this section. By three o’clock she was looking thoughtful–thoughtful and contented.

Then came the summons. The lingerie section was swamped! Report to Miss Jevne at once! Almost regretfully Ray gave her customer over to an idle clerk and sought out Miss Jevne. Some of that lady’s statuesqueness was gone. The bar pin on her bosom rose and fell rapidly. She espied Ray and met her halfway. In her hand she carried a soft black something which she thrust at Ray.

“Here, put that on in one of the fitting rooms. Be quick about it. It’s your size. The department’s swamped. Hurry now!”

Ray took from Miss Jevne the black silk gown, modest but modish. There was no joy in Ray’s face. Ten minutes later she emerged in the limp and clinging little frock that toned down her colour and made her plumpness seem but rounded charm.

The big store will talk for many a day of that afternoon and the three afternoons that followed, until Sunday brought pause to the thousands of feet beating a ceaseless tattoo up and down the thronged aisles. On the Monday following thousands swarmed down upon the store again, but not in such overwhelming numbers. There were breathing spaces. It was during one of these that Miss Myrtle, the beauty, found time for a brief moment’s chat with Ray Willets.

Ray was straightening her counter again. She had a passion for order. Myrtle eyed her wearily. Her slender shoulders had carried an endless number and variety of garments during those four days and her feet had paced weary miles that those garments might the better be displayed.

“Black’s grand on you,” observed Myrtle. “Tones you down.” She glanced sharply at the gown. “Looks just like one of our eighteen-dollar models. Copy it?”

“No,” said Ray, still straightening petticoats and corset covers. Myrtle reached out a weary, graceful arm and touched one of the lacy piles adorned with cunning bows of pink and blue to catch the shopping eye.

“Ain’t that sweet!” she exclaimed. “I’m crazy about that shadow lace. It’s swell under voiles. I wonder if I could take one of them home to copy it.”

Ray glanced up. “Oh, that!” she said contemptuously. “That’s just a cheap skirt. Only twelve-fifty. Machine-made lace. Imitation embroidery–“

She stopped. She stared a moment at Myrtle with the fixed and wide-eyed gaze of one who does not see.

“What’d I just say to you?”

“Huh?” ejaculated Myrtle, mystified.

“What’d I just say?” repeated Ray.

Myrtle laughed, half understanding. “You said that was a cheap junk skirt at only twelve-fifty, with machine lace and imitation–“

But Ray Willets did not wait to hear the rest. She was off down the aisle toward the elevator marked “Employees.” The superintendent’s office was on the ninth floor. She stopped there. The grey superintendent was writing at his desk. He did not look up as Ray entered, thus observing rules one and two in the proper conduct of superintendents when interviewing employees. Ray Willets, standing by his desk, did not cough or wriggle or rustle her skirts or sag on one hip. A consciousness of her quiet penetrated the superintendent’s mind. He glanced up hurriedly over his left shoulder. Then he laid down his pencil and sat up slowly.

“Oh, it’s you!” he said.

“Yes, it’s me,” replied Ray Willets simply. “I’ve been here a month to-day.”

“Oh, yes.” He ran his fingers through his hair so that the brown forelock stood away from the grey. “You’ve lost some of your roses,” he said, and tapped his cheek. “What’s the trouble?”

“I guess it’s the dress,” explained Ray, and glanced down at the folds of her gown. She hesitated a moment awkwardly. “You said you’d send for me at the end of the month. You didn’t.”

“That’s all right,” said the grey superintendent. “I was pretty sure I hadn’t made a mistake. I can gauge applicants pretty fairly. Let’s see–you’re in the lingerie, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

Then with a rush: “That’s what I want to talk to you about. I’ve changed my mind. I don’t want to stay in the lingeries. I’d like to be transferred to the kitchen utensils and household goods.”

“Transferred! Well, I’ll see what I can do. What was the name now? I forget.”

A queer look stole into Ray Willets’ face, a look of determination and shrewdness.

“Name?” she said. “My name is Rachel Wiletzky.”

VIII

THE HOOKER-UP-THE-BACK

Miss Sadie Corn was not a charmer, but when you handed your room-key to her you found yourself stopping to chat a moment. If you were the right kind you showed her your wife’s picture in the front of your watch. If you were the wrong kind, with your scant hair carefully combed to hide the bald spot, you showed her the newspaper clipping that you carried in your vest pocket. Following inspection of the first, Sadie Corn would say: “Now that’s what I call a sweet face! How old is the youngest?” Upon perusal the second was returned with dignity and: “Is that supposed to be funny?” In each case Sadie Corn had you placed for life.

She possessed the invaluable gift of the floor clerk, did Sadie Corn–that of remembering names and faces. Though you had registered at the Hotel Magnifique but the night before, for the first time, Sadie Corn would look up at you over her glasses as she laid your key in its