Chapter II: Part 2

For nine days Mildred Thatcher lived as her neighbours, a life as thick and solid, as uninformed with the spirit as the rubber plant which stood neglected in the drawing-room by the pile of books—as yet unshelved—and the dusty upright piano. The palms had gone to the florist’s, and she had no heart to take the rubber plant in and out each day. She did not care whether the thing died or not. She did not care for anything. Every night when Nevin came home, she greeted him as calmly and affectionately as he greeted her, and waited, tingling, for developments which never came. The rug, which dominated her every waking moment, had, indeed, been almost forgotten by him—pressed out of sight, as is a man’s wont with disagreeable domestic happenings, only the unpleasant impression remaining. He read or went to sleep on the sofa, and they both spent some evenings out. After a week had passed, and while Mildred was waiting for the change in her husband’s manner, it suddenly came over her with a strange shock that he was not only losing his delicate perception of her, but that he was growing content without it. It is so easy to lapse to the lower level! They were getting into the rut that only grows the deeper with travel.

Then there came a day when Mrs. Thatcher could stand it no longer. She had a consultation with Mrs. Brereton, and the next morning the latter came over and the two talked further with great animation over the rug in the little drawing-room. After that Mrs. Thatcher dressed herself with unusual care. She put on her new dark blue suit and a hat that her husband always admired, although it was not quite in the fashion. She looked at herself again and again in the glass before she started for the train, giving a touch here and a touch there with nervous fingers. She could not wait for her husband to come home, even if she had been less painfully aware of her new powerlessness in the conventional surroundings. She must venture into new scenes if she would gain what she wanted. And she could not stand this a minute longer—she must end it all _now_.

Yet, her heart was beating painfully as she neared the city, and she was only somewhat reassured by the glimpse in the ferry-boat mirror of a tall, slender-throated woman with soft, pale cheeks and a curved mouth, her dark eyes gazing indifferently before her under a hat whose cherry wreath drooped against her dark hair, and who turned out to be herself. If she really looked like that——

Her hand lingered on the knob of the ground-glass door that led to the office of her husband’s factory. Then she opened it.

“Nevin!”

Her husband, broad and square-shouldered, was standing over another man’s desk, beyond, talking. There were lines of care on his forehead, and a pencil behind his ear—he was the man of business, not her husband.

He looked up amazed as he saw his wife, but came forward at once.

“Why, _Mildred_!”

“Oh, Nevin, I hope you don’t mind! I’ve been feeling so dreadfully, I couldn’t stand it a moment longer. I’ve something—something to tell you.”

She began to shake a little, her lip trembled, her eyes looked appealingly at him like a child’s. Her husband had always known as a matter of course that she was beautiful, but her beauty came now like a surprise in the dingy surroundings of the factory office, with the whirr of the planing machines beyond. His eyes met the appeal in hers with a smile that set her pulse beating anew, as he said:

“What is it? Hadn’t you better sit down?”

“No, no! Not yet. Maybe you won’t want me to—— Oh, Nevin, I’ve been trying to tell you every night lately how sorry I was—I’d acted so—about the rug—and I couldn’t! You wouldn’t give me a chance.”

The well-known stiffness came over him—a shadow of the past shade.

“That’s of no consequence—don’t let’s talk about it.”

“Yes, _please_—I must! Oh, Nevin, I hope you won’t mind. I knew I couldn’t be decent while the rug was there. I’m so frightfully narrow-minded—things make me horrid even when I don’t want to be. I’ve—I’ve sold it.”

“_Sold_ it?”

“Yes. Mrs. Brereton bought it for her brother-in-law’s room. She didn’t pay quite as much as you did—you left the price mark on—but she said you were cheated.”

“_I_ don’t care what you do with it. I thought it was a pretty good sort, myself.”

“It was a _lovely_ rug,” said Mrs. Thatcher earnestly, “only it wasn’t in the right place. It was just what Mrs. Brereton wanted—for her brother-in-law. But it seemed so mean of me to sell it—when it was your present—and I’ve been so unhappy lately—Nevin—you _can’t think_!”

Her eyes brimmed as she gazed at him; the red cherries in her hat shook against the dark hair that framed her soft, pale cheeks.

“Sit down,” said Mr. Thatcher briefly, pushing a wooden armed office chair towards her. He went away momentarily, and then came back. “Have you had your lunch?”

“No,” replied Mrs. Thatcher faintly.

“Well, neither have I. I think you’d be better for something to eat. You wait five minutes and I’ll be ready to go out with you. We’ll have a little lunch together.”

She raised her drooping head to give him the wistfully pleased, half-encouraged look of one dependent on a benign higher power. Her heart was swelling with the joy of triumph.

When he returned to her with his overcoat, he had been brushed clear of the factory dust and looked trim and smiling, hat in hand.

“It’s nearly two o’clock. I think I won’t come back here this afternoon; I’ve got through about all there is to do. It’s a dull day. I’m going to take you around to the Electrographic Club to lunch; they’ve got a new room for ladies. You’d like to see the pictures there. Come on—this way.”

“Oh, how lovely!” said Mrs. Thatcher, with a deep, contented sigh. “How _good_ you are, Nevin! Do I look all right?”

“Oh, you’ll do,” said her husband, with an affectionate squeeze of the arm next him. “See here! You mustn’t look at me in the street that way; people will think we’re engaged.”

“Well, why not?” murmured Mrs. Thatcher. “I don’t care what anybody thinks—Darling!”

