Chapter IV (2)

It was more than an hour later when he emerged. The woman stood exactly where he had left her. It was another, tall and young, who turned from the window and looked at him with eyes that hurt. But he did not wince this time.

"It's all right!" he said, cheerfully. His voice quite sang with sweetness. He came and stood a moment by the window, breathing hard. His face was gray, but his eyes smiled, and there was something boyish in his aspect. He looked from one woman to the other sunnily.

"Bless me--you ought never to let yourselves go like that! He'll pull through all right."

The younger woman continued to look at him silently, but the elder, with a long quivering sigh, fainted.

"Best thing she could possibly do," said the Doctor, his fingers on her pulse. "Get her to bed as soon as you can,--and have these prescriptions sent out. I'll come back later. He'll sleep hours now."

He ran down-stairs, consulting his visiting-list as he ran, and jumped into the brougham, calling an address as he pulled the door to with a slam. This time, however, he did not take out his papers, but sat with an unlighted cigar between his lips, gazing intently at nothing.

In the course of the next few hours he looked over an assortment of ailing babies, soothed as many distracted mothers, ordered to a gay watering-place one young girl whom he was obliged to treat for chronic headache--chronic heartache not being professionally recognizable,--administered the pathetically limited alleviations of his art to a failing cancer-patient (she happened to be a rich woman, going with the fortitude of the poor down the road to the great Darkness), and so, looking in on various pneumonias and fevers, broken souls and bruised bodies, by the way, brought up at last at the hospital to see how yesterday's operation was going on. It was going on in so very mixed a manner that he telephoned he should not return to lunch--prophesying long after the event.

It was turning dusk when he started on his second round of visits homeward, stopping on the outskirts to rebandage, in one of the tenements, a child's broken arm. He had not returned his footman's salutation that morning, but had carried in his subconsciousness all day this visit to the footman's child. In one manner or another that inconvenient locality had been compassed in his circuit for the past three weeks. From it he passed to his daily ordeal, another rich patient, a nervous wreck, whose primary ailment--the lack of anything to do--had passed into the advanced stages of an inability to do anything, with its sad Nemesis of melancholia--the registered protest of the dying soul. It was a case which took more out of the Doctor than all his day's practice put together; he always came from it in a misery of doubts.

The dusk was becoming the dark when he set his foot wearily on the carriage step once more, and with his hand on the carriage door paused suddenly. He was sick of sickness, mortally tired of mortality! For the first time in the whole day he hesitated; an odd, irresolute look came into his face; he pulled out his watch, glanced, and changing his first-given address for another, threw himself back on the cushions with closed eyes. He did not open them again until the carriage, rolling through many streets, came to a halt under some quiet trees, before an apartment-house. There were yellow daffodils between white curtains--very white and high up. As he stepped out, the Doctor glanced involuntarily towards them, and a half-breath of relief escaped him, instantly quenched in a nervous frown and jump as his arm was seized by a firm gloved hand.

"Doctor,--this is really _providential_! You are the very person I wished to see!"

It was the younger of two heavily upholstered and matronly ladies who spoke, in a voice of many underscorings. The Doctor, who had removed his hat with a purely mechanical motion, knew himself a prey, identified his captor, and eyed her with restrained bitterness.

"Doctor,--it is about my Elsie;--she hasn't a particle of color, and she complains of feeling languid all the time--"

"No wonder!--What do you expect?"--it was the Doctor's harshest tone. "She is loaded up with flesh,--she doesn't exercise,--you stuff her. Send her out with her hoop,--make her drink water,--stop stuffing her. What she, wants is thinning out."

"_Elsie_!--Why, Doctor, the child eats _nothing_,--I have to tempt her all the time;--and when she goes out she complains of feeling tired."

"Let her complain,--and let her get tired;--it will do her good. Don't feed her in betweentimes,--and when you do feed her, give her meat--something that will make red blood,--not slops, nor sweets, nor dough. There's nothing in the world the matter with her." He lifted his hat and strode on up the stairs.

Maternity, grieved and outraged, stared after him, speechless, then turned for sympathy in the nearest feminine eye.

"Really, dear,--I think that was almost _vulgar_,--as well as unkind," murmured the other mother at her side.

"_Vulgar_! _Unkind_! Well, it is the last time he will have the opportunity to insult me! The idea! _Elsie_!--But it's not the first time I have thought of changing physicians!" (This was true,--but she never did; the solid Elsie was her only one.) "And such desperate haste;--he must have a _most critical_ case!" She cast an indignant glance at the building, as if to make it an accessory to the fact, and turning a kindling and interrogative glance upon her companion, encountered one of profound and scintillating significance. For a moment they contemplated their discovery breathlessly in each other's eyes.

"Did you ever!" exclaimed number one at last. "Oh, of course I had heard things,--but I will do myself the justice to say I _never_ believed a word of it before! _This_, of course, makes it plain enough;--this explains _all_!"

The two--good women, but wounded withal--coruscated subtle knowledge all down the street.

