Chapter I: AM convinced now. Roger loves her. Until that supper I had ups and

downs--times when I felt unsure, hours when I argued myself into the belief that I was mistaken. But when I came down to my rooms that night my uncertainties were ended. As I lay in the dark I saw everything as clear as crystal. It seemed as if I was clairvoyant, caught up above myself, the whole situation visualized before me like a picture.

Since then there’s been only one question--what ought I to do?

Apart from my own feeling for Roger--supposing he was only the friend he used to be--should I let him give his heart and his name to a woman, whom, if he knew the truth, he would put away from him like a leper? Every ideal and instinct that make up the sum of his being would revolt, if he knew about Lizzie and John Masters. I know this, I don’t just think it because I want to. According to his code all women must be chaste and all men honest, and if they’re not, he doesn’t want to have anything to do with them. It may not be generous, but that’s not to the point. He is so made and so will remain. He has been kinder to me than any one in the world--kind and just, as far as he knew. Should I, who could prevent it, stand by and watch him--the illustration isn’t flattering but it’s apt--rushing toward the precipice like the Gadarene swine?

And then Lizzie is entirely unfitted to be the wife of such a man. She belongs to another world that he doesn’t understand and couldn’t tolerate. He would think the people she foregathers with were savages. He hasn’t seen her with them, he doesn’t know how blind she is to the niceties of manners and breeding that to him are essentials. I try to fit her into his environment, put her up in a niche beside Mrs. Ashworth--Lizzie, with her tempests, her careless insults, her impossible friends! Suppose there had never been any John Masters, that she was as pure as Diana, could she ever be tamed to the Clements’ standard?

Memories of her keep coming up, throwing oranges out of the window, listening hungrily to Mrs. Stregazzi (fancy Mrs. Stregazzi at Mrs. Ashworth’s tea table talking about her corsets and her cigarettes!) facing Masters like an enraged lioness, weeping against his shoulder and pleading with him to come back. Good heavens, if no man had even touched her hand except in the clasp of friendship, she is not the woman for Roger. And she lived, willingly, proudly, without a twinge of conscience, with John Masters!

That’s one side and here’s the other:

Lizzie’s happiness, Lizzie placed beyond all need, Lizzie the wife of a man so high-thinking and right-doing that everything in her that was fine must answer to his call. Under his influence she might change, become what he now imagines her to be. Women have done that often, grown to love the man they marry and molded themselves to his ideal. Have I the right to stand between her and such a future, bar the way to Eden, an angel with a flaming sword?

I can’t.

In utter abandon she told me the story that I can now use against her. She trusted me and I answered her trust with a promise that I would never tell, unless she asked me to. It is true that she said she didn’t care if I did tell. But does it matter what she said? Wouldn’t I, if I used the permission given in sickness of heart and body, be meaner than the meanest thing that crawls? Am I to buy my happiness at such a price?

I can’t.

If she still had her career it would be different. I could see her going forward in it, certain it was the best thing for her. But her career is over. She is to settle down as a singing teacher, plod on patiently, watch others making for the goal that was once to be hers. She can’t do it any more than she can fly.

If I thought that she was vicious, bad at heart, I would be certain I ought to tell. But with all her faults she is generous, kindly and honest. It’s her chance--the one chance that comes to all of us. Is it my business to take it from her, to interfere, with my flaming sword, and say, “No, this is not for you. You have committed the woman’s unpardonable sin. If you don’t feel the proper remorse it will be my place to punish you, to shut you out from the possibilities of redemption. Whatever _you_ may think about it, _I_ think that you belong in the corral with the goats and I’m going to do all in my power to keep you there”?

I can’t.

And so I go on, round and round like a squirrel in a cage. I wonder if the squirrel ever feels as I do.

They come in to see me and say I look ill. Roger is particularly solicitous, wants me to go south for a month with Mrs. Ashworth. I could no more leave this place, and the spectacle of his infatuation, than I could tell him what is making me hollow-eyed and wan.