* * * * *

“Yes, my husband selected it,” said Mildred. The next door neighbour was standing in Mrs. Thatcher’s little drawing-room with her, and they were both looking down at a dark velvety rug with an Oriental blend of colours in it. “It was a present to me, but he wouldn’t _think_ of getting it alone—though he has such excellent taste. We made quite a little event of buying it yesterday.”

“It is beautiful,” said the neighbour, with a regretful sigh. “How dry that rubber plant looks; it needs water. Why don’t you have it outdoors?”

“Oh, I have it out all the time,” asseverated Mrs. Thatcher hastily. “At least, _nearly_ all the time. Lately I’ve forgotten to see about it. I’ve been so—so _busy_. Why, I do believe there’s a new green leaf coming out at the top!”

“Rubber plants can stand a great deal,” said the neighbour philosophically, following Mrs. Thatcher, who was lugging the heavy pot out into the wooing breeze of the late afternoon. She was so touchingly happy that she felt as if she could have lifted mountains.

She stood and looked down the elm-shaded street, through which the footsteps of her beloved would soon be hastening to her. The department store wagons were still rattling up and down, delivering relays and relays of parcels at the different houses, and here and there weary, draggled-looking women were returning from town, each carrying by one end the large paper bag which contains an untrimmed hat. You could tell by the way they walked that their feet hurt. Down the block the freshening palms and rubber plants were grouped at intervals. On Mrs. Thatcher’s piazza, the emblem of a much-enduring domesticity once more stood in the sunshine, stolid and green.

The Terminal

The Terminal

It was Saturday night—the married “drummer’s” homesick night. Mr. Martin Prescott, walking into the long, narrow hotel bedroom, felt more than ever the wearing familiarity of the scene that met his eye. There were the same dull carpet, the Michigan pine furniture, the drab striped wallpaper, the windows shaded only by little slatted inside shutters, to which he was used in third-rate towns. There was even the same indefinable chill, dusty smell that was associated with evenings of figuring over sales on the coverless table, under the weak, single-armed gas burner that jutted out from the wall at the side of the bureau. Yet, cheerless as it was, he preferred its seclusion just now to the more convivial bar-room, where the liquor and the jokes and the conversation of “the boys” had all the same jading flavour, and he felt unequal to bracing his spirit sufficiently to receiving the Saturday confidences of the garrulous or the weary. Reticent both by habit and principle as to his intimate affairs, he was no stranger to his kind, and in the top strata of his mind were embedded many curious evidences of other men’s lives.

But to-night he had a matter on his mind that companied him whether he would or no, and he was sore at having to stay over in this little town, from which there was egress once only in twenty-four hours. He had waited for a customer who did not arrive in the place until too late for him to get out of it, and had hereby missed the letter from his wife which was waiting for him some hundred miles further westward. Prescott did not, in a way, dislike travelling as a business; his wife always comforted herself with the thought that there were other modes of earning a living more inherently disagreeable to him, yet there were days and nights of a paucity which he was glad she could not picture. Saturday night away from home in this kind of a town, without a letter—when the last one had been disquieting—reached the limit of endurance. He felt that he had travelled long enough.

He made his preparations for the evening with the wontedness of custom. He locked the door, turned up the gas, and worked over the screw in the lukewarm radiator. Then he drew the cane-bottomed rocking-chair underneath the gas burner, and placed a couple of magazines on the bureau beside him, his lean, bearded face reflected in the shadowy mirror above it. He opened his valise and took from it a folding leather photograph case containing the picture of a woman and three children. Prescott gazed at it hard for a few moments before standing it up beside the magazines. He was trying to find an answer to the question he was debating: if he could manage in some way to supplement by three hundred dollars more the income of a new position offered him, he might be able to accept it and stay at home for ever.

He lit his pipe and, putting his heavily booted feet on a chair, began to cut the leaves of a magazine with his pocket-knife. He had meant to get his slippers out of the bag and make himself comfortable, but somehow, after looking at the photographs, he had forgotten about himself. He had written his daily letter to his wife before the last-going train, and he would not begin a fresh sheet now—no matter what he wrote, she would divine his mood. You have to be very careful what you write in a letter that is read some days after, lest you cloud the sunshine for another when it has brightened again for you.

“What is it?”

He sprang up as a knock came to the door, after first hastily sweeping the photograph case into the valise. He hoped devoutly that it was not a visitor; there was no one in this town whose presence would not be an intrusion to-night. But he gave a glad start of surprise as his eyes fell on the man standing with the bell-boy in the hall.

“Brenner! Well, this _is_ good! I never dreamed of seeing _you_ here.”

“I don’t wonder,” said the stranger, a pleasant, fresh-faced, broad-shouldered young fellow, with a light mustache. “It’s ages since I set eyes on you; I changed my route, and then, two years ago, I married. We only moved here last spring. Jim Halliday told me this afternoon that you were in town. What a soak he is! But don’t let’s waste time here; I want you to come right around and spend the evening at our house; I want you to meet my wife.”

“I’ll be delighted,” said Prescott with alacrity. He locked the bedroom door and the two walked out together, conversing briskly as they went. He and the younger Brenner had been chance companions on several notable trips in former years, drawn together in spite of dissimilarities in taste and education by a certain clear and simple cleanness of mind which unerringly divines its kin. The air had seemed raw and chill earlier, but good fellowship had put its warmth into the winter world with Brenner’s presence.