Meantime the Doctor climbed the stairs. He was perfectly conscious that he had been, in fact, both unkind and rude, even though his mood did not incline him to take measure of the extent of his delinquency. He knew equally that he should presently have to write a note of apology--and that it would not do an atom of good, _Tant pis_. He rang at the door of the daffodil-room, and it was opened by the tall girl whose eyes had hurt him that morning. They did not hurt him now, but enveloped him with a keen and soft regard that left no question unanswered. In another moment she had put out a firm hand and drawn him over the threshold in its clasp.

"Don't speak,--don't try to say a word! There!" She had taken from him his hat and gloves and pushed forward a low chair in front of the fire, all in one capable movement. "What is it? Tea? Coffee? A glass of wine?"

"_Music_!" answered the Doctor, raising two haggard eyes, with the exhausted air of an animal taking shelter.

The girl turned away her own and walked towards the piano, stopping on the way, however, to push forward a little table set forth with a steaming tea-urn and cups, matches and a tray, and to lift to its farther edge a bowl of heavy-scented violets. Her every motion was full of ministry, as devoid of fuss.

The room was low, broad, and large, and full of books, flowers, low seats, and leaping firelight. A grand-piano, piled with music, dominated the whole. The girl seated herself before it and began to play, with the beautiful, powerful touch of control. After the first bars, the Doctor's head sank back upon the cushions of the chair and the Doctor's hand stole mechanically to the matches. He smoked and she played--quiet, large music, tranquilly filling the room: Bach fugues, German Lieder, fragments of weird northern harmonies, fragments of Beethoven and Schubert, the Largo of Handel,--and all the time she played she looked at the man who lay back in the chair, half turned from her, the cigar drooping from his fingers. There was no sound in the room but the music and light leaping of little flames in the fireplace,--no motion but theirs and the pulsing fingers on the keys. The girl played on and on, till the fire began to die, and with a sudden sigh the Doctor held up his hand. Then she rose at once, and going forward, stood as simply at the side of the fireplace opposite him. She was not beautiful, but, oh, she was beautiful with health and calm vigor.

The Doctor let his eyes rest on her.

"If you knew," he said, with a little, half-apologetic laugh.

In her turn she held up one of her long hands.

"But I do;--you forget I was there all the morning. And you pulled him through. As for the rest--" She stooped suddenly and began to pile together the logs; the Doctor watched her, noting with a trained and sensitive eye the muscular ease and grace of the supple arms and shoulders--like music. "Of course"--she spoke lightly--"they will kill you some day, among them; but--it's worth while, isn't it?--and there isn't much else that is, is there?" Still kneeling, she turned and looked straight up at him. "Do you know what it was like this morning--before you came?"

The Doctor shook his head.

She hesitated a moment, smiling a little. "'Lord, _if Thou hadst been here_, our brother had not died!'" she quoted.

The Doctor got up quickly from his chair. He knocked the ash from his cigar and laid it down on the tray. "Well," he said, lightly, "I must be off." He squared his shoulders and held out his hand; its grip upon her own trembled very slightly, but he smiled sunnily. "I'll come back for some more music some day."

"Do," the girl said. She had risen and was smiling too.

The Doctor looked about the room wistfully. "Jolly place,--I don't get up very often, do I?"

"Not very."

They smiled at each other again, then the girl, turning abruptly away, walked to the window and came back with a double handful of yellow flowers.

"Will you carry these to your wife? They are the first of the year."

She held the door open for him, and from the little landing watched him down the stairs. At their turn he glanced up for a moment, holding his hat raised silently. She waved him a mute acknowledgment, then going into the room again, closed the door.

The firelight still leaped languidly on the hearth, and on the half-smoked cigar and pile of ashes in the tray. The girl stood a moment looking at these things and the chair, then walked quietly to the piano and sat down before it. But she did not play again.

Meantime the Doctor, an erect and urgent presence in the dusk, had driven through dim streets and climbed again the four flights of the morning, to find the hush of heaven fallen on the house.

"I knew _you_ could save him!" said the pale mother only, lifting blind eyes of worship from the couch.

The Doctor laughed, poured her out with his own hands a sleeping-draught, and sat patiently beside her till she slept, then stole away, leaving injunctions with the nurse, established in his absence, to telephone if there came a crisis--"even," after a moment's hesitation, "in the night."

"Home!"--he gave the order briefly. There were black circles beneath his eyes, making him look thinner than when he left the house that morning; he had no distinct reminiscence of lunch, and he was very tired; but his shoulders no longer ached, his headache was gone, and his hands were perfectly steady.

Odd bits of music hummed perversely through his head, mixing themselves up with all things and rippling the air about him into their own large waves, bearing now and then upon them, like the insistent iteration of an oratorio chorus, fantastic fragments--"If Thou hadst been here!--If Thou hadst been here!" His fingers ached towards the responsive strings, and pulling out his watch, he made a hasty calculation. There should be good fifteen minutes, he decided--toilet allowed for--and he hurried the coachman again and leaned forward, looking with bright, eager eyes into the night, and humming to himself.

One liveried servant opened the house door, another the carriage door, and a third relieved him of his hat and coat. Out of the warmth and brightness his wife advanced to meet him, a child in either hand, their long curls brushed and tied with bright ribbons. Her face was filled with tender solicitude.