One of the bitterest of my thoughts is that I know--an instinct tells me--he is really still fondest of me. I am and always will be the better woman for him, the one that in the storm and stress of a life’s companionship, is his true mate. His feeling for Lizzie is a temporary aberration. He has been bewitched--La Belle Dame Sans Merci has him in thrall. Some day he will wake from the dream--and then? He will find Lizzie beside him, La Belle Dame Sans Merci directing the domestic régime, tactfully accommodating herself to his moods, taking the place of the undistinguished wife of a distinguished husband.

Oh--why do I write like this! It’s low, contemptible, vile. I’m going to stop. I’m going to bow my head and say it’s done and give up.

I wrote that two days ago, pressed the blotter over it and said to myself, “The squirrel has had enough. It’s going to lie down in its cage.”

To-night--it’s past midnight and a big moon is shining on the back walls--I begin with a new pen on a fresh sheet to show how the squirrel didn’t stop. Poor ridiculous, demented squirrel!

There is a sort of grotesque humor about it, I can stand off and laugh at myself.

This afternoon the count came in to see me with news. His people have sent for him to go back to Rome.

“Have you already learned the banking business as conducted in America?” I inquired. I’m not so sympathetic as I used to be but the count doesn’t seem to notice it.

He took a cigarette and answered with deliberation:

“I have now, for four months, pasted letters in a book. It seems that I am to go on forever pasting letters in a book. I wrote it to my father and he sends me an answer saying, ‘My son, you can paste letters in a book as well in Rome as in New York. Come back at once. I find this pasting too expensive!’”

I expressed fitting regrets at this paternal interference.

“It is with great sorrow that I leave,” said the count sadly, “I have made many charming friends here.”

He removed his cigarette and bowed to me. I inclined my head. Our mutual lack of spirits did not prevent us from being extremely polite.

“You, dear madame, have been sweetly kind to the exile. I don’t know what I should have done without your ever beautiful sympathy.”

I made deprecating murmurs.

“A young man like myself, a romantic, must have a confidante, one who feels and understands, one who has lived.” I bowed again in melancholy admission of the fact. “It will be hard to go.”

He looked really troubled. His handsome warmly-tinted face wore an expression of gravity that made him seem much older. His eyes, usually alert and full of laughter, were wistfully dejected.

“I have loved her,” he said quietly.

For the first time in our acquaintance it seemed to me that the count was speaking from that center of feeling that we call the heart. He appeared no longer an irresponsible, almost elfish youth, but a man who, as he himself expressed it, had lived. I was impressed.

“Have you told her?” I asked.

He shook his head murmuring:

“I decide to and I put it off. It is too hard. I fear what I may say.”

A sudden idea took possession of me. Writing it down in cold blood it sounds like the deranged fancy of a lunatic. At the moment when it came, I regarded it not only as a possible solution of all our difficulties, but as an inspiration. My only excuse is that self-preservation is the law of nature. I was drowning and I caught at a straw.

“Do you really love Lizzie Harris?” I asked in a voice tense to the trembling point.

“Very really.”

“More than that other lady, the thin one who wore the fur dress?”

“Much more.”

“More than any woman you have ever known?”

“A hundred times more.”

We must have presented an absurdly solemn appearance, I planting my questions like a detective administering the third degree, the count nodding automatically as he jerked out his answers, his eyes fixed on me with an almost fierce stare.

“Why don’t you marry her?”

That was my inspiration. It seems to me the most inexplicable aberration that ever seized a sane woman--only for the moment I wasn’t sane. One of the curious points about it was that I never thought of Lizzie at all, whether she would want him or not. All I saw was the count transformed into a genie, unexpectedly come to my aid. I make no doubt if she had shown reluctance I would have counseled him to kidnap her as his ancestors kidnaped the Sabine women.

His expression brought me back to sense. He was looking at me with a blank unbelieving surprise as if I had suggested something beyond the limits of human endeavor. If I had urged him to inaugurate a conspiracy against his king or an exploring party to the moon, he could not have appeared more astonished.

“Marry her!” he ejaculated.

“Yes, marry her. You love her, you’ve just said so.”

