Chapter VIII: Part 8

"It's only 'sense' that I'm trying to make," acknowledged Guthrie. "Now look here, you Little Teacher Person, I'm going to talk to you just as bluntly as I would to another fellow. You are in a hole--the deuce of a hole! You have got typhoid fever, and it may run ten days and it may run ten weeks! And you are two thousand miles from home--among strangers! And no matter how glad I personally may be that you did push on and join us, sick or well, from every practical standpoint, of course, it surely was heedless and ill-considered of you to start off in poor health on a trip like this and run the risk of forcing perfectly unconcerned strangers to pay for it all. Personally, you seem so much to belong to me already that it gives me goose-flesh to think of your having to put yourself under obligations to any purely conscientious person. Mrs. Ellis, of course, will insist, out of common humanity, upon giving up her trip and staying behind with you, but Mrs. Ellis, Little Teacher, is on her honeymoon, and Ellis couldn't stay behind--it's his party--he'd have to go on with his people--and you'd never be able to compensate anybody for a broken honeymoon, and the Judge's youngster couldn't nurse a sick kitten, and the two women teachers from New York have been planning seven years for this trip, they told me, and we couldn't decently take it away from them. But you and I, Little Psychology Lady, are not strangers to each other. Hanlon's Mary here at the ranch house, rough as she is, has at least the serving hands of a woman, and Andrews belongs naturally to the tribe which is consecrated to inconveniences, and both can be compensated accordingly. And I would have married you, anyway, before another year was out! Yes, I would!"

Apparently ignoring everything that he had said, she turned her face scowlingly toward the sound of hammering that issued suddenly through the piazza door.

"Oh, Glory!" she complained. "Are they making my coffin already?"

With a little laugh, Guthrie relinquished her limp fingers, and jumping up, took another swift turn along the piazza, stopping only to bang the door shut again. When he faced her once more the twinkle was all gone from his eyes.

"You're quite right, what you said about men," he resumed with desperate seriousness. "We are a heap sight quicker in our susceptibilities than in our mentalities! Therefore, no sane man ever does marry till his brain has caught up with his emotions! But sometimes, you know, something happens that hustles a man's brain along a bit, and this time my brain seems fairly to have jumped to its destination and clean-beaten even the emotions in the race. In cool, positive judgment I tell you I want to marry you this afternoon."

"You've confessed yourself, haven't you, that you've no severer ideal for marriage than that a man should be generous enough to give your personality, no matter how capricious, a chance to breathe? Haven't I qualified sufficiently as that amiable man? More than that, I'm free to love you; I'm certainly keen to serve you; I'm reasonably well able to provide for you, and you naturally have a right to know that I've led a decent life. It's ten good years now since I was thirty and first found nerve enough to break away from the stifling business life I hated and get out into the open, where there's surely less money but infinitely more air. And in ten years I've certainly found considerable chance to fulfil a few of the items in my own little 'List of Necessities.' I've seen Asia and I've seen Africa, and I've written the book I've always wanted to write on North American mountain structures.

"But there's a lot more that I crave to do. Maybe I've got a bit of a 'capricious personality' myself! Maybe I also have been hunting for the mate who would give my personality a chance to breathe. Certainly I've never wanted any home yet, except when the right time came, the arms of the right woman. And I guess you must be she, because you're the first woman I've ever seen whom I'd trust to help me just as hard to play my chosen games as I'd help her to play hers! I tell you--I want--very much--to marry you this afternoon."

"Why do you dally with me so? Isn't it your own argument that there's only just one day in the love-life of a man and woman when the question and the answer mate exactly, and the books are balanced perfectly even for the new start together? Demand and supply, debit and credit, hunger and food? You, wild for help, and I wild to help you! What difference does it make what you call it? Isn't this our day?"

"For a man who's usually as silent as you are, don't you think you're talking a good deal, considering how sick you said I was?" asked the young woman, not unmirthfully.

Guthrie's square jaws snapped together like a trap. "I was merely trying to detain you," he mumbled, "until Hanlon had finished knocking the windows out of your room. We're going to give you all the air you can breathe, anyway."

A little sullenly he started for the stairs. Then just at the door he turned unexpectedly and his face was all smiles again.

"Little Psychology Teacher," he said, "I have made you a formal, definite offer of marriage. And in just about ten minutes from now I am coming back for my answer."

When he did return a trifle sooner than he had intended, he met her in the narrow upper hallway, with hands outstretched, groping her way unsteadily toward her room. As though her equilibrium was altogether disturbed by his sudden advent, she reeled back against the wall.

"Mr. Donas Guthrie," she said, "I'm feeling pretty wobbly! Mr. Donas Guthrie," she said, "I guess I'm pretty sick."

"It's a cruel long way down the hall," suggested Guthrie. "Wouldn't you like me to carry you?"

"Yes--I--would," sighed the Little Psychology Teacher.

Even to Guthrie's apprehensive mind, her weight proved most astonishingly light. The small head drooping limply back from the slender neck seemed actually the only heavy thing about her, yet there were apparently only two ideas in that head.

"I'm afraid of Hanlon's Mary, and I don't like Dr. Andrews--very--specially--much," she kept repeating aimlessly. Then halfway to her room her body stiffened suddenly.

"Mr. Donas Guthrie," she asked. "Do you think I'm probably going to die?"

"N-a-w!" said Guthrie, his nose fairly crinkling with positiveness.

"But they don't give you much of anything to eat in typhoid, do they?" she persisted hectically.

"I suppose not," acknowledged Guthrie.

With disconcerting unexpectedness she began to cry--a soft, low, whimpery cry like a sleepy child's.

"If any day should come when--they think--that I am going to die," she moaned, "who will there be to see that I do get--something awfully good to eat?"