"You must be worn out;--what a long day you have made! Would you like the dinner sent in at once, or would you rather wait? Children, don't hang so on papa; he must be dreadfully tired. Oh, and there's a man been waiting over an hour; he simply _wouldn't go_; but you'll let him come back to-morrow?--you won't try to see any one else tonight?"

The Doctor hesitated a moment, letting all the warmth and brightness sink into him, while his hands played with the soft hair of his little son and daughter. He smiled at his wife, a bright, tired smile.

"Robin," he said, "run down to the carriage; there are some posies there for mamma--from Miss Graham, Louise,--you see I did get a moment's rest."

"Yes," said his wife. She continued to gaze compassionately at the tired man. After a moment she repeated gently, "And the dinner, dear--?"

"No,--don't wait for me; I'll not be long. Have it brought in at once, and--send the man into the office, please."

He stooped and kissed the children, and turning away, went into his office and closed the door behind him.

A WORKING BASIS

BY ABBY MEGUIRE ROACH

Why she married him her friends wondered at the time. Those she made later wondered more. Before long she caught herself wondering. Yes, she had seen it beforehand, more or less. But she had seen other things as well: he had developed unevenly, unexpectedly, if logically. There had been common tastes--which grew obsolete or secondary. As the momentum of what she believed and hoped of him ran down with them both, he crystallized into the man he was, and no doubt virtually had always been.

It was bad enough to have to ask for money, but to have it counted out to you, to be questioned about it like a child, was worse.

"I don't understand," she said in the first months of their marriage. "Are you afraid I won't be judicious, responsible? Mightn't you try before judging?"

"Judicious? Responsible?" He pinched her cheek. (Judith was five feet nine and sweetly sober of mien.) "There are no feminines or diminutives of those words, my dear."

She stepped back. "But with more freedom I could manage better, Sam."

"Manage?"--jocularly. "That _is_ your long suit, isn't it? You feel equal to managing all of us? Could even give me pointers on the business, eh?"

"Why not?" she asked, quietly.

Sam, feet apart, hands in pockets, looked her over with the smile one has for a dignified kitten. "I won't trouble you, my dear. I manage this family." With his pleasantries a lower note struck--and jangled.

"But that isn't the point. I want--"

"Really? You always do. Don't bother to tell me what. If you got this you'd be wanting something else, so what's the use of the expense merely to change the object?" He chuckled at her baffled silence.

"I can't answer when you're like that. But--but, Sam! It isn't fair!" Still she supposed that relevant.

However, money was not the chief thing. He could manage. Let it go.

Having properly impressed her, nothing made Sam feel larger than to bring her a set of pearl-handled knives,--when she had wanted a dollar for kitchen tins. His extravagances were not always generosities. Once, after she had turned her winter-before-last suit and patched new seats into the boy's flannel drawers, because "times were hard," he bought a brace of blooded hunting-dogs.

Next day she opened an account at a department store.

With the promptness of the first of the month and the sureness of death, the bill came. Sam had expressed himself unchecked before she turned in the doorway. "If you will go over it," she said, with all her rehearsal unable, after all, to imitate his nonchalance, "you will find nothing unnecessary. I think there is nothing there for the dogs."

But her cannon-ball affected him no more than a leaf an elephant; he did not know he was hit. It was always so.

In his cool way, however, Sam had all the cumulative jealousy of the primitive male for his long primacy. Some weeks later, when Judith ordered an overcoat for Sam junior sent home on approval, she found the store had been instructed to give her no credit.

She got out, with burning face and heart, without the article. Her first impulse was to shrink from a blow.

But at table that night she recounted her experience: "The very courteous gentleman who informed me of your predicament happened to be a cousin of Mr. Banks, of Head and Banks. (They supply your grain, I believe?) Mrs. Howe (isn't it R. E. Howe who is president of the Newcomb Club?) was at my elbow. The salesgirl has Sam junior's Sunday-school class. Doubtless it will interest them all to know you are in such straits you can't clothe your children."

Ah? She had touched his vulnerable point? Instantly she was swept by compunction, by impulses to make amends, to him, to their love. Their love! That delicate wild thing she kept in a warm, moist, sheltered place, and forbore to look at for yellowing leaves.

Like the battle of Blenheim, it was a famous victory, but what good came of it at last? The overcoat came home, to be sure, with cap and shoes besides. But she was too gallant to press her advantage. Besides, she still looked for him to take a hint.

He did, after his own fashion. "You ought to see Judith here," he laughed to a caller, "practising her kindergarten methods on me." His imperturbability was at once a boast and a slight.

"He doesn't mean it," she apologized, later, protecting herself by defending him. "You know how men are; the best of them a bit stupid about some things. They don't mean to hurt you. You know it, but you can't help crying."

"Oh, I understand!" (That any one should sympathize with her! It was not so much her vanity that suffered as her precious regard for him, her pride in their marriage.) "Nobody minds little things like that against such devotion and constancy. Why, he talks of you all the time, Judith; of your style, your housekeeping. You are his pet boast. He says you can do more with less than anybody he ever saw." And then Judith laughed.

