Chapter I: Front Matter

Transcriber’s Note
Italic text displayed as: _italic_

PICTURE
FRAMES

_NEW BORZOI NOVELS FALL, 1923_

JANE—OUR STRANGER
_Mary Borden_

THE BACHELOR GIRL
_Victor Margueritte_

THE BLIND BOW-BOY
_Carl Van Vechten_

HEART’S BLOOD
_Ethel M. Kelley_

THE BACK SEAT
_G. B. Stern_

JANET MARCH
_Floyd Dell_

A LOST LADY
_Willa Cather_

LOVE DAYS
_Henrie Waste_

PICTURE
FRAMES

THYRA SAMTER
WINSLOW

ALFRED A. KNOPF
NEW YORK 1923

]

COPYRIGHT, 1923, BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.

_Published, February, 1923_
_Second Printing, March, 1923_
_Third Printing, April, 1923_
_Fourth Printing, July, 1923_
_Fifth Printing, December, 1923_

_Set up, electrotyped, printed and bound by the Vail-Ballou Press,
Inc., Binghamton, N. Y.
Paper furnished by W. F. Etherington & Co., New York._

MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

CONTENTS

LITTLE EMMA 3

GRANDMA 21

MAMIE CARPENTER 50

A CYCLE OF MANHATTAN 96

AMY’S STORY 174

CITY FOLKS 194

INDIAN SUMMER 213

A LOVE AFFAIR 237

BIRTHDAY 255

CORINNA AND HER MAN 277

THE END OF ANNA 298

PICTURE
FRAMES

LITTLE EMMA

When little Emma Hooper, from Black Plains, Iowa, came to Chicago to carve out her fortune, she did not leave behind her a sorrowing family who wondered about the fate of their dear child in the city. Neither did she sneak away from a cruel step-mother who had made life hard, unbearable. Emma’s family was quite glad to see her go.

Emma’s father was a member of the Knights of Pythias and worked in an overall factory. Her mother, a lazy, whiny woman, kept house, assisted unwillingly and incompetently by such daughters of the house as happened to be out of work. There were three of these daughters besides Emma and they all worked when jobs were not too difficult to get or keep. They spent their spare time trying to get married. There was one son. He was next in age to Emma, who was the second youngest. He smoked cheap cigars and hung around the livery stable and garage. His name was Ralph.

Emma came up to Chicago because she had read and heard a lot about that great city, and because she wanted to get away from Black Plains. She wanted to have a good time. There was nothing doing in Black Plains, and she knew it. She didn’t belong to “the crowd,” as fashionable society was called there, for she lacked both money and family. She was twenty-two and had gone with the drummers who stayed at the Palace Hotel since she was seventeen.

Emma had been wanting to come to Chicago for a long time, but she didn’t have the money. She had been graduated from grade school and finished at the Black Plains Business College. Her father liked to refer to the fact but good jobs were few in Black Plains, and Emma had not mastered the details of her profession, such as spelling and punctuation, and so she never could save much.

Emma’s money came rather unexpectedly. Clarence Avery got home from college. He was the banker’s son and had gone to grade school with Emma. At that time he had suffered from numerous colds in the head and was inclined to lankiness and freckles. At twenty-two he was the average small-town college graduate. Clarence belonged to the local society crowd, but after several years of metropolitan living he was bored and disappointed with the gaieties of Black Plains. When he met Emma on the street one day he was agreeably surprised. Emma was small and had dark hair that curled naturally and she knew how to do it up. She and her sisters read the fashion magazines and ordered their clothes from a Chicago mail-order house. She wasn’t afraid of a bit of rouge or an eyebrow pencil, either, and she had a neat little figure.

“Hello,” said Clarence, “aren’t you—why, you couldn’t be little Emma Hooper!”

“Well, I just am,” said Emma, and they stood and talked for a long time.