"I'll see to it," said Guthrie, "if you'll only put me in authority."

As though altogether indifferent to anything that he might say, her tension relaxed again and without further parleying she let Guthrie carry her across the threshold of her room and set her down cautiously in the creaky rocking chair. The eyes that lifted to his were as vague and turbid as brown velvet.

"There's one good thing about typhoid," she moaned. "It doesn't seem to hurt any, does it? In fact, I think I rather like it. It feels as warm and snug and don't-care as a hot lemonade at bed time. But what?" brightening suddenly, "but what was it you asked me to think about? I feel sort of confused--but it was something, I remember, that I was going to argue with you about."

"It was what I said about marrying me," prompted Guthrie.

"Oh, y-e-s," smiled the Little Psychology Teacher. Hazily for a moment she continued staring at him with her fingers prodded deep into her temples. Then suddenly, like a flower blasted with heat, she wilted down into her chair, groping blindly out with one hand toward the sleeve of his coat.

"Whatever you think best to do about it," she faltered, "I guess you'd better arrange pretty quickly--'cause I think--I'm--going--out."

This is how it happened that Mr. and Mrs. Donas Guthrie and Dr. Andrews stayed behind at the ranch house with Hanlon and Hanlon's Mary, and a piebald pony or two, and a herd of Angora goats, and a pink geranium plant, and the strange intermittent smell of a New England farmhouse which lurked in Hanlon's goods and chattels even after thirty years, and three or four stale, tattered magazines--and typhoid fever.

It was typhoid fever that proved essentially the most incalculable companion of them all. Hanlon's austerity certainly never varied from day to day, nor the inherent sullenness of Hanlon's Mary.

The meager sick-room, stripped to its bare pine skin of every tawdry colored print and fluttering cheese-cloth curtain, faced bluntly toward the west--a vital little laboratory in which the unknown quantity of a woman's endurance and the fallible skill of one man, the stubborn bravery of another, and the quite inestimable will of God were to be fused together in a desperate experiment to precipitate Life rather than Death.

So October waxed into November, and so waxed misgiving into apprehension, and apprehension into actual fear. In any more cheerful situation it would have been at least interesting to have watched the infuriated expletives issue from Andrew's perennially smiling lips.

"Oh, hang not having anything to work with!" he kept reiterating and reiterating. "Hang being shut off like this on a ranch where there aren't anything but sheep and goats and one old stingy cow that Hanlon's Mary guards with her life 'cause the lady's only a school teacher, but a baby is a baby.' Hang Hanlon's Mary! And hang not being altogether able to blame her! And hang not knowing, anyway, just what nanny-goat's milk would do for a typhoid patient! And hang--"

But before the expletives, and through the expletives, and after the expletives, Andrews was all hero, working, watching, experimenting, retrenching, humanly comprehensive, more than humanly vigilant.

So, with the brain of a doctor and the heart of a lover, the two men worked and watched and waited through the tortuous autumn days and nights, blind to the young dawn stealing out like a luminous mist from the night-smothered mountains; deaf to the flutter of sun-dried leaves in the radiant noon-time; dull to the fruit-scented fragrance of the early twilight, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, sensing nothing, except the flicker of a pulse or the rise of a temperature.

And then at last there came a harsh, wintry feeling day, when Andrews, stepping out into the hall, called Guthrie softly to him and said, still smiling:

"Guthrie, old man, I don't think we're going to win this game!"

"W-h-a-t?" gasped Guthrie.

With his mouth still curling amiably around his words, Andrews repeated the phrase. "I said, I don't think we're going to win this game. No, nothing new's happened. She's simply burning out. Can't you understand? I mean she's probably--going to die!"

Out of the jumble of words that hurtled through Guthrie's mind only four slipped his lips.

"But--she's--my--wife!" he protested.

"Other men's wives have died before this," said Andrews still smiling.

"Man," cried Guthrie, "if you smile again, I'll break your head!"

With his tears running down like rain into the broadening trough of his smile, Andrews kept right on smiling. "You needn't be so cross about it," he said. "You're not the only one who likes her! I wanted her myself! You're nothing but a tramp on the face of the earth--and I could have given her the snuggest home in Yonkers!"

With their arms across each other's shoulders they went back into the sick room.

Rousing from her lethargy, the young woman opened her eyes upon them with the first understanding that she had shown for some days. Inquisitively she stared from Guthrie's somber eyes to Andrews' distorted cheerfulness.

Taking instant advantage of her unwonted rationality, Andrews blurted out the question that was uppermost in his professional responsibility.

"Don't you think, maybe, your people ought to know about your being sick?" he said. "Now, if you could give us any addresses."

For a second it really seemed as though the question would merely safely ignite her common sense.

"Why yes, of course," she acquiesced. "My brother."

Then suddenly, without any warning, her most dangerous imagination caught fire.

"You mean," she faltered, "that--I--am--not--going to get well?"

Before either man was quick enough to contradict her, the shock had done its work. Piteously she turned her face to the pillow.

"Never--never--to--go--to--Oxford?" she whispered in mournful astonishment. "Never--even--to--see my--Bay of Naples?--Never to--have a--a--perfectly happy Christmas?" A little petulantly then her brain began to clog. "I think I--might at least have had--the pink sash!" she complained. Then, equally suddenly her strength rallied for an instant and the eyes that she lifted to Guthrie's were filled with a desperate effort at raillery. "Bring on your--anchovies and caviar," she reminded him, "and the stuffed green peppers--and remember I don't like my fillet too well done--and--"

Five minutes later in the hallway Andrews caught Guthrie just as he was chasing downstairs after Hanlon.

"What are you going to do?" he asked curiously.