They were all articles of the creed she herself repeated--and doubted more and more. Faithful enough. He never came or went without the customary kiss. When he had typhoid fever, no one might be near him but her, until her exhaustion could no longer be concealed, when he fretted about her--until he fretted himself back into high temperature and had a relapse.

So, run down as she was, she hid it, kept up, went on alone, adding to the score of her inevitable day of reckoning, after the old heroic-criminal woman-way.

She had begun with ideas of their saving together for a purpose; but, not allowed to plan, she must use every opportunity to provide against future stricture; besides, Sam's arbitrary and unregulated spending made her poor little economies both futile and unfair.

"I know nothing about your business. How can I tell if I spend too much?"

"Make your mind easy; I'll keep you posted," he laughed. _He_ was not bothering about dangerous ground.

"Doubtless,"--dryly. "But if I spend too little?"

"Not you."

He did mean it! He didn't care! The half-truth fanned the slow fire growing within her into sudden flame. Judith turned, stammering over the dammed rush of replies.

"My dear, my dear!" he deprecated, amused. "How easily you lose your temper lately, every time there is a discussion of expenses! Why excite yourself?" Why, indeed? Anger put her at a disadvantage, and making her half wrong, half made him right. "I don't say I particularly blame you, but you see for yourself you don't keep your balance, and it's mistaken kindness to tempt any woman's natural feminine weakness for luxury and display."

The retorts were so obvious they were hopeless. She stood looking at him.

His eyebrows lifted; he shrugged his shoulders, went out, and forgot.

Why any of it, indeed? There was no bridge of speech between alien minds. Their life was a continual game of cross-questions and silly answers. Their natures were antipodal; he had the faults that annoyed her most; his virtues were those least compensating.

Was her dream of influencing the children a superstition too, then?

The children! They slipped the house whenever possible; avoided their father with an almost physical effect of dodging an expected blow; when with him, watched his mood to forestall with hasty attention or divert with strained wit, with timorous hilarity when he proved complaisant. The possibilities for harm to them were numberless. She and Sam were losing the children, and the children were losing everything.

For years they had been a physical and mental outlet for her nature. That love had no question of reciprocity or merit. She had always been willing for them. Only it seemed to her all the rest of love should come first. It occurred to her ironically how happy her marriage would have been without her husband.

What was his love worth? It was only taxation--taxation without representation. Had either of them any real love left?

Suddenly she stood on the brink of black emptiness. To live without love; her whole nature, every life-habit, changed! _Oh, no, no, no_! So the cold water sets the suicide struggling for shore.

Dear, dear! This would not do. Her nerves were getting the best of her; she was losing her own dignity and sweetness--was on the verge of a breakdown.

But to say so would be to invoke doctors, pointless questions, futile drugs, and a period of acute affection from Sam--affection that took the form chiefly of expecting it of her.

At times Judith thought of death as an escape, but she thought of no other as being any more in her own hands; like so many people, she quoted the Episcopal marriage-service as equal authority with the Bible. She was too live to droop and break as some do. She had not made herself the one armor that would have been effective--her own shell. Friction that does not callous, forms a sore. Her love, her utmost self, ached like an exposed nerve. She had not dreamed one's whole being could be so alive to suffering. She must be alone, to get a hand on herself and things again.

At table one night she wanted them all to know she was going away, for several months perhaps, leaving her cousin Anne in charge. It was all arranged.

The amazing innovation surprised Sam into speechlessness.

Judith had had few vacations. There had always been the babies, of course. And Sam's consent had always been so hard to get. His first impulse about everything was to refuse, contradict, begrudge. Then certainly he mustn't be too easily convinced. After that he always moped through her preparations; counted and recounted the cost, and at the last perhaps gave her a handsome new bag when her old one was particularly convenient, and he had supplied only half she had asked for clothes; would hardly tell her good-by for desolate devotion; tracked her with letters full of loneliness, ailments, discomforts. When she had cut short her plans and hurried back, a bit quiet and unresponsive perhaps, "How truly gracious your unselfishness is, my dear!" he observed. "If it comes so hard to show me a little consideration, you would really better keep doing your own way."

"I never do my own way."

"No? Whose then? I fail to recognize the brand."

"That's the trouble. I might as well stop trying."

Now, she could not delay for, nor endure, the conventional comedy.

Since he asked her no questions, she hastened to explain: "I want to rest absolutely. Not even to write letters. You need not bother to, either. Anne will let me know if I am needed. And if I need anything, you will be sure to hear."

"Oh, sure." Sam was recovering.

But he couldn't think she would really go, in that way at least. He thought he knew one good reason why not. Yet, vaguely on guard against her capacity for surprise, he did not risk the satire of asking her plans. To the last Judith hoped he would shame her a little by offering the money; and against his utter disregard her indignation rose slowly, steadily, deepening, widening, drowning out every other feeling for him.

When, after their final breakfast, he kissed her good-by as for the morning only, she took her jewelry and silver, mementos of his self-indulgence in generosity, and pawned them, mailing him the tickets from the station where she piloted herself alone.