Then Clarence began to call and, disobeying all of the rules of Black Plains society, he escorted Emma to the Airdrome and the movies and the most prominent ice cream parlour. This worried Avery, the banker. After he had argued with Clarence with no apparent success, he asked Emma to call at the bank. There he had made a proposition to her. If Miss Hooper would leave town, over the winter, say, a check for five hundred dollars would belong to her. It was all right, of course, he knew she was a nice girl, not a bit of harm meant or anything like that, but Clarence was young, oh, a fine boy, but young, and if Miss Hooper, now—

So Emma had five hundred dollars. She didn’t like Clarence much, anyhow. He was a silly, conceited thing, who told long tales about himself, and hadn’t changed much, in fact, since his sniffy boyhood days.

The Hoopers rejoiced in Emma’s luck, gave her advice about spending the money and called her a selfish thing, so she gave one hundred dollars to the girls, and then with the rest and a promise to write all about the new styles—Millie, the oldest, had nearly captured a drummer who travelled out of Kansas City—she came up to Chicago.

On the train she figured it all out. Country girls were always important in a large city. She knew that. Didn’t she read about them in the magazines every day? Always “the girl from the country,” sought after, betrayed. Huh! But it sounded interesting, anyway.

“For I’m rather good-looking,” mused Emma, modestly, “and if some country girl has got to be betrayed, it might as well be me. I’ll read the want-ads like the rest and apply for a job where they want girls fresh from the country. I’ll try to get a job with one of those nice, grey-haired old papas, who has a wife that misunderstands him, and some day he’ll take me out to dinner, and, well, of course, Clarence wasn’t a real conquest, that old thing, but if I can’t find a nice old geezer, well, something is the matter with this girl from the country stuff, that’s all.”

As the train neared Chicago, a travelling man got on and sat down beside Emma. He tried to flirt with her. He asked her where she came from, and when she said Iowa, he said, “Oh, forget that stuff, kid; you haven’t been out of Chi a week.” She wondered why he said it, but it rather pleased her. She and her sisters had rather thought that they kept up with things, watching the fashion books and the movies, but she had been awfully afraid she would look like a rube. She resented the travelling man, though. What kind of a fish did he think she was? Why, even in Black Plains she wouldn’t have flirted with a cheap thing like him. He even held one hand over his wedding ring. You couldn’t put a thing like that over Emma.

At seven o’clock Emma landed in the city. The lights and noises confused her for a minute, but she liked them then—it was like a carnival. She didn’t see a policeman, so she went up to a fairly respectable-looking man and asked where the Y. W. C. A. was. She knew about that and had decided to stay there until she had time to look around. The man looked at her and smiled. “Come, now, girlie, you don’t want to go there,” he said, “you and I’ll have something to eat and then I’ll show you a nice place to stay.”

“Can you beat it?” said Emma, as she went on, with a toss of her head. “Do they really get away with that stuff in the city? Regular movie stuff. Can you beat it?”

She finally found the Y. W. C. A. answered a number of questions drawled out by a peevish fat woman, and was given a room.

Emma spent two weeks looking around. She visited all of the department stores and watched people. Then she took an inventory of her clothes. They looked better than she had expected. She’d spy around a bit before getting any new clothes. By putting her hat a bit more over her right ear and pulling her hair down over her forehead, she felt she could look as good as the next one.

She went to matinées and discovered restaurants and hotels and tea rooms and little things to wear. She sent home hideously-coloured postcards, saying what a fine time she was having, and sent each of the girls a waist and her mother a pocketbook. She got tired of the Y. W. C. A. and found a nice, quiet, inexpensive room on the North Side. She liked the city.

She flirted with one man in a tea room, but that was all. She didn’t like that sort of thing. She was looking for the old millionaire whose wife didn’t understand him and who liked little girls from the country.

Finally, she found that her money was beginning to disappear. By this time she knew the city pretty well, and so she began to look for a position in real earnest. “They all like ’em from the country,” she told herself. She answered want-ads, those that asked for “young, inexperienced girls.” Maybe that was the kind the rich old men put in. They sounded that way.