"I am going to send Hanlon out to the telegraph station," said Guthrie. "I'm going to wire to Denver for a pink sash!"

"What she was raving about?" quizzed Andrews. "Are you raving too?"

"It's the only blamed thing in the whole world that she's asked for that I can get her," said Guthrie.

"It'll take five days," growled Andrews.

"I know it!"

"It won't do her any good."

"I can't help that!"

"She'll--be gone before it gets here."

"You can't help that!"

But she wasn't "gone," at all before it came. All her vitalities charred, to be sure, like a fire-swept woodland, but still tenacious of life, still fighting for reorganization, a little less feverish, a little stronger-pulsed, she opened her eyes in a puzzled, sad sort of little smile when Guthrie shook the great, broad, shimmering gauze-like ribbon ticklingly down across her wasted hands, and then apparently drowsed off to sleep again. But when both men came back to the room a few moments later, almost half the pink sash was cuddled under her cheek. And Hanlon's Mary came and peered through the doorway, with the whining baby still in her arms, and reaching out and fretting a piece of pink fringe between her hardy fingers, sniffed mightily.

"And you sent my man all the way to the wire," she asked, "and grubbed him three whole days waitin' round, just for that?"

"Yes, sure," said Guthrie.

"G-a-w-d!" said Hanlon's Mary.

And, the next week the patient was even better, and the next week, better still. Then, one morning after days and days of seemingly interminable silence and stupor, she opened her eyes perfectly wide and asked Guthrie abruptly:

"Whom did I marry? You or Dr. Andrews?"

And Guthrie in a sudden perversity of shock and embarrassment lied grimly:

"Dr. Andrews!"

"I didn't either!--it was you!" came the immediate, not too strong, but distinctly temperish response.

Something in the new vitality of the tone made Guthrie stop whatever he was doing and eye her suspiciously.

"How long have you been conscious like this?" he queried in surprise.

The faintest perceptible flicker of mischief crossed her haggard face.

"Three--days," she acknowledged.

"Then why--?" began Guthrie.

"Because I--didn't know--just what to call you," she faltered.

After that no power on earth apparently could induce any further speech from her for another three days. Solemn and big-eyed and totally unfathomable, she lay watching Guthrie's every gesture, every movement. From the door to the chair, from the chair to the window, from the window back to the chair, she lay estimating him altogether disconcertingly. Across the hand that steadied her drinking glass, she studied the poise of his lean, firm wrist. Out from the shadow-mystery of her heavy lashes, she questioned the ultimate value of each frown or smile.

And then, suddenly--just as abruptly as the first time she had spoken:

"What day is it?" she asked.

"It's Christmas," said Guthrie softly.

"O-h!--O-h!--O-h!" she exclaimed, very slowly. Then with increasing interest and wonder, "Is there snow on the ground?" she whispered.

"No," said Guthrie.

"Is it full moon to-night?" she questioned.

"No," said Guthrie.

"Is there any small, freckle-faced, alto-voiced choir boy in the house, trotting around humming funny little tail-ends of anthems and carols, while he's buckling up his skates?" she stammered.

"No," said Guthrie.

"Are there any old, white-haired loving people cuddled in the chimney corner?" she persisted.

"No," said Guthrie.

"Isn't there--any Christmas tree?"

"No."

"Aren't there even any presents?"

"No."

"Oh!" she smiled. "Isn't it funny!"

"What's funny?" asked Guthrie perplexedly.

The eyes that lifted to his were brimming full of a strange, wistful sort of astonishment. "Why, it's funny," she faltered, "it's funny--that without--any of these things--that I thought were so necessary to it--I've found my 'perfectly happy Christmas.'"

Then, almost bashfully, her wisp-like fingers went straying out toward the soft silken folds of the precious pink sash which she kept always close to her pillow.

"If--you--don't--mind," she said, "I think I'll cut my sash in two and give half of it to Hanlon's Mary to make a dress for her baby."

The medicine spoon dropped rather clatteringly out of Guthrie's hand.

"But I sent all the way to Denver for it," he protested.

"Oh, yes, I know all about that," she acknowledged. "But--what--can--a great big girl--like me--do with a--pink sash?"

"But you said you wanted it!" cried Guthrie. "Why, it took a man and a pony and a telegraph station five entire days to get it, and they had to flag the express train specially for it--and--and--"

A little wearily she closed her eyes and then opened them again blinkingly.

"I'm pretty tired, now," she said, "so I don't want to talk about it--but don't you--understand? I've revised my whole list of necessities. Out of the wide--wide--world--I find that I don't really want anything--except--just--you!"

WOMAN'S ONLY BUSINESS

THE men at the club were horridly busy that night discussing the silly English law about marrying your dead wife's sister. The talk was quite rabid enough even before an English High-churchman infused his pious venom into the subject-matter. When the argument was at its highest and the drinks were at their lowest, Bertus Sagner, the biology man at the university, jumped up from his seat with blazing eyes and said "RATS!"--not anything long and Latin, not anything obscure and evasive, not even "rodents," but just plain "RATS!" The look on his face was inordinately disgusted, or indeed more than disgusted, unless disgust is perhaps an emotion that may at times be served red-hot. As he broke away from the gabbling crowd and began to hunt noisily round the room for his papers, I gathered up my own chemistry notebook and started after him. I was a new man in town and a comparative stranger. But Sagner and I had been chums once long ago in Berlin.

At the outside door he turned now and eyed me a bit shamefacedly. "Barney, old man," he said, "are you going my way? Well, come along." The broad-shouldered breadth of the two of us blocked out the light from the shining chandelier and sent our clumsy feet fairly stumbling down the harsh granite steps. The jarring lurch exploded Sagner's irritation into a short, sharp, damny growl, and I saw at once that his nerves were raw like a woman's.