She spent a month (in her rest-cure!), writing and destroying letters to him. There was no alternation of moods now. Nor was she seeking a solution of the problem; there was only one.

At last a letter seemed to do: "It cannot hurt you to read, as much as me to write. But it must come. I can see now it has always been coming. Things cannot go on as they are. We are unable to improve them together. I will cast no blame. Perhaps some other woman would have called out a different side of you, or would have minded things less. It is enough that we do not belong together, because we are we and cannot change. We are not only ruining each other's happiness--that is already irrevocable,--we are ruining each other, and the children, and their futures. It is a question of the least wrong. And I am not coming back.

"I want the children, all of them. But if you insist, you take Sam junior and I the girls--and the baby, of course, at least for the present. And you shall provide for us proportionately. There is no use pretending independence; I have given my strength and all the accomplishments I had to you and them. And there is no sense in the mock-heroics that I don't want your money. It isn't your money; it's ours, everything we have. I have borne your children, and saved and kept house and served and nursed for you and them. If you want to divide equally now, I will take that as my share forever. But we can't escape the fact that we have been married and have the children."

She could get an answer in two days.

But it did not come in two days, nor two weeks, nor three; while she burned herself out waiting.

Moreover, her funds were running low. She had waves of the nausea of defeat, fevers of the desperation of the last stand.

Then it occurred to her. Her armor had always been defensive. She had never stooped to neutralize his alkali with acid. But there was one weapon of offence she occasionally used. She wrote: "I am drawing on you to-day through your First National for a hundred and fifty. You will honor it, I think. And if I do not hear from you in a day or two I shall have Judge Harwood call on you as my attorney."

The answer came promptly enough:--"My dear child, I couldn't make out what had struck you, so I hoped you would just feel better after blowing off steam and would get over your fit of nerves. Besides, I have nothing to say except to quote yourself: 'We can't escape the fact that we are married and have the children.' I know you too well to be afraid of your throwing off all obligations like that. It is impossible to fancy you airing our privacies." Bait? or a goad? Oh yes, he counted on her "womanly qualities"--but with no idea of masculine emulation! "If you need advice, think what either of our mothers would say." Her mother! Judith could hear her, "His doing wrong cannot make it right for you to," with logic so unanswerable one forgot to question its relevance. And his! Judith held her partly accountable; some women absolutely fostered tyranny. Their mothers, poor things! Occasionally their fathers were different, but so occasionally that now the times were. "This sudden mood strikes me as very remarkable. 'After all I have done--twelve years of grind to keep you from the brunt of the world; and now...! My dear child, do you realize that there are husbands with violent tempers, husbands who drink and gamble and worse?

"I honored your draft. Do not try it again. And I advise you to use it to come home. We will have Dr. Hunter give you a tonic, and you will find you have fewer morbid fancies occupied with your duties. I shall look for you the end of the week." Surely Sam was moved quite out of himself, that he had no lashes of laughter for her. But the next was more in character: "Bridget threatens to leave. She does not work well under Anne. The children are not manageable under her, either. Little Judith is sallow and fretful. I suspect Anne gives her sweets between meals. I saw a moth flying in my closet to-day...."

Judith pushed the letter away, fidgeted, yet smiled. How well they knew each other. And they used it only to sting and bully! Surely it could be put to better purpose. Had she tried _everything_? Had Sam fully understood? Sometimes she thought her early excuses had hurt too much for her to admit their truth: much of his unkindness was not intentional, only stupid; slow sympathy, dull sensibility; he did not suffer, nor comprehend, like a savage or a child. If the possibility of separation was new to her, would not he never have thought of it at all? But now, might he not see? Was not his unwonted self-defence itself admission of new enlightenment and approachability?

She sat long in the increasing dusk. Exhausted with struggle, loneliness was on her, crying need of the children, return to the consideration of many things. Admitting that at times it was right to break everything, wrong not to, it was at least the last resort. Love, of course, was over irrevocably; but were there not some things worth saving? Could not she and Sam find some working basis?

What had made their being together most intolerable to her was their persistence in the religion of a vanished god in whose empty ceremonies alone they could now take part together. Of the sacred image nothing was left but the feet of clay. Freed of that desecration, she could cure or endure everything else; her obligations, moreover, would hardly conflict at all.

Looking back at the pressures of nature, society, events, Sam's persistence, she wondered at times if, from the beginning, she had been any more responsible for her marriage than for the color of her hair. There were many such explanations for Sam, too. Not that they made her like him any better, feel him any more akin. But it was true that between the fatalities of heredity and environment that "slight particular difference" that makes the self had but short tether for action and reaction. Oh, she could be generous enough to him if he did not have to be part of herself!

She got up, lit the gas, shutting out the stars, and wrote: "I am coming back to make one more and one last effort. _Won't you_?" If he would only try!

Sam met her with the magnanimity of forgiveness, the consciousness of kind forgetting. Her redeemed valuables were all in place. Everything should be the same, in spite of--And she put the back of her hand against his lips!

When he dressed for dinner the salvage of the three balls, the spoils of war, were piled in his bureau drawer.

Still he hoped better for the roses by her plate. She had the maid carry them out, explaining in her absence, "No gifts, please, Sam. Substitutes will not do any longer."