“So you’re married,” said Prescott presently. “I remember that I heard of it. I’ve wondered at not meeting you anywhere; I didn’t know you’d given up the road.”

“Well, yes, I’ve quit,” said Brenner. “My wife didn’t like me to be away so much, used to get scared nights, and there’s a sight of things to see to when you have a house—the coal, you know, and the plumbing getting out of order, and then after the boy came—oh, yes, I’ve quit it all right. Seems sort of tied down in a way after you’ve been your own boss, but I’m not sorry—I’m pretty well fixed, I guess. Travelling’s all very well for a single man, but it gets to be an awful pull after you’re married. You miss a lot.”

“I’ve been travelling for sixteen years,” said Prescott soberly; “two years before I married—at twenty-four—and fourteen since.”

“That so? It’s a pretty long time.”

“Yes, it is. I’ve been wanting to give it up.” He hesitated, and then continued with rare expansiveness: “The fact is, there’s a position open for me at home now, but I can’t quite see my way clear to taking it. The salary’s nominally all right, but there’s my living to be taken into account, and other things. I figure out that it would mean about three hundred dollars a year less than we have now—and I don’t see how we could live on that. You see, the trouble is it’s away out of the line I’m in now—yet there _may_ be a future in it.”

He went into explanatory detail, led on by Brenner’s questioning interest.

“Couldn’t you make it up in any way by outside commissions?”

Prescott nodded. “Ah, that’s what I’m trying to get at. You’re a wise man to have made the break early, Brenner. Every year I’ve meant to.” Prescott spoke with a bitter patience. “I’ve never thought of my being on the road as anything but temporary, and here I’m at it still. The longer you wait, the harder it gets to change; you don’t know how to take the risk. I haven’t told my wife yet about this offer, for I don’t want to disappoint her. I hoped to have had a letter from her to-night—the last one was rather disquieting—but I’m behind my schedule.”

“Well, I know what that is,” said Brenner heartily. “I had a letter from Mame once after we were first married—she’d cried all over the paper in big blots; she thought she’d die before morning. Well, my train was snowed up in a South Dakota blizzard and I never got another letter for a week. _Holy smoke!_ I never want to go through that kind of a racket again. Then, when I _did_ hear, I found she’d been to a party the next evening as chipper as you please—belle of the ball. I tell you there’s too much seesaw about that sort of thing for a limited nature like mine; but I suppose I’d have got used to teetering on it same as the rest of you, only she made up her mind I was to quit—and quit I did. Mame runs _me_! I guess she’ll try and run you too; she tries to run most any one that comes to hand. This is my shebang.”

He stopped before a small cottage whose slender piazza was ornamentally fenced in with heavy wooden scroll work, and, opening the front door, ushered the guest into the narrow hall. “Hello, Mame! Here’s Prescott. Prescott—he’s one of ‘the boys,’ you know.”

“We’re so glad to have you here,” said Mrs. Brenner, a stout young woman in a light blue flannel shirt-waist; she had prettily untidy hair, large gentle brown eyes, and small, very soft hands. She brushed the light strands of hair out of the way with a pretty gesture of one hand, while she extended the other to Prescott. He felt an instant sensation of comfort, increased when he found himself finally settled in an armchair in a room that reflected the mistress of it in a sort of warm, attractive disorderliness. A work-basket, with the sewing half out of it, occupied a footstool; the table, lighted by a lamp with a pictorial shade, was piled high with magazines and papers; a banjo sprawled on the sofa amid the tumbled pillows, and a child’s pink worsted sock and a china cat lay in front of the bright little kerosene stove in the middle of the floor.

Mrs. Brenner followed his gaze towards the infant’s belongings and blushed as she laughed.

“Harve won’t let me pick them up! Isn’t it silly of him?”

“I believe she puts them there herself, because she thinks I like it,” said Brenner serenely. “Oh, she’s up to tricks! She sent me for you to-night. Do you remember the evening I spent at your house five years ago? The night I had the cold, and your wife put the mustard plaster on me?”

“Why so she did,” said Prescott delightedly. “I’d forgotten you’d seen my wife and the children. Let me see—there were only two of them—Margaret’s four years old.”

“It was the hottest mustard plaster I ever felt,” said Brenner reminiscently. “I went to sleep with it on. When I woke up—I guess I was sort of dazed—I thought the house was on fire, and started to run down-stairs, but Mrs. Prescott caught on in some way, and sent you to head me off. Hottest mustard plaster I _ever_ felt. Well, your wife was mighty good to me. Not so very rugged-looking though herself, as I remember.”

“Oh, she’s very strong,” said Prescott, with defensive hauteur; “very. She’s never ill.” He turned the conversation towards the Brenner ménage. “And how old is your child?”

But he found himself, later, confiding in Mrs. Brenner, after the cozy little supper in the rag-carpeted dining-room, where she had set out hot mince pie and cheese and cookies, and Brenner had made the coffee. Prescott, who owned the impaired digestion of the travelling man, had long passed the stage of taking whiskey to supplement all deficiencies, arriving at the final attitude of the invariable soft boiled eggs for breakfast and rare roast beef for dinner, but to-night he had recklessly refused to take sickly thought for the morrow. Mame’s pie was good.

Brenner was sitting now cross-legged on the sofa, strumming obliviously on the banjo, while Prescott, his arms on the dining-table, leaned towards Mrs. Brenner’s sympathy. Something in this warm home atmosphere was too much for him.