As we turned into the deep-shadowed, spooky-black college roadway, the dormitories' yellow lights and laughter flared forth grotesquely like the Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge cut up for a Jack-o'-Lantern. At the edge of the Lombardy poplars I heard Sagner swallowing a little bit overhard.

"I suspect that I made rather a fool of myself back there," he confided abruptly, "but if there's anything under the day or night sky that makes me mad, it's the idiotic babble, babble, babble, these past few weeks about the 'dead wife's sister' law."

"What's your grouch?" I asked. "You're not even a married man, let alone a widower."

He stopped suddenly with a spurting match and a big cigar and lighted up unconsciously all the extraordinary frowning furrows of his face. The match went out and he struck another, and that match went out and he struck another--and another, and all the time it seemed to me as though just the flame in his face was hot enough to kindle any ordinary cigar. After each fruitless, breeze-snuffed effort he snapped his words out like so many tiny, tempery torpedoes. "Of--all--the--rot!" he ejaculated. "Of--all--the nonsense!" he puffed and mumbled. "A--whole--great, grown-up empire fussing and brawling about a 'dead wife's sister.' A dead wife! What does a dead wife care who marries her sister? Great heavens! If they really want to make a good moral law that will help somebody, why--don't--they--make--a--law--that will forbid a man's flirting with his living wife's sister?"

When I laughed I thought he would strike me, but after a husky second he laughed, too, through a great blue puff of smoke and a blaze like the headlight of an engine. In another instant he had vaulted the low fence and was starting off across lots for his own rooms, but before I could catch up with him he whirled abruptly in his tracks and came back to me.

"Will you come over to the Lennarts' with me for a moment?" he asked. "I was there at dinner with them to-night and I left my spectacles."

Very willingly I acquiesced, and we plunged off single file into the particular darkness that led to Professor Lennart's rose-garden. Somewhere remotely in my mind hummed and halted a vague, evasive bit of man-gossip about Lennart's amazingly pretty sister-in-law. Yet Sagner did not look exactly to me like a man who was going courting. Even in that murky darkness I could visualize perfectly from Sagner's pose and gait the same strange, bleak, facial furnishings that had attracted me so astoundingly in Berlin--the lean, flat cheeks cleaned close as the floor of a laboratory; the ugly, short-cropped hair; the mouth, just for work; the nose, just for work; the ears, just for work--not a single, decorative, pleasant thing from crown to chin except those great, dark, gorgeous, miraculously virgin eyes, with the huge, shaggy eyebrows lowering down prudishly over them like two common doormats on which every incoming vision must first stop and wipe its feet. Once in a cafe in Berlin I saw a woman try to get into Sagner's eyes--without stopping. Right in the middle of our dinner I jumped as though I had been shot. "Why, what was _that_?" I cried. "What was _that_?"

"What was what?" drawled Sagner. Try as I might the tiniest flicker of a grin tickled my lips. "Oh, nothing," I mumbled apologetically. "I just thought I heard a door slam-bang in a woman's face."

"What door?" said Sagner stupidly. "What woman?"

Old Sagner was deliciously stupid over many things, but he dissected the darkness toward Professor Lennart's house as though it had been his favorite kind of cadaver. Here, was the hardening turf, compact as flesh. There, was the tough, tight tendon of the ripping ground pine. Farther along under an exploring match a great vapid peony loomed like a dead heart. Somewhere out in an orchard the May-blooms smelled altogether too white. Almost at the edge of the Lennarts' piazza he turned and stepped back to my pace and began talking messily about some stale biological specimen that had just arrived from the Azores.

College people, it seemed, did not ring bells for one another, and the most casual flop of Sagner's knuckles against the door brought Mrs. Lennart almost immediately to welcome us. "Almost immediately," I say, because the slight, faltering delay in her footfall made me wonder even then whether it was limb or life that had gone just a little bit lame. But the instant the hall light struck her face my hand clutched down involuntarily on Sagner's shoulder. It was the same, same face whose brighter, keener, shinier pastelled likeness had been the only joyous object in Sagner's homesick German room. With almost embarrassing slowness now we followed her lagging steps back to the library.

It was the first American home that I had seen for some years, and the warmth of it, and the color, and the glow, and the luxurious, deep-seated comfort, mothered me like the notes of an old, old song. Between the hill-green walls the long room stretched like a peaceful valley to the very edge of the huge, gray field-stone fireplace that blocked the final vista like a furious breastwork raised against all the invading tribes of history. Red books and gold frames and a chocolate-colored bronze or two caught up the flickering glint from the apple-wood fire, and out of some shadowy corner flanked by a grand piano a young girl's contralto voice, sensuous as liquid plush, was lipping its magic way up and down the whole wonderful, molten scale.

The corner was rather small, but out of it loomed instantly the tall, supple figure of Professor Lennart with his thousand-year-old brown eyes and his young gray hair. We were all big fellows, but Lennart towered easily three inches over anybody else's head. Professionally, too, he had outstripped the rest of us. People came gadding from all over the country to consult his historical criticisms and interpretations. And I hardly know how to express the man's vivid, luminous, incandescent personality. Surely no mother in a thousand would have chosen to have her son look like me, and I hope that no mother in a million would really have yearned to have a boy look like Sagner, but any mother, I think, would gladly have compromised on Lennart. I suppose he was handsome. Rising now, as he did, from the murkiest sort of a shadow, the mental and physical radiance of him made me want to laugh right out loud just for sheer pleasure.

Following closely behind his towering bulk, the girl with the contralto voice stepped out into the lamplight, and I made my most solemn and profound German bow over her proffered hand before the flaming mischief in her finger tips sent my eyes staring up into her astonishing face.