“Most assuredly I do, to distraction.”

“Then why do you look so surprised?”

“But marriage--me?” He laid a finger on his breast and tapped on the top button of his waistcoat, regarding me from beneath raised brows. His expression was that of an intelligent person who can not believe that he has heard aright. It made me angry.

“Yes, you. I could hardly be alluding to anybody else after what you’ve just said.”

“But, my dear lady--” he sent a roving glance round the room as if hunting for some one who would explain, then came back to me. As he met my eyes he smiled, deprecatingly, almost tenderly, the smile with which maturity greets the preposterous antics of a child. “Is it a joke you make?”

“No, it is not,” I answered, “and I don’t see why you should think it was. When you love a person you marry them, don’t you?”

“Alas, not always. I could never marry Miss Harris. She is not of my order.”

“Order?” I was the one who ejaculated now.

“Exactly. Whomever I may love I only marry in my order.”

My inspiration collapsed, pierced by this unexpected and unfamiliar word. For a moment we sat regarding each other. I don’t know how I looked but I don’t think it could have been as abject as I felt or the count, who is one of the most amiable of youths, would have wanted to know what was the matter. If I had had my wits about me I should have pretended it was a joke but I was too ashamed and crushed to pretend anything. In the embarrassing pause I tried to smile, a feeble propitiatory smile, which he answered in kind, brightly and reassuringly. I saw he expected me to go on, and I didn’t know how to go on except to argue it out with him.

“What does your order matter if you love a person?”

“But everything. It is, as you say here, what we’re there for.”

“But you do marry out of your class. Italian nobles have married American women who were without family.”

He gave a gay smile, jerking his head with a little agreeing movement toward his shoulder:

“Ah, truly, yes, but with fortunes--large fortunes. We need them, we have not got the huge moneys in Italy that you have here. But the adorable Miss Harris has nothing. Figure to yourself, Mrs. Drake; she must work for her living. If I come home to my father with a story like that, what happens? He is enraged, he turns me out--and then _I_ have to work for _my_ living.” He gave a delightful boyish laugh. “At what?--pasting letters in a book? That is all I know.”

“Foreigners are very hard for Americans to understand,” I muttered, wondering if any foreigner of any race would ever have understood why a respectable American widow should offer her friend in marriage to an unwilling Italian count.

He leaned from his chair, pointing the smoking cigarette at me. His melancholy had vanished. He was a boy again, a light-hearted Latin boy, intrigued and amused at the sentimental point of view obtaining under the stars and stripes.

“It is you who are hard for us to understand--so loving money and so loving love. And which you like the best we can’t find out. For us one is here and one is there.” He pointed with the cigarette to two opposite corners of the room. “Miss Harris I adore but I do not marry her.” He planted his romance in the left-hand corner with a jab of his cigarette. “And I marry a lady whom I may not love, but who has fortune and who is of my class.” He planted her in the opposite corner with a second jab. “They are so far apart.” And he waved the cigarette between the two, with a sweep wide enough to indicate the distance that severed sentiment from obligation.

That was the end of it. I pulled myself together and led the conversation into a comparison of national characteristics. I don’t know what he thought of me, probably that I was a horrible example of what can be produced by a romance-ridden country.

When I think of it now (if I cared a farthing what happened to me) I would be quite scared. I wonder if I’ve inherited a queer strain from any of my forebears. They don’t look like it, but you can’t tell from portraits and miniatures. In their days it was the fashion to paint out all discreditable characteristics as, in ours, it is the highest merit to paint them in. Could it be possible that one of those pop-eyed, tight-mouthed women ever swerved from “a sweet reasonableness” and bequeathed the tendency to me? I’ve read somewhere that while the inclination to wrong-doing may not be transmitted, the weakened will can pass on. Is my lunacy of to-day, my distracted waverings, my temptations to disloyalty, the result of some one else’s lapse from the normal? (The lamp’s going out. With the room getting dim I can see the moonlight in a clear wash of silver on the windows.) It wasn’t the little Huguenot lady. But her husband opposite, the formidable Puritan in the wig, was one of the jury who condemned the witches. That may be it. His cruelty is coming back to be paid for by his descendant--the poor old witches are getting even at last. Perhaps my descendants will some day writhe in atonement for my faults. But I have no descendants! I never will have.