“She—I—there’re some things you can’t talk about, Mrs. Brenner. Now, the other night my wife had to get up at two o’clock in the morning and go out over the snow to the doctor’s; Martin, that’s my boy, was taken sick. Little Emma wouldn’t let her mother go alone—she’s only nine. My wife wrote me that it didn’t scare her a bit, but it does seem sort of pitiful—doesn’t it?—to think of their doing it. It’s never happened before, but the neighbours we used to have moved away.”

“Oh, you mind it more than she would,” said Mrs. Brenner encouragingly. Her soft eyes made a temporary home for him.

“Things seem to tell on her more than they used, though she tries hard not to let me see it. She’s always worrying about me, in this kind of weather, for fear I’ll come down with something alone in a hotel. But my wife”—Prescott paused a moment awkwardly—“my wife’s awfully _good_; I’m not that way myself, Mrs. Brenner, but I don’t think I would care for a woman that wasn’t religious. She thinks everything is _meant_. And it helps her a lot.”

“Yes, I know,” said Mrs. Brenner. She added after a little silence: “Was your boy very ill?”

“Ill? No; he was all right the next day. But she caught cold; she doesn’t think enough of herself; she’s that kind, you know. It’s clear foolishness! Last time I was home I found that when the girl left—we had one for six years and have been changing hoodlums every fifteen minutes since she married—well, when the last one left I found she’d been carrying up the coal for the fires because the boy got tired, and she was afraid it would hurt him. Husky little beggar, I’d tire him all right! He’s just getting to the age when he’s too much for his mother—nothing wrong about him, but he worries her. He slings his books at the brakemen when he goes in to school on the train and gets complained of—and he smokes cigarettes around the corner and the neighbours come and tell her, and it breaks her all up.”

“He needs a man,” said Mrs. Brenner.

“Yes. But you see I’m home so seldom she can’t bear to have me down on the children the only time I’m with them. You see, a man doesn’t think much whether he likes to travel or not—it’s just something that’s got to be done, if you’re in the business—but it’s hard on a woman. Some women seem to get used to it, though.”

“Ah,” murmured Mrs. Brenner, “when we married I said to my husband: ‘When I get over caring for you, then I’ll get over minding your leaving me—and not before.’”

“Why, that’s what my wife says!” said Prescott. He laughed, with a rising colour, and shook his head. “You women—you’re all alike. You don’t know what lots of good it’s done me to be here and talk to you to-night; it’s most as good as being home—not quite, though.”

“Can’t you stop travelling?” said Mrs. Brenner, going with penetrative instinct to the thought she felt. She added, after a pause: “Are you sure you can’t?”

He looked at her uncertainly. “How did you know that? No, I’m not sure I can’t—but I’m not sure I can. And I’m not so young as I was.”

“Think of it.” Her hand gave his a warm clasp; through her eyes he saw his wife. “_Think_ of it.”

“God knows I do,” said Prescott huskily. His hand wrenched hers in its farewell, before he put on the overcoat Brenner brought him from the back hall.

All the way back to the hotel he was thinking over things. It all depended on that few hundred dollars extra, so absolutely necessary that, without it, he could not provide a shelter for his family. More than a living he no longer planned for. He looked at the future with the eye of the man who, whatever his abilities, has come to learn that, either from early training, or environment, or the iron bands of need, more than a careful living can never be his. He could have enjoyed riches as well and more than many another man, but they were so out of all calculation that what they could buy no longer aroused in him any particular interest. He would never even be able to indulge in that pathetically ludicrous dream of the business man of retiring to a green and placid land and raising catalogue produce from theory. He would be able to save little, after educating his children, but the money to pay the insurance that would keep his wife from penury when he died. For all his days he must work in harness, and take no holiday but that which Death gives to the great rank and file.

Yet, in spite of these limitations, for all that he tacitly renounced, he had good measure. He had the freedom of spirit which belongs to him who, given a competence, envies not any man his wealth or his opportunity. He had gained a capacity for getting great and far-reaching happiness from the exquisite little joys of life. If he had a little of the inner sadness that comes of foregoing the ambitions natural to a man, it was not the sadness of defeat, but rather the thoughtful weighing of the loss as the least—all things considered—that he could have had. In the silent times of those long journeyings by day and night over the earth, the pricelessness of the common blessing of a home had sunk deeper and deeper into his soul. And the spring of all this was in the love he and his wife had for each other, a love that was too much of a vital power to be consciously dwelt upon; it was rather an enlarging and enriching of the whole nature because they two were one in the possession of a country which it is given to but few of the married to see even afar off. Below all trouble lay ever a secret joy; whither he went, she companied him. In all the years of separation, they were less apart than many whose hands meet daily; there could be no real separation between them even after death.

But now—but now—she was getting tired. Her small face with its pure outlines, the sweet, nervous mouth and the loving eyes came before him—her low controlled voice, her quick motions, her rapid adjustment of all domestic problems that his brief stay at home might be bright and restful, the children at their best, the meals most home-like, and she herself dressed prettily, with the work so ordered that she might not lose a minute of his society. If callers came on one of those precious afternoons, she rebelled as if at a calamity. She had always been so brave, so helpful, but she was not so strong as she had been, and the boy was too much for her. If he could but see his way a little clearer! He had the cautiousness of methods new to him that comes of the inexperience of manhood, far more frustrating than the inexperience of the boy.

Brenner came around the next day just before train time.