I have never thought that American women are extraordinarily beautiful, but rather that they wear their beauty like a thinnish sort of veil across the adorable, insistent expressiveness of their features. But this girl's face was so thick with beauty that you could not tell in one glance, or even two glances, or perhaps three, whether she had any expression at all. Kindness or meanness, brightness or dullness, pluck or timidity, were absolutely undecipherable in that physically perfect countenance. She was very small, and very dark, and very active, with hair like the color of eight o'clock--daylight and darkness and lamplight all snarled up together--and lips all crude scarlet, and eyes as absurdly big and round as a child's good-by kiss. Yet never for one instant could you have called her anything so impassive as "attractive." "Attracting" is the only hasty, ready-made word that could possibly fit her. Personally I do not like the type. The prettiest picture postal that ever was printed could not lure me across the borders of any unknown country. When I travel even into Friendship Land I want a good, clear face-map to guide my explorations.

There was a boy, too, in the room--the Lennarts' son--a brown-faced lad of thirteen whose algebraic seance with his beloved mother we had most brutally interrupted.

Professor Lennart's fad, as I have said, was history. Mrs. Lennart's fad was presumably housekeeping. The sister-in-law's fad was unmistakably men. Like an electric signboard her fascinating, spectacular sex-vanity flamed and flared from her coyly drooped eyes to her showy little feet. Every individual gesture signaled distinctly, "I am an extraordinarily beautiful little woman." Now it was her caressing hand on Lennart's shoulder; now it was her maddening, dazzling smile hurled like a bombshell into Sagner's perfectly prosy remark about the weather, now it was her teasing lips against the boy's tousled hair; now it was her tip-toeing, swaying, sweet-breathed exploration of a cobweb that the linden trees had left across my shoulder.

Lennart was evidently utterly subjugated. Like a bright moth and a very dull flame the girl chased him unceasingly from one chair, or one word, or one laugh to another. A dozen times their hands touched, or their smiles met, or their thoughts mated in distinctly personal if not secret understanding. Once when Mrs. Lennart stopped suddenly in the midst of my best story and asked me to repeat what I had been saying, I glanced up covertly and saw the girl kissing the tip of her finger a little bit over-mockingly to her brother-in-law. Never in any country but America could such a whole scene have been enacted in absolute moral innocence. It made me half ashamed and half very proud of my country. In continental Europe even the most trivial, innocent audacity assumes at once such utterly preposterous proportions of evil. But here before my very eyes was the most dangerous man-and-woman game in the world being played as frankly and ingenuously and transiently as though it had been croquet.

Through it all, Sagner, frowning like ten devils, sat at the desk with his chin in his hands, staring--staring at the girl. I suppose that she thought he was fascinated. He was. He was fairly yearning to vivisect her. I had seen that expression before in his face--reverence, repulsion, attraction, distaste, indomitable purpose, blood-curdling curiosity--SCIENCE.

When I dragged him out of the room and down the steps half an hour later my sides were cramped with laughter. "If we'd stayed ten minutes longer," I chuckled, "she would have called you 'Bertie' and me 'Boy.'"

But Sagner would not laugh.

"She's a pretty girl all right," I ventured again.

"Pretty as h--," whispered Sagner.

As we rounded the corner of the house the long French window blazed forth on us. Clear and bright in the lamplight stood Lennart with his right arm cuddling the girl to his side. "Little sister," he was saying, "let's go back to the piano and have some more music." Smiling her kindly good night we saw Mrs. Lennart gather up her books and start off limpingly across the hall, with the devoted boy following close behind her.

"Then she's really lame?" I asked Sagner as we swung into the noisy gravel path.

"Oh, yes," he said; "she got hurt in a runaway accident four years ago. Lennart doesn't know how to drive a _goat_!"

"Seems sort of too bad," I mused dully.

Then Sagner laughed most astonishingly. "Yes, sort of too bad," he mocked me.

It was almost ten o'clock when we circled back to the college library. Only a few grinds were there buzzing like June-bugs round the low-swinging green lamps. Even the librarian was missing. But Madge Hubert, the librarian's daughter, was keeping office hours in his stead behind a sumptuous old mahogany desk. At the very first college party that I had attended, Madge Hubert had been pointed out to me with a certain distinction as being the girl that Bertus Sagner was _almost_ in love with. Then, as now, I was startled by the surprising youthfulness of her. Surely she was not more than three years ahead of the young girl whom we had left at Professor Lennart's house. With unmistakable friendly gladness she welcomed Sagner to the seat nearest her, and accorded me quite as much chair and quite as much smile as any new man in a university town really deserved. In another moment she had closed her book, pushed a full box of matches across the table to us, and switched off the electric light that fairly threatened to scorch her straight blond hair.

One by one the grinds looked up and nodded and smiled, and puckered their vision toward the clock, and "folded their tents like the Arabs and silently stole away," leaving us two men there all alone with the great silent room, and the long, rangy, echoing metal book-stacks, and the duddy-looking portraits, and the dopy-acting busts, and the sleek gray library cat--and the girl. Maybe Sagner came every Wednesday night to help close the library.

Certainly I liked the frank, almost boyish manner in which the two friends included me in their friendship by seeming to ignore me altogether.

"What's the matter, Bertus?" the girl began quite abruptly. "You look worried. What's the matter?"

"Nothing is ever the matter," said Sagner.

The girl laughed, and began to build a high, tottering paper tower out of a learned-looking pack of catalogue cards. Just at the moment of completion she gave a sharp little inadvertent sigh and the tower fluttered down.

"What's the matter with _you_?" quizzed Sagner.

"Nothing is ever the matter with me, either," she mocked smilingly.