Emma did not meet with much success. Usually, the place was filled when she went to apply for it. Other times, men with wearied, blank faces asked her questions—but nothing ever came of it.

For several weeks she looked for a position, somewhat carelessly at first, later with hard earnestness. Was it possible that there were no millionaires hunting for little girls, no positions even? For a week she had a job in a dirty, poorly-ventilated office, where the proprietor chewed tobacco. It was some sort of a fake insurance place. She was fired at the end of the week, but she would have quit anyhow.

She looked again. It was a tiresome job. She still had over a hundred dollars. “Not a millionaire in sight!” she sighed, as she went to bed. “These magazines are sure putting it over people.”

Then she applied for positions by mail. She said she was all alone in the city, from Iowa. She had more luck. Over half of her letters were answered, but, though she was given interviews, she wasn’t given a job. One man, tall, lean, sneering, looked at her for a long time.

“What made you say you were from the country?” he asked.

“I am,” said Emma, “Iowa.”

“Iowa. Hell!” said the man. “One look is enough to show that the White City is the nearest the country you’ve ever been.”

The White City is a summer amusement park, but Emma didn’t even know it. But she had got a hint at the truth.

A week later she met Hallie Summers. They were both applying for the same position—“expert stenographer.” Hallie was correctly tailored, perfectly groomed. Her black suit had a bit of fur at the throat, her hat was a smart rough felt, trimmed with a single wing. Her white buckskin gloves were immaculate, her shoes absolutely correct.

Emma gave her name and answered the usual questions. Hallie listened. She was next. As Emma waited for the elevator, Hallie joined her.

“What,” asked Hallie, “is that gag you pulled about being from Iowa?”

Emma smiled. She liked the looks of Hallie, straight haired, correct looking.

“That,” said Emma, “was the honest truth. I am from Iowa and I don’t care who knows it. I don’t know a soul in town but a girl I roomed with in the ‘Y. W.’ She wears cotton stockings and is studying to be a milliner. Why?”

“Well,” said Hallie, as she led the way into the elevator, “if that’s the truth or if it’s a stall, you’re the worst imitation of a country girl I ever saw.”

“Meaning what?”

“Why, meaning, of course, my dear child, that you don’t look the part. Where did you get those clothes, west side of State Street?”

“Iowa, but they are what most people up here are wearing.”

Emma had on a blue and white striped silk, trimmed with a touch of green and she liked it.

“Sure,” said Hallie, “that’s what’s the matter with them.”

“I don’t quite get you,” said Emma.

Hallie smiled.

“You poor thing,” she said, “I believe you really don’t, at that. Come up to the Clover Tea and I’ll buy a sandwich, though I’m not usually that kind of a philanthropist, and we’ll talk it over.”

Hallie ordered tea and sandwiches and the girls talked. The only girls Emma had talked to in Chicago had been cheap and slow and stupid. She liked Hallie. Hallie was old, that indefinite age around thirty, and she was wise—next to things. She knew Chicago—the way she wanted to know it. She, too, was, in a way, looking for a millionaire, though she had found one and lost him again.

The two girls talked. In five minutes they had bridged the distances more formal people would have spent years over. Emma knew all about Hallie, who wanted sixty dollars a week—and sometimes got it, and Hallie knew about Clarence and the five hundred dollars and the rich old papa who hadn’t appeared.

“Now what’s the matter with my looks?” asked Emma.

“It’s because there isn’t, in a way,” said Hallie. “You look like the average stenographer, the twenty-dollar-a-week kind, that’s all. Your clothes are cheap and they are almost in style. Look at all those bits of velvet and buttons.”

“It said in the catalogue,” said Emma, “that it was the latest thing. I’ve seen several in this very pattern here.”