“Mame sent me,” he explained. “She’s been talking to me ever since you left. She’s got a brother in New York who’s in the line you’re looking up, and she has an idea you can fix up something with him in connection with the position you were telling me of. If you can carry some of his business with you I don’t see but it would help you out mighty well. He’s a good man—and he’ll do anything for Mame, if he _can_ do it. She’s written him a letter, and here’s one for you.”

“I’m much obliged, I’m sure,” said Prescott politely. He did not speak with enthusiasm; he had a rooted distaste for a woman’s intervention in business matters, and by daylight his evening confidences rather annoyed him. Still——

“A telegram for you, sir,” said a boy, coming up.

Prescott took it and opened it mechanically. He stood for a moment with his eyes glued to the paper, and when he looked up Brenner cried in horror:

“Not your _wife_, man!”

“No,” said Prescott thickly. “It’s little Margaret.” He consulted the paper. “She’s not dead—yet. She’s been run over. She may not be so badly hurt as they fear. My God! I can’t get there for two days!”

“Thank heaven the east-bound train’s on time,” said Brenner devoutly, and went home to be cheered by his Mame.

* * * * *

“Papa is to carry little Margaret up-stairs—think of it!—dear papa to carry her—such a treat! His arms are so much stronger than mamma’s.” It was a week since the day of the telegram.

“Mamma jiggles,” said the child roguishly, looking backward from the shelter of her father’s arms to the slender figure toiling up laboriously with shawls and pillows. “Mamma carries Marget all slippy.”

“Poor mamma,” said the father; “she has to do everything when I’m not here.” He pressed his lips to the soft baby cheek of the little girl who was getting well, but his thought was with the mother. “Now what on earth are you lugging all those things up for, Annie? Didn’t I tell you to call Martin to take them? You know you’re all worn out.”

“He’s reading, and I thought I wouldn’t disturb him.”

“Where’s that magazine I had? _There_ you go again! Why _don’t_ you let the children wait on you?”

“I knew _just_ where it was,” said the wife with eager excuse.

“Well, it’s their business to know where things are,” said Prescott severely; “they don’t help you half enough. When I go away to-morrow——”

The joy in his wife’s face went out as the light is snuffed out in a candle.

That evening, as they sat alone together in the cozy library after the children were in bed, she broke into the conversation with a tone that showed the effort. “I haven’t asked you yet what time you want breakfast to-morrow morning. I hope you don’t have to take the six-fifty, it’s so very dark and early, and you never really eat anything, no matter what I get for you.”

Prescott looked at the pure outline of her cheek and brow, and the stricken cheerfulness of her eyes. He hardly seemed to hear her words for a minute, and then answered absently:

“No; I’m not going so early to-morrow. Hark, is that somebody coming up our steps?”

“Oh, I _hope_ it’s no one to call! It would be dreadful when it’s our last evening together. No, thank goodness! It’s next door.”

“When I’ve been home five whole days that you didn’t count on, you oughtn’t to stand out for such a little thing as the last evening. It was well I could come—wasn’t it? When I got that telegram——”

He broke off with a shudder, and their hands clasped. Their minds traversed the past week with its terror and anxiety, and its later joy—the great happiness which comes from no new phase, but from the blessed continuance of the unnoticed daily good.

“You have been in town so much of the time,” she murmured half-jealously.

“Yes, I know. It was necessary.”

“You haven’t told me yet what time you want your breakfast.”

“Oh, any old time. I don’t think I’ll go in the morning.”

“Why didn’t you say so before?” She looked at him reproachfully. “Then I would have hired Maria for the day. Now I’ll have to spend a lot of time in the kitchen when I’ll want to be with you.”

“How would you behave if I were to stay home all the time?”

“How would I behave?” She gleamed at him with sudden sweet tremulous humour through the mistiness of her eyes. “I’d never come near you. I’d make calls and belong to all the societies in the place and not get back until after dinner-time. I’d go next door in the evening and leave you home reading. I’d behave the way other women do whose husbands come home every night. I expect I’d get tired of seeing you around. Don’t you believe it?” The gaiety in her tone flickered and went out, as if she were very, very tired. Her voice dropped to a whisper. “I know you’ve been considering that offer—_you_ didn’t tell me of it—and you’ve refused it. I’ve been watching you. And I don’t see how I’m going to let you go this time.”

“Annie!”

“Oh, forgive, forgive me! I’ll be brave again, I will indeed. But I’ve been through so much lately that just now—it gets so hard—so hard”—her voice was almost inaudible—“harder and harder. I’ve been praying—and _praying_.”

“Annie, dear, you’re all wrong. I’m not going to-morrow or Tuesday either. Can’t you guess?”

She lifted her head from his shoulder and pushed him from her. “How queer you act! What do you _mean_?”

He tried to bend a jovial gaze upon her.

“I’m not going to travel any more, Annie, ever. You were all wrong; I’ve taken the offer. I went to see Mrs. Brenner’s brother in town. I tell you that little woman in Wisconsin did you a mighty good turn! And I’ve taken the chances. I’ve figured it all out.” He tried to gather her to him, but she drew back. “Why, Annie, aren’t you glad? What makes you shake so?”

“You are going to stay _now_?”

“Yes, always. I’m going to look after my children and my—sweet—wife. Why _Annie_! Oh, you poor, _poor_ girl, has it been as bad as _that_?”

He tried once more to draw her to him, but she eluded his grasp and was gone. He heard her light footfall above and then there was only silence.

He sat there by the table for a few minutes with a book before him, as he smoked, but he did not read. Once he went to the door and called “Annie!” softly, that little Margaret might not be wakened, and yet again, “Annie! Come down; I want to read to you,” but there was no response.