It’s the lamp’s last sputter--going out as I’m going out. In a minute it will be dark, with the moonlight filling the gulfs of the backyards and I, alone in the night, listening to the stillness, wondering if I was only created to be an expiatory offering.

XVII

AS soon as Betty heard that the European offer was refused she turned her attention to the lessons. Bustling about, making appointments, talking over reluctant mothers, forcing people to study singing who never thought of doing so, she is an inspiring sight to everybody but the object of her campaign.

Lizzie makes me uneasy. She has shown no enthusiasm, taking it all for granted as though busy ladies could not better employ their time than by helping her to fortune. Betty thinks it timidity, that she is distrustful of herself. I know better. Her languor conceals a dreary disinclination. She has never said a word of thanks to Betty or Mrs. Ashworth. Once or twice I have suggested that they have taken a good deal of trouble and she might--I have always stopped there and she has never asked me to go on. What is the good of telling a person they ought to have feelings which nature seems to have left out of them?

Last night Roger came and after a few moments with me suggested that we go up-stairs and talk over the new work with her. I wouldn’t, said I was sleepy and wanted to go to bed. When he had gone I lowered the lights and sat waiting to hear his footsteps coming down. I waited an hour and a half, and then they came, descending the creaking staircase, passing my door, and going on to the street. That wasn’t a good night for sleeping. In the small hours I got up and tried to read. The book was painfully appropriate, _The Love Letters of Mademoiselle de Lespinasse_. I read them till I heard the milkman making his rounds.

There is something horribly humiliating about women’s love-letters. When the passion is unrequited, or half requited as it was with De Lespinasse, they are so abject. She made a brave stand, poor soul, tried to find Guibert a wife and pretend she didn’t mind. But when she began to sicken to her death, all her bravery vanished. Those last letters are like a shrill frenzied wail. And she was a very first-class woman in love with a very second-class man. I suppose it’s a sort of sex tradition that we should adore and adhere in this ignominious way. We’ve had it hammered into us that to love and cling was our mission till it’s grown to have a fictitious value, and we feel if we don’t love and cling something is wrong with us. And what’s accomplished by it--who is benefited by our useless suffering?

The other evening down-town in the dusk I passed a girl waiting on the corner by a show-window. The light fell full on her face and I knew by her expression why she was there--a rendezvous with her young man who was late. She was angry, close-lipped and sullen-eyed. I could read her thoughts--she was going to tell him her opinion of him, be haughty and frigid, give him a piece of her mind and leave him. Just then he came slouching up, a lowering surly cub, and when she saw him she couldn’t hide her joy. Her anger vanished at his first word. She’d have believed anything he told her knowing in her heart it was a lie. She hardly wanted his excuses, so glad he’d come, so pitifully slavishly glad.

It’s shameful, crushing, revolting. Here am I, the heir of all the ages in the foremost files of time, feeling just the same as that subjugated shop-girl. Roger up-stairs with Lizzie, and I can’t sleep, and can’t eat, and can’t stop caring, and worst of all, if he wanted to come back to me I’d open my arms to him. Talk of the forward march of women! When the cave man went forth to find a new wife, the old discarded one left in the corner by the fire felt just the same as I do in the opening of the twentieth century.

But now, as Pepys says, to bed. I’ll sleep if I have to take a thumping dose of trional which I was taught in my youth was even more wicked than powdering your nose.

This afternoon Lizzie went forth to give her first lesson and I stayed in to wait for her. I was anxious about it. If the survival of the fittest prevails among educators as it does in the animal kingdom I felt sure that Lizzie as a teacher would not survive. Her pupil is the spoiled child of fortune, sixteen, with a voice as small as her _dot_ will be large. Betty had conjured me to make our protégée give up the black tea-tray hat and I had tried and failed. Before her haughty and uncomprehending surprise I had wilted. No one would have had the courage to tell her why she should look meek and unassuming. As it was she had dressed herself with unusual care, even to the long green earrings which I hadn’t seen for months. She was more like the duchess in an English comedy cast for Broadway, than a penniless music teacher being pushed up the ladder.