“Sure you have. That’s why you oughtn’t to wear it. You may not know it, but people in cities have ideas about how country girls should look, though Heaven knows, they don’t look that way. They think that country girls wear ginghams and never know that styles change. You can’t wear a sunbonnet very well in the city, but if you want to get away with the country girl stuff you can wear plain things and look—sunbonnety. But rouge and made-up eyes—oh, my!”

“I’m pale without rouge, and my eyes—”

“Sure, you’re pale. Let your eyes alone. How much money have you left?”

Hallie looked honest.

“A little over a hundred dollars,” said Emma.

Hallie nodded. “You can just about do it for that.”

“You mean?”

“Look the part—Iowa.”

“Frumpy and back-to-the-farm?”

“Oh, you don’t have to overdo it. All you’ve got to do is to look like a country girl from a city man’s viewpoint. It’s easy.”

On the street, after lunch, Emma pointed to a girl that they passed.

“Like her?”

“Heavens, no. She’s just cheap. Halsted or Clark Street. Real simplicity, I mean,” said Hallie, leading the way to Michigan Avenue. “Cheap clothes are just like furniture—curlicues and frills and fancy velvets and silks and things ‘in style’ come cheapest of all. It’s simplicity that costs money. I know the shops, anyhow.”

At an exclusive little shop, Hallie picked out a plain little frock. It was dark blue. A tiny white collar was around the neck. In front was a touch of silk embroidery in dull shades and a small flat black bow.

“Old men, the kind you are looking for, fall for this stuff,” said Hallie. “They all came from the country—once, though they have forgotten what it looks like. Musical comedy and the magazines have done their worst. They expect frilly white aprons on the farm instead of Mother Hubbards. They want what they think is simplicity, so you may as well give it to them.”

Emma bought the little frock. It cost forty-five dollars. The mail-order silk had cost fifteen.

They bought a hat next, black and floppy and not too big, with a bow on one side. It cost more than six of the stylish kind. The shoes were stout and flat heeled and the gloves were grey. The coat was plain and dark and had a wide belt and big pockets.

Hallie came over the next day and helped try things on. Emma’s dark hair was parted and drawn into a plain little knot.

“That’s the stuff,” said Hallie. “To be a simple country girl you’ve got to buy the stuff on the Boul’ Mich’, if you’re in Chicago, or Fifth Avenue, if you’re in New York. I wish some one would expose this small-town stuff. Why, every town the size of a water bug has at least two stores where the buyers go to Chicago or New York twice a year. With travelling and mail-order houses—huh, it’s only city people that don’t know the girl from the country disappeared right after the Civil War.”

“You’ve certainly got that straight,” said Emma. “Why, Black Plains people spend all of their time trying to look as if they just came from the city. But if they could see me in Black Plains dressed like this!”

Under Hallie’s directions, Emma answered a few more want-ads. She picked out important office buildings. “Go where they are if you want to catch them,” said Hallie, and Emma did.

In two days she had found a job. But the owner of the firm was young and happily married and the only other man around the office was a young boy who received twenty a week. “Nothing doing,” said Emma and she left.

“Be careful, the city is full of allurements and pitfalls for country girls,” said the happily married man. Emma thanked him for his advice. “I wish I thought so,” she said to herself as she left.

The next week she found her real job. It was what she had been looking for. She applied by mail and was told to call. She dressed in her new clothes and left off rouge and powder.

A man of about forty-five interviewed her. He was the senior partner. He looked old enough to suit Emma. “A nice papa,” thought she. His younger brother was the junior partner—they sold bonds—the firm of Fraylir and Fraylir.

Emma cast down her eyes during the interview and murmured things about being all alone and wanting to succeed. She got the job. Her work was to stay in the reception-room and answer questions when people came in. There was a little typing and stenography. The wages were twenty dollars.