Trying to butt into the silence that was awkward for me, if not for them, I rummaged my brain for speech, and blurted out triumphantly, "We've just come from Professor Lennart's."

"Just come from Professor Lennart's?" she repeated slowly, lifting her eyebrows as though the thought was a little bit heavy.

"Yes," said Sagner bluntly. "I've been there twice this evening."

With a rather playful twist of her lips the girl turned to me. "What did you think of 'Little Sister'?" she asked.

But before I could answer, Sagner had pushed me utterly aside once more and was shaking his smoke-stained finger threateningly in Madge Hubert's face. "Why--didn't--you--come--to the--Lennarts'--to--dinner--to-night --as--you--were--invited?" he scolded.

The girl put her chin in her hand and cuddled her fingers over her mouth and her nose and part of her blue eyes.

"I don't go to the Lennarts' any more--if I can help it," she mumbled.

"Why not?" shouted Sagner.

She considered the question very carefully, then "Go ask the other girls," she answered a trifle hotly. "Go ask any one of them. We all stay away for exactly the same reason."

"WHAT IS THE REASON?" thundered Sagner in his most terrible laboratory manner.

When Sagner speaks like that to me, I always grab hold of my head with both hands and answer just as fast as I possibly can, for I remember only too distinctly all the shining assortment of different sized knives and scalpels in his workshop and I have always found that a small, narrow, quick question makes the smallest, narrowest, quickest, soon-overest incision into my secret.

But Madge Hubert only laughed at the laboratory manner.

"Say 'Please,'" she whispered.

"Please!" growled Sagner, with his very own blood flushing all over his face and hands.

"Now--what is it you want to know?" she asked, frittering her fingers all the time over that inky-looking pack of catalogue cards.

Somehow, strange as it may seem, I did not feel an atom in the way, but rather that the presence of a third person, and that person myself, gave them both a certain daring bravado of speech that they would scarcely have risked alone with each other.

"What do I want to know?" queried Sagner. "I want to know--in fact--I'm utterly mad to know--just what your kind of woman thinks of 'Little Sister's' kind of woman."

With a startled gesture Madge Hubert looked back over her shoulder toward a creak in the literature book-stack, and Sagner jumped up with a great air of mock conspiracy, and went tip-toeing all around among the metal corridors in search of possible eavesdroppers, and then came flouncing back and stuffed tickly tissue paper into the gray cat's ears.

Then "Why don't you girls go to the Lennarts' any more?" he resumed with quickly recurrent gravity.

For a moment Madge Hubert dallied to shuffle one half of her pack of cards into the other half. Then she looked up and smiled the blond way a white-birch tree smiles in the sunshine.

"Why--we don't go any more because we don't have a good time," she confided. "After you've come home from a party once or twice and cried yourself to sleep, it begins to dawn on you very gradually that you didn't have a very good time. We don't like 'Little Sister.' She makes us feel ashamed."

"Oh!" said Sagner, rather brutally. "You are all jealous!"

But if he had expected for a second to disconcert Madge Hubert he was most ingloriously mistaken.

"Yes," she answered perfectly simply. "We are all jealous."

"Of her beauty?" scowled Sagner.

"Oh, no," said Madge Hubert. "Of her innocence."

Acid couldn't have eaten the fiber out of Madge Hubert's emotional honesty. "Why, yes," she hurried on vehemently, "among all the professors' daughters here in town there isn't one of us who is innocent enough to do happily even once the things that 'Little Sister' does every day of her life. You are quite right. We are all furiously jealous."

With sudden professional earnestness she ran her fingers through the catalogue cards and picked out one and slapped it down in front of Sagner. "There!" she said. "That's the book that explains all about it. It says that jealousy is an emotion that is aroused only by business competition, which accounts, of course, for the fact that, socially speaking, you very rarely find any personal enmity between men. There are so many, many different kinds of businesses for men, that interests very seldom conflict--so that the broker resents _only_ the broker, and the minister resents _only_ the minister, and the merchant resents _only_ the merchant. Why, Bertus Sagner," she broke off abruptly, "you fairly idolize your chemistry friend here, and Lennart for history, and Dudley for mathematics, and all the others, and you glory in their achievements, and pray for their successes. But if there were another biology man here in town, you'd tear him and his methods tooth and nail, day and night. Yes, you would!--though you'd cover your hate a foot deep with superficial courtesies and 'professional etiquette.'"

She began to laugh. "Oh, the book is very wise," she continued more lightly. "It goes on to say that woman's only business in the whole wide world is LOVE--that Love is really the one and only, the Universal Profession for Women--so that every mortal feminine creature, from the brownest gypsy to the whitest queen, is in brutal, acute competition with her neighbor. It's funny, isn't it!" she finished brightly.

"Very funny," growled Sagner.

"So you see," she persisted, "that we girls are jealous of 'Little Sister' in just about the same way in which an old-fashioned, rather conservative department store would be jealous of the first ten-cent store that came to town." A sudden rather fine white pride paled suddenly in her cheeks. "It isn't, you understand," she said, "it isn't because the ten-cent store's rhinestone comb, or tinsel ribbon, or slightly handled collar really competes with the other store's plainer but possibly honester values, but--because in the long run the public's frittered taste and frittered small change is absolutely bound to affect the general receipts of the more conservative store."

"And it isn't," she added hastily, "it isn't, you know, because we're not used to men. There isn't one of us--from the time we were sixteen years old--who hasn't been quite accustomed to entertain anywhere from three to a dozen men every evening of her life. But we can't entertain them the way 'Little Sister' does." A hot, red wave of mortification flooded her face. "We tried it once," she confessed, "and it didn't work. Just before the last winter party seven of us girls got together and deliberately made up our minds to beat 'Little Sister' at her own game. Wasn't it disgusting of us to start out actually and deliberately with the intention of being just a little wee bit free and easy with men?"