As I sat waiting Miss Bliss came in--wrapped in the Navajo blanket. She threw it back and stood for me to admire, very dainty in a new pink blouse with a Pierrot frill encircling her neck and a broad pink ribbon tied round her head. Boyishly slender, her arms extended to hold out the blanket, she had the fragile grace of a Tanagra figurine--a modern Tanagra with a powdered nose and a dash of carmine on the lips. When I told her she was pretty she blushed, dropped the blanket on the floor and herself on the blanket, and said a girl owed it to herself always to look her best.

“You might meet a man in the hall,” she murmured, mechanically reaching for the poker, “and what’s the sense of looking like a slob?”

When she poked the fire a belt held down the back of the blouse. The kimono jacket, the safety pin and the golden corset string were gone, if not forever, at least till their owner was safely landed in her own little flat with her own little husband.

Our gossiping stopped when we heard Lizzie’s step on the stairs. She entered without knocking, sweeping in and slamming the door. A brusk nod was all Miss Bliss got and my greeting was a curt “Hello, Evie.” She threw herself into a rocker, and extending her feet beyond the hem of her skirt, sunk down in the chair and looked at her boots. In her hand she held a bunch of unopened letters.

I was keyed up for something unusual but I hadn’t seen her in this state since her illness. We waited for her to speak, then as she showed no inclination to do so I remarked, with labored lightness:

“Well, Lizzie, how was it?”

“Beastly,” she answered, without looking up.

“Was your pupil a nice girl?”

“No.”

“Was she disagreeable?”

“I don’t know, but I detested her. A little, simpering, affected idiot. _Sing_--that fool!”

She lifted her head and looked round the room with a wild and roving eye. Her glance, raised high, avoided us as if the sight of her fellow humans was disagreeable. Miss Bliss cleared her throat and stirred cautiously on the blanket. She knew where Lizzie had been and was exceedingly anxious to hear her adventures in the halls of wealth, but didn’t dare to ask.

“It really isn’t of any consequence what she’s like,” I soothed. “Just take her as a matter of business.”

“Matter of business!” She struck her hands on the arms of the chair with a slapping sound and jumped up. “What have I to do with business?” Then she walked to the window and stood drumming with her fingers on the pane.

The quick nervous tattoo fell ominously on my uneasiness. Miss Bliss sent a furtive masonic look at me, and glanced away. With an elaborate air of nonchalance she patted her frill and picked at her skirt, and finally, unable to stand the combined pressure of our silence and her own curiosity, said boldly:

“What kind of a house was it?”

Lizzie answered slowly, pronouncing each word with meticulous precision:

“It was a large, shiny, expensive house. It was a hideous house. Nobody who was anything, or ever expected to be anybody, ought to go into such a house.”

“You don’t say!” exclaimed Miss Bliss, artlessly amazed. “I read about it in the papers and they said it cost millions and had things in it out of kings’ palaces.”

To this there was no response, and Dolly Bliss and I began to talk together. We chose a safe topic--a bargain sale of stockings at Macy’s. We tried to invest it with a careless sprightliness, which was difficult, not so much because of the subject but by reason of the tattoo on the pane. It was like an accompaniment out of tune. We couldn’t seem to give our minds to the stockings while it went on, even when we raised our voices and tried to drown it. Suddenly it stopped and we stopped, too, dropping the stockings and eying each other with fixed stares. Each of us was determined not to look at Lizzie and it took all our will to refrain.

She began moving about behind us, and we tried a new subject--the count’s approaching departure. We said nice things about him, echoed each other. I remarked that he was a charming person, and Miss Bliss remarked that he was a _very_ charming person. We had to make a great effort. It was almost impossible to keep it up with that woman padding about behind your chair like an ill-tempered tiger. When a sudden unexpected sound of tearing paper came from her, I jumped as if the tiger had made a spring at me. She was opening one of her letters. It loosened the tension. We suppressed gasps and took up the count again, more as if he was a human being and less as if he was the center piece at a dull dinner-party. Lizzie’s voice, loud and startled, stopped us.