Sam played with his fork, smiling, with lips only. How shockingly she showed suffering. Separation had made her appearance unfamiliar; he thought the change all recent. He took pains to compliment the immediate improvement in the pastry, to give her the servants' money unreminded as soon as they were alone.

How characteristic! Judith thought, wearily, letting the bills lie where he laid them.

"That's one of the things for us to settle, Sam," she said, in her new freedom and self-respect discarding the familiar little diplomacies by which she was used to soothe, prepare, manage, the lord of the hearth. "I am not going to ask for money in the future, nor depend on what you happen to give." The manner was a simple statement of fact. "You must make me an allowance through your bookkeeper."

Sam was lounging through his cigar. "So that's it? Still?" He smiled confidentially at the smoke, puffing it from his lower lip. "As accurately as I can recollect, my dear, I have told you seven thousand and three times that I am not on a salary, and don't know from month to month what I will make."

How unchanged everything was! Her determination stiffened. "But you know what you have made. Base it on the year before. Or have a written statement mailed me every month, and file my signature at the bank."

Not quite unchanged; for Sam took the cigar from his mouth and turned slowly to look at her. If he had taken her return for capitulation and had met it according to his code, things were not fitting in. "Really, my dear! Really! What next? Evidently I have never done you justice; you have positive genius in the game--of monopoly; first thing, _I'll_ be begging from _you_."

Well, why not, as fairly? and why should he think better of her than of himself? But it was too old to go over again. For a breath she waited to see her further way. She had not planned this as the issue, but the moment was obviously crucial, and offered what, in international politics already awry, would constitute a good technical opportunity. If her mirage of regeneration, her hope of an understanding, perhaps even her love, had flung up any last afterglow in this home-coming, it was over now. Indeed, now it seemed an old grief, the present but confirmation concerning a lover ten years lost at sea. She saw the whole man now clearly, the balance of her accusations and excuses; he had neither the modern spirit of equality, nor the medieval quixotism of honor and chivalry; appeal merely stirred the elemental tyranny of strength and masculinity, held as a "divine right"; weakness tempted an instinctive cruelty, half unconscious, half defiant.

It was Sam who spoke first, abruptly, not laughing. Sam who was never angry, was angry now. "I never have understood you in some ways. How a woman like you can forever bring money between us! How you got tainted with this modern female anarchy! You seem to forget that _I_ made the money, it is _mine_. There is bound to be discussion; I never knew any one so determined to have everything his own way. All the same," the defence rested its case, "it takes two to quarrel, and I won't."

No, his defence was only admission of conscious weakness. He was afraid--of the solution she had discarded. She did not go back to it now. But now she saw the way, the only way, to accomplish reconstruction.

Judith looked at him steadily. Her voice was deadly quiet. "I am sure I have made myself quite plain. We will never discuss this again. You can let me know in the morning which arrangement you choose."

They faced each other with level eyes.

And Sam's shifted.

He never had real nerve, she realized; they didn't--that kind. How had she managed to love him so long?

Late that night he knocked at her door with a formal proposition: Would that do?--dumbly. She changed a point or two: _That_ would do, and signified good night. Sam, looking at her face, turned away from it, hesitated, turned back, broke. Fear increased his admiration, and, to do him justice, the fear was not wholly for conventions and comforts; the man had certain broad moralities and loyalties. A reflex muscular action had set in to regain what he had lost. "Judith! Judith!" he begged.

Her raised hand stopped him. "You are too late, Sam."

"My dear, you mustn't get the idea that I don't love you still."

"Love has nothing to do with it any more. Besides, it is never any use to talk of love without justice."

He went out, dazed and aggrieved. He had always thought they got along as well as most people. _He_ had not been cherishing grudges.

Womanlike, having met the emergency gallantly, after it was all over Judith collapsed. The day of reckoning for which she had so long been running up an account was on her. But the growing assurance rallied her, that her going away and her coming back were equally means to her success in failure.

The reality of their marriage could not have been saved. But they had the children; and to the children was restored much of what their father had largely spoiled in the first place, and she nearly forfeited in the second. For the fact was that Sam did better; the despot is always a moral coward, and always something of the slave to a master. Moreover, her growing invulnerability to hurt through him set, in large measure, the attitude of the household; everybody was more comfortable. She discounted his opinions and complaints; but, in considering the welfare of the greatest number, she sacrificed as little as possible his individual comforts. His interests she studied. And for the rest, she let him go his way and went hers.

Life is a perfect equation: if something is added or subtracted, something is subtracted or added, so long as there _is_ life. Judith got her poise again in time, as strong natures do after any death; with some fibres weakened past mending, gray, but calm. If his side of her nature was stunted, she seemed to blossom all the more richly in other ways. She loved her children in proportion as she had suffered and worked for them. After her domestic years, like so many women, she took fresh start, physically and mentally. Her executive ability found public outlet. She could admit friends again. Freedom from the corrosion of antagonism was happiness. Without the struggle to keep that love which must ask so much of its object, she could give Sam more of that altruism which asks nothing.