"How did it work?" persisted Sagner, half agrin.

The color flushed redder and redder into Madge Hubert's cheeks.

"I went to the party with the new psychology substitute," she continued bravely, "and as I stepped into the carriage I called him 'Fred'--and he looked as though he thought I was demented. But fifteen minutes afterward I heard 'Little Sister' call him 'Psyche'--and he laughed." She began to laugh herself.

"But how did the party come out?" probed Sagner, going deeper and deeper.

The girl sobered instantly. "There were seven of us," she said, "and we all were to meet at the house of one of the girls at twelve o'clock and compare experiences. Three of us came home at ten o'clock--crying. And four of us didn't turn up till half-past one--laughing. But the ones who came home crying were the only ones who really had any fun out of it. The game was altogether too easy--that was the trouble with it. But the four who came home laughing had been bored to death with their _un_-successes."

"Which lot were you in?" cried Sagner.

She shook her head. "I won't tell you," she whispered.

With almost startling pluck she jumped up suddenly and switched the electric light full blast into her tense young face and across her resolute shoulders.

"Look at me!" she cried. "Look at me! As long as men are men--what have I that can possibly, possibly compete with a girl like 'Little Sister'? Can I climb up into a man's face every time I want to speak to him? Can I pat a man's shoulder every time he passes me in a room? Can I hold out my quivering white hand and act perfectly helpless in a man's presence every time that I want to step into a carriage, or out of a chair? Can I cry and grieve and mope into a man's arms at a dance just because I happen to cut my finger on the sharp edge of my dance-order? Bah! If a new man came to town and made not one single man-friend but called all of us girls by our first names the second time he saw us, and rolled his eyes at us, and fluttered his hands, you people would call him the biggest fool in Christendom--but you flock by the dozens and the hundreds and the millions every evening to see 'Little Sister.' And great, grown-up, middle-aged boys like _you_, Bertus Sagner, flock _twice_ in the same evening!"

With astounding irrelevance Sagner burst out laughing. "Why, Madge," he cried, "you're perfectly superb when you're mad. Keep it up. Keep it up. I didn't know you had it in you! Why, you dear, gorgeous girl--WHY AREN'T YOU MARRIED?"

Like a scarlet lightning-bolt spiked with two-edged knives the red wrath of the girl descended then and there on Sagner's ugly head. With her heaving young shoulders braced like a frenzied creature at bay, against a great, silly, towering tier of "Latest Novels," she hurled her flaming, irrevocable answer crash-bang into Sagner's astonished, impertinent face.

"You want to know why I'm not married?" she cried. "You want to know why I'm not married? Well, I'll tell you--why--I'm--not married, Bertus Sagner, and I'll use yourself for an illustration--for when I do come to marry, it is written in the stars that I must of necessity marry your kind, a mature, cool, calculating, emotionally-tamed man, a man of brain as well as brawn, a man of fame if not of fortune, a man bred intellectually, morally, socially, into the same wonderfully keen, thinky corner of the world where I was born--nothing but a woman.

"For four years, Bertus Sagner, ever since I was nineteen years old, people have come stumbling over each other at college receptions to stare at me because I am 'the girl that Bertus Sagner, the big biologist, is _almost_ in love with.' And you _are_ 'almost' in love with me, Bertus Sagner. You can't deny it! And what is more, you will stay 'almost' in love with me till our pulses run down like clocks, and our eyes burn out like lamps, and the Real Night comes. If I remain here in this town, even when I am middle-aged--people will come and stare at me--because of you. And when I am old, and you are gone--altogether, people will still be talking about it. 'Almost in love' with me. Yes, Bertus Sagner, but if next time you came to see me, I should even so much as dally for a second on the arm of your chair, and slip my hand just a little bit tremulously into yours, and brush my lips like the ghost of a butterfly's wing across your love-starved face, you would probably find out then and there in one great, blinding, tingling, crunching flash that you LOVE ME NOW! But I don't want _you_, Bertus Sagner, nor any other man, at that price. The man who was made for me will love me first and get his petting afterward. There! Do you understand now?"

As though Sagner's gasp for breath was no more than the flutter of a book-leaf, she plunged on, "And as for Mrs. Lennart--"

Sagner jumped to his feet. "We weren't talking about Mrs. Lennart," he exclaimed hotly.

It has always seemed to me that very few things in the world are as quick as a woman's anger. But nothing in the world, I am perfectly positive, is as quick as a woman's amusement. As though an anarchist's bomb had exploded into confetti, Madge Hubert's sudden laughter sparkled through the room.

"Now, Bertus Sagner," she teased, "you just sit down again and listen to what I have to say."

Sagner sat down.

And as casually as though she were going to pour afternoon tea the girl slipped back into her own chair, and gave me a genuinely mirthful side-glance before she resumed her attack on Sagner.

"You were, too, talking about Mrs. Lennart," she insisted. "When you asked me to tell you exactly what a girl of my kind thinks of a girl like 'Little Sister,' do you suppose for a second I didn't understand that the thing you really wanted to find out was whether Mrs. Lennart was getting hurt or not in this 'Little Sister' business? Oh, no, Mrs. Lennart hasn't been hurt for a long, long time--several months perhaps. I think she looks a little bit bored now and then, but not hurt."

"Lennart's a splendid fellow," protested Sagner.

"He's a splendid fool," said Madge Hubert. "And after a woman once discovers that her husband is a fool I don't suppose that any extra illustrations on his part make any particular difference to her."

"Why, you don't--really think," stammered Sagner, "that there's any actual harm in Lennart's perfectly frank infatuation with 'Little Sister'?"