He lingered a moment hesitatingly, and then went up the stairs himself, his feet pausing half-reluctantly on the steps. Thrice he halted, and then went on again into the room where she was a kneeling figure by the bed, her arms spread out upon it, and her hair falling over her shoulders. She raised her head momentarily with a backward glance of rapt joy at him before burying it again in the coverlet, and as his footfalls stopped on the threshold she held out one arm appealingly as if to encircle him beside her.

“No—no!” he said painfully. “No, Annie! I—I can’t—it wouldn’t be right. Annie, you don’t want _me_, dear; you don’t want—— _No!_”

Her white hand still mutely pleaded. Even at the very gate of heaven she could not be satisfied without him. He drew nearer, and a little nearer. Then, somehow, he had stumbled down awkwardly into the warm enclosure of her arm, and hid his face within her bosom.

The Hinge

The Hinge

“Mrs. Ranney is going away to-morrow with the children to visit her mother; did you hear that? It will be a nice change for her, she’s alone so much, with Mr. Ranney nearly every evening at the Rowing Club or at that old hotel. Goodness knows how late he’ll stay out after she’s gone! I shouldn’t think she’d like it _at all_.”

The four women who were neighbours on the Ridge were coming back from a meeting of the Vittoria Colonna Club, picking their way in gala attire over the puddles left by a shower, with the aid of the two parallel see-sawing boards that made the suburban sidewalk. Mrs. Stone, who had spoken, was tall and large-featured; she wore a startlingly wide, high-plumed hat that seemed to have no connection with her head, rearing into strange shapes with the wind that blew from the sea.

“Perhaps she’s glad to have him out of the house,” suggested the fair, prettily garbed little Mrs. Spicer, who talked very fast. “Not that he’s dissipated at all, I don’t mean that, but I think he’s one of those horrid domineering men you’d hate to have around. I don’t believe he ever gives her a cent of money—_he_ is always so well-dressed, but she hasn’t had a new thing since she came here a year ago. I’d like to see Ernest Spicer treat me that way!”

“Mrs. Ranney says she likes him to take a walk after dinner; that he’s used to it,” interpolated the handsome, brown-eyed Mrs. Laurence, with a characteristic lift of her white chin. “He often asks her to go with him.”

“Oh, yes, so she says!” Mrs. Stone made a clutch for her hat. “Of course she _acts_ satisfied; you can’t tell anything by that. She’s a dear little woman, but I don’t believe there’s much to her; he’s a great deal above her as far as brains go, that’s evident. Keep over this side, Mrs. Spicer, that maple is just dripping. But there’s very little warmth or cordiality in Mrs. Ranney as far as I can see; she doesn’t respond as you’d think she would. I ran over the other day when she happened to be out and Ann let me see her preserve-closet. When I spoke to her the next day about the number of jars she had, she almost made me feel as if I had been intrusive. Some people have that unvarying manner, always pleasant but nothing more. It wears on _me_, I know, and I shouldn’t wonder if it did on Mr. Ranney; I think he feels a lack in her.”

“Oh, it’s such a great subject!” said little Mrs. Spicer with earnest volubility, “it’s such a great subject, that of being attractive to one’s husband. Miss Liftus spoke so feelingly about it the other day at the Club, she says that women are so engrossed in their own affairs that they neglect to adapt themselves to the husband’s life; she thinks intelligent coöperation in business matters should be the key-note. It’s a lovely idea; I know a woman who is in her husband’s office, and they enjoy it so much, but”—Mrs. Spicer paused wistfully—“it’s very hard to help a man when he’s in stocks, like Ernest Spicer; I _can not_ seem to remember quite what it is when he’s on a margin; I’ve had it explained to me so many times I am ashamed to ask him any more; I seem to understand it just for a minute, and then it goes. I don’t know what’s the reason, but Ernest never wants to talk about business with me.”

“Don’t you think husbands are very different?” asked Mrs. Budd with a slow distinctness, as if she were reading from a primer; her large, unwavering blue eyes pinned your butterfly attention fast in spite of involuntary writhings. “I know my husband and Mr. Ranney are very different, they like such different things for breakfast. I am very particular about Mr. Budd’s meals, and he depends so much on his breakfast. He always begins on——”

“Well, I’ll tell you one thing,” interrupted Mrs. Stone impatiently, she knew Mr. Budd’s _ménu_ by heart. “You can adapt and adapt and they’ll never know it, but they do know when they’re comfortable. Nobody can say that Mr. Stone isn’t comfortable in his own house. When I see a man like Mr. Ranney leaving his home every evening you may be sure there’s a screw loose somewhere. That little woman is making a great mistake, but it’s the kind of thing you’d find it difficult to speak about.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t speak about it for the world!” cried Mrs. Laurence in horror. “As Mrs. Budd says very truly, people are so different.” Yet she found herself wondering afterwards. She was sure that the Ranneys were fond of each other in a way, though she wouldn’t have cared for the way. On what hinge hung Mr. Ranney’s neglect of his wife? A lack in her, as Mrs. Stone had said, selfishness on his part—coldness on hers? Mrs. Laurence herself didn’t need to discuss her attraction for Mr. Laurence—in their case it was something inherent, not an accident of adjustment; it interpenetrated every condition of life. She had put a blue bow in her hair when she dressed, because she had a theory that a woman should look her nicest for her husband, but as a matter of fact she knew that Will thought her beautiful in anything she wore.