“The position is an easy one, for the right girl,” Frederick Fraylir had said. “Perhaps you don’t know what I mean because you are new to the city. I’m glad there are still girls like you, wholesome and sane looking. Now—”

“I can start at once,” murmured Emma. She thought she noticed a funny little glint in his eye but she wasn’t sure. She knew she could just about live on that twenty dollars—for a while.

“Now,” she told herself, “if Fraylir only works out according to specifications. Rich old man, girl from the country, wife who misunderstands—”

At first Emma didn’t know that Frederick Fraylir was married, but she soon deduced the fact from conversation that she heard around the office and over the telephone. The brothers lived together in a big apartment on Lake Shore Drive and there was a Mrs. Fraylir who rang up rather frequently. The brothers called her Belle and she had a slow, drawling voice. “Hope she misunderstands him,” thought Emma.

Emma liked her job, as much as she liked any kind of work. She liked Frederick and even his younger brother, Edward, though Edward was colder, more distant. Frederick was friendly, but not friendly enough, for Emma, though she sometimes caught him looking at her when the door of his office was open. The brothers had one large private office together.

In a few months she was raised to twenty-five dollars, but she knew that this wouldn’t pay for a regular supply of the new kind of simple clothes. She had actually begun to like them. She read magazines in her spare time and wondered how long it would be before Fraylir would arise to the rôle of the devilish city man. At times she was almost on the point of quitting her job—before her clothes wore out—but she always stayed on. She did her work as well as she knew how—really tried, and cast down her eyes when spoken to and acted the modest and retiring country girl.

“If they could see me act like this in Iowa,” she thought, “they’d be wondering if I was copying some new movie star.”

But she liked it. It was so quiet and peaceful. There were no quarrels with her sisters, no whinings of her mother, no fights between her father and Ralph, no drummers to keep in their places.

Several times Mrs. Fraylir called. She was tall and stately and dignified. “Cold as ice,” thought Emma, “just the kind to misunderstand a husband.” She dropped her eyes when she answered Mrs. Fraylir’s questions. “No use letting her suspect I’m even human. They make trouble enough—these wives.”

Then Frederick asked her out to dinner. The suddenness of the invitation almost staggered her. It had been a rainy day and the evening was disagreeably cold and damp. She was putting on her simple hat and wondering if she could buy another one soon. It was getting a bit shabby.

“Miss Hooper,” he said, “may I—will you come to dinner with me? I have to return to the office and look over these new papers. It’s a bit unusual, I know, but if you don’t mind, it might be a change for you. I thought—”

He actually seemed embarrassed—and he had grey hair and was getting old!

They went to a cozy, quiet restaurant. Fraylir ordered a simple, hearty meal. Emma put on her best I’m-all-alone-in-the-city manner. But pretty soon she began telling him her real impressions of the city and she was surprised to find that he seemed to enjoy them. He had a lot more sense than any other man she had ever known.

Halfway through the meal a well-dressed young couple came into the restaurant. As they passed, Fraylir spoke to them. Emma was introduced, under her real name, as Fraylir’s stenographer, and at Fraylir’s invitation, the couple sat down at their table. Emma didn’t know things were ever done that way at all. The young couple didn’t even seem surprised. Emma liked to hear them talk, so quiet and well bred and clever. Emma was careful what she said. When Fraylir smiled his approval at her, it made her quite happy. “What kind of a fish am I getting to be?” she asked herself that night, when she got home.

After that there were dinners and lunches and an occasional visit to the theatre. Emma saw several dramas; she had always limited her theatregoing to a musical comedy and vaudeville and had scoffed at high-brow stuff. She was surprised to find that she liked them and enjoyed discussing the problems they presented with Fraylir. Fraylir lent her books and she read them at night because she couldn’t go around alone very well and didn’t enjoy the other men and girls she met—silly things. She and Fraylir went to the Art Museum and even to a couple of private exhibitions and to musicales and she met some interesting people. She tried to talk to Fraylir and tried to learn as much as she could from him. After all, she had missed a lot of things in Black Plains, stopping school at the eighth grade and running around with a bunch of cheap, slangy travelling men.