THE GLASS DOOR

BY MARY TRACY EARLE

Charlotte and Emory Blake lived at the old Blake place, on the little plateau at the foot of the Colton hill, in a vine-covered stone cottage. The place had belonged to old George Blake. When it came into Emory's hands he sold it to Uncle Billy Kerr, and used the money for a course in a school of pharmacy. Later, Charlotte, who was then Charlotte Hastings, bought it, and, after her marriage, finished paying for it out of its own products, while her husband talked politics or played chess in his drug-store. It was said that when Blake was doing either of these things he was as likely as not to keep a customer standing a half-hour before waiting on him,--and this not so much out of interest in his discussion or his game as from complete lack of interest in the business of selling drugs.

North Pass correctly interpreted this general nonchalance of Blake's as a sign that he was an unwilling partner in the matrimonial venture he had undertaken. Indeed, it was known that the engagement had hung fire for years through no fault of Charlotte's, and everybody had noticed that such mildly loverlike enthusiasm for her society as Blake had shown before he went to the school of pharmacy had disappeared from his manner when he returned. Charlotte had told people that they should marry as soon as he came home, yet the wedding did not come off for two years. During this time it was noticed that although she held her head high and was fertile in good reasons for the delay, her girlish look left her, her features sharpened, and her speech developed an acid reaction; it was at this time, too, that she bargained with Uncle Billy Kerr for the old Blake place, and also borrowed money from the old man to put up a new house. When people saw the house going up it was generally supposed that she was preparing either to rent it or to live in it as an old maid; but when it was completed, to the surprise of every one, Charlotte and Blake were married and moved in.

The morning after the wedding Blake was in his drug-store playing chess as languidly as ever, but Charlotte spent her whole day planting a vegetable-garden, in a mood of unreckoning exaltation such as rarely comes to a woman of her nature, and never comes to her but once. She had felt no such blissful security when Blake and she were first engaged. Blake was weak. She had felt it intensely even when her infatuation for him was too fresh to permit her to reason, and a weak man while unmarried is peculiarly liable to changes of affection. But, on the other hand, a weak man once safely married is completely in the power of his wife; during the last two years of their engagement certain illusions regarding herself and Blake had fallen from her eyes; she had stated both those facts plainly to herself, and they had helped her to decide upon a course of action. There had been moments when she had despised herself for using her stronger will to coerce Blake into the fulfilment of his engagement, but on the morning after the wedding these moments were forgotten, and, as she hoed and raked and planted in the brisk air and the bright spring sunshine, her whole existence seemed uplifted by the knowledge that she and Blake at last belonged unquestionably to each other; that every output of her strength was for their common comfort, and would continue to be as long as they both should live.

As the first year of married life goes, Charlotte's first year was fairly successful. She knew Blake's faults already, and had made up her mind to them, and if there was a frank indifference in his quiet languor, she had made up her mind to that, too. He was never unkind, and there were times when some fresh evidence of her devotion to him would touch him into an appreciation that was almost responsive. And there were other times when she would find him looking at her with an expression which any other observer might have classed as pity, but which she counted as tenderness. On the whole, it seemed to her that time was bringing them together, as she had counted that it would, and with this hope her face lost its sharp outlines.

Her first heavy chagrin was at the time of her baby's birth. When Blake came into the room to inquire for her, and she turned down the bed-cover to show him the little bundle at her side, a look of pain and aversion flashed across his face, and he moved away, begging her not to show the baby to him until it was older. On another day she tried to make him select a name for it, and he refused.

"Call it anything you please," he said at first, but she would not let him go at that.

"I've been thinking," she suggested, with a hesitation that was foreign to her,--"I've been thinking of calling her for your mother--Dorcas."

They were alone in the room, and he was sitting by her bed, but looking away from her into the corner of the room, while she looked anxiously at him. At her words he started, flashing a keen glance at her. "Why should we name her that?" he asked.

There was something so sharply disturbed in his manner, and his distaste for the idea was so evident, that Charlotte flushed in extreme embarrassment.

"I thought you might like to," she explained.

"Well, I wouldn't,--I--I don't think the name's pretty in itself," he declared; adding, with a great effort to speak naturally, "I'd rather name her for you."

Charlotte's lips came together so closely that all the unpleasant lines showed around them. "I certainly shall not name her for myself," she said. "You must think of some other name."

Blake got to his feet. "That's the only one I can think of," he said. "If you don't like it, you can take some other. It's your affair, not mine."

Charlotte's eyes flashed and then filled with tears, for she was very weak. "If I were asking you to father some other man's child, you couldn't act more as if you despised me," she sobbed.

He turned as he was leaving the room and gave her a long look full of exasperation, repugnance, and despair. "You are quite mistaken," he said. "I don't despise you. I despise myself."