“What do you think of this--Mrs. Stregazzi’s married Berwick!”

The count fled from our minds like an offended god. We ejaculated, “Berwick!--Mrs. Stregazzi!” and sat stunned.

Lizzie consulted the letter:

“Last week in Portland, Maine. She says, ‘We’re as happy as clams and everybody predicts a great future for Dan.’”

“Well!” I breathed and looked at the other two. Lizzie’s temper was gone, a shared sensation made her one with us.

“Did you ever!” she murmured as any ordinary young woman might have done.

“Why she’s fifteen years older than he is.”

“More like twenty. She’s not so young as she looks.”

“Good gracious, how extraordinary!” I fell back in my chair aghast before this evidence of a woman’s daring. “And those two children, _and_ the grandmother!” Mrs. Stregazzi’s dauntless courage began to pale when I compared it to the bridegroom’s.

“Maybe he wanted a home,” Miss Bliss hazarded.

“A man may want a home but he doesn’t want a ready-made family in it.”

It was my place in the trio to voice the sentiments of that staid and unadventurous middle class, which is described as “the backbone of the country.”

“Singers don’t want homes,” said Lizzie, “they’re in the way.”

“It must have been love,” I said in an awed voice. “Nothing else could explain it.”

For a moment we were silent, each deflecting her glance from the other to an adjacent object. I don’t know why it should have been, but Mrs. Stregazzi’s reckless act seemed to have depressed us. Any one coming into the room would have said we had had bad news.

Miss Bliss broke the spell, emerging from depths of thought in which she had been evolving a working hypothesis.

“I don’t see why it is so strange,” she said ponderingly.

“You don’t?”--the backbone of a country in which all men are free and equal does not bend readily--“with that disparity and he just beginning his career?”

“No, I don’t.” She was sitting cross-legged, holding an ankle in each hand and rocking gently. “I’ll tell you just what I think--I believe they were lonely. Lots of people get married because they’re lonely.”

“She had a mother and two children.”

“She took care of them, they weren’t companions. Berwick’s a companion, likes what she does and works at the same thing. It’s great to have a person like that around.” She nodded, with shrewd eyes shifting from one face to the other. “I’ve seen a lot and I’ve noticed. All sorts of people get married, and it comes out right. It’s not just the young ones and suitable ones that pull it off. It’ll be fine for Mrs. Stregazzi to have him to go round with, and it’ll be fine for him to have her to think about and talk things over with.”

“They can help each other along in their work,” I admitted.

“They can be fond of each other,” said Miss Bliss.

She ceased rocking and looked out of the window, the shrewd eyes growing dreamy. Our appearance of depression returned, a shade darker than before. Mrs. Stregazzi and Berwick might have shown a dashing disregard for public opinion, but there was no reason for us to look as if we had heard of their mutual destruction in a railway accident. If we had been waiting for their mutilated remains we couldn’t have appeared more melancholy. Miss Bliss heaved a sigh and observed:

“It’s a great thing to have some one fond of you.”

Lizzie and I didn’t answer, but we gave ear as if the Delphic oracle had spoken and we were trying to extract balm from its words.

“And it’s a great thing to be fond of some one yourself.”

Our silence gave assent, but the oracle’s wisdom did not seem to cheer us. We sat sunk in our chairs, eying her morosely. Her imagination roused, she ranged over the advantages of the married state:

“Just think how lovely it would be to know there was some one who cared whether you were sick or well, or happy or blue. Wouldn’t it be great to have some one come home in the evening who was going to be awfully glad to see you and who you were just crazy to have come? And when work was slack and you were losing your sleep about money, wouldn’t it be grand to know there was a feller who could chip in and pay the bills? Oh, gee--” she dropped her eyelids with the ecstatic expression of one who glimpses ineffable radiances. “Well, I guess yes.”