Mrs. Ranney always looked nice, there could be no two opinions on that. She was a slight, very young woman, with a heart-shaped, childish face, that wore an expression of gentle, matronly dignity, repelling to familiarity. She had serious, flower-blue eyes, and quantities of waving, chestnut-brown hair coiled back so tightly from a broad, low forehead that you hardly realized at first that when it was let down it formed a beautiful, shimmering cloak around her that nearly touched the floor. Her whole personality was intensely feminine. In any demand of the day her simple gowns became her, yet were never too fine for the work her busy fingers found to do, for Mrs. Ranney was a housewife and a sewer of garments; she even helped vegetables as well as flowers to grow with a quiet inborn capability that showed in whatever she undertook. She was known to be tender-hearted; the suffering of others seemed to hurt her very flesh. When that little bruiser, Herbert Ranney, fell and bumped his head, Mrs. Ranney would fly white and breathless from the house, and clasp him to her breast in a wild effort to fight off this thing that was attacking her child. She couldn’t _stand_ it that a child should suffer.

Yet she had, at unexpected moments, a roguish sense of humour that set her serious blue eyes dancing mischievously; when she got laughing, as had happened, half inaudibly, so that she was helpless to stop herself, she was as provocatively charming as a lovely child. Her husband had been once heard to state that he had never expected to marry, having lived until the age of thirty-six contentedly a bachelor, but that when he met “that rascal there,” she bowled him over on the spot. It certainly was a fact that, though she was so hard to get acquainted with, every man admired Mrs. Ranney.

Women, as a rule, did not care much for Mr. Ranney, perhaps, because he used towards them a gallant deference so evidently given them as a sex that it piqued by ignoring any personal claim to his attention. In appearance he was large and heavily built, smooth-shaven, with fine intellectual features, and hair and brows of blue black; his square chin was almost aggressively assertive. A man of semi-nautical tastes, he had at times almost a quarter-deck manner alike to barking dogs, poaching cows and trivial or unauthorized approach from his fellows. With the men who were his friends he was reputed to be a charming companion, witty, genial, and whole-hearted; the wives took the fact on hearsay, with some suspicion. Mrs. Laurence felt a distinct sense of resentment as, sitting on her piazza after dinner she saw him coming up the steps, natty and immaculate in his blue flannels, pipe in hand—he was actually going to leave his wife alone on the eve of her departure. He doffed the peaked, gold-banded cap of his boating club.

“Good-evening, Mrs. Laurence. Is Laurence anywhere around?”

“Oh, yes, indeed, he’s never far off when I’m here,” returned Mrs. Laurence incautiously, with what she felt was almost too much meaning for politeness; she saw Mr. Ranney’s left eyebrow go up a little with quizzical effect; it made her feel hot. “Your wife leaves to-morrow, I believe. How is she to-night after all her packing?”

“Mrs. Ranney is quite well, I think,” said Mr. Ranney in a tone that in spite of its apparent politeness placed a wedge between himself and his personal affairs, though Mrs. Laurence still persevered.

“You will miss her dreadfully after she goes.”

“Oh, Minda will look after me,” said Mr. Ranney coolly. Minda was a capable old coloured woman who worked for the neighbourhood. “Hello, Laurence!” His voice changed to one of good fellowship. “Want to walk down with me and take a look at Harker’s boat?”

“No, I think I’d better not,” said Mr. Laurence lingeringly, his long figure coming into view in the semi-darkness of the summer evening. He really did not care to go, “the boys” bored him; an uncut magazine, with his wife for audience had been pleasantly ahead of him after the work of the day; yet such is the power of attraction from man to man, so much greater than that from woman to woman, that he almost felt as if he wanted to be Ranney’s companion if Ranney wanted him. It was the Call of the Wild. Past experience warned him clear of those mistakenly jocular words, “my wife won’t let me”—he put his hand caressingly on the back of her chair as he said: “I don’t think I’ll leave Anna this evening, we’re finishing a serial together.”

“Oh, very well,” responded Mr. Ranney. He put on his cap as he went down the steps again, lit his pipe, and walked off with that air of jaunty and masterful freedom that in its way was an offense to the marital traditions of the street; it subtly discredited his wife, it seemed to undermine the generous, dual obligations of a home. And to-night——

“_Pig!_” said Mrs. Laurence, with an indignation that hurled the adjective after him like a stone. “If you didn’t consider me any more than that, Will—— Wait a moment.” She ran impulsively over to the next house, quickly forestalling the invitation she saw on Mrs. Ranney’s lips, as the latter came to the door in her white gown, a book in her hand.

“No, I thank you, I can’t come in—Mr. Laurence is waiting for me at home. How tired you look! _Won’t_ you come over and sit with us a while? We’d love so much to have you—and I’ll make some lemonade. We feel that we won’t see anything of you for so long.”

“Oh, thank you!” said Mrs. Ranney. She looked surprised. “You’re very kind, but I think I’ll stay here and rest, if you don’t mind; I thought I’d just read a little before I went to bed; you see I have everything packed, and we don’t go until after lunch to-morrow.” She seemed to cast around for something more to say. “I read a good deal in the evenings when Mr. Ranney is out; I haven’t any time during the day.”

“It takes a great deal of time to keep up with the magazines,” sympathized Mrs. Laurence.

“I don’t know much about the magazines—Mr. Ranney doesn’t care for them. I’ve been reading the Bible through this year, I always intended to when I had a chance,” said Mrs. Ranney simply. “I found it very interesting. Mr. Ranney thinks a good deal of Homer, too; I’ve just finished the ‘Odyssey.’ _Won’t_ you come in?”