Winter passed. Spring came. Emma stayed at Fraylir and Fraylir’s. She knew there were dozens of millionaires looking for innocent country girls, but the prospect seemed less real and alluring than in the past. She felt pretty well satisfied, somehow. She went without lunches a couple of days and managed to get some new clothes—simple things.

She met Hallie one day, Hallie with a new job and a new friend, more tailored looking than ever.

“How’s your millionaire?” asked Hallie.

“Fine,” answered Emma, “it was great of you to tell me about clothes and things.”

“That’s right,” said Hallie, “I see you’re sticking to the styles I picked out for you. I hope your millionaire is the real thing.” Emma, for some reason, felt almost insulted. It had been, well, almost coarse of Hallie.

Then Mrs. Fraylir went away for the summer. Emma learned about it when Mrs. Fraylir talked over the telephone to Edward or Frederick, whichever one happened to be in the office when she rang up.

“Now’s the time,” thought Emma, “when their wives go away and they realize how misjudged they’ve been.” But she wasn’t exactly enthusiastic about it.

Fraylir took her out to dinner and to the summer gardens. She tried to show him how sympathetic she could be. It surprised her to find out that she really meant it. She was almost afraid to use all of the little tricks that she had learned in Black Plains. It didn’t seem honest.

Sometimes Edward Fraylir went with them, but usually the two of them went alone.

She got a letter saying that Millie was married—she had finally landed the drummer who travelled out of Kansas City. And Irma, next youngest, was going with a Black Plains boy who kept a cigar store. Emma had to write back that she was still working and she took the answering jokes about her city success without a murmur. After all, there were so many things besides getting a rich papa!

And then, one night without warning—

Frederick Fraylir and Emma had stayed in the office after the others had gone. There was some work that had to be copied and they were going to have dinner together. As Emma slipped the last page from the typewriter, Frederick bent over her.

“Little girl,” he said, “do you know that I care very much for you?” Emma closed her eyes. She was afraid to say anything. Why couldn’t things have kept on—the way they were? Her heart was beating rather rapidly. She had never thought about that.

“Don’t you care, a little?” Frederick went on. “You must have known, how I felt, all these weeks.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” said Emma. She suddenly remembered that that was the right answer, though she was afraid that she had put it in the wrong place.

“Why, I mean,” said Frederick, “that I love you. I’ve cared for you from the first. It’s hard to say—for an old fellow like me. You are so innocent, so sweet. You are so little and alone and unprotected. I love you, I want to—”

Well, so it was over! “What about Mrs. Fraylir?” interrupted Emma. Mrs. Fraylir had never been brought into their conversation before. The words seemed to choke Emma a little.

“Why, dear, she likes you too. She told Edward that as long as I felt this way, she hoped you liked me. She wanted to talk to you when she came to the office, but she was afraid she’d say the wrong thing, as long as I hadn’t said anything to you. I know you’ll like her, though. Edward and she will be glad they won’t have to bother with me, I guess. Ever since they’ve been married, over seven years, I’ve lived with them. They said they wanted me, but I guess they’ll be glad if—” he paused.

“Ever since they’ve been married?” repeated Emma, mechanically. “I thought, why I thought—”

Frederick misunderstood her.

“Oh, yes,” he said, “seven years, and I’d like a home of my own. We can be married whenever you say the word, if you love me a little and I’m not too old. I’ve wanted to tell you for a long time, wanted to offer you a real home, wanted you to stop work, but you were so young, so unaccustomed to the world. I wanted you to know me and like me a little first, so that I wouldn’t frighten you when I proposed. You’re the kind of a girl I’ve always been looking for, a simple, small-town girl with pure thoughts about things. You’ll marry me, won’t you, dear?”

And Emma, quite overcome, put her head on his shoulder and wept a little and said she thought she would. After all, she was all alone in the city and only a little country girl.

GRANDMA