An answering “yes” came faintly from me. The ecstatic expression flashed away, and she turned, all brusk negation:

“Oh, Mrs. Drake, _you_ don’t know what it is. _You’re_ well fixed with money of your own. But girls like us”--she pointed to Lizzie, then brought her finger back to her own knee upon which she tapped in bitter emphasis--“_we’ve_ got only ourselves. We’ve _got_ to make good or go under. And it’s fight, fight, fight. I’ve had to do something I hated since I was sixteen and now she”--with a nod at Lizzie, “has got to do something she hates.”

Lizzie, sunk in the chair, eyed her like a brooding sphinx. She met the gaze with the boldness of the meek roused to passion:

“You do hate it, Miss Harris. You’ve done as good as say so. And it’s new now, you’re only beginning. Wait till you come home every evening, disgusted with it all and everything and everybody; when it’s bad weather and you feel sick and nobody cares. Wait till you have to stand anything they hand out to you, and not say a word back or you’ll lose your job. I know. I’ve tried it and it’s tough. It’s too much. Any man that ’ud come along and offer to take you out of it would look all right to you.” Her boldness began to weaken before that formidable gaze. She became hurriedly apologetic. “I’m not saying there _is_ any man. I’m only supposing. And I don’t mean now. I mean after you’ve been up against it for years and years and the grind’s crushed the heart out of you.”

There was no answer, and the oracle, now openly scared at her temerity, scrambled to her feet. In the momentary silence I heard the distant bang of the street door. She heard it too and forgot her fear, wheeling to the mirror for a quick touching up of her hair ribbon and frill. When she turned back her color had risen to match her reddened lips and her manner showed a flurried haste.

“I got to go--several things to attend to--my supper and some sewing to finish.” She didn’t bother to be careful of excuses. The man who hoped to acquire the legal right to pay her bills was waiting below. She went, trailing the Navajo blanket from a hanging hand.

Lizzie drew a deep breath and said:

“She’s right.”

“About what?”

“About me.”

“You mean the teaching?”

“I do. It’s a dog’s work.”

She rose and faced me, sullen as a thunder-cloud.

“But you’ve hardly tried it.”

“I’ve tried it enough. There are plenty of women who can scratch along that way and be thankful to Providence and pleasant to the pupils. Let them do it. It’s their work, not mine.”

She turned from me and went to the window, but not this time to drum on the pane. Leaning against the frame she looked out on the tin roof. The angry contempt of her face suggested that the millionaires Betty was collecting were gathered there, unable to escape, and forced to hear how low they stood in the opinion of their hireling.

“I am an artist. Those people,” she made a grandiose gesture to the tin roof, “don’t know what an artist is. They think they’re condescending, doing a kindness. _I’m_ the one that’s condescending--I do them not a kindness but an honor, when I enter their houses and listen to the squawking of their barbarous children.”

“You can’t expect them to think that.”

“I don’t, they haven’t got sense enough. That woman, the mother, came in while I was there. I’ve no doubt she thought she was being very agreeable. She asked me questions about my method.” She gave me a sidelong cast of her eye full of derision. “I sat and listened, and when she was done I said I didn’t discuss my method with people who knew nothing.”

“Oh, Lizzie,” I groaned. “You didn’t say that?”

“Certainly I did. Only that. I was polite and patient. If I hadn’t felt so disgusted and out of spirits I’d have spoken to her freely and fully. But it wasn’t worth while.”

“But they won’t stand that sort of thing. They won’t have you again.”

“I don’t intend to go again. I couldn’t endure it for five minutes. I’d rather sweep a crossing on Lexington Avenue.”

“There aren’t any crossings on Lexington Avenue, and if there were, you don’t know how to sweep. What will you say to Mrs. Ferguson and Mrs. Ashworth?”

She shrugged with an almost insolent indifference.

“I’ll say I don’t like it. That’s enough, isn’t it?”

“Lizzie, I beg of you to be reasonable. They won’t go on helping you if you disappoint them like this.”