“No, no, I can’t,” returned Mrs. Laurence hastily. “Is that the ‘Iliad’ you have there?”

“No,” said Mrs. Ranney. Her eyes gleamed dancingly with sudden mischief; she leaned forward with roguish defiance. “I’ll tell you what this is—it’s the ‘Thompson Street Poker Club!’” She relapsed into one of her lovely, helpless fits of half-inaudible laughter in which Mrs. Laurence joined perforce, and the two women held on to each other for mutual support, in feminine fashion.

Mrs. Ranney went away the next day at one o’clock, trim and pretty in her blue travelling suit; the women who flocked to bid her good-bye were profuse in offers of caring for Mr. Ranney, but she only thanked them with gentle unresponsiveness, and said that Minda would look after him quite well.

It was strange what a difference her departure seemed to make at once in the aspect of the little house; a shadow had fallen over it, a visible grayness of desolation touched it, mistlike; the embowering vines drooped like the adjuncts of a cemetery; there was a curious deadness about the very hang of the curtains, one could see from without, and the half-lowered shades. The very fact of the front doors being closed set the seal of strangeness upon it. A spirit, so vitally sweet, so informing that even inanimate objects reflected it, had departed and left only the cold and empty shell behind, not alone to the intimate heart, but to even the casual observer.

“Really, I hate to look over there,” confided Mrs. Spicer to Mrs. Stone. “Minda came into our kitchen a while ago, she said she could hardly stay in the place, she felt just as if Mrs. Ranney and the children were dead. I’m sorry she felt that way. I had the most peculiar feeling myself when I saw her go. Forebodings are so—— Well, of course, you don’t believe in them, but you don’t like them. I’ve just taken some of my nerve tonic. I can hardly blame Mr. Ranney if he stays out till all hours now.”

The watching neighbourhood could hardly believe it when eight o’clock struck—half-past eight—and no Mr. Ranney walked jauntily down the street, immaculately attired, with his gold-banded yachting cap on the side of his head. He was known to have come home to his dinner, and afterwards the smoke of his pipe had risen from the verandah. Laurence, urged thereto by his wife, lounged finally up to the door-step to find Ranney sitting there in a disreputable pongee coat, with an old, gray felt basin on his head, smoking, with his shoulders hunched forward and his eyes fixed sombrely before him. He only nodded at Laurence’s greeting, and made room on the steps beside him.

“There’s a chair up there, if you want it.”

“No, this does well enough,” said Laurence. “How is the election going on?”

“The election?” Mr. Ranney’s eyes sought for a connecting clue. “Oh, yes, of course, the Club election. I don’t know how it’s getting on, I don’t care a hang how it goes. Did you see the weather report to-night, Laurence? They say there’s a storm brewing up the coast, where my wife’s gone. Those steamers are nothing but rotten old tubs; it’s only a question when they’ll go to Davy Jones if a storm hits them. The _Peerless_ foundered three years back, you remember. When I think of that girl and her two babies out there to-night in that old _Patriot_, with nothing but a plank between them and the bottom—I tell you I’ll be glad to get a wire to-morrow night and know they’re all right. I’ve gone all to pieces thinking of it; lost my nerve completely.”

“Couldn’t they have gone by rail?” asked Mr. Laurence practically.

“Oh, yes, they could, but—they’d have to stop off on the way, and then—— Well, I _wanted_ her to, but she thought it took too much money.”

“But if you insisted on her taking it?”

“Insisted on her taking it! Why, man alive, she has it all, that’s the trouble; I hand all the funds over to that rascal, else we’d never have a penny. Oh, there’s always plenty for me when I want it, but she won’t spend it on herself. I can’t make her. But I’ll get even with her some day, you see if I don’t. I’ll plunge her into extravagance. What’s that shutter slamming for? I tell you I don’t like the way the wind is rising. When I think of that girl and her two babies——”

“Why don’t you come over on our piazza and sit awhile?” suggested the visitor; to keep rolling over and over on a wheel of marital sympathy embarrassed him.

“No, I thank you, I rather think I’ll turn in early,” said Ranney, rising as the other had done. Mr. Laurence hurried home to his wife, childishly eager to startle her with his piece of news. Ranney was going to bed at nine-of-the-clock.

“Well, I’m glad he’s missed her for one evening,” she retorted viciously. “It won’t last, though.”

But the next night when she happened to stroll over to the dividing fence in the half gloom, she discerned a figure sitting on the steps. He rose and came slowly forward, as she spoke, removing the old felt basin from his head perfunctorily.

“It looks very lonely over here without Mrs. Ranney and the children,” she said.

“Yes, it does,” answered Mr. Ranney. He knocked his pipe ruminatively on the top rail. “I didn’t realize before what a helpless being a man is without his wife; I never can remember where she keeps the clean towels.”

“I suppose she felt that she needed the change,” suggested Mrs. Laurence, a little stiffly.

“Oh, I persuaded her to go. She didn’t want to leave me, but a girl has to see her family sometimes; it’s only right.” He took a long breath. “It’s only _right_. When the letter came I said she ought to go, I said: ‘Jean, _I_ can get along; your place this summer is with your father and mother.’ She’s only been home once since I took her away—her family don’t like it very much. I had a hard time to get the scamp—regular stern-chase; but a man thinks a good bit more of a girl when he has to work to get her.”