"Oh, no," said Madge Hubert, "of course there's no real harm in it at all. It's only that Mrs. Lennart has got to realize once for all that the special public that she has catered to so long and faithfully with honest values and small profit, has really got a ten-cent taste! Most men have. And it isn't, you know, because Professor Lennart really wants or needs all these ten-cent toys and favors, but because he probably never before in all his studious, straight, idealistic life saw glittering nonsense so inordinately cheap and easy to get. Talk about women being 'bargain-hunters'!

"But, of course, it's all pretty apt to ruin Mrs. Lennart's business. Anybody with half a heart could see that her stock is beginning to run down. She hasn't put in a new idea for months. She's wearing last year's clothes. She's thinking last year's thoughts. Even that blessed smile of hers is beginning to get just a little bit stale. You can't get what you want from her any more. Dust and indifference have already begun to set in. How will it end? Oh, I'll tell you how it will end. Pretty soon now college will be over and the men will scatter in five hundred different directions, and 'Little Sister' will be smitten suddenly with conscientious scruples about the 'old folks at home,' and will pack up her ruffles and her fraternity pins and go back to the provincial little town that has made her what she is. And Professor Lennart will mope around the house like a lost soul--for as much as five days--moaning, 'Oh, I wish "Little Sister" was here to-night to sing to me,' and 'I wish "Little Sister" was going to be here to-morrow to go canoeing with me,' and 'I wish "Little Sister" could see this moonlight,' and 'I wish "Little Sister" could taste this wild-strawberry pie.' And then somewhere about the sixth day, when he and Mrs. Lennart are at breakfast or dinner or supper, he'll look up suddenly like a man just freed from a delirium, and drop his cup, or his knife, or his fork 'ker-smash' into his plate, and cry out, 'My Heavens, Mary! But it's pretty good just for _you_ and _me_ to be alone together again!'"

"And what will Mrs. Lennart say?" interposed Sagner hastily, with a great puff of smoke.

For some unaccountable reason Madge Hubert's eyes slopped right over with tears.

"What will Mary Lennart say?" she repeated. "Mary Lennart will say: 'Excuse me, dear, but I wasn't listening. I didn't hear what you said. I was trying to remember whether or not I'd put moth-balls in your winter suit.' Though he live to be nine hundred and sixty-two, Harold Lennart's love-life will never rhyme again. But prose, of course, is a great deal easier to live than verse."

As though we had all been discussing the latest foreign theory concerning microbes, Sagner jumped up abruptly and began to rummage furiously through a pile of German bulletins. When he had found and read aloud enough things that he didn't want, he looked up and said nonchalantly, "Let's go home."

"All right," said Madge Hubert.

"Maybe you hadn't noticed that I was here," I suggested, "but I think that perhaps I should like to go home, too."

As we banged the big, oaken, iron-clamped door behind us, Madge Hubert lingered a second and turned her white face up to the waning, yellow moonlight. "I think I'd like to go home through the dark woods," she decided.

Silently we all turned down into the soft, padded path that ran along the piny shore of our little college lake. Sagner of course led the way. Madge Hubert followed close. And I tagged along behind as merrily as I could. Twice I saw the girl's shoulders shudder.

"Don't you like the woods, Miss Hubert?" I called out experimentally.

She stopped at once and waited for me to catch up with her. There was the very faintest possible suggestion of timidity in the action.

"Don't you like the woods?" I repeated.

She shook her head. "No, not especially," she answered. "That is, not all woods. There's such a difference. Some woods feel as though they had violets in them, and some woods feel as though they had--Indians."

I couldn't help laughing. "How about these woods?" I quizzed.

She gave a little gasp. "I don't believe there are violets in any woods to-night," she faltered.

Even as she spoke we heard a swish and a crackle ahead of us and Sagner came running back. "Let's go round the other way," he insisted.

"I won't go round the other way," said Madge Hubert. "How perfectly absurd! What's the matter?"

Even as she argued we stepped out into the open clearing and met Harold Lennart and "Little Sister" singing their way home hand in hand through the witching night. For an instant our jovial greetings parried together, and then we passed. Not till we had reached Madge Hubert's doorstep did I lose utterly the wonderful lilting echo of that young contralto voice with the man's older tenor ringing in and out of it like a shimmery silver lining.

Ten minutes later in Sagner's cluttered workroom we two men sat and stared through our pipe-smoke into each other's evasive eyes.

"Madge didn't--hesitate at all--to tell me a thing or two to-night, did she?" Sagner began at last, gruffly.

I smiled. The relaxation made me feel as though my mouth had really got a chance at last to sit down.

"Am I so very old?" persisted Sagner. "I'm not forty-five."

I shrugged my shoulders.

Pettishly he reached out and clutched at a scalpel, cleansed it for an instant in the flame, and jabbed the point of it into his wrist. The red blood spurted instantly.

"There!" he cried out triumphantly. "I have blood in me! It isn't embalming fluid at all."

"Oh, quit your fooling, you old death-digger," I said. And then with overtense impulse I asked, "Sagner, man, do you really understand Life?"

Sagner's jaw-bones stiffened instantly. "Oh, yes," he exclaimed. "Oh, yes, of course I understand Life. That is," he added, with a most unusual burst of humility, "I understand everything, I think, except just why the gills of a fish--but, oh, bother, you wouldn't know what I meant; and there's a new French theory about odylic forces that puzzles me a little, and I never, never have been able to understand the particular mental processes of a woman who violates the law of species by naming her firstborn son for any man but his father. I'm not exactly criticising the fish," he added vehemently, "nor the new odylic theory, nor even the woman; I'm simply stating baldly and plainly the only three things under God's heaven that I can't quite seem to fathom."