“Then they can stop helping me--I’m not so immensely charmed and interested in them. They try and force me into things I don’t want to do. They take it out of my hands and then come smiling at me and say it’s all arranged. So it is--to their liking but not to mine.”

“It’s your profession, the only thing you know. What else could they do?”

“Let me alone.”

It was like beating yourself on a brick wall. I felt frantic.

“But _what’s_ going to become of you? You’ve got no means of livelihood.”

She shrugged again.

“I don’t know. But one thing I do know and that is that I won’t do slave’s work for you, or Mrs. Ferguson, or any one else in the world.”

I didn’t know what to say. I might go on talking all night and not make a dent on her. Demosthenes would have turned away baffled before her impossible unreasonableness.

It was getting dark and I could see her as a tall black silhouette against the blue dusk of the window. There was only one suggestion left.

“Are you going to take Dolly Bliss’s advice and marry?” My voice sounded unnatural, like somebody else’s.

“Marry?” she echoed absently. “I suppose I _could_ do that.”

“Is it that you can’t make up your mind, Lizzie?”

“I don’t know,” she murmured again, this time as if she wasn’t thinking of what she said.

I rose with shaking knees. It was the critical moment of her fate and mine.

“Don’t you want to?” I almost whispered, drawing near her.

Her answer made me stop short. It came with a tremor of fierce inner feeling, revolt, rage and desperation, seething into expression:

“Oh God, how I hate it all!”

“Hate what--marriage?”

“No, everything that’s around me. Those women, this damnable work--no money--no hope! I’m crazy with the misery of it. It’s like being bound down and smothered. I want to get out. I want to be free. I want to do what I like and be myself. You’re trying to make me into some one else. You’re crushing me and killing me. I’d rather be dead in my grave than go on this way.”

She burst into frantic tears, savage, racking, snatching the curtain about her and sobbing and strangling behind it. The room was nearly dark and I could see the long piece of drapery swaying as she clutched it to her. I tried to pluck it away, and through its folds, felt her body shaken and bent like a tree in a tempest. I had never heard such weeping, moans and wails, with words coming in inarticulate bursts. I was frightened, caught her hand and drew her out of the curtain which hung askew from torn fastenings. She pushed me away and threw herself on the sofa, where, under the vast circumference of her hat, she lay prone, abandoned to the storm.

I stood helplessly regarding her, then as broken sentences came from under her hat, took out the pins and held it before me like a shield, while she gasped in choked reiteration that we were killing her, that she hated us all, that she’d rather die than give another lesson. If her paroxysm hadn’t been so devastating I would have lost my temper at the outrageous injustice of such sentences as I could catch. I tried to say something of this in a tempered form, but she shut me off with an extended hand, beating it at me, calling out strangled execrations at Betty and Mrs. Ashworth and the mother of her pupil. If any one who did not know the situation had heard her, they would have thought those worthy and disinterested women had been plotting her ruin.

There was nothing for me to do but wait till her passion spent itself, which it began to do in sighs and quivering breaths that shook her from head to foot. When I saw it was moderating I told her I would get her some wine and went to the kitchenette, leaving her with drenched face and tangled hair, a piteous spectacle. In a few moments I was back with the wine-glass. The room was empty--she had gone leaving the black hat.

I picked it up and sat down on the sofa. We certainly had got to the climax.

I didn’t count--with my hundred and sixty-five dollars a month. I could retire into any corner, and live forgotten and love forlorn like Mariana. But Lizzie--? She couldn’t sing, she wouldn’t teach, nobody could help her. Marriage was the only way out. As I sat on the sofa, absently staring at the hat, I had a memory of a corral I had seen at a railway station in a trip I once took to the West. It was a pen for the cattle that came off the range and had to be driven into the cars. The entrance was wide, but the fenced enclosure narrowed and narrowed until there was only one way of exit left, up a gangway to the car. The comparison wasn’t elegant but it struck me as fitting--Lizzie was on the gangway with the entrance to the car the only way to go.

“I wish to heaven she’d hurry and get into it,” I groaned.

XVIII