For half an hour Charlotte sobbed, her hands clenched at her sides, her tears flowing unchecked; then, quite suddenly, she was calm, and, drying her disfigured face, she began to take account of stock. All that she had before, she reasoned, she still had. The gains of a year might seem to be lost in the outbreak of a moment, yet they still existed as a solid foundation to build upon. There would be constraint at first, but the effort of daily patience would overcome it in time; moreover, there was the baby. Blake might refuse to look at her now, but as she grew and acquired the irresistible graces of a healthy babyhood he would be obliged to see and to yield to her. A man of his nature could not live in the house with a child and not love it. She touched the small form at her side, as if to assure herself that this ally which she had so suffered for had not deserted her. Yes, she had more hope now than ever before, she told herself, and her eyes shone with a passionate tenderness, though her lips were set in a hard line. Suddenly the line broke into a smile.

"I'll name her Hope," she said.

When Hope was two months old she began her mission, and when she had reached six months Blake was vying with Charlotte in his devotion to her. He even plucked up a little interest in his business; sometimes he talked over his place with his wife, and the words which had passed between them over the naming of the child, though unforgotten, seemed so far in the past that Charlotte's courage strengthened with each day. The sense of security which had marked the first months of her married life did not return, but she could feel herself making a strong fight against fate to hold what she had, and, if she were never entirely certain of the issue, at least she fought with the obstinacy which has no knowledge of yielding. Sometimes even her love for Blake seemed to lose itself in this obstinacy, and her tenderness towards her child seemed the only womanly sentiment left in her; but more often her love for her husband mounted high and unmixed above the other feelings as the tremendous, inexplicable passion of her life.

Hope's attainment of six months was marked by an unusual display of energy on the part of Blake. The first cold weather of autumn had come, and when the house doors were closed, Charlotte was surprised to hear her husband declare that the sitting-room, where the baby would spend most of her time in winter, was poorly lighted, and needed to have a glass door substituted for the wooden one which opened on to the front porch. Still more to her surprise, the door was delivered from an adjoining town the next day, and on the following morning Blake rose earlier than usual and hung it before going down to his store. It was the first time he had lifted his hand towards the improvement of Charlotte's house.

He whistled boyishly while he measured and fitted in the hinges, and when it came to holding the door while the hinges were screwed in place, he called to Charlotte. She came, with lips as usual closed very tight, but with cheeks flushed very pink, and when the work was finished she was so atremble that she had to sit down for a moment before she could put breakfast on the table.

To give a reason for the delay, she kept looking at the door. "The room, is perfect now," she said.

Blake swung the new acquisition back and forth, and latched it once or twice to make sure that it was perfectly adjusted. When he was satisfied he glanced at his wife.

"It will give our baby the sunlight," he said, and their eyes met for a moment.

All that day, whenever Charlotte could bring her work into the sitting-room, she sat facing the glass door. She was not exactly happy; she was too strangely excited for happiness; but she was keenly awakened and alert. Every nerve in her seemed keyed up to its ultimate tension, and if the shadow of a cloud passed, even if a red leaf fell outside, she looked out expectantly through the door.

It was middle afternoon when, on looking up, she saw a young woman crossing the porch, leading a little child. Charlotte jumped to her feet, then reseated herself and waited for the tap on the glass. The visitors were strangers to her, and though she could not have told why, as she sat staring at them through the door, her mouth suddenly set into the lines of indomitable obstinacy which had grown so deep around it in the past three years. When she finally crossed the room to open the door, she walked slowly and deliberately, as if she had some definite purpose in mind and meant to accomplish it.

The woman on the outside was the first to speak. "Does Mr. Emory Blake live here?" she asked.

"He does. I am his wife. What can I do for you?" asked Charlotte.

The woman gave a little cry and drew back. "Oh no!" she said, breathlessly.

Charlotte stood, white and stiff and silent, while the other looked about her in a despairing helplessness. She was a frail-looking woman, worn with fatigue and the excited emotions with which timidity spurs itself to action. She looked as if she longed to sit down somewhere, and as if perhaps she could have more courage seated, but Charlotte made no motion to invite her to enter. After a while the newcomer brought her frightened eyes back to the set face in the doorway.

"I am so sorry for you," she said, timidly. "I am his wife."

A shiver of resentment ran convulsively through Charlotte's muscles. "You can be sorry for yourself," she said, roughly.

"But he married me while he was at the school of pharmacy," the other cried, weakly. "I was Nettie Trent. I clerked, and I boarded where he did, and we fell in love and married. He told me about you. You are Charlotte Hastings, aren't you, that wanted to marry him before he left home?"

Charlotte moved her dry lips soundlessly once or twice before she could speak. Then her masterful spirit rose to a new task. She drew herself up and looked down gravely, almost compassionately, upon the woman who had been Nettie Trent.

"I was Charlotte Hastings before my marriage," she said. "I am sorry to be the one to hurt you, but you have been cruelly treated. I was married to Emory Blake before he left home for the school."

The smaller woman gave a little gasp and stood silent, while Charlotte, with the fire in her veins scorching her cheeks and eyes and almost smothering her breath, waited for her to offer some resistance, to assert her own claim, or to ask for proof of the statement which denied it; but Nettie said nothing, and after a moment her gaze dropped from Charlotte's and she began to sob. Charlotte took her by the hand and led her into the room.

Neither of them spoke for a long time. Nettie sat with her face buried in her hands. On one side her child tugged at her dress; on the other, little Hope slept in her cradle. Charlotte stood pale and tall, watching all three.